I found this post useful, thank you. One comment—you say
We often wait until we feel confident to act, but the psychology of courage works in reverse; the feeling follows the movement. We inhabit the posture of the person we wish to be, treating the terrifying moment as a low-stakes simulation rather than a final referendum on our worth. By playing the role of a courageous person before we actually feel like one, we prove to our nervous system that the catastrophe we fear does not occur when we act. This lowers the stakes of the environment, turning a life task into a simple experiment.
I think this contains an unaddressed issue, and the issue is a textbook example of self-fulfilling fun times. If you expect things to go badly, and
1. your system would find it comforting for your model of the world to be confirmed by events; and
2. you now have skin in the the game to fail so that others see that your excuse was true all along and they should just excuse you from Doing The Scary Things in the future (which itself adds tension),
then trying to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ can really not work out so well, even if you—or at least some of your subagents that actually would like to not be shying away from everything or avoiding responsibility/vulnerability—are genuinely on board with taking whatever the step is in the given scenario.
A couple of other elements I see in that causal web (which I’m not fully scoping out here, these are just some dynamics I notice among probably more):
a) anxiety (and I assume other emotions that suck the bandwidth right out of your PFC) quite literally removes your ability to engage fluidly with the situation, which means you’re actually likely to fail/be ungraceful per your expectations, while people who don’t have tangles about this kind of scenario would do just fine and expect you to do just fine (and by the way, then, said people will watch with a mixture of bafflement and admiration for accurately predicting such remarkable failure, which isn’t much comfort, when you fail at something they thought would be trivial and towards which they thought you just needed a bit of encouragement to sail smoothly through) [a different lens on this is ‘I expect my circumstances to be unsafe, therefore, I act like everything is unsafe in expectation, which causes a bunch of friction by being the wrong behaviour for the actual situation’]
b) predictably, you then learn Real Hard that you in fact should be excusing yourself of any situation involving any of the parameters of this situation in the future. Got really anxious during a dinner date? Better never eat with anyone else, or wear a white shirt again, or walk into a situation too relaxed or too tense, or make eye contact with anyone, etc. Great, now a bunch more things associated with elements of that memory network are super scary, and you’ll be even more on edge trying to meet such situations in the future
Tbc I’m not advocating in favour of hiding behind excuses—but there is a real issue here, at least for me.
I think what allows me to get better over time despite this is— to be aware that these patterns are at least part of why I fail, and assign a bit more credence to ‘there’s not really anything really wrong with me, but my silly anxiety gets in the way and it’s kinda goofy, oh well’ - to use anxiolytics or similarly grounding/metacognition-supporting substances/practices so I can notice all this better as it unfolds, and encode stories about how things happened that are more useful than what my racing, scared mind might otherwise record + so my predictive processing system comes at situations expecting them to be slightly less doomy, which means I gradually get a higher proportion of experiences that don’t end in ‘everything is terrible’, which creates a virtuous cycle.
I found this post useful, thank you. One comment—you say
I think this contains an unaddressed issue, and the issue is a textbook example of self-fulfilling fun times. If you expect things to go badly, and
1. your system would find it comforting for your model of the world to be confirmed by events; and
2. you now have skin in the the game to fail so that others see that your excuse was true all along and they should just excuse you from Doing The Scary Things in the future (which itself adds tension),
then trying to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ can really not work out so well, even if you—or at least some of your subagents that actually would like to not be shying away from everything or avoiding responsibility/vulnerability—are genuinely on board with taking whatever the step is in the given scenario.
A couple of other elements I see in that causal web (which I’m not fully scoping out here, these are just some dynamics I notice among probably more):
a) anxiety (and I assume other emotions that suck the bandwidth right out of your PFC) quite literally removes your ability to engage fluidly with the situation, which means you’re actually likely to fail/be ungraceful per your expectations, while people who don’t have tangles about this kind of scenario would do just fine and expect you to do just fine (and by the way, then, said people will watch with a mixture of bafflement and admiration for accurately predicting such remarkable failure, which isn’t much comfort, when you fail at something they thought would be trivial and towards which they thought you just needed a bit of encouragement to sail smoothly through)
[a different lens on this is ‘I expect my circumstances to be unsafe, therefore, I act like everything is unsafe in expectation, which causes a bunch of friction by being the wrong behaviour for the actual situation’]
b) predictably, you then learn Real Hard that you in fact should be excusing yourself of any situation involving any of the parameters of this situation in the future. Got really anxious during a dinner date? Better never eat with anyone else, or wear a white shirt again, or walk into a situation too relaxed or too tense, or make eye contact with anyone, etc. Great, now a bunch more things associated with elements of that memory network are super scary, and you’ll be even more on edge trying to meet such situations in the future
Tbc I’m not advocating in favour of hiding behind excuses—but there is a real issue here, at least for me.
I think what allows me to get better over time despite this is—
to be aware that these patterns are at least part of why I fail, and assign a bit more credence to ‘there’s not really anything really wrong with me, but my silly anxiety gets in the way and it’s kinda goofy, oh well’
- to use anxiolytics or similarly grounding/metacognition-supporting substances/practices so I can notice all this better as it unfolds, and encode stories about how things happened that are more useful than what my racing, scared mind might otherwise record + so my predictive processing system comes at situations expecting them to be slightly less doomy, which means I gradually get a higher proportion of experiences that don’t end in ‘everything is terrible’, which creates a virtuous cycle.
(probably other things but my PC is dying!)