If a partner makes you grow stronger and better, that means they’re not acting like you’re good enough as you are.
If a partner acts like you’re good enough as you are, they’re not pushing you to grow stronger and better.
This isn’t true for everyone. You can want to get even better while still thinking you’re good enough to be loved, and lots of people find it easier under those circumstances.
Agree. It could also be that your desire to keep growing is one of the things that your partner considers good about you, and that they express frequent appreciation when you’ve in fact put work into growing and also gotten better. So you are good as you are, where “as you are” = “being the kind of a person who keeps growing and wants to continue doing so”.
More generally, there’s a difference between judgment and discernment. If you judge someone, you are considering them to be e.g. morally or intrinsically bad, in ways that lead you to express disapproval (out loud or just in your head). If you are being discerning, you merely note that someone could be better, without that being a judgment on them.
I think the quoted bit from the OP is failing to make that distinction. People want a partner that doesn’t judge them, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily want a partner who is undiscerning of the ways where they could improve. (Some people do also want a partner who’s undiscerning! But not all.)
Agree. It could also be that your desire to keep growing is one of the things that your partner considers good about you, and that they express frequent appreciation when you’ve in fact put work into growing and also gotten better. So you are good as you are, where “as you are” = “being the kind of a person who keeps growing and wants to continue doing so”.
That is the stance I most often take toward myself, too.
If you judge someone, you are considering them to be e.g. morally or intrinsically bad, in ways that lead you to express disapproval (out loud or just in your head). If you are being discerning, you merely note that someone could be better, without that being a judgment on them.
To be clear, I do make this distinction in my head. The problem is that it’s a very hard distinction to signal out loud; expressing discernment will often cause people to immediately assume there’s judgement. The quoted section was trying to gesture at the fact that people very often conflate the two, so it’s hard to convey one without the other.
I disagree that it’s hard, in the relevant context.
It’s hard to communicate this to someone who don’t have a distinction between the two concepts in their head. It’s also hard to communicate this with someone who are two quick to jump to conclutions regarding what you mean to say, and also have bad priors about you. This is enough of a problem, that I don’t recommend offering decernments to people you don’t know well. But that’s also kind of a mute point, since I think it’s bad to offer unsolicited advice to people you don’t know well, for other reasons.
But with someone like a romantic parner, or a close friend, with whom you’d have lots of long form conversation, I don’t think it’s hard.
You can infact just say: “I love you as you are, and among the things I love about you is the desire to grow stronger. I’ve noticed a way you could be stronger, do you want to hear it now or later?”
Or if you have extablished the words “desernment vs judgment” you can just pre-prease any suggestion for imporvment with “desernment”. Or what ever communication style works for you.
Later into the relationship, you might not even have to clarify, but the person will just have the correct prior that you’re expressing a desernment, and not a judgment.
On reflection, I think this maybe conflicts with my observations of most people. Not necessarily that it’s literally false as stated, but that the true versions of it don’t generalize very far.
There is a true interpretation: if somebody picks up e.g. chess for the first time, and finds that they’re pretty good at it for a beginner, sometimes that makes them want to practice it more and get better. That I definitely buy.
Another true interpretation: when people feel like they have slack and a safety net, including the emotional safety net of a partner who will still be there if they fail, they’re more likely to do the sort of hard things which induce lots of growth but have nontrivial chance of failure. Starting a business would be a canonical example.
But I observe that most people, most of the time after reaching adulthood, are remarkably well-described as growth minimizers, subject to the constraints of their environment (which sometimes forces some growth). For instance, the supermajority of college students are well-described as learning as little as possible while still getting the degree they want. The supermajority of people in general will spend lots of time repeatedly doing the things they think they’re already good at or get positive feedback for, and avoid things they’re bad at. New managers or new parents will be forced to develop some skills, but they rarely develop those skills further than they have to. New hires take only a few months to ramp up (often less), and then plateau. The most reliable method for getting in shape is to join the military, where the environment will force you to get into shape.
Of course that isn’t a perfect model, but it fits what I see remarkably well and remarkably often.
And with that in mind, I sure do expect people to normally satisfice on growth. Far more often than not, if someone thinks they’re good enough in some domain, if someone is told they’re good enough in some domain, they will respond by not growing in that domain. The opposite can happen, but those tend to be the unusual cases which define a person’s identity, not the usual cases which dominate their life.
And this is exactly what makes it so high value for one’s environment to contain a partner who is always pushing one to grow more.
Maybe the reason people stick to what they are good at, is not lack of motivation to explore, but lack of safety net to explore. This seems to explain all your observations, if you assume most people are much more anxious than you. In this case, what other people need to grow is more acceptance in their life, not more pushing.
I definitely buy that “most people are much more anxious than me” is a key load-bearing factor here. I do not buy that the anxiety goes away when one has a safety net. Anxiety generally directs itself at various ways things could go wrong, so it often feels like more safety net would yield less anxiety. But from the people I’ve best known who have lots of anxiety, it seems much more like the anxiety is a conserved quantity. Remove one thing they’re anxious about, and their subconscious will promptly find something else to be anxious about.
(This is a common pattern with lots of emotions—e.g. the most obvious evidence of hangriness or hormonal anger is that if one thing the person is angry about is resolved, they promptly become angry about something else.)
I don’t know what is true for the typical person, and I’m definatly not a typical person.
With those caviats, what you describe is not true for me. To feel ok, I need to have a handfull of close friends that I see regularly. This provides some sort of validation, among other values. If I have this, my social anxiety is low. If I don’t have this my anxiety is high, and causes lot’s of problems.
It might look like my anxiety was recistant to be cured by more safety, because it took me a long time to find the people I need. Before I found people of my approximat neurotype, I was so far from being ok, that it was unclear to me that the thing I could clearly feel I was missing, was something that could exist.
And it’s not the case that the further from the safe situation I am, the more anxiety I feel. It’s more like a step function.
Also, sometimes the anxiety need some time to fully update on a new situation. This looks like the anxiety comming back. And then I focus on the evidence that things are acctually ok, or ask for some help to do this, and then it goes away. This does not work if things are not acctually ok.
I can see how this could look like anxiety is conserved, over a lot of diffrent datapoints, and I don’t know how someone can tell the diffrence untill they have experienced sufficient safety.
I think that case matches what I had in mind with the “anxiety is conserved” model. I don’t mean that nothing can ever make the anxiety go away; the point is that the things which one feels anxious about are not counterfactual to the emotion.
It’s generalized hangriness: if someone is hangry, they’ll feel angry about X, and if X is resolved they’ll quickly latch onto something else to be angry about; that’s the conservation. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up their hangriness; they just need to eat something.
Likewise, it sounds like you probably felt anxious a lot, and if one problem cleared up you’d feel anxious about something else. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up the anxiety; you apparently needed time with certain kinds of friends, just like a hangry person needs to eat. The anxiety was resistant to being cured by a generic safety net. You needed a particular thing which was not just safety in the literal sense of the word.
No, I don’t think what you say maches my experience. My anxiety was pointing straight at the thing I needed. Although I acknolage I did not put forward enough details for thus to be clear to you.
But it did not tell me how much I would need exactly. So it’s more like your hungry, and you eat some, and notice that you’re still hungry, and then start to wonder if eating is actually what you need, or this hunger feeling is about something else.
I don’t know what you mean by “generic safery net” or “safety in the literal sense”. I assumed based on context that we’re not talking about physical safety.
I mean things like: I’m not lonely and I expect to continue not to be lonely, because I found people I like who reliably also want me around.
I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.
Not literally that; the military is not really optimizing for independent agency and competence. They’re optimizing to get people who will follow orders. And I don’t expect the military-style pressure to work well for developing independent agency and competence.
(Actually, I should also flag that what I want from partner isn’t necessarily to be pushed for independent agency and competence; joint agency and competence with them would also work.)
That does seem like the healthiest version, but it’s a tough one to emotionally communicate to a partner if they’re not already taking that stance themselves—attempts to push growth come across as criticism of current state, if they’re not already in that mindset. So, yeah, ideally one finds a partner who just reflexively takes that stance toward everything all the time. Especially since it’s the things which one is most insecure about which tend to end up being bottlenecks.
This isn’t true for everyone. You can want to get even better while still thinking you’re good enough to be loved, and lots of people find it easier under those circumstances.
Agree. It could also be that your desire to keep growing is one of the things that your partner considers good about you, and that they express frequent appreciation when you’ve in fact put work into growing and also gotten better. So you are good as you are, where “as you are” = “being the kind of a person who keeps growing and wants to continue doing so”.
More generally, there’s a difference between judgment and discernment. If you judge someone, you are considering them to be e.g. morally or intrinsically bad, in ways that lead you to express disapproval (out loud or just in your head). If you are being discerning, you merely note that someone could be better, without that being a judgment on them.
I think the quoted bit from the OP is failing to make that distinction. People want a partner that doesn’t judge them, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily want a partner who is undiscerning of the ways where they could improve. (Some people do also want a partner who’s undiscerning! But not all.)
That is the stance I most often take toward myself, too.
To be clear, I do make this distinction in my head. The problem is that it’s a very hard distinction to signal out loud; expressing discernment will often cause people to immediately assume there’s judgement. The quoted section was trying to gesture at the fact that people very often conflate the two, so it’s hard to convey one without the other.
I disagree that it’s hard, in the relevant context.
It’s hard to communicate this to someone who don’t have a distinction between the two concepts in their head. It’s also hard to communicate this with someone who are two quick to jump to conclutions regarding what you mean to say, and also have bad priors about you. This is enough of a problem, that I don’t recommend offering decernments to people you don’t know well. But that’s also kind of a mute point, since I think it’s bad to offer unsolicited advice to people you don’t know well, for other reasons.
But with someone like a romantic parner, or a close friend, with whom you’d have lots of long form conversation, I don’t think it’s hard.
You can infact just say: “I love you as you are, and among the things I love about you is the desire to grow stronger. I’ve noticed a way you could be stronger, do you want to hear it now or later?”
Or if you have extablished the words “desernment vs judgment” you can just pre-prease any suggestion for imporvment with “desernment”. Or what ever communication style works for you.
Later into the relationship, you might not even have to clarify, but the person will just have the correct prior that you’re expressing a desernment, and not a judgment.
On reflection, I think this maybe conflicts with my observations of most people. Not necessarily that it’s literally false as stated, but that the true versions of it don’t generalize very far.
There is a true interpretation: if somebody picks up e.g. chess for the first time, and finds that they’re pretty good at it for a beginner, sometimes that makes them want to practice it more and get better. That I definitely buy.
Another true interpretation: when people feel like they have slack and a safety net, including the emotional safety net of a partner who will still be there if they fail, they’re more likely to do the sort of hard things which induce lots of growth but have nontrivial chance of failure. Starting a business would be a canonical example.
But I observe that most people, most of the time after reaching adulthood, are remarkably well-described as growth minimizers, subject to the constraints of their environment (which sometimes forces some growth). For instance, the supermajority of college students are well-described as learning as little as possible while still getting the degree they want. The supermajority of people in general will spend lots of time repeatedly doing the things they think they’re already good at or get positive feedback for, and avoid things they’re bad at. New managers or new parents will be forced to develop some skills, but they rarely develop those skills further than they have to. New hires take only a few months to ramp up (often less), and then plateau. The most reliable method for getting in shape is to join the military, where the environment will force you to get into shape.
Of course that isn’t a perfect model, but it fits what I see remarkably well and remarkably often.
And with that in mind, I sure do expect people to normally satisfice on growth. Far more often than not, if someone thinks they’re good enough in some domain, if someone is told they’re good enough in some domain, they will respond by not growing in that domain. The opposite can happen, but those tend to be the unusual cases which define a person’s identity, not the usual cases which dominate their life.
And this is exactly what makes it so high value for one’s environment to contain a partner who is always pushing one to grow more.
Maybe the reason people stick to what they are good at, is not lack of motivation to explore, but lack of safety net to explore. This seems to explain all your observations, if you assume most people are much more anxious than you. In this case, what other people need to grow is more acceptance in their life, not more pushing.
I definitely buy that “most people are much more anxious than me” is a key load-bearing factor here. I do not buy that the anxiety goes away when one has a safety net. Anxiety generally directs itself at various ways things could go wrong, so it often feels like more safety net would yield less anxiety. But from the people I’ve best known who have lots of anxiety, it seems much more like the anxiety is a conserved quantity. Remove one thing they’re anxious about, and their subconscious will promptly find something else to be anxious about.
(This is a common pattern with lots of emotions—e.g. the most obvious evidence of hangriness or hormonal anger is that if one thing the person is angry about is resolved, they promptly become angry about something else.)
I don’t know what is true for the typical person, and I’m definatly not a typical person.
With those caviats, what you describe is not true for me. To feel ok, I need to have a handfull of close friends that I see regularly. This provides some sort of validation, among other values. If I have this, my social anxiety is low. If I don’t have this my anxiety is high, and causes lot’s of problems.
It might look like my anxiety was recistant to be cured by more safety, because it took me a long time to find the people I need. Before I found people of my approximat neurotype, I was so far from being ok, that it was unclear to me that the thing I could clearly feel I was missing, was something that could exist.
And it’s not the case that the further from the safe situation I am, the more anxiety I feel. It’s more like a step function.
Also, sometimes the anxiety need some time to fully update on a new situation. This looks like the anxiety comming back. And then I focus on the evidence that things are acctually ok, or ask for some help to do this, and then it goes away. This does not work if things are not acctually ok.
I can see how this could look like anxiety is conserved, over a lot of diffrent datapoints, and I don’t know how someone can tell the diffrence untill they have experienced sufficient safety.
I think that case matches what I had in mind with the “anxiety is conserved” model. I don’t mean that nothing can ever make the anxiety go away; the point is that the things which one feels anxious about are not counterfactual to the emotion.
It’s generalized hangriness: if someone is hangry, they’ll feel angry about X, and if X is resolved they’ll quickly latch onto something else to be angry about; that’s the conservation. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up their hangriness; they just need to eat something.
Likewise, it sounds like you probably felt anxious a lot, and if one problem cleared up you’d feel anxious about something else. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up the anxiety; you apparently needed time with certain kinds of friends, just like a hangry person needs to eat. The anxiety was resistant to being cured by a generic safety net. You needed a particular thing which was not just safety in the literal sense of the word.
No, I don’t think what you say maches my experience. My anxiety was pointing straight at the thing I needed. Although I acknolage I did not put forward enough details for thus to be clear to you.
But it did not tell me how much I would need exactly. So it’s more like your hungry, and you eat some, and notice that you’re still hungry, and then start to wonder if eating is actually what you need, or this hunger feeling is about something else.
I don’t know what you mean by “generic safery net” or “safety in the literal sense”. I assumed based on context that we’re not talking about physical safety.
I mean things like: I’m not lonely and I expect to continue not to be lonely, because I found people I like who reliably also want me around.
I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.
What I’m getting from this is you want a partner who will push you like the military pushes recruits. Is that correct?
Not literally that; the military is not really optimizing for independent agency and competence. They’re optimizing to get people who will follow orders. And I don’t expect the military-style pressure to work well for developing independent agency and competence.
(Actually, I should also flag that what I want from partner isn’t necessarily to be pushed for independent agency and competence; joint agency and competence with them would also work.)
That does seem like the healthiest version, but it’s a tough one to emotionally communicate to a partner if they’re not already taking that stance themselves—attempts to push growth come across as criticism of current state, if they’re not already in that mindset. So, yeah, ideally one finds a partner who just reflexively takes that stance toward everything all the time. Especially since it’s the things which one is most insecure about which tend to end up being bottlenecks.