I really like this post! (I have liked most of your posts of the last decade and a bit. They also inspired me to learn hypnosis, which led to rather cataclysmic changes in my life.) I think therapists call this “somatization”, which can be both positive and negative, in the same sense the hypnotic (or psychotic) illusions are. You seem to mainly focus on the negative somatization (no swelling) and a bit on positive ones, though I suspect that positive somatization (both beneficial and detrimental) is just as controllable with the intent/expectation fusion. Maybe visualizing making the hoop really helps to steady your hand.
which led to rather cataclysmic changes in my life.
Well that sounds… scary, at best. I hope you’ve come out of it okay.
I’m not really sure how to take this, but it’s humbling regardless. Thank you for sharing.
You seem to mainly focus on the negative somatization (no swelling) and a bit on positive ones, though I suspect that positive somatization (both beneficial and detrimental) is just as controllable with the intent/expectation fusion.
Yeah, for sure.
Though these distinctions are kinda confusing for me.
For example, I don’t really draw too much distinction between “negative” and “positive” because I don’t see a good way to pick a “privileged default”. For example, “deciding not to swell” seems like the weird thing so it seems like a “negative somatization”, but once you get used to that, all that unnecessary swelling seems like positive somatization. So when that guy didn’t understand and she got self conscious, was that removal of a negative somatization, or a positive somatization? When I helped her get her swelling down again, is that another negative somatization or removal of a positive one? Kinda depends on your frame of reference, so it can’t really work for the negative without also working for the positive. I just look at it as changing the response from one thing to another.
Similarly, I don’t really see a distinction between a “somatization” and any other behavior we choose to do. “Raising your right hand” feels a lot more “conscious” and “like a decision” than stuff like swelling, but that’s just because we tend to have better self-understanding in the former case, not because of an inherent difference in the two phenomena. If you try to explain how you raise your right hand, even if you know which muscles you’re contracting it’s unlikely that you’re conceptualizing the action that way when you do it. You just kinda… do it. You know you can, so you expect to raise your right hand in the circumstances that seem to call for it, and then you take credit for that behavior because it’s in line with your self-narrative. Once you get familiar with things like swelling, it’s kinda the same thing though. You just kinda do it when it seems to make sense, and might even take credit for it.
When hiking our honeymoon for example, my wife mentioned that her hands were really cold despite her core being warm. I said “So send more blood to them?” and she said “Okay :)”—and a few minutes later, her hands were really warm. Is that still a “somatization”, or “just another conscious decision”?
Sorry for the delayed reply… I don’t get notifications of replies, and the LW RSS has been broken for me for years now, so I only poke my head here occasionally.
Well that sounds… scary, at best. I hope you’ve come out of it okay.
50⁄100. But that rather exciting story is best not told in a public forum.
Though these distinctions are kinda confusing for me.
Well, lack of appearance of something otherwise expected would be negative, and appearance of something otherwise unexpected would be positive?
For example, a false pregnancy is a “positive somatization”. Or stigmata. Having trouble coming up with intentionally “good” examples, other than the visualizations helping you shoot a hoop better or something. Not sure if the new-agey “think yourself better” is actually a thing. Hence my question. “Send more blood to your hands” seems like a good example, actually. Not something one would normally think possible except by physical labor.
50⁄100. But that rather exciting story is best not told in a public forum.
Heh, okay. If you want to tell it in private, you definitely have my attention.
Well, lack of appearance of something otherwise expected would be negative, and appearance of something otherwise unexpected would be positive?
Right, so now the question is which expectations we’re measuring relative to. Which gets kinda weird, because the way we’re getting changes is through changing expectations, specifically by noticing that the original expectations were wrong.
Measured relative to the best expectations, every improvement is removal of a deviation from the default. It’s hard to think of things that are 1) physiologically possible, 2) desirable, and 3) completely unexpected. Even the things that most closely fit become expected by the time you achieve them, because that’s how you achieve them. Notice how the examples you gave of “false pregnancy” and “stigmata” don’t work as examples of how looking more closely at reality can give better outcomes by evoking positive somatizations? Stigmata isn’t exactly desirable, and “false pregnancy” almost by definition doesn’t fit reality.
So for example with my kid cousin and the fire poker, most people came at it from a perspective of “It’s expected that this kid suffers! He burned his hand!”, and from this POV my intervention looks like a “negative somatization” because we’re taking away suffering which would otherwise be expected. Whereas I came at it from a perspective of “It’s weird that this kid is suffering, wtf is this about?” and then realized “Oh! These MFers gaslit him into suffering when he otherwise wouldn’t have suffered!”. From my perspective, which I’d argue better represents reality and that’s why it got better results, all I did was help him see through the unnecessary positive somatization that had been created before I got there.
Because we’re not actually adding any “superpowers” and are just noticing when existing abilities fit the context, it ends up very invisible unless we get caught up enough in confused expectations to have a bad baseline to compare to. When the woman who showed up with me caught the tail end and just saw a kid not suffering, nothing seemed weird about it to her because “What? It’s not a big deal, why would he suffer over it?”. My wife’s warm hands only sounds like a positive somatization because she stopped and commented on them being cold. “I went on a hike, and stayed warm, and my hands stayed warm too” is just business as usual, and expectations being met.
Another good example of this is when I met my friend’s ex-boyfriend. It was a completely unnoteworthy introduction, with absolutely nothing out of the norm so far as I could tell. And then my friend came up to me afterwards saying that she wished she could have been there to witness whatever magic I pulled, because she’s literally never seen him respect anyone like that. I tried to explain to her that I literally did nothing and that if he respected me more than normal she gets the credit for that. She didn’t buy it, and it took me at least weeks before I noticed what it is about him that causes most people to not have normal boring introductions with him. From her perspective, “respect” appeared unexpectedly, but from my perspective it just never occurred to me to give him reasons to not respect me.
So if most people do things mostly right most of the time, then when someone struggles due to their misfit expectations, we say “Hey look, that person has a problem”, and in those cases updating to better expectations looks like “removing a problem”. Even if most people struggle with a certain thing and expect that the ideal won’t be achieved, the ideal is still “things not being broken” so even “superhuman” abilities look like “removing the problem that most people have”—like removing suffering from getting burned or whatever.
In order for it to look like a positive somatization and also be good, it has to be something where proper functioning is so rare that people don’t even recognize that it’s worth wanting for. Things like this do exist sometimes, but they’re usually in odd little corners that most people don’t frequent in the first place—because otherwise enough people would find the right expectations that it would stop seeming weird and start seeming worth wanting for. My wife’s vasodilation can look like a “positive somatization” because having cold hands when hiking out in the cold is normal enough that doesn’t seem like a “problem”, even if warmer hands is better. If her cold hands were unexpected, then it’d be seen as “inappropriate vasoconstriction”, and then it’d be “removing a positive somatization” again.
Can you think of any “positive somatizations” that you would want? Any that don’t just happen automatically upon realizing that they’re context appropriate?
I really like this post! (I have liked most of your posts of the last decade and a bit. They also inspired me to learn hypnosis, which led to rather cataclysmic changes in my life.) I think therapists call this “somatization”, which can be both positive and negative, in the same sense the hypnotic (or psychotic) illusions are. You seem to mainly focus on the negative somatization (no swelling) and a bit on positive ones, though I suspect that positive somatization (both beneficial and detrimental) is just as controllable with the intent/expectation fusion. Maybe visualizing making the hoop really helps to steady your hand.
Well that sounds… scary, at best. I hope you’ve come out of it okay.
I’m not really sure how to take this, but it’s humbling regardless. Thank you for sharing.
Yeah, for sure.
Though these distinctions are kinda confusing for me.
For example, I don’t really draw too much distinction between “negative” and “positive” because I don’t see a good way to pick a “privileged default”. For example, “deciding not to swell” seems like the weird thing so it seems like a “negative somatization”, but once you get used to that, all that unnecessary swelling seems like positive somatization. So when that guy didn’t understand and she got self conscious, was that removal of a negative somatization, or a positive somatization? When I helped her get her swelling down again, is that another negative somatization or removal of a positive one? Kinda depends on your frame of reference, so it can’t really work for the negative without also working for the positive. I just look at it as changing the response from one thing to another.
Similarly, I don’t really see a distinction between a “somatization” and any other behavior we choose to do. “Raising your right hand” feels a lot more “conscious” and “like a decision” than stuff like swelling, but that’s just because we tend to have better self-understanding in the former case, not because of an inherent difference in the two phenomena. If you try to explain how you raise your right hand, even if you know which muscles you’re contracting it’s unlikely that you’re conceptualizing the action that way when you do it. You just kinda… do it. You know you can, so you expect to raise your right hand in the circumstances that seem to call for it, and then you take credit for that behavior because it’s in line with your self-narrative. Once you get familiar with things like swelling, it’s kinda the same thing though. You just kinda do it when it seems to make sense, and might even take credit for it.
When hiking our honeymoon for example, my wife mentioned that her hands were really cold despite her core being warm. I said “So send more blood to them?” and she said “Okay :)”—and a few minutes later, her hands were really warm. Is that still a “somatization”, or “just another conscious decision”?
Sorry for the delayed reply… I don’t get notifications of replies, and the LW RSS has been broken for me for years now, so I only poke my head here occasionally.
50⁄100. But that rather exciting story is best not told in a public forum.
Well, lack of appearance of something otherwise expected would be negative, and appearance of something otherwise unexpected would be positive?
For example, a false pregnancy is a “positive somatization”. Or stigmata. Having trouble coming up with intentionally “good” examples, other than the visualizations helping you shoot a hoop better or something. Not sure if the new-agey “think yourself better” is actually a thing. Hence my question. “Send more blood to your hands” seems like a good example, actually. Not something one would normally think possible except by physical labor.
Heh, okay. If you want to tell it in private, you definitely have my attention.
Right, so now the question is which expectations we’re measuring relative to. Which gets kinda weird, because the way we’re getting changes is through changing expectations, specifically by noticing that the original expectations were wrong.
Measured relative to the best expectations, every improvement is removal of a deviation from the default. It’s hard to think of things that are 1) physiologically possible, 2) desirable, and 3) completely unexpected. Even the things that most closely fit become expected by the time you achieve them, because that’s how you achieve them. Notice how the examples you gave of “false pregnancy” and “stigmata” don’t work as examples of how looking more closely at reality can give better outcomes by evoking positive somatizations? Stigmata isn’t exactly desirable, and “false pregnancy” almost by definition doesn’t fit reality.
So for example with my kid cousin and the fire poker, most people came at it from a perspective of “It’s expected that this kid suffers! He burned his hand!”, and from this POV my intervention looks like a “negative somatization” because we’re taking away suffering which would otherwise be expected. Whereas I came at it from a perspective of “It’s weird that this kid is suffering, wtf is this about?” and then realized “Oh! These MFers gaslit him into suffering when he otherwise wouldn’t have suffered!”. From my perspective, which I’d argue better represents reality and that’s why it got better results, all I did was help him see through the unnecessary positive somatization that had been created before I got there.
Because we’re not actually adding any “superpowers” and are just noticing when existing abilities fit the context, it ends up very invisible unless we get caught up enough in confused expectations to have a bad baseline to compare to. When the woman who showed up with me caught the tail end and just saw a kid not suffering, nothing seemed weird about it to her because “What? It’s not a big deal, why would he suffer over it?”. My wife’s warm hands only sounds like a positive somatization because she stopped and commented on them being cold. “I went on a hike, and stayed warm, and my hands stayed warm too” is just business as usual, and expectations being met.
Another good example of this is when I met my friend’s ex-boyfriend. It was a completely unnoteworthy introduction, with absolutely nothing out of the norm so far as I could tell. And then my friend came up to me afterwards saying that she wished she could have been there to witness whatever magic I pulled, because she’s literally never seen him respect anyone like that. I tried to explain to her that I literally did nothing and that if he respected me more than normal she gets the credit for that. She didn’t buy it, and it took me at least weeks before I noticed what it is about him that causes most people to not have normal boring introductions with him. From her perspective, “respect” appeared unexpectedly, but from my perspective it just never occurred to me to give him reasons to not respect me.
So if most people do things mostly right most of the time, then when someone struggles due to their misfit expectations, we say “Hey look, that person has a problem”, and in those cases updating to better expectations looks like “removing a problem”. Even if most people struggle with a certain thing and expect that the ideal won’t be achieved, the ideal is still “things not being broken” so even “superhuman” abilities look like “removing the problem that most people have”—like removing suffering from getting burned or whatever.
In order for it to look like a positive somatization and also be good, it has to be something where proper functioning is so rare that people don’t even recognize that it’s worth wanting for. Things like this do exist sometimes, but they’re usually in odd little corners that most people don’t frequent in the first place—because otherwise enough people would find the right expectations that it would stop seeming weird and start seeming worth wanting for. My wife’s vasodilation can look like a “positive somatization” because having cold hands when hiking out in the cold is normal enough that doesn’t seem like a “problem”, even if warmer hands is better. If her cold hands were unexpected, then it’d be seen as “inappropriate vasoconstriction”, and then it’d be “removing a positive somatization” again.
Can you think of any “positive somatizations” that you would want? Any that don’t just happen automatically upon realizing that they’re context appropriate?