January 25th, 2022

idea for GCI landing page, re "make people feel good as part of selling to them"

idea re tapping the daemon, inner compass

I've mostly had a pretty decent relationship with myself, so I resonate with "largely true, false for me". I did at one point in ~2015 notice that I was trying to motivate myself towards doing homework with a "get your head out of your ass and just do it" energy and then I realized with someone walking me through an emotional introspection process that I was ALSO the person TO WHOM I was saying "get your head out of your ass" and then I felt sad. I didn't want to be yelled at! (I also "didn't want" to yell at people (in this case myself) I just didn't know what else to do.)

So there's also something about like, do you identify with the part of you who is telling yourself what to do and sometimes frustrated you won't do it, or do you identify with the part of you that is constantly getting berated by the inner critic and feeling not good enough? Power-over or power-under? And maybe for some people it goes back & forth. I could imagine this paragraph doesn't apply to Duncan Sabien at all though.

On a different level of abstraction, I think "abuse" is kind of a bad frame for this (and also a bad frame for most, though not all, of interpersonal harms). But most people most of the time don't respect that people have coherent reasons for doing what they're doing, and also they don't respect that they themselves have coherent reasons for doing what they're doing. As I sometimes like to put it, "if what you/he were doing didn't make some sort of sense, you'd be doing some *different* apparently-senseless thing!"

And their strategies (inner & outer) are therefore engaged in various distrustful battles, wishing the other would just give in. This approach to conflict is wasteful like running your AC to try to cool down your house when your furnace is also on trying to warm your house.

Here's a case study of me exploring an approach for creating a different quality of dialogue internally. It's notably different than double crux in that it assumes both perspectives are in some sense right and seeks to find out how that's possible, rather than seeking to find out which is right.

If— poem by Kipling

"you can't trust what you can't trust"

why is "I can't trust" more powerful than "I have a story"