I think we’ve got a pretty clear case of “Self-Soothing₁ vs Self-Soothing₂” here:
What I and the article are referencing is That Internal Thing that takes place when being soothed down from your Big Emotions, self-triggered as immediately and mentally as possible; While what your sources describe are techniques for people who did not acquire this as a natural skill from their caretakers when they were little, aimed at triggering That Internal Thing.
I propose differentiating between A: “The skill/event of [internally] self-soothing” and B: “Self-soothing techniques[via the external world as intermediate], aimed at triggering A”.
Do you figure that captures both our perspectives?
It apepars that my mental constitution is rather different from those of people who do experience Those Big Emotions and Soothing and You Know, That Internal Thing. The very ontology does not match what I observe in myself.
When bad things happen, I deal with them and move on.
That sounds like everything went well enough for you in your formative phase that you indeed possess the skill of Self-Soothing₁ and are triggering That Internal Thing automatically and naturally. It’s the kind of mental stuff you take for granted if it works properly and are only forced to notice and actively think about when it’s broken. Imagine having to learn to walk for the first time as a fully-formed adult. It’d be a pretty difficult and complicated affair to learn all the subtle movement/feedback patterns etc. If you had outside instruction, you might learn certain terms and ways of consciously thinking about the act of walking. This is Self-Soothing₂.
A regular person hearing you discuss this with your fellow walking-learners in passing would certainly go: “Well no clue about all those words you’re using and concepts you’re talking about. They certainly don’t match anything I observe in myself[because he has never actually needed to observe that part of himself in such depth, never had to intentionally learn/apply Self-Soothing₁]. When I’m walking, I just put one foot in front of the other!”
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 think we’ve got a pretty clear case of “Self-Soothing₁ vs Self-Soothing₂” here:
What I and the article are referencing is That Internal Thing that takes place when being soothed down from your Big Emotions, self-triggered as immediately and mentally as possible; While what your sources describe are techniques for people who did not acquire this as a natural skill from their caretakers when they were little, aimed at triggering That Internal Thing.
I propose differentiating between A: “The skill/event of [internally] self-soothing” and B: “Self-soothing techniques[via the external world as intermediate], aimed at triggering A”.
Do you figure that captures both our perspectives?
It apepars that my mental constitution is rather different from those of people who do experience Those Big Emotions and Soothing and You Know, That Internal Thing. The very ontology does not match what I observe in myself.
When bad things happen, I deal with them and move on.
That sounds like everything went well enough for you in your formative phase that you indeed possess the skill of Self-Soothing₁ and are triggering That Internal Thing automatically and naturally. It’s the kind of mental stuff you take for granted if it works properly and are only forced to notice and actively think about when it’s broken.
Imagine having to learn to walk for the first time as a fully-formed adult. It’d be a pretty difficult and complicated affair to learn all the subtle movement/feedback patterns etc. If you had outside instruction, you might learn certain terms and ways of consciously thinking about the act of walking. This is Self-Soothing₂.
A regular person hearing you discuss this with your fellow walking-learners in passing would certainly go: “Well no clue about all those words you’re using and concepts you’re talking about. They certainly don’t match anything I observe in myself[because he has never actually needed to observe that part of himself in such depth, never had to intentionally learn/apply Self-Soothing₁]. When I’m walking, I just put one foot in front of the other!”
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.