Making all human interaction therapeutic, not just therapy hour

ppl don't realize it but most human interactions in our culture aren't just neutral but mild-to-moderately traumatizing... so in order to heal, we need to not just have an hour of therapy each week but to make cultures wherein all human interactions are intrinsically therapeutic

Dec 9, 2020

I used to underappreciate formal therapy, but now I see it as having a crucial but partial role to play. Crucial because people need healers with some distance & detachment from their immediate relationships. Partial because those relationships still need to become therapeutic!

Furthermore, Coherence Therapy and its framework describes how in order to unlearn an old schema, one needs to juxtapose it with a new knowing, and as far as I can tell this means that you can't actually unlearn Game A until you've seriously experienced Game B.

Having said that, now that I understand emotional schemas better, it's also clear to me that you can get remarkably far by just unlearning basic things like "I need to (not) feel certain ways or my parents will abandon me" or "I'm imprisoned & powerless"

QC @QiaochuYuan · Nov 13, 2019

hey remember how we went to school where we spent 8 hours a day for over a decade having what our bodies could do completely under the control of authority figures boy i wonder if that had any lasting effects

or for that matter, the idea that standard schools are well-designed for nurturing learners and that if you don't like it it's you who has the problem most kids sooner or later learn to silence a voice that says "I think this is not actually the thing"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Nov 1, 2020

Healing from trauma amounts to learning that it is okay to know what you know, and feel what you feel. — Bessel van der Kolk (quoted from my notes of an out-loud remark, so maybe slightly paraphrased, hence no " marks)

there's a bootstrappy upward spiral between: 💗 unlearning trauma-based & trauma-generating schemas 💞 creating cultures that are therapeutic 💗 enables more of 💞 enables more of 💗 enables more of 💞, ad infinitum

and having frameworks & examples can help the *idea* that there could be something culturally as different from Game A as Game A is from hunter-gatherer society is deeply powerful the growing subculture of ppl tweeting re learning self-noncoercion illuminates that possibility

Oh! Ofc, need to mention here that part of the dynamic here is related to the normal-is-functional fallacy, aka the DSM fallacy. Very liberating to understand one's personal healing process as part of larger cultural shift to actually-functional-humanity.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 31, 2019

@QiaochuYuan @a_witch_in_time Yeah, I generally phrase this as "because the DSM measures deviation from norm, it is structurally incapable of recognizing a dysfunctional condition that everyone has." I tried to say this to a group of ppl at YC120 and one of them literally said "but then it would be normal!"

Part of why it's liberating is because it gives way more space to be like "I don't like this!" where "this" is the majority of human dynamics, without that making one misanthropic. A sense this is not just "how humans are" but contingent & changeable.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 8, 2020

idk who needs to hear this, but…   You don't have to like it. That thing you don't like? That book? That person? That situation? That awful sound? That thing your partner/parent/roommate/kid does? You don't have to like it. You get to have whatever experience you're having.

And this is one way to point at what I mean by the blacklight pill

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Dec 9, 2020

blacklight pill