My "2.9 trauma limit"

Even though I think there's value in the "healing" frame, I also liked this counterpoint to it:

“Healing” requires an ideal form to move towards

How is that form chosen?

For things like “I sprained my ankle” the obvious answer is to move towards the form of your able-bodied self, v familiar 
For things like “i have a disorganized soul and disregulated inner drives”

The form you choose to move towards can be much more arbitrary 
“No mark of health to be well adjusted to a sick society” and all that

Do you move towards a form that can function socially? Or a form that can meditate on a mountaintop? What are you aiming for? How did you choose the bullseye? 
This isn’t academic,

A lot of people take time away from their previous life “to heal”

And end up becoming something unrecognizable, strange, and let’s just be perfectly honest: it’s very often unclear if there’s much upside to the “healed” version of them 
“I undid all the conditioning society wounded and scarred me with. That’s why I now live under this tarp in the woods, drinking rain water and covering my head in sap to protect my thoughts from faerie sprites” 
“I spent my whole life under the thumb of authoritarian control freaks—my mother, my principal, my boss. Then I left and took time to heal; now I live how *I* want, scamming money off of older divorcees and travelling the world” 
“Healing” as a concept in spiritual/self-help/therapeutic circles is often colored with a lot of “awayness” and very little “towardness”

Intention is vague if present at all. 
Very often, the idea is “the important thing is following technique X—from there you’ll transform, and you can trust that transformation”

But that’s not enough. It’s clearly, obviously not enough. 
And the closer we get to an intention that makes real sense and has real telos,

The less sense it makes to refer to it as “healing” 
You want to infuse your soul with divine connection? Excellent, I love it. Why does the word “healing” apply to that?

You want to feel calm and comfortable and connected as a baseline state? Sounds great. Why is that “healed”? 
The answer seems fairly obvious,

If you can confidently assert that your preferred direction/intention is “healing”

That comes w a whole narrative-world that gives *your* intention precedence and primacy. 
It muddies the water, disguising how arbitrary your particular intention is.

If it’s “healing”, then it’s not uncertain and arbitrary—it’s a return to proper function. To original function. It’s what you (and everyone else) we’re always *supposed* to be like 
“Healing” provides a narrative that lets you brush off the need for narrative.

You don’t have to answer any questions about why you’re choosing the intention that you are—no more than someone w a broke arm needs to answer questions about why they want their bone to mend 
There’s a lot of sloppiness here.

When it’s normal to have zero need to even think about why you’re going in the direction you are, there’s a lot of ways to lie to yourself 

There are many things in my life that I’ve chosen for shitty reasons.

Emotional stuntedness, trauma, heartbreak, peer pressure, limited imagination, inertia,,,

But I was able to follow some of them longer than I should have, by not feeling any need to inquire into them

“Healing” is a non-answer, in most cases. It doesn’t make sense, outside of a few v limited contexts, as more than a rhetorical device for credibility-laundering.

If you can’t explain to yourself why the things you’re doing are “healing” rather than “exploring” or “floundering” or sth else, maybe don’t use the word or frame. It invites incoherence

 

This is an interesting perspective. The advice at the end is certainly all things I’d endorse.

I’d caution anyone against taking this sort of ontology too seriously, though (especially people who find it appealing!)—things like this (conceptual ontologies of psychological phenomena, which are grounded in nothing but subjective experience and introspection) are the epitome of “you could think of it as” [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Interesting, this is not really how I think about trauma at all! Or if it is you've framed it in a way that I never would have.

I tend to think of trauma as things that happened in the past that led to stuck memories that are strongly immune to updating. When things happen that will create stuck memories it's not very clear that that's what's going to happen; it's only well after the fact that it's clear something is stuck. Thus there's no sense to me in which these things have to be processed, they just are.

There's something else, which I don't really have to deal with any more, that looks more like what you're talking about: new stuff happens that violates my expectations and meta-expectations about the world, and then I have to spend time letting my mind work through what the new evidence means and maybe deal with some emotional stuff caused by those expectations being forced to change.

(To be fair, though, I'm a bit weird in that I've meditated a lot and that's changed me in important ways such that you might say I've mentally refactored away lots of my technical debt. Memory reconsolidation was also really useful here for clearing out traumatic things so that they were no longer stuck.)

(I also note that I use trauma just to refer to these stuck memories, and not to big things that are supposed to be Traumatic.)

...some of those other people who got really into Processing Trauma seemed to... end up falling into a Process Trauma Hole and never come out. They seemed (to me) to get addicted to little microepiphanies, and processing emotions for the sake of processing emotions.

Personally most of the emotion-processing stuff that I do tends to be aimed at specific internal or external goals, like fix anxiety X or become capable of doing Y. I do think that there's also value in doing emotional processing for its own sake, since that can help reveal issues one didn't know were issues, but it's good to keep checking whether you're making progress on your Xs and Ys. Endless processing can also be a way to avoid facing the actually really hard issues while focusing on something easier, and that becomes easier to notice if it's clear to you that you're still stalling on your goals. 

My most memorable example is one occasion when I managed to take a significant amount of time off work and also found an introspective technique that seemed to work fantastic. Everything felt so much better.

Until I needed to return to work and most of the gains seemed to vanish.

Now I do think that the technique did work. It wasn't only that I got to take some time off: that by itself wouldn't have allowed me to feel so much better.

It's more that returning to work triggered some traumas and issues so strong, they shattered the gains.

As a somewhat similar experience, I was unemployed for most of 2021 and that allowed me to feel truly satisfied. Only, it wasn't long-term sustainable and it was enabled because I had no job and also felt like I didn't need to achieve anything else. Once I get back to work, that triggered other issues and made me less happy overall... but with more long-term satisfaction about doing something right and not just being happy because I'm sitting at home doing nothing.

That said, I do definitely also agree with some of the other commenters on some kinds of endless processing coming from the fact that the stuff is simply very deep and huge to work through.

And to be clear, I don't think that the progress would need to be short-sighted. It doesn't mean every session with one's therapist (or whatever) should immediately translate into being able to do something more. Progress can be "there were 12 things about the thought of doing X that gave me overwhelming anxiety and prevented me from even trying it, and now there are only 11 such things".

The main thing is that if I care about being able to do X, then my progress comes from actually trying to tackle X, as opposed to feeling better because I am - say - just going on endless silent retreats where I feel better because I can just meditate and do nothing else. (That is not a criticism of silent retreats. I've found them to have some value and may go on future ones. It is a criticism of the failure mode where you use them to avoid your problems and never even ask the question of how to translate the gains into real life.)

And I also don't think that I was making a mistake when I spent most of 2021 unemployed. It was necessary for me to reorient, catch some breath, and get a sense of what the heck I want to do with my life. A person does also need to take breaks and just rest.

Thanks, I appreciate you writing this, and I appreciate you sharing about this in public. I'm somewhat excited to see how this conversation might develop more centrally in rat discourse. I think there's currently some major incommunicable cruxes surrounding these questions, and I've had a lot of conversations about this domain with people who are squarely rats, but mostly auxiliary to rat discourse in a way that's frustrating.

I have some critiques:

• I think this is a plausible contour of how things might go for people who started out relatively healthy, who experience a substantial disturbance and then work to return to something about as stable as their previous configuration. I don't think this is a good point of reference for people who began this process quite disturbed and have been so for quite a while. 
  • Indeed, you refer to people trying to address a morass of confusing and illegible motivational/emotional/etc issues, whose situations I don't think are described well by this sort of story. I currently have the most weight on Mark Lippmann's work in this domain, over any other framework, traditional or modern. (Warning: I don't actually recommend his writing to almost anyone, unfortunately.)
  • There's some very important questions around how or why people are apparently getting stuck on this emotions/trauma stuff, and whether they should actually be regarded as stuck. This also trades off sharply depending on whether they're doing vital work otherwise: I hold people working on x-risk in an almost unique category in this respect, where to me even if they might seem to have tons of un-worked-out stuff, I lean towards preferring they continue their work rather than investing hard in healing.
• My impression, from <20 conversations with you ever, is that you have obvious-to-me stuff, that probably remains largely untouched by the emotional work you describe having done. To be clear, this is completely blameless, and should not be a source of shame. However, from my perspective this mostly negates your judgements about what is right or advisable in this domain.

Lastly, and I think you're not much to blame for this either: 

• It's not clear to me how we should be having these conversations in public. I'm pretty frustrated by a bunch of "Works On My Machine™" posts about this topic all over the internet (and just as well in print), and I'm pretty confused how these conversations should even work, especially in our discourse. 
• There's some problematic epistemological questions relating to claims about phenomenology and psychology, and I don't think that the existing literatures (modern western psychology, or any of the traditional contemplative schools) have resolved them. For that matter, the techniques and models from the existing literatures mostly aren't great either, so I'm hardly saying something like "there are established models, please go read these textbooks and stop posting quack physics."

Hey, thanks for writing it up! I like the term "emotional inbox". I suppose an average person (on LW) does not even realize they have such a thing. Or that they would be better off clearing it. A lot of non-normies also have childhood baggage they tend to ignore. Happy to hear that what you did worked for you. A lot of others would likely need some professional help (EMDR/ART are my favorites).

Did you ever figure out whether any parts of your new ~3 traumas were somehow in fact downstream of past unprocessed traumas that you didn't understand? Or was this really just new stuff happening to you, and you were correct to believe that the 2018 trauma advocates weren't talking about anything related to your life?

I really appreciated how this balanced your personal experience with the model building. I like the model a lot more than a model that arrives seemingly ex nihilo. (On no, this is why self help books are written this way isn't it? I'm also just now realizing that the biggest thing I dislike about most self help books is that the author does this pattern but usually exclusively with other people's problems and not their own).

Samskara theory from classical yoga traditions is (partially) the idea that by default people spend a lot of extra effort reacting to a mashup of the present and the salient bits of the past that are trying to do transfer learning but in practice winds up with a traffic jam of competing constraints. One of the big ideas is that digesting experiences fully is a skill that can be trained like any other and that with such training you eventually hit an inflection point where you process things faster than they come in and will eventually hit what's being referred to here as emotional inbox zero. The constraints idea is also why you wind up with this limit where tangles get exponentially worse when added together. The wicked tangles paralyze you along exactly the degrees of freedom you need for processing.

Also from Yoga we have the idea that a lot of this processing can be done purely physically/somatically, which can be dramatically less tangled than engaging with all the mental contents. I've taken to calling the endless therapy loop as the Integration Trap, and liken it to whack a mole. If you aren't improving your digestion skill then you are constantly firefighting rather than actually decreasing the rate of new moles popping up.

It generally had to do with me trying to navigate a part of me that really wanted to just have a nice village, and be a humble village priest who helped their local community be nice. And a part of me that felt "man, the village is not safe. I can't in good conscious just stay here having a nice life. The spirit of the village compels me to leave the village and figure out how to help protect the village. But man something about that feels really sad/bad."

OOF.

Had a similar realization recently. It sucks. I was really lucky¹ to have access to competent emotional support when I did.

¹ not in fact luck, but skilled organizers who were prepared-in-advance for an increased likelihood of such events AT their event.

I appreciate and encourage the "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" nature of this blog post. I also appreciate and encourage the "write similarly to how you'd talk to friends in real life" nature.

I think there's often a language/terminology challenge around these areas. For instance, at different times I had a grade 3 ankle sprain after endurance training, and a grade 2 wrist sprain after a car crash - those are clearly acute trauma (in the medical meaning of the word) and they do require some mix of healing to the extent possible for recovery of physical function. 

But I've always found it tricky that the same word 'trauma' is used for physical injuries, past bad experiences, and as a broad description of maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior. 

It's a broad word that people use in different ways.

Two things I've found useful.

(1) Highest recommendation for Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By (1980) which looks at conceptual metaphors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

From Chapter 7, "Personification":

Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. Here are some examples:

- His theory explained to me the behavior of chickens raised in factories.
- This fact argues against the standard theories. 
- Life has cheated me. 
- Inflation is eating up our profits.
- His religion tells him that he cannot drink fine French wines. 
- The Michelson-Morley experiment gave birth to a new physical theory. 
- Cancer finally caught up with him.

In each of these cases we are seeing something nonhuman as human. But personification is not a single unified general process. Each personification differs in terms of the aspects of people that are picked out. 

Consider these examples.
- Inflation has attacked the foundation of our economy. 
- Inflation has pinned us to the wall.
- Our biggest enemy right now is inflation. 
- The dollar has been destroyed by inflation.
- Inflation has robbed me of my savings. 
- Inflation has outwitted the best economic minds in the country.

I think a lot of discussion around the word "trauma" follows these characteristics — the challenge is, a lot of times people move between a literal well-scoped definition of trauma, say the medical one, and a more metaphorical/ontological description. People often do this without noticing it.

For instance, I can talk about the acute trauma of the wrist injury from a car crash, and everyone will largely understand what I'm talking about. But the same word 'trauma' will often be used if I had described some fear or aversion of getting into cars going forwards. I don't have one, but if I did, people would refer to both the wrist injury and the thing which caused the aversion to cars as 'trauma' — which seems somewhat confused to me. Clearly a wrist injury needs healing, in the biological and medical sense of the word healing. 

Does an aversion to getting into cars need "healing" in the same way? I mean, maybe, if you've got a definition of "healing" from neuroscience around how incoming information is processed and how chain reactions of synapses firing in response to a stimuli that produces a maladaptive behavioral pattern is classified as "healing." But - like, probably not. "Healing" in that context is a metaphor.

For my part, and just speaking for myself, I think the term "extinction" — though less in line with the current cultural milieu — is a much better word than "healing" for removing maladaptive emotional and behavioral patterns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)

In my way of thinking about it,

• A traumatic wrist injury is repaired by physical healing.
• An irrational aversion to getting in cars is repaired by extinction of the behavior.

How to do the latter — talk-oriented therapies, exposure therapy (which is typically recommended for phobias), practice and training on implementing good patterns in similar situations to ones where you've displayed undesirable patterns of behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy if you're ruminating too much, etc - well, unfortunately there's no consensus currently on what works the best for any given case. 

But I think starting with a model of "I need to heal" is questionable. Relatedly, I'm also skeptical of using the word "heal" for biochemical imbalances — for biochemical-based depression, for instance, I think "I need to get my hormones and biochemistry better-regulated to remove depressive symptoms" is a a mix of more actionable, more accurate, and more subjectively empowering than "I need to heal from depression."

Anyway, this goes strongly against the current cultural milieu - and I haven't been maximally precise in the comment. A lot could be nitpicked. But I think extinction of maladaptive thought patterns and maladaptive behavior patterns is more easily accomplished (and a more accurate description of reality) than healing; likewise, "regulating" seems more accurate than healing to me on biochemical based phenomenon. 

It's been useful for me to think about it this way, and sometimes useful for other people. Though, different things work for different people - so add salt liberally. Regardless, Lakoff's Metaphors is extremely relevant the topic and highly recommended.

A trauma is an instance where something hurts you, and you develop coping mechanisms to route around the hurt, but the coping mechanisms limit your action space, blind you to some things, and distort your thinking a bit.

🫣

You can fix your emotional problems/confusions, but it'll take awhile.

But how?

This is not a very good LW comment, but, I’m interested in talking about this with you some time if you’re up for it.

conscious

Typo, should be conscience

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