February 17th, 2021
- Scraps from something I'm publishing on my blog
- The value of being able to speak stuff
- As far as I can tell, most of the time when people are upset with each other, most of the quantity & quality of the upset is not so much about the present situation but about some much larger thing, often an undigested past experience. However! The present situation is genuinely in some sense unworkable in some way as well, and I'm not saying that all that needs to happen is for the upset person to differentiate the present from the past and then things will be fine. I'm also not saying that all that needs to happen is for the upset person to do therapeutic reconsolidation on the past experience or schema, in order to integrate that, and then things will be fine.
- Both of those things (which I might call "mindset" and "integration") will definitely tend to help you have conversations in ways that reach satisfying resolutions for both parties, but they don't automatically make everything fine. Things might straight up not be fine. Even though the size & shape of the upset is often about the past, there's something happening in the present that your system can't trust fully, and while that might sometimes go away once you have more space, often there's still something unworkable there.
- You don't have to like it.
- How does Learning work?
- On the subject of being ready to learn...
- There's a near-ubiquitous unstated assumption that if someone says to you that you're doing something that hurts or bothers them, that there are only a few appropriate responses. These responses are perhaps appropriate in situations where there's been a simple lack of communication about something that's under conscious control, but such situations are rare.
- Here they are:
- apology: "oh shit, I'm sorry, I won't do that again!"
- deflection: "that's not actually an issue, or not the issue you think it is"
- defensiveness: "I have to do the thing I do; when you do the thing you do, this is the only reasonable response."
- These responses all emerge out of a lack of understanding of how learning works, including unlearning & integrating of emotional schemas. To someone who gets how learning & unlearning work, the most common response in such a situation will actually be the following statement, which I suspect will be totally foreign to most people:
- Oh. Yeah, I can kinda see what behavior pattern you're pointing at, though there might still be more for me to understand. I can totally see why that would be hurtful or would undermine your trust in me, and I don't want to be having that effect on you. At present though, I don't actually know why I apparently find it vital to behave in this way that's bothering you so much, and until I understand that better I'll probably keep doing it!
- the stuff from illustration doc
- this stuff also ties in beautifully with the original topic of impatience with peoples' learning!!!
- something something creative tension
- Imported leadlag learning system from a private roam where I'd written it
1 linked reference
leadlag learning system
- Commentary February 17th, 2021
- I wrote this in November 2019; this represented an upgrade on my thinking from previous-to-that, but I've since had further shifts in my thinking so I probably would do something slightly different than the below, or I would at least articulate aspects differently.
- There are also probably unexplained things below, since it was originally written as an internal doc for Liminal Space Agency.