my systems theory of unconscious frame control: conditions: 1. two+ people have sufficiently different experiences of reality 2. one of them desperately wants something from the other (money, sex, approval. can go both ways simultaneously!) 3. they attempt to communicate
A systems theory of unconscious frame control
18 tweets · December 2023 · 302 likes · 15 retweets · read on Twitter
ah! a 4th condition for unconscious frame control: 4. they fail to allow the gulf in realities to exist; they don't have the shameless humility found in recognizing that what they're each seeing is totally true, but not the total truth
let's consider a simple & common example: parents communicating with their kids. let's say with a teenager, about something about living well 1. diff realities because of age & era 2. kid desperate for support, parent for control 3. … 4. rare to have this humility, on both ends
point #1 is super dangerous as an intervention if you haven't already intervened on points 2 or 4 while there's desperation for something, or arrogance about the nature of reality, can't honestly speak or listen or offer a new experience. can't really consent to have one shared.
it's nice to shift out of this desperation, which can sometimes come from a material shift but can also come from widening perspective: "well, I don't need YOU to date me in order to be dateable by someone I want". space to play!
in some sense, a better point of intervention, that may be developmentally a reach for some people but is sort of immediately right here, is this humility: to allow the gulf to exist. to allow that you don't even understand the nature of the gulf!
but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself: WHY do these conditions I've named, lead to unconscious frame control?
frame control is often talked about as a sort of manipulative thing, where the person doing the frame control is consciously yanking others into their frame I'm sure that happens, and maybe it's extra bad, but I think it's sort of an edge case, not the central case
assuming frame control is conscious also leads to mad jank when trying to sincerely sort out whether or not it's happening if you say "you're frame controlling me" and I'm like "nah I'm not, I'm just trying to talk" then we're kinda gaslighting each other (...another bad frame)
at some point I will refactor these ideas into a more wholesome frame, but in the meantime here we are I've played around with a lot of terms. my roam has: - frame battle - frame dialogue - frame dance - frame cave - frame push - frame shear - frame strength - frame override &+
and it seems to me that in some sense frame control goes both ways. it only requires the unallowed gap in realities plus one person having a quality of desperation, for BOTH PEOPLE to experience pressure to warp their frame towards the other person's
but sometimes the power differential is strong enough, whether charisma or money or a social field, that one person consistently "wins" in the sense that their frame/reality overrides the other person's when this happens we often say the person has a Reality Distortion Field
Steve Jobs is ofc the original example of the RDF. here, his unusual sense of reality was a visionary one: "THIS IS POSSIBLE!" his reality yelled, into anyone close enough to hear and people working for him desperately wanted to be working for a visionary, keep their jobs, etc
I'm curious who among Apple employees of those eras had the humility I'm talking about here, and if so, what the impact of that was. and who, if anyone, was able to hold their own view & Jobs's at the same time?
what am I trying to get at anyway? that what we call "frame control" is emergent and isn't usually experienced on the inside as an aggressive attempt at steering the frame but as defensive attempts to merely keep one's own reality in view while talking
if you can recognize "damn these views are far apart" and just let them be far apart while talking, it's WAY easier for each person to keep their own reality in view while slowly making their way towards each other, where that's possible
one of the things this model has given me is compassion for people who have really weird experiences of reality, since merely trying to engage in "ordinary" conversation leads to them and others feeling what could be called "frame control"
my thread on blindspot feedback says a lot of what I'm trying to say with this thread, and better: