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 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.)