{"id":13644,"date":"2022-09-05T16:56:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-05T16:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=13644"},"modified":"2023-05-07T18:12:49","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T18:12:49","slug":"behavior-change-requires-addressing-copes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2022\/09\/05\/behavior-change-requires-addressing-copes\/","title":{"rendered":"behavior change requires addressing copes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(og thread<\/a>) vague intuition that a critical factor of why behavior change\/redesign is so unsuccessful so often is: insufficient support for the turbulent emotional quality of the transition. There\u2019s a glossing over of how much sadness, despair, despondence there often is in the process<\/p>\n\n\n\n

every cope is an emotional support cope, and on the inside at some level we become screaming crying babies when you take our pacifiers from us. behavior change necessitates that we both be this new kind generous supportive adult and the old screaming baby simultaneously<\/p>\n\n\n\n

several good corollaries\/implications here, one is that obviously behavior change becomes MUCH easier if you do it in concert with supportive peers, environments\u2026 (sometimes people think their bottleneck is time but it’s actually the absence of a supportive context)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

another is that, it\u2019s fairly reasonable to assume that someone who has<\/em> managed such a transition is probably more capable than most re: managing \u201cturbulence\u201d in general. A lot of my favorite people are like this. It\u2019s no guarantee that they will be dysfunction-free though<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(When I say \u201cdysfunction\u201d here I mean less \u201cthey have issues\u201d- everyone has issues- and more, \u201cthey have issues with the way they manage their issues\u201d. This too, technically everyone has, but that\u2019s like saying \u201ceveryone\u2019s a little crazy\u201d. There are consequential thresholds.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tricky thing about kinship is- everything that\u2019s better with good friends is worse with bad friends, and it can be very hard to know the difference from the inside especially when you\u2019re still working through your own worst dysfunctions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

also interesting to think about how context dependent dysfunction can be, and how a person with some horrendous dysfunctions can still live an approximate good life by steering clear of what they know they cannot manage. But the more of life you avoid this way, the hollower it is<\/p>\n\n\n\n

re: therapy, a good therapist should be like a full-stack \u201csuffering engineer\u201d but bad therapists are more like script-following \u201csuffering technicians\u201d\u2013 and as with friends, the more down bad you are, the harder it is to know in the short\/medium term if you\u2019ve got it good or bad<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in both cases, once you get sufficiently good at knowing how to ask for the help you need, you can actually get far more out of an \u201caverage\u201d or \u201cdecent\u201d actor than most people tend to assume is possible. but again, the ppl who most need help, don\u2019t know how to ask for it<\/p>\n\n\n\n

this is an extreme caricature example <\/a>using a literal chatbot, but it\u2019s illustrative of how a script-following therapist can leave you worse off. one would hope that no human therapist is this bad. Knowing humans, it\u2019s imo near-certain that some are actually worse \ud83d\ude05\ud83d\udc80<\/p>\n\n\n\n

apparent in the exchange is that the person is suffering from being in an unsustainable, unjust environment, and obviously no chatbot or even an excellent therapist can fix injustice for you. But imo at least properly acknowledging the truth of the matter would be of some relief<\/p>\n\n\n\n

then once you acknowledge that you\u2019re stuck in a losing game and you\u2019ve grieved etc the tragedy of that, it becomes a question of how you\u2019re going to play the shit hand you\u2019ve been dealt. \u201cDo more breathing exercises for anxiety\u201d is not an intrinsically bad suggestion but\u2026 until you come to terms with the full truth of everything about your life \u2013 from your mortality to the nature of the context you\u2019re in to the range of options you have to trade-offs you\u2019re making \u2013 there\u2019ll just be more fresh new anxiety. And tbf this is a massive project\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and \u201cbecome enlightened\u201d is probably not a sustainable or accessible solution for most people just trying to live their life with less suffering. But yeah there has to be a whole spectrum of options between \u201cbreathing exercises\u201d (good!) and \u201cBuddha mode\u201d (also good? lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I were talking with a depressed teacher friend I\u2019d probably ask them a bunch of questions, mainly, from a place of genuine human curiosity and affection. What got you into teaching? What if you just quit? (followup q\u2019s) What if you semi-quit by just not doing some stuff?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

usually then what comes up is a bunch of guilt, a sense of obligation, etc (which if you zoom out you can see how the wider education apparatus exploits this) and we gotta talk about realistic\/reasonable expectations for a human being in unfair circumstances<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and maybe in the grand scheme of things that\u2019s what it\u2019s all about, isn\u2019t it? to bring it all back bc it\u2019s all connected, that\u2019s why we use our copes and pacifiers, to deal with the Sisyphean task of trying to live reasonably in an absurd universe<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there\u2019s another POV on all of this that\u2019s less dire, it involves humor and silliness, but I\u2019m currently too sleep-deprived to bring it up gracefully in plaintext in a way that wouldn\u2019t come across as insulting to someone who\u2019s struggling. It does involve \u201cto hell with everyone!\u201d, but in a cheeky-cheerful way the way Alan Watts might say it<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I slept maybe 4-5 hours and woke up with the thought \u201chmm I should write about behavior change\u201d. deranged behavior. which I will not change<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(jun2022 thread<\/a>) For two decades now I\u2019ve been pondering varying versions of the question \u201cwhy do we not do more of that which we know to be good for us\u201d, and I think the dominant answer I return to is \u201cthere is a part of us which does not want it\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

this thought recurred to me this morning when I woke up with a groggy head and it suddenly occurred to me that I used to solve my grogginess with box breathing- it works fantastically and there\u2019s no downside – and\/but at some point I just stopped doing it and went groggy instead<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it does also seem to me to be true that there are people who look and seem conventionally successful who get there by basically suppressing the Do Not Want part of them, gagging and tying them up in a cellar of the subconscious, mocking and insulting them\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve always sensed that this is not a healthy or happy way to live, and over the years I\u2019ve seen a lot of cautionary tales, Midas tragedies. And I\u2019ve heard from remarkable people doing remarkable things about how anxious, despondent, lonely, depressed and despairing they are<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the interesting Q to me then is to really get to know and really understand my void self. at the end of the spectrum some will say that shadows cannot be perceived, known, understood, only feared. there\u2019s some truth in that but it\u2019s not the whole truth. language is tricky<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LOL it\u2019s almost like gender stuff<\/p>\n\n\n\n

men and women both talking about each other like the other = incomprehensible aliens<\/p>\n\n\n\n

some of incomprehensibility is \u201cyou\u2019re not even trying\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a lot of it is \u201cyou\u2019re starting with a set of assumptions and you don\u2019t even realize what they are\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Obi Wan: Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a lot of the first version of @introspectvv<\/a> is about preparing the reader \u2013 and myself, really \u2013 for all the hard, self-annihilating questions. I talk abt the latter too, but a lot of that stuff is vague and sketchy and under construction bc I\u2019m not yet confident in my knowledge<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(og thread) vague intuition that a critical factor of why behavior change\/redesign is so unsuccessful so often is: insufficient support for the turbulent emotional quality of the transition. There\u2019s a glossing over of how much sadness, despair, despondence there often is in the process every cope is an emotional support… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[733],"class_list":["post-13644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-twitter-thread"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3y4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13644"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13660,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13644\/revisions\/13660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}