trust dance moves
- If the non-naive trust dance is a kind of dance, what are its dance moves?
- Well, since it's descriptive, almost everything everyone does can be understood as a move in the dance. How can all types of moves be seen as an opportunity for fueling upward spiral dynamics? (the obstacle is the way)
- Everything everyone does, the challenge is to somehow see it as part of building trust.
- This whole page is lenses for understanding what's already happening, whatever protocol or implicit culture people are using to approach conversation or thinking.
- As an exercise, you can consider something annoying that someone does, and try to frame it as a trust-dance move. ie frame it as something that one could workably respond to (even if you don't have the capacity to do so in that moment)
- Here's one model from August 3rd, 2020, with a bit of edits since. There are probably others!
- There are a couple of modes people are often in when trust-dancing.
- trust dance modes
- Refusing to step anywhere whatsoever that isn't non-naively trustworthy by current standards.
- Type 1 has to check everything, before going forward. Or not go forward at all.
- The integrity to honor of this mode is the courage to listen to one's own "no"
- Making a bet on something you don't know how to non-naively trust but you on some level predict that you will become able to trust
- via one or more of:
- evolution of it (it wasn't trustworthy before, but becomes so)
- evolution of you (you grow so as to become able to relate to it in a reliable way)
- evolution of the dialogue (you understand the generator of the thing, so you can trust it)
- (ideally doing all of this without a sense of self-blame or other-blame if it “doesn’t work out”—on any timescale)
- Type 2 allows for some naivety, in some sense. One part might want to try something and another part doesn't quite trust it, but you go for it anyway.
- The integrity to honor of this mode is the courage to listen to one's best guess of a good bet to make.
- People usually aren't consciously in control of which mode they're in:
- when they feel unsafe, they tend to do NNTD mode 1: uncompromised non-naivety
- when they feel more safe they tend to do NNTD mode 2: trust bet
- added November 19th, 2021 in convo with Eric Chisholm - if people are really out of slack (eg person working paycheck to paycheck for an abusive boss) then they are in some sense maybe doing neither, but making the best available compromise
- can't trust their "no" or their "yes"
- but can honor that they are actually making the most of their situation given their capacity and their ontology and fractal careabouts
- relates to coherence empathy & second suffering
- "and this is why it doesn't pay to be a rescuer" - Eric
- the only way out of this, we think, is to get more slack
- which might involve material support
- or maybe the person needs therapy or some other meta-level help to get out of the situation
- or a friend to talk to to help them make sense of stuff
- or something
- of course, one is never obligated to support anyone in particular! if you don't trust yourself to support someone in a particular way without losing your own slack, don't do it! unless you want to!
- As someone becomes more integrated, the available range of both modes becomes larger and begins to overlap more.
- There's a natural back & forth between these two moves. Sometimes that back & forth happens as a kind of naive, painful oscillation, sometimes it happens as deeply workable breathing-in-and-out.
- The second type of move is an investment of one kind of slack to create another. It's not always available. If it's not available, then great—do the first type of move!
- Here's a random brainstorm of some more specific moves, not necessarily on the same level of abstraction as each other, nor necessarily fitting cleanly into the two trust dance modes above.
- re-enact your half of an old janky dynamic to see if this scene responds differently somehow this time
- (this is a super weird one that is often really frustrating for others)
- (this is perhaps the default move that people are making most of the time, but usually people don't understand it this way)
- attempt to do something that is incompatible with someone else's projection, to earn their trust
- extreme ownership game (like the stump convo about the porch tweet)
- revealing your best awareness of your own system dynamics
- listening for what someone else is needing in order to be able to trust you (or I guess a third party) and seeing if there's a way you can be trustable to that, without violating your own self-trust
- (reverse of previous) articulating your best understanding of what you're needing, with an openness (explicit or implicit) to the possibility that the other person may:
- not understand what you're saying at all
- think they understand but they don't
- feel threatened by what you're asking
- understand it and be able to empathetically say "I can see you want that and I don't have an available move there"
- understand it and say "I don't have a free move there, but I have slack I could bet on that move"
- understand it and say "yes that makes complete sense and I feel very motivated to care for that...
- in the way you're requesting"
- in this other way that I think will work, does it sound workable for you?"
- noticing a moment of “huh, I can’t step into that”
- or as George and I explored, “I don’t buy it” or “I seem to not believe this” (even if on some other level you think you could believe it)
- “If I believe you, then…”
- honoring that someone seems to be in NNTD mode 1: uncompromised non-naivety, and communicating (however feels possible) to
- What are some template protocol-esque phrases though?
- "I'd like to invite you to take any step towards trusting me that all of you can get behind, if any."
- This move has to be done after clearly validating that whatever distrust is present is totally fine, and it functions as a kind of recognition that the distrust may be particularly loud because it hasn't been validated, and inasmuch as it is now validated, inviting it to recalibrate, without any assumption of what that will do.
3 linked references
August 14th, 2021
- "I'm not intending to [cause you the problem you're having framed in your terms]. I'm intending to [solve my problem], and it's been