Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[7Wannabe5]

However, my post was also targetting evolutive models (including his(Wilber's), I believe, but also Plotkin's, Spiral Dynamics, etc.), often grounded in developmental psychology, that describe this as an evolution (of consciousness), as an evolutive process. So yes, @Gin+Guice, this is what is (partly) questionned here. In a certain way, I am questionning that "self-actualization is required before self-transcendence", but now I will depart from Maslow (and this terminology) as well as psychology, because my point is that the topic is not best approached from the confines of a psychological perspective.

Wilber's model is meant to be a model of "everything", so it is quite complex. To the extent that I understand it, I would describe it as only partially "evolutive." For example, his writing on the topic absolutely concurs with what you are communicating about "self-transcendence" not being an evolutive and inherently not a striving process; more like a realization/being to which a guru can only offer "pointers" rather than instructions. OTOH, he also argues that transcendent states, like any subjective state, only gain credence through shared recognition of state as experience, and any shared recognition can only be achieved through shared language, culture and concepts. For example, as/if we objectify The Witness to the objects of our consciousness (thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc.) we are likely somehow making use of an inherently embodied mathematical/structure or perspective, because as humans our waking and dreaming lives/consciousness is largely visual and we have two eyes that scan the field in front of us, yet, for instance, we do not "visually" witness the emotion of anger or the sensation of itchy or the smell of jasmine as they pass as objects through our consciousness.

One of the pointers Wilber offers towards the state of "Waking Up to the ever-present ultimate Reality of Nondual Suchness" is the phrase "the sky turns into a big blue pancake and falls on your head." And there is a sense in which this represents a different "level" of Waking Up than, for instance, a Transcendentalist such as Emerson sensing the presence of God radiating through all the interiors of Nature, but these "levels" only exist within our mutual struggle/striving to share and verify our interior subjective realities. Thus, the concept of Non-Duality is evolutive within intersubjective culture as experienced by the individual evolving selves participating in the inter-subjective even as the Nondual Suchness remains outside of time and evolution. Or if I take great liberty with Wilber's model and attempt to state the matter even more over-simplistically, Nondual Suchness exists whether or not humans are able to talk to each other about Nondual Suchness as an IT/object/concept, but the level of cognition necessary to communicate the concept can be placed on an evolutive scale. For example, if my held concepts were such that I might say, "I am a Pantheist", then it is highly likely that I am not a Pantheist, but rather a Neo-Pantheist yet not a Trans-Pantheist nor a Meta-Pantheist. IOW, I believe that some of the difficulty here is simply semantis; the Self-Transcendent level of Maslow is simply not meant/intended to be the Transcendence of Self that is Waking Up to the ever-present ultimate Reality of Nondual Suchness.

However, at the purely pedestrian level of cultural cynicism one might also note the relatively large number of BMWs and Audis parked in the lot of the Buddhist center located next to the nature trail in the most educated city in the U.S. and then contemplate whether any philosophy "invented" or promoted by affluent man/men (see also Marcus Aurelius) is preferable to the hedonic ever-present mud-is-meaning Goddess (she who laughs from the enduring deepness of egg within egg within belly at the striving of men) worship practice of Neo-Pantheism. IOW, although the Nondual is inherently both/neither masculine/feminine, it strikes me that any approach/philosophy/model that commences from or is based upon concept of "striving" is more retentive of masculine perspective or maybe even something like the sorrow of the spermatazoa.

[Jin+Guice]

@OutofTheBlue:

Yes! I did mean heterotelic but wrote homeotelic... I'll edit in the original post. Thank for pointing that out!

I don't feel like we're taking to each other anymore? It seems like the point of disagreement is whether or not dialectical evolution based models are valid or not? And whether or not self-actualization as presented, largely based on these models, is a deterrent to the higher goal of transcendence of self?

I don't know, that's not what I researched.

I appreciate your thoughtful post. However, what I do not see is a convincing argument that either dialectical, evolution based models are wrong or that my approach hinders transcendence of self. I see how those things might be true. I am interested in what you have to say about self-transcendence and an alternative path, but I am not convinced that my idea is harmful or misguided or that we are necessarily even addressing the same thing.

Please feel free to continue talking about this alternative transcendental path alongside my posts about actualization. Please feel free to continue to question me, I appreciate both. I don't know how else to respond!



To be clear, here is why and how I came up with my approach:

I got to WL6 and started developing skills.

I pretty quickly realized there are a lot of skills and it would be convenient if I could find a system to guide me on which skills to learn as well as a system that fit them together in a way that highlighted shared attributes amongst different skills.

I brainstormed some ideas about how to do this. I felt my two best were 1) based on needs (therapy/ enm approach) and 2) based on permaculture zones (I don't totally understand permaculture zones, but enough to get started).

But for needs... which needs to focus on first? Well, Maslow conveniently has a hierarchy, so let's try that.

I started formerly thinking about Maslow (this also helped organize the permaculture zone thing... these two ideas converged for me) and realized that it actually had some interesting ERE implications. Also, as I developed and systematized skills and structured my day around needs according to this hierarchy, things go easier and easier.

After doing this for several months, I ran into two problems: 1) sometimes I still didn't know what to do and 2) sometimes I identified heterotelic goals and still couldn't change my behavior.

Both of these problems made me realize that I didn't have a sold internal driver behind what I was doing. I was having trouble prioritizing because I didn't really know why I was doing things, I was mostly just responding to trauma. This struck me as odd because from an internal and external perspective, my life is going just fine. So I started asking 1) why is this happening? and 2) how do I build an intuitive internal sense of what I want be doing and why I'm doing it?

This ended up sounding a lot like Maslow's concept of self-actualization. And then I looked back at the WL table and level 8 is called "actualization." And so I decided to see what actualization is all about, while still keeping those two prior questions in mind.

And on this journey I found some stuff that I think is interesting from an ERE perspective, so I wrote this post series.




So to maybe tie this together a little bit for both of us:

It's Tuesday morning and I wake up and I find that I don't quite know where I want to direct my energy. What do I do or how to I figure out what to do with the transcendental method?

I find out that I have heterotelic goals/ behaviors but can't seem to alter them. What does the transcendental method suggested I do?

I want to self-transcend but don't know how. I get that no one can tell me exactly how to self-transcend (note I can't tell anyone exactly how to actualize). But, what do I do to pursue self-transcendence?

[7Wannabe5]

It's Tuesday morning and I wake up and I find that I don't quite know where I want to direct my energy. What do I do or how to I figure out what to do with the transcendental method?

Relax in your relationship to the Universe. Realize that you are not alone at the center. Do the work in front of you.

I find out that I have heterotelic goals/ behaviors but can't seem to alter them. What does the transcendental method suggested I do?

Relax in your relationship to the Universe. Realize that forces that seem to be in opposition are often two sides of the same coin or productive of the energetic tension that drives life, love, and art. Feminine/masculine, work/play, production/consumption...Imagine the embrace of these opposing forces as they are borne across the sky that is the timeless Universe within you. Close your eyes and feel the strong, deep love of the Universe as if fills and fulfills you beyond all boundaries. Open your eyes and with soft, fresh gaze begin anew.

I want to self-transcend but don't know how. I get that no one can tell me exactly how to self-transcend (note I can't tell anyone exactly how to actualize). But, what do I do to pursue self-transcendence?

Your doing is now done. You have been a warrior in your self-actualization, but within this time and this space, the war is not with or within you. Release the sword at your side and place down your burden. Hang your shield upon the wall and observe how the heraldic symbols brightly painted dim and then darken as you relax and allow your tension to release, as the earth once more turns from the sun, as you relax now in this moment, free of all armaments that bind and tether you heavy to the earth. Slowly, with great tenderness, unwind the cloth from your limbs, in time your wounds revealed will heal and your scars will also soften. Relax further now, fall back in trust with the Universe that still holds you even as your boundaries blur and lose definition, as your breath slows and your chest opens, and only the rhythm of your strong warrior heart holds the time. Relax, as time itself spreads open in the flow within your heart's rhythm, as you still in the endless moment, and all that is flows throughout the all that is within you, and you softly shatter within the bliss.

[Jin+Guice]

@7: I don't see any difference between this method and the method I describe.

[Henry]

Relax, as time itself spreads open in the flow within your heart's rhythm, as you still in the endless moment, and all that is flows throughout the all that is within you, and you softly shatter within the bliss.

It's good to know that I'm not the only one who can't help but let one rip during those moments.

[OutOfTheBlue]

I have been wrestling with a reply, but this stuff is quite subtle and it's a bit overwhelming because there are many things to say, many ways to approach this, it's a mess. But I find that being challenged back, and trying to formulate understanding/insight, communicate it in words, share it with people outside what I have been marinating in, all this is also helping clarify things for me as well.

I'll try to post an answer tomorrow or on Monday!

Reserving this space.

[Jin+Guice]

@OutofTheBlue:

I appreciate the time you're putting into a response and am looking forward to it! I may post the next addition to this series before you reply, but please don't hesitate to reply to my last comment (I recommend you quote something if you're referencing something specific though so I know what you're replying to) or keep responding to my last blog post... or incorporate both. Thanks again for your thoughtful and interesting responses!

[Jin+Guice]

Actualization as Alignment

How do we self-actualize?

My most concise working answer is "do exactly what we want all of the time."

The hard part is knowing what we want. Standing in the way is our fractured self. We want opposing things at the same time.

Our "lizard brains" or "limbic system" want immediate rewards, while our newer, smarter brain wants long-term rewards, if only we could drop the damn marshmallow.

While I believe there is some truth to this, I think it is an oversimplification of the story that stands in the way of self-actualization.

I think the main roadblocks to self-actualization are: emotional blindspots, misalignment of the fight/ flight/ freeze mechanism with our current environment and the modern value memes obsession with productivity and progress.

Correcting these, self-actualization is self-alignment.

Before launching into a series of long posts, I'll give away my current ideas on how to actualize (no promises I won't change my mind by the end).

I think the keys to self-actualization are: (1) dealing with trauma (2) learning to notice and appreciate the world around us (3) self-alignment so that we know (and do) exactly what we want and (4) having very strong boundaries, which we are free to be flexible within.

ERE is helpful for this because it shows that, given the current cultural and technological paradigm, physiological needs are trivial to meet for able bodied adults. This frees up the time and resources to explore ourselves, uncover our values and learn to live by them.

[jacob]

Actualization as Alignment

How do we self-actualize?

My most concise working answer is "do exactly what we want all of the time."

I think that answer needs some work reformulating. A spoiled brat does what they want all the time but acting like a 12 year old man-child is hardly fulfilling their potential as a human being or at least I hope it isn't.

It think this quote describes the process well:

At fifteen my heart was set on learning, at thirty I stood firm, at forty I had no more doubts, at fifty I knew the will of heaven, at sixty my ear was obedient, at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right.

This kinda sounds obtuse and there are many different translations of this but what it actually means is the following.

When Confucius was fifteen (for some it comes earlier, for others later, for some never) he made a deliberate choice to learn a set of rules or rites. In modern parlance this could be a religion, a philosophy, a way of life, a system, or a "lifestyle design". At this point he's already ahead of the normal contemporary human being many of whom "just follow along" whatever stream they find themself in.

At thirty (again nothing that automatically happens by chronological age... ages here are more to give some realistic expectations of how long it takes to crawl before one can walk), he was committed to the chosen path (system, etc.) and forty marked the end of the "cafeteria"-approach to picking and choosing. He no longer doubted that the system's answers were the better ones.

At fifty he knew how the system should be applied to the world at large. The "decree of Heaven" or the Mandate is essentially the ability to rule [the world] well. In modern parlance, this would translate into being able to give good advice to other people or perhaps more accurately give good solutions to others that will work for them.

At sixty, he became what we today would call "construct-aware". He could "hear from Heaven"---a place outside his system---what the system was about and why it was they way it is. It's the ability to go meta and think about how you're thinking. And at seventy, this was fully integrated with his being. One might say he became one with the system.

Now at what stage was Confucius self-actualizing. The best answer is that it didn't suddenly happen overnight at a particular date. It didn't even happen over a particular decade. It's better to think of it as a percentage that remains zero until sometime after the 50-point where it ramps up. Another way of thinking of it is in terms of art. Even if the untrained/unartsy mind often struggle to tell the difference, the "art" produced by the random smatterings of a kindergarten class and the art produced by the best artists is not the same. The message of the former is random or crude. The message of the latter has a deep meaning that shows understanding of current or past paradigms.

[Jin+Guice]

I agree that my definition is subject to the interpretation that a under-developed person is actualized, which is incorrect.

I propose that a spoiled brat man-child is not actually doing what they want. Of course this is an internal and subjective process so I cannot tell you if you are "really" doing what you want anymore than I can tell you if you are "really" actualizing. However, the rewards of being actualized are also internal, so saying that your actualized when you aren't isn't doing much for you beyond stroking your own ego.

At fifteen Confucius was exploring what he wanted. At thirty he committed to the realizing the results of that exploration. At forty he was sure he knew what he wanted. I say he actualized at 40 and the rest is transcending. I don't think the spoiled brat reaches the 15 year old stage in this model.

And I agree with you that no one "is" or "is not" actualized. Rather, at 40 Confucius crossed a certain percentage threshold that we can arbitrarily define as actualized.

To summarize, I think we are actually saying the same thing, though I appreciate your addition as my definition is very sparse. I think learning what you want is a process, which I don't think many people realize.

[Jin+Guice]

What I'm doing is describing this process and what I'm thinking about as I go through it:

...WL5/6 also seems to coincide with the beginning transition into the postconventional ego stages as described by Loevinger and Cook-Greuter (and many others). What makes this harder is that WL6 is the first time the person is beginning to question who they are without the support of society. "If I am not my specialized job function (career), who am I really?" The thing is that society doesn't really have an answer for this. Yet ERE does.

By "do what you want" I mean the post-conventional and not pre-conventional:

The pre/trans-fallacy here would be in confusing the pre-conventional "I do what I want" with the post-conventional "I replace/improve previous conventions with my own".

where "doing what you want" in this context is how we separate our own conventions from prescribed conventions.

In recommending this, I'm assuming that the people reading this are at least conventional and not pre-conventional.

[Jin+Guice]

I'm attempting to add to a discussion in the anti-consumerism vs. frugality thread to my journal here because it directly relates to the next point in my series about actualization. In my last post I talk about how I think actualization is self-alignment. This begs the question "what causes misalignment."

The answer is what I've been calling "trauma," however we've been discussing in the other thread whether this is the best word for it.

I'm trying to explain phenomenon related to heterotelic behavior. What I've noticed is identifying heterotelic behavior is not enough to eradicate heterotelic behavior. People kling to their heterotelic behaviors as if their life depended on them. Why?

Heteroteic behavior means there has to be at least one goal that one behavior moves us towards and the other behavior counteracts. It is also possible that we hold goals that are in opposition to each other. What is the generator of these goals?

My initial line of inquiry was exploring needs. I think the generator of goals are needs. But, the goals we have often end up obscure, not really seeming to satisfy any identifiable need. The mind can often create a superficial story of how this goal springs from that need, but it has been my experience that actual inquiry often reveals that this tie is tenuous at best. Moreover, people are often unwilling to change behaviors or explore this dissonance in stated versus revealed needs.

One possible explanation is for this behavior is trauma. PTSD provides a particularly vivid example. There's a loud noise, the emotions and body override the mind and react before the mind can process what happened and the person reacts as though there has been an explosion or gunfire or is taken back to a particularly painful event that occurred at the same time as a loud noise.

What is happening in this instance is that the fight/ flight/ freeze mechanism is being activated in a way that does not respond accurately to environmental stimulus. With the classic PTSD trope, it's usually very noticeable and disruptive. The person flings themselves to the ground or scream or cries or becomes very emotional at a time that is obviously inappropriate in their current environment. To someone unaware of or unfamiliar with PTSD, this person seems temporarily insane. In fact the are temporarily departing from present reality, haunted by some past event.

What I'm guessing is that we all incur smaller instances of when our body/ emotions don't respond automatically and inappropriately to our present environment. Unlike someone with PTSD however, we don't respond in a big or inconvenient or noticeable way. Initially we are too young to understand what is happening. Eventually we develop a system for ignoring certain signals from ourselves (as I'm sure many PTSD suffers wish they were able to do), effectively blocking them out. However, I think this system is also how we communicate needs to ourselves. Thus certain needs, that elicit bodily or emotional responses that are inappropriate for our environment get deemed threatening and repressed. When we feel lacking in this need, our fight/ fight/ freeze mechanism gets subtly activated, we feel uncomfortable and we develop some alternative non-threatening way to meet that need or come as close to it as we can.

I also think several forms of trauma* are socially and culturally sanctioned. Certain human needs are downplayed and certain emotional reactions are deemed inappropriate, thus creating a cultural shadow. I'm theorizing this is how we end up with things like a large-scale alienation epidemic where large parts of the population are on psychotropic drugs and an environmental (and to a certain extent economic equality) crisis, where we can't stop ruining the environment by going to jobs we dislike to purchase things we don't use (among other problems!)

*This is where reading the discussion in the other thread of how the word trauma is often misused and misunderstood is likely to be helpful.

I'm saying there are two drivers of human action: 1) "needs" and 2) "trauma."

[blink2ce]

What I'm guessing is that we all incur smaller instances of when our body/ emotions don't respond automatically and inappropriately to our present environment. Unlike someone with PTSD however, we don't respond in a big or inconvenient or noticeable way. Initially we are too young to understand what is happening. Eventually we develop a system for ignoring certain signals from ourselves (as I'm sure many PTSD suffers wish they were able to do), effectively blocking them out. However, I think this system is also how we communicate needs to ourselves. Thus certain needs, that elicit bodily or emotional responses that are inappropriate for our environment get deemed threatening and repressed. When we feel lacking in this need, our fight/ fight/ freeze mechanism gets subtly activated, we feel uncomfortable and we develop some alternative non-threatening way to meet that need or come as close to it as we can.

This sounds a lot like Complex PTSD (CPTSD). See here for the difference between PTSD and Complex PTSD (https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/d ... mplex-ptsd).

Complex PTSD is a lot harder to identify, because it isn't obvious like screaming when you hear a loud noise. Complex PTSD, in my opinion, almost always has a childhood component to it. There must have been very difficult conditions during childhood without the guidance of a parental figure. Abuse and emotional neglect could also easily cause it.

Check out the book "Running on Empty" for more info about emotional neglect, which is very real. It is hard to know if you have emotional neglect issues you need to deal with, because you are trying to locate something that you DIDN'T receive, which is a more difficult than knowing what you DID receive. The book does a good job.

[Jin+Guice]

@blink2ce: I listened to an audiobook of "Running on Empty" thanks for the recommendation. I think pathological culture makes it so everyone suffers from some form of emotional neglect (I have a lot to say about this).

[Jin+Guice]

Undigested Experience

Standing in the way of actualization is something I've been calling "trauma." However, trauma is often incorrectly used in common conversation. In asking for another word, @OutofTheBlue suggested "undigested experience."

What is undigested experience?

Undigested experience is any past experience that caused us to distrust our sensory or emotional information systems.

I think the effect of this is the creation of the psychological shadow. It splinters our personality and throws us into an ever so slightly alternative reality.

In the previous post I gave an example of (complex) PTSD. When someone suffers from PTSD, present stimuli cause them to relive a past experience and respond in a way that is misaligned with their current reality.

To highlight what I think is going on, I'll use the example of a loud noise. Imagine someone with severe PTSD who ducks and hides or starts crying every time they hear a loud noise. What is happening is their sensory and emotional memory has been trained by a previous loud noise where this response was deemed necessary for survival.

However, our CNS is wired to respond with fight/flight/freeze to loud (particularly unexpected) noises. We have now designed a world where loud unexpected noises are an accepted fact of life. We deem our natural responses inappropriate, but I could just as easily say we have designed a world that is inappropriate for our natural responses.

The difference between us and someone with severe PTSD is that the person with PTSD has an automatic response which is large and inconvenient. The rest of us are able to hide our responses (most importantly from ourselves) and slowly develop a reality where we feel foolish for jumping when we hear an unexpected loud noise.

Over time this misalignment teaches us to mistrust ourselves. We learn to mute the part of ourselves which senses the stimuli so we don't respond inappropriately. This causes us to not experience our experiences and leave them undigested. This undigested bit of experience builds over time into a shadow self.

I believe this is the other driver of human action. So we have the conscious, light sided driver of needs and wants that we are aware of and we claim drivers our every action and the secret, subconscious driver of undigested experience/ the shadow-self which we are unaware of and would deny drives our actions.

The alignment I mention in a previous post is that of bringing the shadow self into the light and integrating it into the conscious. It's a process of listening to the parts of ourselves we have turned off and learning to understand rather than repress our emotional and sensory responses.

[jacob]

Given the parallel discussion in AH's journal about semiotics (happening around approximately this point) I feel compelled to offer an alternative non-trauma based theory for explaining why humans human. Psychotherapy is really one of those fields where many different theories, perspectives, and definitions remain, which makes this interesting from an epistemic perspective.

The schwerpunkt of my explanation revolves around the idea that "your greatest strength is also [causing] your greatest weakness". When it comes to personality (=neurotransmitter based temperament + lived experience), great strengths generate great weaknesses over time as one is inclined to build on the strong aspects and neglect the weak aspects of one's preferred way to deal with the world. (I said "inclined"). For example, a person who is strong with logic and reason (because they've been awarded by their brain chemistry for as long as they've been alive for that approach) is inclined to use it everywhere and proceed not to develop their ability to feel their way around the world (insofar they haven't been rewarded for that). Someone who is good at planning is not going to focus on developing their ability to react and vice versa. Of course there are those balanced people (the majority of people), but their weakness is that they are not particularly good at anything in particular.

(I submit that the very idea of actualizing doesn't occur to them because they're already actualizing as they are. And that's as far as they're going to get. Conversely, if actualizing becomes a concern of someone, it's probably because they're a bad fit for their environment---and this is the case for anyone who is particularly strong[er] in one or more areas than the people in their environment.)

Going back to MBTI which is my hammer to all these nails, the shadow is well-defined. See viewtopic.php?p=256876#p256876 for how to compute it.

Here the shadow is not due to unprocessed trauma but rather perspectives that the person(ality) is blind to because the required perspective for seeing it (weakness) is dominated by a different perspective (strength).

"It's not about the nail" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg) is a very relatable example with Te being blind to Fe and vice versa. Even if the other perspective is seen, it is not appreciated. The person who is strong in Te simply can't understand why someone would prefer Fe and not Te. Likewise, the strong Fe can't empathize with someone who just want to solve the problem... because where does that leave the empathizer and the empathee? (rhetorical question, answer useless)

Here doing "both-and" is incredibly much harder than doing one-not-the-other insofar one is not balanced. Balanced is different. In most cases, there's neither light nor shadow. (Balance comes at the expense of depth.) Only in very rare cases are both lit up. Frankly, I don't know any examples of a fully developed human. It's very likely that I simply fail to recognize them not being one myself.

The alignment I mention in a previous post is that of bringing the shadow self into the light and integrating it into the conscious. It's a process of listening to the parts of ourselves we have turned off and learning to understand rather than repress our emotional and sensory responses.

Given what I wrote above, I can generalize this. I agree that it's a "process of listening to the parts of ourselves we have turned off". However, I also assert that different people have turned off different parts. As an act of masochism, I frequent spaces where people are very much in touch with their emotional and sensory responses... or at least they try to be. These are person[alities] who really sense and feel their feels, engaging in all sorts of grounding rituals. Yet, they've also turned off---nay, never really developed---their faculties to reason with and within an [inter]objective reality. As such, there's belief in things like ESP, synchronicity, angels, insect observations (dragonflies!) suggesting a connection with the afterlife, ... in the stronger/stranger cases and generic incredulity ("I don't know how to think or predict anything, therefore nobody else knows either") in the weaker or more common cases.

This is where I don't think "trauma" explains everything unless it's somehow traumatic that someone never learned the multiplication table and thus remains unable to instantly perceive 6*8 as 48 (and so on with more complicated lenses) and thus see it as numbers-schmumbers ... just like a strong Ti/Te easily dismisses a frown as being irrelevant to their making a point.

[7Wannabe5]

just like a strong Ti/Te easily dismisses a frown as being irrelevant to their making a point.

This might also depend on how likely it is that the frowner is going to kick you out of the passenger seat of his car on some random dirt road in Kentucky, thereby worsening your suffered trauma load to the extent that your practice has now become always carrying appropriate supplies in your bag to deal with this potentiality in the event that you just can't stop yourself from making your point. Luckily, I am now beyond being traumatized if the frowner limits their reaction to verbal commentary such as "You are too nerdy to fuck." , because I will then be thinking "Clearly that is not an entirely true statement, because there do exist men who are capable of not paying attention to anything that I say." but I will usually wait until I am safely out of furniture throwing range before communicating my concluding logic via text.

Obvious alternative tactic being to quickly relax into my more feminine energy, smile and switch over from logic to my feeling and preference words, as in "I feel hungry. I like ice cream." which is much more likely to result in having the car door opened for me and treat purchased at the Frosty King. I once went three whole days using only my feeling and preference words with a male companion and he gave no indication that he found my behavior odd or lacking.

[Jin+Guice]

@jacob:

My initial thoughts on your post were that you are coming at what I'm saying sideways. I don't think mbti provides a meaningful challenge to the model I am presenting, in fact I think they can easily coexist.

None of this is to disagree with what you wrote or dissuade the mbti perspective. From the context I am coming from though, responding to mbti is challenging because I don't see a direct agreement or disagreement from that model, nor do i feel it adds much to what I've been thinking about in the way I've been thinking about it.

Your post did inspire me to think about my thinking differently, but none of that directly challenges the ideas you laid out.



I am trying to answer the questions: "Why do we repeatedly claim to want things that don't align with our actions?" and "Why is it so hard to notice this behavior?" "Why is it so hard to change it, even when we notice it?"

I came to these questions through noticing this behavior in myself. One of my methods for trying to grapple with this internal problem was to try to see if this behavior appeared to be present in others. Overnight I had a few simple heuristics that seem to have massive explanatory power.

So this is a sort of personal journey turned gonzo social pseudoscience experimental process.




I get that mbti is your perspective and the model with great explanatory power to you, but if I understand your idea correctly, I can strip it of its mbti context (though I do think mbti adds a ton of depth to your viewpoint):

When it comes to personality (=neurotransmitter based temperament + lived experience), great strengths generate great weaknesses over time as one is inclined to build on the strong aspects and neglect the weak aspects of one's preferred way to deal with the world.

Restating this to make sure I understand (but then also responding as if I do!): "People turn off parts of themselves. The majority turn off their weaknesses while doubling down on their strengths."

I think this is a strong possibility, almost definitely with some truth and explanatory power in it, that I had not considered. As you point out in your post:

Psychotherapy is really one of those fields where many different theories, perspectives, and definitions remain, which makes this interesting from an epistemic perspective.

so it's hard to operate from one shared perspective and I am likely the slave to my own experience and context.


I think the salient points of these two theories are: In one explanatory power is given to needs and trauma (undigested experience). In the other explanatory power is given to strengths and weaknesses.

Each idea additionally relies on a concept of the shadow, which is invisible to the person who has it.

The needs/ trauma model claims the existence of an innate and undefined generator of personal "needs." At the level I am interested in, I take this as given. Physiological needs are easiest to see. Harder to see, yet I am still arguing profoundly important, are esteem (emotional), social, intellectual and aesthetic needs. I haven't thought a lot about where these needs come from, but if I have to guess I would say it's a person's innate inborn personality/ skillset.

Trauma* is a specific type of lived experience which causes your ability to know your own needs to disconnect and form and alternative false or circuitous path.

*I realize I keep redefining this over and over, but because this is an area that so acutely lacks good terminology and concrete definitions, the entire argument seems to be underpinned by definitions. Reaching a mutual understanding seems to be difficult.

The shadow is generated by trauma, which hides the disconnect, hiding it from the conscious mind.


If I am understanding strengths vs weaknesses, there exists an innate generator of strengths vs weaknesses. This comes from an innate inborn skillset.

Through the process of lived experience, a person biases their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

The weaknesses become a shadow as they are ignored to the extent which they are turned off, effectively being lost to the conscious mind.

I don't see any direct contradiction between these two ideas. We are both claiming explanatory power of human behavior, based on conscious/ subconscious behavior and the creation of a shadow. What I think we have instead are four explanatory variables rather two opposing two variable models.



I want to add a few things which are part of where I am going that @jacob's post made me think of. I think cognitive and intellectual trauma is a thing. A big thing. I think the body has 3 modes of signaling, sensational, emotional and cognitive. Importantly, these systems all interact and reinforce each other when they are aligned.

The emotional and sensational mostly act without cognitive thought, but importantly signal the cognitive mind in the presence of a threat or reward. Actualization is not brining all subconscious thought into the conscious mind. It is reconnecting with our innate emotional and sensational signals. Haidt's elephant and Kahneman's system I are not erased but understood, embraced and deployed in alignment with, respectively, the rider and system II.

What I am calling trauma has several telltale signs. The hallmark of a trauma response is saying we want something and repeatedly failing to align our actions with what would bring us that thing. The hallmark of live-action trauma is repressing or not expressing a sensation, feeling or thought. So cognitive level trauma is not expressing what you think... which if y'all are anything like me... yikes!

So, from my perspective, not being able to multiply 6*8 may be the result of trauma, if the person has experienced a situation where expressing their ability to multiply 6*8 was deemed threatening. I admit that it is more likely that multiplication was not their strength and so they forgot the ability to multiply as they leaned into their strength and lost their weaker multiplication ability.

More generally I argue that people lose the ability of thinking how to think. They also lose the ability to figure out things for themselves outside of their narrow specialization as well as lose (or more likely never develop) the capability to consider multiple perspectives/ ways of thinking.

I think there is a strong possibility for interaction between our two models here. A weakness in math becomes a fear of feeling stupid and ashamed in math class becomes an identity that one is bad at math.


A giant part of my theory that I have no yet laid out is the effect of social value meme on pretty much everything. For the purpose of my theory, social value meme will set a large part of the environment, which determines a large part of the trauma endured. I think the modern social value meme is responsible for a particular set of traumas on a mass scale, which is causing large scale trauma responses (I laid out part of this in the discussion in @AH's journal).

Social value meme will also have a large effect on what strengths are valued (devalued) and what weaknesses are further devalued (valued).

Social value meme adds another layer of depth in that it sets expectation. Humans are not born knowing that 6*8 is 48. I doubt the average human could figure this out without social and cultural context and I doubt it would be of much value to arbitrarily know this without social and cultural context.



In answering my own questions, I believe the needs/ trauma model has one element of explanatory power that the strength/ weakness model does not. Both models have an unknown unknown component in the shadow, but what Is unknown differs slightly.

In the weakness model, if I understand correctly, the weakness is likely known but the information and as well as the reasons to know that information are forgotten. For example, a person knows and admits they are bad at math and also thinks (internally) that being good at math is unnecessary or at least unnecessary for them. However, if they suddenly decide they want to overcome this weakness in math, they are likely to take actions to become better at math. The unlikely part here is that they will want to, but what this person has is alignment of intent and action.

In the trauma model, the person feels shame and fear around math. This person may still acknowledge they are bad at math, but they are less likely to internally believe that math is unnecessary, instead viewing themselves as inadequate for not being able to do math or feeling anger at a world that so coldly demands math of them. In this case, whether or not they possess stronger or weaker ability in math, they will (subconsciously) feel fear whenever they have to do math. In this scenario it is more likely that they would (internally) wish to become better at math, but they are unlikely to achieve it because of the fear mechanism that is triggered whenever they attempt to learn math. This person will not have alignment of intent and action.

[ertyu]

I mean, it's not that hard. If you try to repeatedly meet a need and can't, it hurts like fuck. Over time, it hurts less to accept you can't and stop trying. It hurts even less if you "alienate" that need -- lose it from consciousness, numb from it, whatever. So, two stages: disconnect from outside, then disconnect from inside.

For the dumbest example, assume you want mommy to hug you and love you. If she won't hug you, it sucks, so over time, you get "tough," wanting mommy to hug you is for babies. Plus, mommy sucks. So, fuck mommy. ... you still need a hug, tho, and it sucks to need a hug and not to be able to ask for it (cause last time when you asked mommy, she turned you away and it hurt like fuck: no skill + no psychological bravery). So, no one's giving you hugs. Well, fuck hugs, too, hugs are for weak girly sissies -- you can get a big red car, tho, that'll make you feel really strong and cool and manly, (and definitely like someone who deserves others to want to hug them, but we're not talking about that part, to ourselves or to anyone else).

The big bummer of it all is that, ok, you've got a big red car, maybe the big red car flagged you to some gold-digger or another and never get any actual hugs ('cause all the functional partners are with people who know they need hugs, know how to ask for them, know that it's normal for humans to want hugs, and give hugs to their loved ones without a second thought as to whether this does or doesn't make anyone manly or sissy). It's all over, and yes, it sucks balls.

I'm not sure why we need trauma as a word here at all.

[jacob]

I mean, it's not that hard. If you try to repeatedly meet a need and can't, it hurts like fuck. Over time, it hurts less to accept you can't and stop trying. It hurts even less if you "alienate" that need -- lose it from consciousness, numb from it, whatever. So, two stages: disconnect from outside, then disconnect from inside.

[...]

I'm not sure why we need trauma as a word here at all.

I for one struggle with the word trauma because it's a very loaded word. To me trauma suggests an event or a series of events that were specific in time and space. The medical equivalent would be breaking a bone. Whereas the way it's sometimes used is more the medical equivalent of allergies or some other chronic condition that makes life in a given environment uncomfortable (to say the least). However, I wouldn't describe sneezing every time an allergic person smells a flower as trauma.

This is why I like the "strength <=> weakness"-theory which leans more into the allergy-kind of explanation.

Keep in mind, I agree with J&G that we're for the most part talking about the same thing with two lenses. The Venn overlap is strong. My main complaint is that the "trauma" lens comes with some baggage/limitation. For example, I would like to get away from the exclusive focus on "feelings" and "sensations", which is of course very much associated with treating big-T trauma of the typical human.

My reason is that this [mode of human surveys] is very SF-centered and I believe blind to other certain needs (for those who have them) like "thinking" or "imagination". "Talking with someone about your feelings" works for some 60% (I'm just throwing out a reasonable number here) of the population, so if a therapist were to have a hammer believing that every human problem is a nail, this is a good choice. But it's no where near universal! It leaves 40% (again a reasonable number) unexplained.

I have a personal/anecdotal example if you'll indulge me. We'll do both lenses.

I am what is now recognized as intellectually gifted. This basically means that I'm aware and know more dots and I connect them faster and better than 99% of people. Doesn't make me the smartest person in the world by far, but it does make me smarter than almost everybody I encounter on a random basis. I don't know where it came from. Genetically nobody in my family is like this. I'm the first person in my lineage past HS. My grandfather read many books but exclusively spy and crime novels---he is probably the closest. Unfortunately, he died before I started thinking about these [origin] issues. However, it is what it is.

When/where I grew up [gifted] was not recognized as being a thing and indeed the prevailing pedagogical and cultural value system of the time was positively biased against this idea. (Perhaps one can compare "being smarter than others in a postmodern culture" to "being LGBTQ in a traditionalist culture"?) So I was in a position where my parents didn't recognize it but thankfully indulged me by at least not holding me back from pursuing my curiosities, whereas the schooling system very much did that: "Reading ahead" was positively discouraged. The reward for solving a problem was being partnered up with the dumbest kid in class and having to TA them. Group/team work was often an exercise in wasting time during class and then having to finish the work for most of the rest of the "team" at home on my own while accepting a lower grade for the combined result. As such, this article describes a typical outcome which has some fairly strong analogies to my implementation of ERE as well as my overall perspective on life.

The second kind of social adaptation may be called the marginal strategy. These individuals were typically born into a lower socio-economic class, without gifted parents, gifted siblings, or gifted friends. Often they did not go to college at all, but instead went right to work immediately after high school, or even before. And although they may superficially appear to have made a good adjustment to their work and friends, neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention. They hunger for more intellectual challenge and more real companionship than their social environment can supply. So they resort to leading a double life. They compartmentalize their life into a public sphere and a private sphere. In public they go through the motions of fulfilling their social roles, whatever they are, but in private they pursue goals of their own. They are often omnivorous readers, and sometimes unusually expert amateurs in specialized subjects. The double life strategy might even be called the genius ploy, as many geniuses in history have worked at menial tasks in order to free themselves for more important work. Socrates, you will remember was a stone mason, Spinoza was a lens grinder, and even Jesus was a carpenter. The exceptionally gifted adult who works as a parking lot attendant while creating new mathematics has adopted an honored way of life and deserves respect for his courage, not criticism for failing to live up to his abilities. Those conformists who adopt the committed strategy may be pillars of their community and make the world go around, but historically, those with truly original minds have more often adopted the double life tactic. They are ones among the gifted who are most likely to make the world go forward.

Now, was I traumatized? (I'm asking rhetorically because I consider the answer to be "no" unless you want to expand the definition of trauma to ... pretty much everything (which is where my sticking point is)). Now, clearly there was some kind of "intellectual neglect" or even worse in the sense that you weren't allowed to "read ahead" in class given that conforming to the social group was considered more important. The analogy being someone who wanted a hug but never got one and so had to resort to hugging themselves or reading about hugs for what it was worth.

But lets do the "strength <=> weakness" theory. My experience could also be understood as someone who got a lot more satisfaction from reading interesting (1%) authors than having conversations about daily feelings or sensations with the other 99% in my local environment. More satisfaction (catharsis) from proving a theorem or solving a problem than getting hugged or hugging someone. And so on. And so via what is essentially operant conditioning, I basically developed into the type 5 person I am now: A problem-solving machine who is fiercely protective of my finite amounts of problem-solving energy---don't you dare waste it trying to talk about feelings and sensations In MBTI terms, very strong on Ni and Te, very much don't care about Fe or Si.

Even as I'm reluctantly coming around to realizing that the majority of people don't actually want their problems solved as much as they rather see problems as an excuse to gather in teams and whine about it (actually solving it would be a bug, not a feature), I still don't feel compelled to join them. It's wired too deep. It's hard to convince an intelligent man otherwise, when he is already firmly convinced it is so.

Trauma? Strength? Weakness?