Thank you for sharing. Definitely a real but hard-to-pin down thing.
Your story about communal bonding vs handling emergencies was clearest for me as a recent dealt with a relatives’ significant other who was doing this constantly. I labelled it “passive aggressive” in my head. That may a prime sub-aspect of some of this frame label.
If I were defining it, passive aggression is when someone acts against their subject in ways subtle enough that it makes the punishment clear to the subject, but also is not overt enough to allow the subject to respond overtly.
I think it’s toxic, and always try to bring passive aggression into surface, actual, adult discussions, instead… which pretty quickly either resolves the problem or weeds out passive aggressive people.
There are also interesting questions with *moderate* amounts of frame control though. I think most people want people close to them to be… relatively similar to them. That’s a natural desire. When one is choosing who to associate with, this isn’t a huge problem because if someone has super dissimilar values, you just don’t associate with them. But if one is *stuck* with someone… e.g., marriage, children, family in general, or even relationships where years have already been invested … I think one can understand the motivation for trying to shift a person’s thinking to become more similar (even if that’s not good.)
By the way, frame control is also a “pickup artist” term—where the idea is to not give in to the girl’s frame at all (e.g., in particular, promiscuous sex is shameful) and be so confident in one’s own frame (e.g., promiscuous sex is fun!) that the person buys into the new frame.
Thank you for sharing. Definitely a real but hard-to-pin down thing.
Your story about communal bonding vs handling emergencies was clearest for me as a recent dealt with a relatives’ significant other who was doing this constantly. I labelled it “passive aggressive” in my head. That may a prime sub-aspect of some of this frame label.
If I were defining it, passive aggression is when someone acts against their subject in ways subtle enough that it makes the punishment clear to the subject, but also is not overt enough to allow the subject to respond overtly.
I think it’s toxic, and always try to bring passive aggression into surface, actual, adult discussions, instead… which pretty quickly either resolves the problem or weeds out passive aggressive people.
There are also interesting questions with *moderate* amounts of frame control though. I think most people want people close to them to be… relatively similar to them. That’s a natural desire. When one is choosing who to associate with, this isn’t a huge problem because if someone has super dissimilar values, you just don’t associate with them.
But if one is *stuck* with someone… e.g., marriage, children, family in general, or even relationships where years have already been invested … I think one can understand the motivation for trying to shift a person’s thinking to become more similar (even if that’s not good.)
By the way, frame control is also a “pickup artist” term—where the idea is to not give in to the girl’s frame at all (e.g., in particular, promiscuous sex is shameful) and be so confident in one’s own frame (e.g., promiscuous sex is fun!) that the person buys into the new frame.