I’ve only circled twice, not sure how relevant this is. (FWIW, my takeaway so far is “eh, pretty okay, depends a lot on facilitator and situation”). But, some perspective I think is important to the debates going on here.
5 years ago, I was very pro “giving people an excuse to be more vulnerable than they’d normally feel comfortable being.”
I’m still pretty pro this. But… in a less naive way than I was 5 years ago.
It seemed like being vulnerable was basically how you got anything worthwhile. I saw people curled up in their shells, desperately lacking in intimacy in ways that was having a crippling effect on them. They lived in fear of expressing themselves, of taking risks. And having an environment conducive to exploring intimacy and vulnerability was profoundly valuable. (I was at least somewhat this type of person, although I don’t think it was as big a deal for me as for other people I knew)
And the thing that I intellectually understood, but took several years to grok, was that being vulnerable is in fact vulnerable, and you can get hurt doing it.
[my impression is that circling, at least as described by Unreal, is not primarily about vulnerability, but that willingness to try it is a necessary ingredient]
Some situations I’ve run into while doing things-in-a-similar-genre-to-Circling:
No such thing as a “safe space”
A friend of mine facilitated a discussion of friendship/relationships, which he established as a “safe space”. People were encouraged to share anxieties that plagued them. Several people did. At the time, it seemed pretty positive. But, several months later, when Friend A was a combination of sick/exhausted/literally-dying and was frustrated with Friend B who had attended the friendship discussion, Friend A used anxieties that Friend B had opened up about in the circle as a weapon to criticize them, in a public setting. This had permanent harm on Friend B’s ability to trust.
Friend B’s takeaway was that Friend A was a sociopath who gathered anxieties on purpose. I think it’s actually worse than that – I think Friend A is in fact one of the most trustworthy people I knew, was earnestly trying to help people at the time. But “earnestly trying to create a safe, helpful space” is not a good enough indicator to tell you how a person will handle being stressed out and angry several months later. I think there is no such thing as a person you can thoroughly trust enough to create a safe space.
I’ve personally been involved with running “explore vulnerability”-esque spaces where I was encouraging people to open up, and then I found myself realizing too late that I didn’t have the skills to handle the issues that came up as a result of that.
Now, I still think that vulnerability and intimacy and emotional risk taking are basically necessary for most people to achieve their social/emotional needs. (Both for literal intimacy/connection, and for self-awareness as a skill that helps them achieve connection elsewhere – idealized Circling-as-Unreal-Describes-It seems to be more for the latter)
Ideally, everyone would have the opportunity to explore vulnerability carefully, step by step, with a skilled therapist or something to turn to if things ever got dicey. In practice, this is really hard. Not everyone has friends whose combination of skills, needs and connection are the right combination to do optimal-stepping-stone-vulnerability-training. Not everyone has access to a good facilitator or therapistor mediator.
Meanwhile, most of the time, nothing bad happens.
So I think it is net-good for small groups of friends to try this sort of thing on their own, even if they’re not sure what they’re doing. I think there’s something intrinsic to doing risky things together (of any sort) that creates bonds and friendship you can’t get elsewhere. (Unfortunately I can’t explain this very well beyond “if this doesn’t make sense you probably have a Concept Shaped Hole).
I think a lot of the disconnect in this thread (and some similar threads in the past) has to do with some people being noticing how crucially important it is to take the kinds of leaps that involve real emotional risk are, and other people noticing how badly hurt you can get if you aren’t careful.
Ideally, everyone would have the opportunity to explore vulnerability carefully, step by step, with a skilled therapist or something to turn to if things ever got dicey.
I think this is an essential line, and a core problem. For more than a half century the social capital of the average person in the US has been falling and falling and falling. A therapist is sort of just a person you pay to pretend to be a genuine friend, without you having to reciprocate friendship back at them. That it is considered reasonable or ideal (as the first thought) to go to a paid professional to get basic F2F friend services is historically weird.
Maybe it is the best we can do, but… like… it didn’t used to be this way I don’t think, and that suggests that it could be like it was in the past if we knew what was causing it.
I think the Shell, Shield, Staff post by SquirrelInHell feels very relevant to all of this. (Not sure if SquirrelInHell would endorse my application of it here).
A few people said the original post was too poetical, and I’m not sure I can summarize it without resorting to most of the same poetry, but here goes:
i. Shell
If the world seems scary, often people first start by forming a shell. The shell prevents the world from affecting them at all. This is “safe”, but it means that you’re limiting your opportunity for growth. Well meaning friends may try to coax you out of your shell, but you know that if you leave your shell they’ll start trampling over your boundar.ies and hurting you.
ii. Shield
An evolution of the shell is the shield.You figure out which parts of the world are most threatening, and develop a defense specifically against those. Instead of fully protecting you, the shield points to only one side. This has the advantage that it gives you more flexibility. You can let parts of the world affect you that seem trustworthy, allowing you to learn and grow. Occasionally this results in your getting stabbed, but you’ve become resilient enough that it’s worth accepting the risk—you can take the occasional dagger to the back.
The downside of the shield is that it obscures part of your vision. If you raise a shield against a particular kind of attack, you’re unable to see and learn from that part of reality.
iii. Staff
The final evolution in this pattern is the staff. That staff doesn’t protect you at all. It helps you stand taller. You can lean on it. It gives you some structure, preventing you from falling into a puddle on the ground. But standing taller makes you more exposed to attack, not less.
By trading a shield for a staff, you’re optimizing for agility, and trusting in yourself to regenerate faster than reality can deal damage to you. It helps you walk faster, farther.
One thing that’s not great about this framing is that since the three things come in an order it’s easy to get into an implicit frame where people with staffs are better than people with shields who are better than people with shells, or at least be worried that other people are doing this. (I have this concern about Kegan levels, for example, and it seems related to PDV’s concerns around circling / NVC.)
So I’d like to push strongly for additional norms around this sort of thing, of the form “and also let’s agree that we won’t criticize people for having a different pattern than us or try to pressure them into ‘leveling up’ from our perspective.”
Is this a social worry (“people will use it as a blugeon”) or an epistemic worry (“people will incorrectly think there’s a hierarchy, but actually they’re all useful frames”)?
I don’t have strong feelings about shell/shield/staff, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Kegan levels, and I think the hierarchy is actually a loadbearing part of the theory. (Specifically, it matters that each level is legible to the one after it, but not vice versa.) I endorse being careful about the social implications, but I wouldn’t want that to become a generalized claim that there aren’t skill hierarchies in the territory.
I wonder, though, if you could say more about this aspect:
I think a lot of the disconnect in this thread (and some similar threads in the past) has to do with some people being noticing how crucially important it is to take the kinds of leaps that involve real emotional risk are, and other people noticing how badly hurt you can get if you aren’t careful.
… specifically, the former half of it.
To me, for instance, it’s clear enough that there’s a lot of damage potential in such “vulnerability-inducing” activities; but it would be inaccurate of me to say that this is my primary problem with them. Rather, I simply can’t see what meaningful benefit they have! You say that it’s “crucially important” to undertake such steps, and that you think (or thought) that “being vulnerable was basically how you got anything worthwhile”. I’m interested to hear more about this, because these, to me, seem like very dubious propositions, and I am wondering what part of the inferential chain I’m missing, here.
The closest bonds I have in my life, are bonds that have been tested. One of my closest friends is someone with whom I decided to make a 450-person conference happen, given us having zero experience running conferences, and we eventually had some really big names coming, and things could have gone badly wrong and reflected terribly on us. But we worked hard and it succeeded, and now I know that when that friend tells me that we are going to do ambitious project X, then we are going to do ambitious project X, and they will not leave me behind to fail.
I trust that person in a way that I couldn’t have if we hadn’t opened ourselves to massive failure.
Something else I want in life, is the ability to talk with people about what thought processes I’m having, what’s stressing me out, and what I’m worried about. Maybe I’m angry at my partner. Maybe I’m feeling depressed. However, many people have very different internal lives, and if you don’t quite have the same internal life I have, something I say could come across wrong—as petty, or as selfish, or as nasty for example—when I’m trying to deal with the thought processes and reason about whether they make sense. So, for me to tell someone, is to take a risk, the risk of not being understood and being rejected. Yet only if I try this, and test whether myself and a friend really understand each other, will we be able to get the value of communication about difficult and important things.
(Here’s Scott with the closely related point that Friendship is Countersignalling: building trust requires putting things on the line.)
I’ve tried this, and sometimes I’ve been burned. And sometimes I’ve built stronger relationships by it. And I couldn’t have gotten the latter without risking the former.
My guess, after several years of very similar conversations with you, is that there’s a cluster of things (I’d vaguely call “fuzzy emotional group stuff”) that just… aren’t relevant to you as much, for one reason or another. It may be that different people get value from different things, and you don’t get value from this class of thing. It may be that you have some kind of conceptual blocker and if you successfully understood the the thing, you’d suddenly get a lot of value out of it. I don’t know.
Again, Scott Alexander’s “Concept Shaped Holes” thing seems relevant. I, Qiaochu and I think others have attempted to explain a variety of things in this cluster, but we keep saying “these sorts of things are really hard to communciate via text-based media—you really need to just try it.” Ultimately you either believe that (and are willing to think about reasons why this may all make sense without asking others to explain it in exhaustive detail, and/or just try stuff for yourself and lean hard into it to actually have a chance of gaining benefit), or you don’t.
And I certainly understand that being frustrating, but if you aren’t convinced enough that there’s something real here worth putting effort into figuring out for yourself, I’m not currently convinced it’s worth (either of our) time to continue to discuss this class of thing.
(“I’ve tried this and it doesn’t seem useful” seems totally fine here, just… if that’s the case, this conversation doesn’t seem very useful. I personally am finding it a bit exhausting)
FYI, although this isn’t super optimized for helping with the current conversation, this post is essentially my previous attempt to summarize a lot of “why fuzzy, social, emotional stuff is important to understand and take seriously”, relying as much as possible on System-2 explanations (instead of trying to ask analytic-oriented thinkers to take any leaps of faith).
a) People are part of the territory. Not only that, they contain relevant map bits, such that I alone could never collect all the map bits without them.
b) My System 2 alone is not sufficient for epistemic rationality. System 1 not only has to be involved, but it is in fact the main determinant of my epistemics. As most “beliefs” are actually aliefs (nonverbal beliefs below the level of consciousness).
c) As such, it is ideal for my System 1 and 2 to work together to form correct beliefs. And, it is ideal for me to be able to fully engage with other people and their epistemics / beliefs. Where ‘fully engage’ means engaging with both System 1 and 2. (Do not mistake me as saying, “It’s good to fully open up to people and expose myself.” That’s not what I mean. I mean that I want to be able to skillfully navigate human interaction—like I have a dashboard where I can see all the incoming streams of data. And I want to notice where I’m inclined to block/parry vs allow/receive, among other possible moves.)
The emotional involvement that occurs (the SNS activation) is a System 1 response, which to me indicates that I’m about to receive some pretty important data, and whatever happens next could be an important update for me.
I think I have way more to say on this, but I’m out of time for now. AMA.
Rather, I simply can’t see what meaningful benefit they have!
This is related to a lot of the other disagreements we’ve been having lately. Many of the things I think I’ve learned about embodiment, human values, my own blind spots, etc. over the past year have come from circling.
5 years ago, I was very pro “giving people an excuse to be more vulnerable than they’d normally feel comfortable being.”
People generally have good reasons for picking the degree of vulnerability they pick. They are comfortable with it, and would not be comfortable with more, due to real things in the world, not personal quirks. Giving an ‘excuse’ to be more vulnerable always has a serious risk of pushing people to be more vulnerable without actually addressing the reasons they are uncomfortable with being more vulnerable. When it’s social risk they’re being vulnerable to, it is necessarily a social environment and therefore has substantial implicit social pressure to avail yourself of the ‘excuse’, so that risk becomes a certainty. Every time you Circle, you are pushing people to be vulnerable whether or not it’s good for them, and they generally know better than you whether it’s good for them. And communicating those boundaries, in this kind of setting, is a risk of the exact type they’re trying to limit their exposure to.
I think people’s defense mechanisms are rarely globally optimal. They’re often created from a specific set of little t and big T traumas that happened throughout their life, and created to avoid those very specific failure modes. And while they’re effective at doing that, they’re probably not well calibrated and create a bunch of other failure modes (this is part of what draws people to circling).
The question is, is the circling context that you’re in a safe place to explore the boundaries of your failure modes? A lot of this is related to which type of safe space you’re in and how do you know? Are you in any of those safe spaces?
Of course, even if you are indeed in one of those safe spaces, that have a tight container held by good leaders and powerful vetting, your defense mechanisms may still not let you want to believe that. I think that’s where the “leap” sometimes comes in, as there’s no amount of small steps that can get you to the large step of trusting people to explore your sub-optimal defense mechanisms.
I agree that they’re unlikely to be globally optimal, but it is unlikely that anyone* other than Bob has a better idea than Bob of where the optimal boundaries/defense mechanisms are relative to where Bob has placed his boundaries. Many people—myself probably included—have defense mechanisms which are too strong, but many others have defense mechanisms which are too weak. It’s a bravery debate, strongly susceptible to typical-minding. And the people most likely to be willing to try Circling are those who least need it and in fact need the opposite.
*Excepting therapists and other forms of trained professional boundary/defense-mechanism-optimality-assessors, whose training also includes a number of required secondary skills like maintaining confidentiality and the virtue of silence which are required to provide that expertise in an ethical and positive-EV way.
And the people most likely to be willing to try Circling are those who least need it and in fact need the opposite.
This feels like a fairly strong claim that I don’t think you’ve justified. (I also note that you just claimed people don’t generally know better than other people about what they need. But, you’re kinda implicitly claiming here that you know better than the people who do circling whether circling is right for them)
I am with you on “circling and circling-esque-things have some risks that people don’t realize”, and “people into circling shouldn’t implicitly assume everyone will be into it”, and there are several better practices that people should be doing with regards to it. But you seem to be assuming a level of danger that’s 10x-100x worse than it is, and/or assuming a harm minimization model that I don’t think most people are running.
I think most of the danger from circling lives in black swan events (I’ve seen a bunch of circles, only 2 cases where I think someone was harmed)
Black swan events are not something I’m meaningfully including in my assessment of the risks. If there’s risks from black swans, and there do seem to be from e.g. bgaesop’s case, that’s on top of the risk from standard cases which is already substantial.
You would not notice most cases of harm, and I’m not sure why you think you would. I’d guess that only half or so of cases of harm (large error bars, roughly 5:1 to 1:5) are noticed by the person affected in a way that allows them to connect the emotional damage to the Circle (probably as a merely substantial contributor rather than a sole contributor; many causes is the norm for this kind of thing), and even those aren’t necessarily noticed immediately. The rest are likely to manifest as unease or nonspecific feelings of wrongness around the Circle, the people who were in it, that day, etc.; as misgivings about something tangentially related; or in no internally-legible way at all, just low-level anxiety/depression or worsening of issues that already existed. In other words, I would expect harm to present exactly like a mild social trauma, because that’s precisely what it is.
And the people most likely to be willing to try Circling are those who least need it and in fact need the opposite.
This feels like a fairly strong claim that I don’t think you’ve justified.
*Excepting therapists and other forms of trained professional boundary/defense-mechanism-optimality-assessors, whose training also includes a number of required secondary skills like maintaining confidentiality and the virtue of silence which are required to provide that expertise in an ethical and positive-EV way.
This feels cruxy to me. I think that there are many groups and people who can are good at figuring this out who aren’t therapists, and many therapists who aren’t good at this.
I’ve been part of at least one circling group that was better at this than therapists I’ve been to, had strict rules and vetting around confidentiality and the virtue of silence, etc.
Another way to say this:
Is circling playing with fire? Yes.
Should you only play with fire with registered firemen? Not necessarily, you just need to be aware of what type of safety precautions the group you’re with is taking, and protect yourself accordingly.
Therapists are the only group with structures to get systematic feedback on whether their assessments are correct; in the absence of such structures, I see no reason to believe self-reports of effectiveness. To paraphrase an -adjacent friend’s recent FB post: “Everyone I’ve met who considered themself a ‘people person’ skeeved me out and eventually alienated me and many people around me. Everyone I’ve met who considered themself an ‘empath’ spent a lot of time telling me what my emotions were and not much time being correct about it.” Someone who tells you they are good at this kind of skill, without reference to a structure they have in place which would detect them instead being very bad at it, is not giving you evidence that they are good at this skill. In practice, they are giving you (very weak) evidence they are very bad at it.
Therapists are not always useful; I’ve had—six? I think six—and only the most recent one has been helpful. But therapy training is training in the skills required to “first, do no harm”. Circling facilitators and similar things do not have those skills and generally don’t actually try to investigate what skills they need to acquire in order to do no harm, nor to acquire those skills.
Therapists are the only group with structures to get systematic feedback on whether their assessments are correct
What feedback mechanisms are you talking about here? I’m having trouble thinking of the difference of a skilled circling facilitator that works with the same closed group, and a skilled therapist working with the same people
Circling facilitators and similar things do not have those skills and generally don’t actually try to investigate what skills they need to acquire in order to do no harm, nor to acquire those skills.
This has not been my experience with good circling facilitators.
This has not been my experience with good circling facilitators.
I think Czynski is claiming many/most circling facilitators are not good.
And I think I likely agree with this, especially if we’re looking at “all circling”, or especially “all circling like things.”
While I disagree, I do think it’s a reasonable position “you should only do Circling with a trained facilitator” (notably different from small meetups self-organizing, which I think happens a fair bunch). And I have some sense that Circling Certification requires less total training than therapy. (But I’m not sure I have much reason to expect the therapy training to be that good.)
I think Czynski is claiming many/most circling facilitators are not good.
I agree with this as well, but I think Czynski is claiming “therefore don’t circle” vs. “therefore find good circling facilitors” which seems like the better move here .
There may be a small minority of facilitators who do not have this problem. I do not think I, you, or anyone else can, before something goes wrong, pick them out from the crowd of seems-pretty-good facilitators who do have the problem. Especially since charismatic people are better at seeming trustworthy than trustworthy but uncharismatic people are. Individual evaluation, absent an actual record of past behavior to examine, is pretty worthless. And if they are following reasonable counselative ethics*, there will be no record; allowing such a record to be read by the public is itself an ethics violation.
Therapists are trained in counselative ethics, and if they violate them, can, and if it’s discovered usually will, face severe consequences like revoking their license and making them unable to practice. I vaguely recall that there are somewhat-analogous pseudolicense-issuers who declare people “certified Circling facilitators”. Even assuming, though, that those organizations put equivalent effort into investigating and assessing claimed violations and promulgating their conclusions (doubtful), they do not have real credibility. Revoking the certification might make it somewhat harder to continue to be a Circling facilitator; it’s a very surmountable barrier, if it is a barrier at all. Those facilitators therefore do not have real skin in the game for the code of counselative ethics, because the issuing organizations just do not have the credibility to impose it. (They lack the right to be sued, in essence.)
*I’m using this to mean “the therapist code of professional ethics” except without the connotation that it is their profession. The correct ethical standard is not actually dependent on whether it is your job or a hobby. It is sufficiently hard to maintain this standard that most people are not willing to put in the effort for a hobby, which is one part of “professional”. The other part is that requiring that someone maintain a certain code to retain their authorization to provide counseling for money is both morally and practically simpler (piggy-back it on top of contract law) than it is to require someone to maintain it for something they do as a hobby. (As an example, many people provide a similar informal service for their friends. Assume for the sake of argument that it would be net good to have all those people obey counselative ethics when they did. Even if so, it would be logistically horrendous, practically infeasible, and morally dubious to establish and enforce that norm.)
I’m not sure I buy that emotional leaps are crucially important. Lowering barriers is, but I am not at all convinced that taking leaps is a good way to go about that.
I think the idealized way to do it is with small, incremental steps that let you explore new, untrusted domains and people as safely as you can, and the issue is that life doesn’t necessarily provide safe, small, incremental steps where you can easily formally verify everything before diving in. Sometimes you meet a new person, find a new activity, or experience a new thing, and you don’t have much choice between taking a leap of faith, or being so hesitant that the opportunity passes you by before you had the chance to explore it.
Or, even when life is providing you with a nice “difficulty curve” / “formal verification curve”, the fact remains that there’s a difference between maximizing safety, and maximizing expected value. Sometimes they are the same, but sometimes the payoff of seizing a new opportunity quickly (and, having a habit of seizing new opportunities quickly) lets you gain much more than you’d get by minimizing damage.
I don’t think there is such a thing as “permanent harm in one’s ability to trust”. Although it can certainly feel that way, the capacity to trust isn’t something that gets permanently damaged. There is always the potential to heal from relational trauma and learn to become more resilient, and find a way to understand and come to terms with what happened, and also work on your own ability to discern in what situations and to what degree you feel it is safe for yourself to risk vulnerability.
So if you take out the assumption that “ability to trust” is an on/off switch you must avoid ever tripping in life, then damage to trust becomes a painful but temporary risk of all relating, and part of the growth of relational skill.
I do think that tending to the relative fragility or lack of relational skill (part of which is inability to determine or set healthy boundaries around one’s own vulnerability) is a crucial facilitation skill and it can be risky for a bunch of relatively low-skilled friends to get together and decide to play around with vulnerability. Not only is the lack of skill a problem, but circling with people with whom you have pre-existing relationships is usually a lot MORE complicated than with strangers. This is because all the unspoken stuff starts coming out, unspoken agreements to not discuss certain things start getting violated, and this is all happening within the high-stakes situation that you care about these people and want to maintain the relationship. All hell can break lose rather quickly.
So I’d recommend (a) get comfortable with one on one therapy first, as it is the safest space you will find and much safer than a group of friends and then (b) get comfortable with a well-facilitated group of strangers led by someone with some therapy-type training and then if you want to (c) invite your friends to that well-facilitated group, and then only after that (d) try circling unsupervised with friends. And even after all of that, expect it to get rather messy, and have some agreements before hand about how you will handle that mess when it happens. Like, “here is our repair procedure for damaged trust”.
In other words, do not underestimate how tricky authentic relating actually is, and how much our day to day habits and cultural and social norms shield us from having to be any good at it. But, also don’t believe that you can’t recover and learn from socially-induced pain, shame, and embarrassment, because you absolutely can. Resilience is absolutely a thing. It is like a muscle though and takes time to build so go slow and take care of yourself.
I think I agree with the object level advice here.
Not 100% sure if I communicated the right thing with the “permanently damaged ability to trust” thing. I didn’t mean they can’t trust any more (pretty sure they can and do), but they are now more slow to trust.
Over time, as they form relationships with new people I expect the system-1 evidence to pile up which gradually moves the needle on how easily they are able to trust a new person. (i.e. I believe their experience with Person A was an extreme outlier, so overtime their distrust-o-meter would naturally regress to the mean until it’s properly calibrated, and if they do this mindfully and purposefully it may happen faster)
But also because their experience with Person A was an extreme outlier (in terms of how trustworthy they appeared and how much they violated the trust), the rate at which they come to trust new people will, at the very least, take a much longer time to recover than usual, and seems likely (and perhaps even correct in some sense) that they’ll never become quite as trusting as I currently am.
I’ve only circled twice, not sure how relevant this is. (FWIW, my takeaway so far is “eh, pretty okay, depends a lot on facilitator and situation”). But, some perspective I think is important to the debates going on here.
5 years ago, I was very pro “giving people an excuse to be more vulnerable than they’d normally feel comfortable being.”
I’m still pretty pro this. But… in a less naive way than I was 5 years ago.
It seemed like being vulnerable was basically how you got anything worthwhile. I saw people curled up in their shells, desperately lacking in intimacy in ways that was having a crippling effect on them. They lived in fear of expressing themselves, of taking risks. And having an environment conducive to exploring intimacy and vulnerability was profoundly valuable. (I was at least somewhat this type of person, although I don’t think it was as big a deal for me as for other people I knew)
And the thing that I intellectually understood, but took several years to grok, was that being vulnerable is in fact vulnerable, and you can get hurt doing it.
[my impression is that circling, at least as described by Unreal, is not primarily about vulnerability, but that willingness to try it is a necessary ingredient]
Some situations I’ve run into while doing things-in-a-similar-genre-to-Circling:
No such thing as a “safe space”
A friend of mine facilitated a discussion of friendship/relationships, which he established as a “safe space”. People were encouraged to share anxieties that plagued them. Several people did. At the time, it seemed pretty positive. But, several months later, when Friend A was a combination of sick/exhausted/literally-dying and was frustrated with Friend B who had attended the friendship discussion, Friend A used anxieties that Friend B had opened up about in the circle as a weapon to criticize them, in a public setting. This had permanent harm on Friend B’s ability to trust.
Friend B’s takeaway was that Friend A was a sociopath who gathered anxieties on purpose. I think it’s actually worse than that – I think Friend A is in fact one of the most trustworthy people I knew, was earnestly trying to help people at the time. But “earnestly trying to create a safe, helpful space” is not a good enough indicator to tell you how a person will handle being stressed out and angry several months later. I think there is no such thing as a person you can thoroughly trust enough to create a safe space.
I’ve personally been involved with running “explore vulnerability”-esque spaces where I was encouraging people to open up, and then I found myself realizing too late that I didn’t have the skills to handle the issues that came up as a result of that.
Now, I still think that vulnerability and intimacy and emotional risk taking are basically necessary for most people to achieve their social/emotional needs. (Both for literal intimacy/connection, and for self-awareness as a skill that helps them achieve connection elsewhere – idealized Circling-as-Unreal-Describes-It seems to be more for the latter)
Ideally, everyone would have the opportunity to explore vulnerability carefully, step by step, with a skilled therapist or something to turn to if things ever got dicey. In practice, this is really hard. Not everyone has friends whose combination of skills, needs and connection are the right combination to do optimal-stepping-stone-vulnerability-training. Not everyone has access to a good facilitator or therapistor mediator.
Meanwhile, most of the time, nothing bad happens.
So I think it is net-good for small groups of friends to try this sort of thing on their own, even if they’re not sure what they’re doing. I think there’s something intrinsic to doing risky things together (of any sort) that creates bonds and friendship you can’t get elsewhere. (Unfortunately I can’t explain this very well beyond “if this doesn’t make sense you probably have a Concept Shaped Hole).
I think a lot of the disconnect in this thread (and some similar threads in the past) has to do with some people being noticing how crucially important it is to take the kinds of leaps that involve real emotional risk are, and other people noticing how badly hurt you can get if you aren’t careful.
I think this is an essential line, and a core problem. For more than a half century the social capital of the average person in the US has been falling and falling and falling. A therapist is sort of just a person you pay to pretend to be a genuine friend, without you having to reciprocate friendship back at them. That it is considered reasonable or ideal (as the first thought) to go to a paid professional to get basic F2F friend services is historically weird.
Maybe it is the best we can do, but… like… it didn’t used to be this way I don’t think, and that suggests that it could be like it was in the past if we knew what was causing it.
A therapist is also someone who is bound by confidentiality—things you tell them don’t get spread around and used against you by other people.
I think the Shell, Shield, Staff post by SquirrelInHell feels very relevant to all of this. (Not sure if SquirrelInHell would endorse my application of it here).
A few people said the original post was too poetical, and I’m not sure I can summarize it without resorting to most of the same poetry, but here goes:
i. Shell
If the world seems scary, often people first start by forming a shell. The shell prevents the world from affecting them at all. This is “safe”, but it means that you’re limiting your opportunity for growth. Well meaning friends may try to coax you out of your shell, but you know that if you leave your shell they’ll start trampling over your boundar.ies and hurting you.
ii. Shield
An evolution of the shell is the shield. You figure out which parts of the world are most threatening, and develop a defense specifically against those. Instead of fully protecting you, the shield points to only one side. This has the advantage that it gives you more flexibility. You can let parts of the world affect you that seem trustworthy, allowing you to learn and grow. Occasionally this results in your getting stabbed, but you’ve become resilient enough that it’s worth accepting the risk—you can take the occasional dagger to the back.
The downside of the shield is that it obscures part of your vision. If you raise a shield against a particular kind of attack, you’re unable to see and learn from that part of reality.
iii. Staff
The final evolution in this pattern is the staff. That staff doesn’t protect you at all. It helps you stand taller. You can lean on it. It gives you some structure, preventing you from falling into a puddle on the ground. But standing taller makes you more exposed to attack, not less.
By trading a shield for a staff, you’re optimizing for agility, and trusting in yourself to regenerate faster than reality can deal damage to you. It helps you walk faster, farther.
One thing that’s not great about this framing is that since the three things come in an order it’s easy to get into an implicit frame where people with staffs are better than people with shields who are better than people with shells, or at least be worried that other people are doing this. (I have this concern about Kegan levels, for example, and it seems related to PDV’s concerns around circling / NVC.)
So I’d like to push strongly for additional norms around this sort of thing, of the form “and also let’s agree that we won’t criticize people for having a different pattern than us or try to pressure them into ‘leveling up’ from our perspective.”
Is this a social worry (“people will use it as a blugeon”) or an epistemic worry (“people will incorrectly think there’s a hierarchy, but actually they’re all useful frames”)?
I don’t have strong feelings about shell/shield/staff, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Kegan levels, and I think the hierarchy is actually a loadbearing part of the theory. (Specifically, it matters that each level is legible to the one after it, but not vice versa.) I endorse being careful about the social implications, but I wouldn’t want that to become a generalized claim that there aren’t skill hierarchies in the territory.
Mostly a social worry.
Yes, important point.
This is an excellent comment.
I wonder, though, if you could say more about this aspect:
… specifically, the former half of it.
To me, for instance, it’s clear enough that there’s a lot of damage potential in such “vulnerability-inducing” activities; but it would be inaccurate of me to say that this is my primary problem with them. Rather, I simply can’t see what meaningful benefit they have! You say that it’s “crucially important” to undertake such steps, and that you think (or thought) that “being vulnerable was basically how you got anything worthwhile”. I’m interested to hear more about this, because these, to me, seem like very dubious propositions, and I am wondering what part of the inferential chain I’m missing, here.
The closest bonds I have in my life, are bonds that have been tested. One of my closest friends is someone with whom I decided to make a 450-person conference happen, given us having zero experience running conferences, and we eventually had some really big names coming, and things could have gone badly wrong and reflected terribly on us. But we worked hard and it succeeded, and now I know that when that friend tells me that we are going to do ambitious project X, then we are going to do ambitious project X, and they will not leave me behind to fail.
I trust that person in a way that I couldn’t have if we hadn’t opened ourselves to massive failure.
Something else I want in life, is the ability to talk with people about what thought processes I’m having, what’s stressing me out, and what I’m worried about. Maybe I’m angry at my partner. Maybe I’m feeling depressed. However, many people have very different internal lives, and if you don’t quite have the same internal life I have, something I say could come across wrong—as petty, or as selfish, or as nasty for example—when I’m trying to deal with the thought processes and reason about whether they make sense. So, for me to tell someone, is to take a risk, the risk of not being understood and being rejected. Yet only if I try this, and test whether myself and a friend really understand each other, will we be able to get the value of communication about difficult and important things.
(Here’s Scott with the closely related point that Friendship is Countersignalling: building trust requires putting things on the line.)
I’ve tried this, and sometimes I’ve been burned. And sometimes I’ve built stronger relationships by it. And I couldn’t have gotten the latter without risking the former.
My guess, after several years of very similar conversations with you, is that there’s a cluster of things (I’d vaguely call “fuzzy emotional group stuff”) that just… aren’t relevant to you as much, for one reason or another. It may be that different people get value from different things, and you don’t get value from this class of thing. It may be that you have some kind of conceptual blocker and if you successfully understood the the thing, you’d suddenly get a lot of value out of it. I don’t know.
Again, Scott Alexander’s “Concept Shaped Holes” thing seems relevant. I, Qiaochu and I think others have attempted to explain a variety of things in this cluster, but we keep saying “these sorts of things are really hard to communciate via text-based media—you really need to just try it.” Ultimately you either believe that (and are willing to think about reasons why this may all make sense without asking others to explain it in exhaustive detail, and/or just try stuff for yourself and lean hard into it to actually have a chance of gaining benefit), or you don’t.
And I certainly understand that being frustrating, but if you aren’t convinced enough that there’s something real here worth putting effort into figuring out for yourself, I’m not currently convinced it’s worth (either of our) time to continue to discuss this class of thing.
(“I’ve tried this and it doesn’t seem useful” seems totally fine here, just… if that’s the case, this conversation doesn’t seem very useful. I personally am finding it a bit exhausting)
FYI, although this isn’t super optimized for helping with the current conversation, this post is essentially my previous attempt to summarize a lot of “why fuzzy, social, emotional stuff is important to understand and take seriously”, relying as much as possible on System-2 explanations (instead of trying to ask analytic-oriented thinkers to take any leaps of faith).
The Real Hufflepuff Sequence Was the Posts We Made Along the Way
You know, this sounds like that Clicking thing that Logic Nation guy talked about.
a) People are part of the territory. Not only that, they contain relevant map bits, such that I alone could never collect all the map bits without them.
b) My System 2 alone is not sufficient for epistemic rationality. System 1 not only has to be involved, but it is in fact the main determinant of my epistemics. As most “beliefs” are actually aliefs (nonverbal beliefs below the level of consciousness).
c) As such, it is ideal for my System 1 and 2 to work together to form correct beliefs. And, it is ideal for me to be able to fully engage with other people and their epistemics / beliefs. Where ‘fully engage’ means engaging with both System 1 and 2. (Do not mistake me as saying, “It’s good to fully open up to people and expose myself.” That’s not what I mean. I mean that I want to be able to skillfully navigate human interaction—like I have a dashboard where I can see all the incoming streams of data. And I want to notice where I’m inclined to block/parry vs allow/receive, among other possible moves.)
The emotional involvement that occurs (the SNS activation) is a System 1 response, which to me indicates that I’m about to receive some pretty important data, and whatever happens next could be an important update for me.
I think I have way more to say on this, but I’m out of time for now. AMA.
This is related to a lot of the other disagreements we’ve been having lately. Many of the things I think I’ve learned about embodiment, human values, my own blind spots, etc. over the past year have come from circling.
People generally have good reasons for picking the degree of vulnerability they pick. They are comfortable with it, and would not be comfortable with more, due to real things in the world, not personal quirks. Giving an ‘excuse’ to be more vulnerable always has a serious risk of pushing people to be more vulnerable without actually addressing the reasons they are uncomfortable with being more vulnerable. When it’s social risk they’re being vulnerable to, it is necessarily a social environment and therefore has substantial implicit social pressure to avail yourself of the ‘excuse’, so that risk becomes a certainty. Every time you Circle, you are pushing people to be vulnerable whether or not it’s good for them, and they generally know better than you whether it’s good for them. And communicating those boundaries, in this kind of setting, is a risk of the exact type they’re trying to limit their exposure to.
I think people’s defense mechanisms are rarely globally optimal. They’re often created from a specific set of little t and big T traumas that happened throughout their life, and created to avoid those very specific failure modes. And while they’re effective at doing that, they’re probably not well calibrated and create a bunch of other failure modes (this is part of what draws people to circling).
The question is, is the circling context that you’re in a safe place to explore the boundaries of your failure modes? A lot of this is related to which type of safe space you’re in and how do you know? Are you in any of those safe spaces?
Of course, even if you are indeed in one of those safe spaces, that have a tight container held by good leaders and powerful vetting, your defense mechanisms may still not let you want to believe that. I think that’s where the “leap” sometimes comes in, as there’s no amount of small steps that can get you to the large step of trusting people to explore your sub-optimal defense mechanisms.
I agree that they’re unlikely to be globally optimal, but it is unlikely that anyone* other than Bob has a better idea than Bob of where the optimal boundaries/defense mechanisms are relative to where Bob has placed his boundaries. Many people—myself probably included—have defense mechanisms which are too strong, but many others have defense mechanisms which are too weak. It’s a bravery debate, strongly susceptible to typical-minding. And the people most likely to be willing to try Circling are those who least need it and in fact need the opposite.
*Excepting therapists and other forms of trained professional boundary/defense-mechanism-optimality-assessors, whose training also includes a number of required secondary skills like maintaining confidentiality and the virtue of silence which are required to provide that expertise in an ethical and positive-EV way.
This feels like a fairly strong claim that I don’t think you’ve justified. (I also note that you just claimed people don’t generally know better than other people about what they need. But, you’re kinda implicitly claiming here that you know better than the people who do circling whether circling is right for them)
I am with you on “circling and circling-esque-things have some risks that people don’t realize”, and “people into circling shouldn’t implicitly assume everyone will be into it”, and there are several better practices that people should be doing with regards to it. But you seem to be assuming a level of danger that’s 10x-100x worse than it is, and/or assuming a harm minimization model that I don’t think most people are running.
I think most of the danger from circling lives in black swan events (I’ve seen a bunch of circles, only 2 cases where I think someone was harmed)
Black swan events are not something I’m meaningfully including in my assessment of the risks. If there’s risks from black swans, and there do seem to be from e.g. bgaesop’s case, that’s on top of the risk from standard cases which is already substantial.
You would not notice most cases of harm, and I’m not sure why you think you would. I’d guess that only half or so of cases of harm (large error bars, roughly 5:1 to 1:5) are noticed by the person affected in a way that allows them to connect the emotional damage to the Circle (probably as a merely substantial contributor rather than a sole contributor; many causes is the norm for this kind of thing), and even those aren’t necessarily noticed immediately. The rest are likely to manifest as unease or nonspecific feelings of wrongness around the Circle, the people who were in it, that day, etc.; as misgivings about something tangentially related; or in no internally-legible way at all, just low-level anxiety/depression or worsening of issues that already existed. In other words, I would expect harm to present exactly like a mild social trauma, because that’s precisely what it is.
I guess it’s a strong claim, but it’s the standard prior on advice, cf. All Debates Are Bravery Debates, The Loudest Alarm is Probably False, and leverage points in systems analysis. People’s biases for psychological interventions tend to be anticorrelated with how much they’re needed.
(quick note to avoid doublecounting: bgaesop’s black swan is the same one as mine)
This feels cruxy to me. I think that there are many groups and people who can are good at figuring this out who aren’t therapists, and many therapists who aren’t good at this.
I’ve been part of at least one circling group that was better at this than therapists I’ve been to, had strict rules and vetting around confidentiality and the virtue of silence, etc.
Another way to say this:
Is circling playing with fire? Yes.
Should you only play with fire with registered firemen? Not necessarily, you just need to be aware of what type of safety precautions the group you’re with is taking, and protect yourself accordingly.
Therapists are the only group with structures to get systematic feedback on whether their assessments are correct; in the absence of such structures, I see no reason to believe self-reports of effectiveness. To paraphrase an -adjacent friend’s recent FB post: “Everyone I’ve met who considered themself a ‘people person’ skeeved me out and eventually alienated me and many people around me. Everyone I’ve met who considered themself an ‘empath’ spent a lot of time telling me what my emotions were and not much time being correct about it.” Someone who tells you they are good at this kind of skill, without reference to a structure they have in place which would detect them instead being very bad at it, is not giving you evidence that they are good at this skill. In practice, they are giving you (very weak) evidence they are very bad at it.
Therapists are not always useful; I’ve had—six? I think six—and only the most recent one has been helpful. But therapy training is training in the skills required to “first, do no harm”. Circling facilitators and similar things do not have those skills and generally don’t actually try to investigate what skills they need to acquire in order to do no harm, nor to acquire those skills.
What feedback mechanisms are you talking about here? I’m having trouble thinking of the difference of a skilled circling facilitator that works with the same closed group, and a skilled therapist working with the same people
This has not been my experience with good circling facilitators.
I think Czynski is claiming many/most circling facilitators are not good.
And I think I likely agree with this, especially if we’re looking at “all circling”, or especially “all circling like things.”
While I disagree, I do think it’s a reasonable position “you should only do Circling with a trained facilitator” (notably different from small meetups self-organizing, which I think happens a fair bunch). And I have some sense that Circling Certification requires less total training than therapy. (But I’m not sure I have much reason to expect the therapy training to be that good.)
I agree with this as well, but I think Czynski is claiming “therefore don’t circle” vs. “therefore find good circling facilitors” which seems like the better move here .
There may be a small minority of facilitators who do not have this problem. I do not think I, you, or anyone else can, before something goes wrong, pick them out from the crowd of seems-pretty-good facilitators who do have the problem. Especially since charismatic people are better at seeming trustworthy than trustworthy but uncharismatic people are. Individual evaluation, absent an actual record of past behavior to examine, is pretty worthless. And if they are following reasonable counselative ethics*, there will be no record; allowing such a record to be read by the public is itself an ethics violation.
Therapists are trained in counselative ethics, and if they violate them, can, and if it’s discovered usually will, face severe consequences like revoking their license and making them unable to practice. I vaguely recall that there are somewhat-analogous pseudolicense-issuers who declare people “certified Circling facilitators”. Even assuming, though, that those organizations put equivalent effort into investigating and assessing claimed violations and promulgating their conclusions (doubtful), they do not have real credibility. Revoking the certification might make it somewhat harder to continue to be a Circling facilitator; it’s a very surmountable barrier, if it is a barrier at all. Those facilitators therefore do not have real skin in the game for the code of counselative ethics, because the issuing organizations just do not have the credibility to impose it. (They lack the right to be sued, in essence.)
*I’m using this to mean “the therapist code of professional ethics” except without the connotation that it is their profession. The correct ethical standard is not actually dependent on whether it is your job or a hobby. It is sufficiently hard to maintain this standard that most people are not willing to put in the effort for a hobby, which is one part of “professional”. The other part is that requiring that someone maintain a certain code to retain their authorization to provide counseling for money is both morally and practically simpler (piggy-back it on top of contract law) than it is to require someone to maintain it for something they do as a hobby. (As an example, many people provide a similar informal service for their friends. Assume for the sake of argument that it would be net good to have all those people obey counselative ethics when they did. Even if so, it would be logistically horrendous, practically infeasible, and morally dubious to establish and enforce that norm.)
I’m not sure I buy that emotional leaps are crucially important. Lowering barriers is, but I am not at all convinced that taking leaps is a good way to go about that.
I think the idealized way to do it is with small, incremental steps that let you explore new, untrusted domains and people as safely as you can, and the issue is that life doesn’t necessarily provide safe, small, incremental steps where you can easily formally verify everything before diving in. Sometimes you meet a new person, find a new activity, or experience a new thing, and you don’t have much choice between taking a leap of faith, or being so hesitant that the opportunity passes you by before you had the chance to explore it.
Or, even when life is providing you with a nice “difficulty curve” / “formal verification curve”, the fact remains that there’s a difference between maximizing safety, and maximizing expected value. Sometimes they are the same, but sometimes the payoff of seizing a new opportunity quickly (and, having a habit of seizing new opportunities quickly) lets you gain much more than you’d get by minimizing damage.
I don’t think there is such a thing as “permanent harm in one’s ability to trust”. Although it can certainly feel that way, the capacity to trust isn’t something that gets permanently damaged. There is always the potential to heal from relational trauma and learn to become more resilient, and find a way to understand and come to terms with what happened, and also work on your own ability to discern in what situations and to what degree you feel it is safe for yourself to risk vulnerability.
So if you take out the assumption that “ability to trust” is an on/off switch you must avoid ever tripping in life, then damage to trust becomes a painful but temporary risk of all relating, and part of the growth of relational skill.
I do think that tending to the relative fragility or lack of relational skill (part of which is inability to determine or set healthy boundaries around one’s own vulnerability) is a crucial facilitation skill and it can be risky for a bunch of relatively low-skilled friends to get together and decide to play around with vulnerability. Not only is the lack of skill a problem, but circling with people with whom you have pre-existing relationships is usually a lot MORE complicated than with strangers. This is because all the unspoken stuff starts coming out, unspoken agreements to not discuss certain things start getting violated, and this is all happening within the high-stakes situation that you care about these people and want to maintain the relationship. All hell can break lose rather quickly.
So I’d recommend (a) get comfortable with one on one therapy first, as it is the safest space you will find and much safer than a group of friends and then (b) get comfortable with a well-facilitated group of strangers led by someone with some therapy-type training and then if you want to (c) invite your friends to that well-facilitated group, and then only after that (d) try circling unsupervised with friends. And even after all of that, expect it to get rather messy, and have some agreements before hand about how you will handle that mess when it happens. Like, “here is our repair procedure for damaged trust”.
In other words, do not underestimate how tricky authentic relating actually is, and how much our day to day habits and cultural and social norms shield us from having to be any good at it. But, also don’t believe that you can’t recover and learn from socially-induced pain, shame, and embarrassment, because you absolutely can. Resilience is absolutely a thing. It is like a muscle though and takes time to build so go slow and take care of yourself.
I think I agree with the object level advice here.
Not 100% sure if I communicated the right thing with the “permanently damaged ability to trust” thing. I didn’t mean they can’t trust any more (pretty sure they can and do), but they are now more slow to trust.
Over time, as they form relationships with new people I expect the system-1 evidence to pile up which gradually moves the needle on how easily they are able to trust a new person. (i.e. I believe their experience with Person A was an extreme outlier, so overtime their distrust-o-meter would naturally regress to the mean until it’s properly calibrated, and if they do this mindfully and purposefully it may happen faster)
But also because their experience with Person A was an extreme outlier (in terms of how trustworthy they appeared and how much they violated the trust), the rate at which they come to trust new people will, at the very least, take a much longer time to recover than usual, and seems likely (and perhaps even correct in some sense) that they’ll never become quite as trusting as I currently am.