I remain sceptical that these parts actually exist, rather than being (like most forms of psychotherapy) an invented story that helps some people. Crutches help some people to walk, but that doesn’t mean that people who walk fine without crutches just haven’t noticed the crutches. They really don’t have them!
The crutches would be Self-Soothing₂ in my map. Walking is Self-Soothing₁. You’re already walking fine, so you don’t need the crutches. What you’re not noticing is the internal process of orchestrating the walking. You’ve well abstracted it away. Other people have to unfold that entire dimension which to you is just a point. In programming terms, you’re already running a firmware driver that other people need to write from scratch, which does a million things for you with just one function call. You’re only seeing “walk()”, while others are looking at the documentation and using trial-and-error to write the underlying library.
I am fortunate enough to have always been able-bodied, so learned to walk in my early years. Presumably by continual trying, no instruction involved. But I have since had occasion to learn other motor skills, for example riding a bicycle. I learned to do that by doing it. No instruction, no “figuring out”, no “documentation”, just getting on and trying, over and over. It took about three weeks.
I cannot map any of this to the concepts under discussion here. I prefer to just do things. Ok, some people cannot just, and must use other means, and “self-soothing” is one of those other means.
I remain sceptical that these parts actually exist, rather than being (like most forms of psychotherapy) an invented story that helps some people. Crutches help some people to walk, but that doesn’t mean that people who walk fine without crutches just haven’t noticed the crutches. They really don’t have them!
The crutches would be Self-Soothing₂ in my map. Walking is Self-Soothing₁. You’re already walking fine, so you don’t need the crutches. What you’re not noticing is the internal process of orchestrating the walking. You’ve well abstracted it away. Other people have to unfold that entire dimension which to you is just a point. In programming terms, you’re already running a firmware driver that other people need to write from scratch, which does a million things for you with just one function call. You’re only seeing “walk()”, while others are looking at the documentation and using trial-and-error to write the underlying library.
I am fortunate enough to have always been able-bodied, so learned to walk in my early years. Presumably by continual trying, no instruction involved. But I have since had occasion to learn other motor skills, for example riding a bicycle. I learned to do that by doing it. No instruction, no “figuring out”, no “documentation”, just getting on and trying, over and over. It took about three weeks.
I cannot map any of this to the concepts under discussion here. I prefer to just do things. Ok, some people cannot just, and must use other means, and “self-soothing” is one of those other means.