To pick on a couple of the institutions you mentioned:
I see AoA as being mostly orthogonal to what CFAR is doing. I imagine AoA can help you become unstuck in relationships, be more honest in your dealings with others, be more comfortable with uncomfortable emotions, etc. I think this could help you become more rational in certain domains where self-knowledge/introspection is the blocker; like, if you’re doing a pro/con list on whether you should break up with your partner then you’re probably ignoring the bigger emotional fact that given you are making a pro/con list you should probably just break up (to give a clichéd example).
But I’m not sure it really teaches any techniques that force you to engage your system 2 and actually grapple with a thorny problem in a way that Murphyjitsu or doing a pre-mortem or sitting with a timer and writing for 5 minutes actually do.
Jhourney seems much more focused on accessing particular psychological states that feel good—I’m not sure I see it as improving your rationality or decision-making?
I also think these things can have harms in some other ways that probably don’t apply to CFAR techniques—e.g. in the AoA Connection Course, you’re asked to think of something that would be really “triggering” to your partner (scare quotes because I think they use the word as a synonym for ‘upset’ rather than as ‘triggering some underlying trauma/mental health issue’) and then deliver it to them. When I did this my course partner cried and I felt very bad about it and I don’t really think there was any benefit to it—and made me update away from the idea that Joe Hudson is some kind of emotional savant.
Likewise Jhourney explicitly forbids certain people from taking their courses, namely people who have ever had a psychotic episode or are prescribed psychiatric medication (except SSRIs, from what I recall). So I would suspect that these other more ‘vibes-based’ courses/approaches have quite different risk profiles from going to a CFAR retreat (although perhaps that also has its own risks!).
I think your claim about AoA being orthogonal relies on rejecting my claim above that “emotional blocks are the main reason why people make bad decisions”.
For example, AoA doesn’t teach stuff like Murphyjitsu or pre-mortems, but on my model both of those are primarily useful as ways of sidestepping how painful and aversive the prospect of failure usually is. So I’d count AoA as trying to do the same thing, but more robustly, if it tried to address the underlying pain of / aversion to failure (which it sounds like it does).
Re Jhourney, I know they advertise themselves as being about accessing bliss states, but when I attended a month or two ago they actually seemed to place just as much (or more) emphasis on emotional processing more generally.
To pick on a couple of the institutions you mentioned:
I see AoA as being mostly orthogonal to what CFAR is doing. I imagine AoA can help you become unstuck in relationships, be more honest in your dealings with others, be more comfortable with uncomfortable emotions, etc. I think this could help you become more rational in certain domains where self-knowledge/introspection is the blocker; like, if you’re doing a pro/con list on whether you should break up with your partner then you’re probably ignoring the bigger emotional fact that given you are making a pro/con list you should probably just break up (to give a clichéd example).
But I’m not sure it really teaches any techniques that force you to engage your system 2 and actually grapple with a thorny problem in a way that Murphyjitsu or doing a pre-mortem or sitting with a timer and writing for 5 minutes actually do.
Jhourney seems much more focused on accessing particular psychological states that feel good—I’m not sure I see it as improving your rationality or decision-making?
I also think these things can have harms in some other ways that probably don’t apply to CFAR techniques—e.g. in the AoA Connection Course, you’re asked to think of something that would be really “triggering” to your partner (scare quotes because I think they use the word as a synonym for ‘upset’ rather than as ‘triggering some underlying trauma/mental health issue’) and then deliver it to them. When I did this my course partner cried and I felt very bad about it and I don’t really think there was any benefit to it—and made me update away from the idea that Joe Hudson is some kind of emotional savant.
Likewise Jhourney explicitly forbids certain people from taking their courses, namely people who have ever had a psychotic episode or are prescribed psychiatric medication (except SSRIs, from what I recall). So I would suspect that these other more ‘vibes-based’ courses/approaches have quite different risk profiles from going to a CFAR retreat (although perhaps that also has its own risks!).
I think your claim about AoA being orthogonal relies on rejecting my claim above that “emotional blocks are the main reason why people make bad decisions”.
For example, AoA doesn’t teach stuff like Murphyjitsu or pre-mortems, but on my model both of those are primarily useful as ways of sidestepping how painful and aversive the prospect of failure usually is. So I’d count AoA as trying to do the same thing, but more robustly, if it tried to address the underlying pain of / aversion to failure (which it sounds like it does).
Re Jhourney, I know they advertise themselves as being about accessing bliss states, but when I attended a month or two ago they actually seemed to place just as much (or more) emphasis on emotional processing more generally.