Like… remember the classic It’s Not About The Nail? You should watch the video, it’s two minutes and chef’s-kiss-level excellent.
I just drafted a comment defending a hypothetical woman of your description, about how the desire to have her pain & suffering be recognized and not wanting to solve the object level problem could grow out of someone who had adapted to an environment where indeed nobody ever recognized her pain & suffering as real, and how this had significantly hurt her, to the point where she didn’t trust their mere words to be honest.
Then I figured out a way around my YouTube blocker to watch the video. Now I agree that the right response is not some lower-level psychological problem, but that she is just messing up for no good reason and needs to be held to higher standards. So I broadly am on board with your disgust response.
Nod, although I wanna flag, there’s the thing where the woman in the video is, like, a caricature, not the real thing. And there are some instances of the real thing that are more like that caricature, and others where I think it’s an unfair and/or incomplete characterization. (So, like, feeling disgust at that caricature isn’t super informative)
I wrote the above because, for a minute, I kind of forgot that sometimes people don’t screw up for good reasons, sometimes they’re screwing up for pointless reasons. It wasn’t adaptive, it didn’t make sense, and they should do better.
Suppose there actually were perfectly good reasons for the nail to be there? Like, taking it at the most literal level, taking it out would create an open wound with a lot of blood loss, etc., and would make things a lot worse in the short run?
Sometimes people haven’t thought about or actually tried the obvious solutions, and sometimes they have and, for whatever reason, feel as though they’re worse than putting up with the problem. “The situation sucks but it’s still a local optimum, so just let me vent and listen without offering solutions.”
My late wife would insist all the time that “Mr. Fixit is not welcome” because she thought (not without reason) that letting me act would have a good chance of making things worse than they already were.
I just drafted a comment defending a hypothetical woman of your description, about how the desire to have her pain & suffering be recognized and not wanting to solve the object level problem could grow out of someone who had adapted to an environment where indeed nobody ever recognized her pain & suffering as real, and how this had significantly hurt her, to the point where she didn’t trust their mere words to be honest.
Then I figured out a way around my YouTube blocker to watch the video. Now I agree that the right response is not some lower-level psychological problem, but that she is just messing up for no good reason and needs to be held to higher standards. So I broadly am on board with your disgust response.
Nod, although I wanna flag, there’s the thing where the woman in the video is, like, a caricature, not the real thing. And there are some instances of the real thing that are more like that caricature, and others where I think it’s an unfair and/or incomplete characterization. (So, like, feeling disgust at that caricature isn’t super informative)
I agree.
I wrote the above because, for a minute, I kind of forgot that sometimes people don’t screw up for good reasons, sometimes they’re screwing up for pointless reasons. It wasn’t adaptive, it didn’t make sense, and they should do better.
Suppose there actually were perfectly good reasons for the nail to be there? Like, taking it at the most literal level, taking it out would create an open wound with a lot of blood loss, etc., and would make things a lot worse in the short run?
Sometimes people haven’t thought about or actually tried the obvious solutions, and sometimes they have and, for whatever reason, feel as though they’re worse than putting up with the problem. “The situation sucks but it’s still a local optimum, so just let me vent and listen without offering solutions.”
My late wife would insist all the time that “Mr. Fixit is not welcome” because she thought (not without reason) that letting me act would have a good chance of making things worse than they already were.