Huh. Looks like the author decided to raise the price and sell it exclusively on their own site. Kind of a pity, since it means dramatically fewer people will even know it exists. Anyway, it’s Embrace The Unlovable, by Amyra Mah.
pjeby
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Gendlin seems to think that anything not in the conscious mind is somehow stored/processed out there in the muscles and bones
That’s an uncharitable reading of a metaphorical version of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis. Which in turn is just a statement of something fairly obvious: there are physiological indicators of mental and emotional function. That’s not the same thing as saying that these things are actually stored in the body, just that one can use physiological state as clues to find out what’s going on in your head, or to identify that “something is bothering me”, and then try to puzzle out what that is.
An example: suppose I have something I want to say in an article or post. You could describe this “wanting to say something” as my felt sense of what it is I want to say. It is preverbal, because I haven’t said it yet. It won’t be words until I write it down or say it in my head.
Words, however, aren’t always precise, and one’s first attempt at stating a thing—even in one’s head—are often “not quite right”. On hearing or reading something back, i get the felt sense that what I’ve said is not quite right, and that it needs something else. I then attempt new phrasings, until I get the—wait for it—felt sense that this is correct.
Gendlin’s term “felt sense” is a way to describe this knowing-without-knowing aspect of consciousness. That we can know something nonverbally, that requires teasing out, trial and error that reflects back and forth between the verbal and the nonverbal in order to fully comprehend and express.
So, the essential idea of Gendlin’s focusing is that if a person in psychotherapy is not doing the above process—that is, attempting to express felt, but as yet unformed and disorganized concepts and feelings—they will not achieve change or even true insight, because it is not the act of self-expression but the act of seaching for the meanings to be expressed that brings about such change. If they are simply verbalizing without ever looking for the words, then they are wasting their time having a social chat, rather than actually reflecting on their experience.
Meanwhile, those bits of felt sense we’re not even trying to explore, represent untapped opportunity for improving our quality of life.
[Edited to add: I’m not 100% in agreement with the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, personally: I think the idea of somatic markers being fed back to the brain as a feedback mechanism is one possible way of doing things, but I doubt that all reinforcement involving emotions work that way. Evolution kludges lots of things, but it doesn’t necessarily kludge them consistently. :) That being said, somatic markers are an awesome tool for conscious reflection and feedback, whether they are an input to the brain’s core decisionmaking process, or “merely” an output of it.]
Bob has replaced a concrete goal (live in France) with a vague abstract one (be cool?). Near motivation trumps far, every time.
Sally assumed that “procrastination” is one thing, rather than a wide variety of things we lump under one name.
(Even though an identity element is implied by the presentation, it’s not clear this is directly related to either person’s mistake.)
To correct his mistake, Bob needs to consider whether he actually has any concrete reason for learning any other languages: what actual concrete result is desired? Sally’s mistake would be resolved by getting clearer on the nature of her specific procrastination and then choosing a more suitable approach for dealing with it.
I only heard about it after it was turned off, and spent my time since wondering if the news stories about the feature were the prank. (That is, that it didn’t actually happen and Google merely announced they were turning off a feature that never existed… a kind of meta-prank as it were.)
Your map is of Melbourne, Florida, rather than Melbourne, Australia. As a result, the site sent out notices to people in Florida, but (presumably) not people in Australia. I’m not sure what you need to do to correct that.
I don’t think these stages are currently accepted anymore as they are seen to be too rigid.
“Stages” was probably never the right word in the first place: they’re more like strategies we use to avoid acknowledging unpleasant truths, and therefore have no required order or progression between them.
Searching for “Hamming circle” yields only information about hamming codes. Do you have a link?
Use Goal-factoring and Hemming circle’s. Basic rationality techniques.
I’ve at least heard of goal-factoring. What is/are “Hemming circle’s”? Google only turns up articles about sewing.
Given how you were talking about pains, it seems to be a noticeable issue for you
Yes—it happens a few times a week, depending on circumstances.
Your advice would totally make sense if the baseline issue were that I’m not consuming enough water. But on a baseline day I consume between 1 and 1.5 gallons of water alone, not counting any water in the food I eat, or any other beverages such as almond milk. (I don’t consume sodas, fruit juice, coffee, tea, alcohol, or really anything else.)
The problem is that sometimes, that 1-1.5 gallons isn’t enough, and there are occasionally days where it’s been not enough for a few days in a row, such that I end up running “a few quarts low”. (I actually use my scale as another clue: if I’ve lost a pound or two from one day to the next, and my fat % is higher, then I know I’m dehydrating. But an hour or so difference in time spent sleeping can do the same thing to my weight, so it’s not a very precise measurement.)
I don’t know, sip 50ml every half an hour or something?
What makes you think I’m not doing that now? As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, my rate of water need is not constant. If I have a couple of days in a row where I underestimate how much I need to raise my intake to compensate for losses like having more conversations or physical exertion than usual (or the air conditioner running more to maintain the temperature inside!), then I will fall behind and experience dehydration symptoms. But if I try to consume more water as a matter of course, then that also disrupts my digestion, makes me feel cold, keeps me running to the bathroom, and so forth.
So, if you don’t have some method for actually changing my body’s regulation of water, I’m not interested. AFAICT I’m already doing everything that is doable with respect to changing my behavior around water consumption, given the lack of any reliable means for determining my precise water need, in a situation where both under- and over-consumption create health problems.
I’m going to tap out of this discussion now, as my original post was not a request for advice; it was an expression of curiosity about someone saying they experienced headache relief from both placebos and painkillers, making me wonder if it was water-related (since I have some experience of that).
Your body can easily handle an extra cup of water without trouble … If you are thirsty enough to gain any pleasure from drinking, drink.
Beware the Typical Bladder Fallacy. ;-) (Or just the typical body fallacy.)
You seem to be assuming that I don’t already force myself to drink water to this extent. I do. The problem is that there is no sensation that tells me I am “thirsty enough”, most of the time. Or more precisely, there is very little correlation between my sensation of thirst and my level of dehydration. I can be thirsty and not dehydrated, but I can also be dehydrated and not thirsty, and slip from one state to the other without noticing. This means I have to use a drinking habit as a workaround, and also check for symptoms like nasal congestion.
If you find talks stressful and this raises your blood pressure
It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is, or whom I’m speaking with; what matters is the total time I spend with my mouth open; I salivate profusely and presumably lose quite a bit to evaporation. Likewise, I sweat profusely from almost any amount of physical exertion. In general. In general, my body always acts as if it thinks it has plenty of water and should get rid of it ASAP, at least with respect to those systems that acquire or eliminate water.
Water conservation systems, on the other hand (like my nasal mucus and digestive tract) do seem to notice that I am dehydrating and act to conserve water!
So in general, I notice that my body is confused. ;-) Unfortunately, I’m not yet aware of any means by which I may resolve its confusions about water.
don’t you want to err on the side of more water?
Of course I do. In fact, most of my water consumption is forced, in the sense that I’m drinking without any sensation of thirst. That’s the problem: I have little sensation of thirst, unless I’m already drinking. While I’m drinking water I can notice I’m thirsty, or at any rate, that drinking the water is pleasurable. But the rest of the time, I drink by forcing myself to notice that there’s water in the 32-ounce glass on my desk and that I should drink it, or that the glass is empty and I should refill it.
But this doesn’t help as much as you’d think, because my body doesn’t seem to store the water for later demand, and just prompts me to get rid of it instead… then quickly becomes dehydrated again… all with no sensation of thirst except in certain extreme cases. But I can also get too dehydrated to function, without any sensation of thirst.
Have you tried just drinking more on a regular basis?
Yes, but since the presence of such pains is the main thing that tells me I’ve not had enough, it doesn’t help too much. An amount that seems sufficient can be easily overwhelmed by say, some hard work and sweating, and/or the use of the car air conditioner to recover from said hard work. Giving a talk or just having a talk with someone can do it, too. So unless I over-drink some of the time, there will always be situations where I end up under-drinking, in the absence of some finer-gauge way to tell my hydration state. I do at least know now to start chugging after I give a workshop, for example. Before I figured out the hydration link, I used to spend many painful hours recovering after each talk I gave.
I have. I have no evidence that either pain killers or placebos work in any sort of medical sense; I have clear evidence that swallowing a pill causes me to relax, resulting in a immediate reduction in pain.
Do you take the pills with water, and if so, have you tried just drinking the water? I find that water reduces a great many pains for me, including headaches, muscle cramps, and digestive difficulties, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the effects you’re observing are from water taken with both the pain killer and placebo.
The big reason? Construal theory, or as I like to call it, action is not an abstraction. Abstract construal doesn’t prime action; concrete construal does.
Second big reason: the affect (yes, I do mean affect) of being precise, is very much negative. Focusing your attention on flaws and potential problems leads to pessimism, not optimism. But optimism is correlated with success, pessimism is not.
Sure, pessimism has some benefits in a technical career, in terms of being good at what you do. But it’s in conflict with other things you need for a successful career. TV’s Dr. House is an extreme example, but most real people are not as good at the technical part of their job as House nor are the quality of their results usually as important.
Both of these things combine to create the next major problem: a disposition to non-co-operative behavior, aka the “why can’t our kind get along?” problem.
Yes, not everyone has these issues, diverse community, etc. But, as a stereotypical and somewhat flippant summary, the issue is that simply by the nature of valuing truth—precise truth, rather then the mere idea of truth—one is treating it as being more important than other goals. That means it’s rather unlikely that a person interested in it will be sufficiently interested in other goals to make progress there. I would expect it more likely that a person who is not naturally inclined towards rationalism would be able to put it to good use, than someone who’s just intellectually interested in rationalism as a conversation topic or as an ideal to aspire to.
To put it another way, if you already have “something to protect”, such that rationality is a means towards that end, then rationality can be of some value. If you value rationality for its own sake, well, then that is your goal, and so you can perhaps be called “successful” in relation to it, but it’s not likely that anyone who doesn’t value rationality for its own sake will consider your accomplishments impressive.
So, the truth value of “rationalists don’t win” depends on your definition of “win”. Is it “win at achieving their own, perhaps less-than-socially-valued goals? Or “win at things that are impressive to non-rationalists”? I think the latter category is far less likely to occur for those whose terminal values are aimed somewhere near rationality or truth for its own sake.
I don’t really know why I do this.
Any self-help technique can be trivially defeated by arguing with it. And anything can be argued with, because the whole point (evolutionarily speaking) of our critical faculties is to find things we can attack in that which we have defined as our enemy. The truth, relevance, or usefulness of the argument is beside the point.
When I read that book I didn’t even notice anything about pride or self-worth, honestly. I wasn’t reading it because I drink (I don’t), but as research into his approach. I found it fascinating because the various arguments I noticed seemed pretty universal to almost anything one might want to quit.
Anyway, I wasn’t looking for things to argue with, so I didn’t find any. In general, it’s not useful to read a self-help book looking for things to argue with: skim over those, and look for things you agree with, or at least things you can consider with an open mind. Carr’s books explicitly point out the need for this consideration at the beginning, and you will get more value out of them if you heed that advice.
Do you write about this i.e. new websites as TTD or DS are not maintained much lately?
Mostly I do online workshops with my paying subscribers, and the occasional tweet about things I’m noticing or realizing as they come up.
you wrote this comment and chapters 6-7 5 years ago, are there any new developments since then?
Quite a lot of them. Sadly, none of them make the overall picture any easier to understand. There seem to be an almost infinite number of “things that work” for some set of problems, but almost nothing that works for all the problems, for all of the people, all of the time. The basic idea of negative motivation is still valid, though, as is the idea that the primary negative motivations that are problematic derive from identity issues or pseudo-moral “shoulds”.
instant motivation does not seem to work for me for the goals where you really, truly, are running away from something bad and there is no positive goal to pursue
Yes, that was explicitly stated as a qualifier on the technique: if you can’t pass the “mmm” test, it’s not going to work.
Example: stopping smoking: the best possible outcome of not smoking is staying as healthy as today, the worst outcome of smoking is early painful death
For such outcomes, I suggest the methods used by Allen Carr: essentially they work by systematically eliminating all the perceived benefits of the activity you wish to cease. His books are basically step-by-step persuasion walking you through the reasoning to achieve a realization that the thing you think you’re getting is in fact of no value to you. (This is quite different from negative motion or deciding the act isn’t “worth” it: rather, it is the systematic demolishing of any positive motivation towards the act, through deliberately induced disillusionment.)
Example: the kind of jobs one does only to pay bills. In both cases there are no possible positive outcomes to imagine: the best case outcome is things staying as they are now.
The trick to this kind of issue is realizing that your brain is using the wrong baseline for measurement of gain/loss. The correct baseline to use in such a scenario is not how things are now, but how they would be if you didn’t have the job. Not having the job is the default case, since if you do nothing, that is the result you will get. ;-)
(I am, of course, omitting any details of how to do this change-of-baseline in this comment, due to the difficulty of describing it briefly, in this medium, in a way that would actually be implementable by anyone without the prerequisite skills of introspection and mind-changing.)
I have no feeling to overwrite the current body feeling (gag reflex, sour face).
You’re probably overthinking the technique, which doesn’t involve higher cognition at all. Certainly, there is nothing in it about “overwriting” anything. The method is simply intensifying a response long enough to trigger a refractory period, during which the response can’t be re-triggered at the same intensity as before, leading to having a new experience or reaction in the context of the original triggering thought or external stimulus. (Not entirely unlike “flooding” as a desensitization technique, though I have no idea whether the mechanism is really the same.)
By the time I wrote about that technique, though, I had already mostly stopped using it, because I’d exhausted all the low-hanging fruit in my personal experience. Some people also get much more value out of it than others; I’ve had a few people who used it extensively and came back gushing to me about completely transforming their lives… while others are like “meh”.
The optimum use seems to be for situations that trigger an immediate and visceral conditioned response that interferes with your ability to think clearly. It can be used to eliminate beliefs when the belief was formed later and as a result of the conditioned feeling, but does not work when it’s the other way around.
(That is, if the feeling and belief arose at the same time, from the same event, or if the feeling is the result of a belief, then the feeling elimination technique will probably be of little value. Of course, your conscious estimation of which situation applies is unreliable, which means that until you’ve exhausted your own low-hanging fruit, it’s better to just go ahead and try it, rather than guessing.)
In contrast to the feeling elimination technique, most everything I teach these days can be considered—in one way or another—a Ritual For Changing One’s Mind. Or, more precisely, I recommend rituals developed by other people, and my work focuses more on identifying what it is in your mind that needs changing, and how to know what to change it to.
And unfortunately, the methods of Changing One’s Mind are the relatively easy part of that. Sort of like knowing how to use an IDE (programmer’s development tool) doesn’t tell you what code to write or how to know where a bug is in your code.
Unfortunately, “true” and “easy to understand” are not synonyms. ;-)
It might help to taboo “creativity”. I know of three major schools of thought on the subject, all of whose definitions I agree with, despite certain of the group(s) claiming that other group(s) are “wrong. ;-)
One group defines creativity in terms of being able to systematically generate novel alternatives for a design problem, or within some target space.
Another defines it in terms of creating… that is, being able to formulate a desired objective in the first place, and pursue a process of bringing it into being by continually comparing and contrasting the desired state with the current state of reality.
A third defines it in terms of fluency—that the mere practice of generating different sequences of output in some medium causes one to develop an intuitive sense of what sequences are likely to be “good” or “bad”. (I don’t know a ton about this group, but I heard someone give a talk once on this, demonstrating how teaching children to generate sequences of the form 1-2-3, 1-3-2, 2-3-1, 2-1-3, 3-1-2, 3-2-1 would allow them to learn interesting things about music and mathematics in a very short period, by changing e.g. pitch and duration of notes.)
All three of these characteristics—the ability to hold a vision, generate alternatives to solve specific problems, and be fluent in the low-level expression of your subject area—seem to be important to any good definition of “creativity”. But quite a lot of materials tend to take on only one of these areas, and then usually some relatively small subset thereof.
Rubber ducking is for when you’re uncertain how to proceed. An incident on a military aircraft is not such a situation: there are checklists that detail precisely how you’re supposed to proceed, which you’d better be following.
If you are doing problem-solving in a distressed aircraft, and that problem-solving activity is not explicitly listed on the checklist for the current issue, you are Doing It Wrong. And if you’re praying in such a scenario, it had better be something like, “grant me the calm and clarity to follow the checklist, so I’m not distracted by any panicky impulses”.
I think that using the word “valuing” adds back in confusion that this trichotomy is trying to remove. Wanting is the axis of urgency to act or not act, liking is the axis of feeling enjoyment or suffering, and approving is the axis of feeling morally elevated or disgusted. These are independent axes that can exist simultaneously regardless of time, and which are only made more vague by lumping them together as “valuing”.
(Notably, one’s experience can be placed simultaneously on all three axes: it is not necessary for these experiences to be separated in time. You can approve or disapprove beforehand and during, not just after. You can want while doing, as well as beforehand.)