erratio

Yesterday marks my first time advising a friend on how to make a complaint about an unethical therapist

 Last term, when we covered Gestalt Therapy, it was the most impenetrable thing I've ever seen. It's one of the very few topics where the more I read, the less I felt like I understood what the heck it was about. And then the lecturer did an in-class demonstration and I went away going "what did I just watch?". A week later after thinking about it, I had a slightly better idea of what he'd been doing, but my view on Gestalt was still basically "????????".

In the time since then, I've worked my butt off in personal therapy. I don't know how much concrete progress I've made, but I have a much better idea of what the target is that I'm trying to hit and what kinds of things I need to work on in order to hit it. I mention this because we're covering the modalities again this term, but in greater depth, and this time when I did the Gestalt readings and paid attention to the lecturer it made sense. It's such a trippy feeling, that I wasn't explicitly doing anything related to it in the meantime and yet this time around it felt less like a load of weird impenetrable nonsense and more like a description of something that's inherently not very easy to describe (and also obscured further by a bunch of unnecessary jargon, but that's a different issue). 

Concurrently with the lecture on Gestalt, my housemate has gone to a leadership/self-development retreat thing and has come back with a lot of... very similar ideas to Gestalt, really, where before he used to be overly focused on trying to be an advice dispenser. And I'm pretty sure he sounds impenetrably mystical now to a lot of people. His next step is trying to figure out how to communicate the same concepts in a way that doesn't alienate the SSC/LW-type crowd.

 That's the second time this week I've linked someone to information about safety planning because a friend of theirs is suicidal.

I just went back to my last life update post to see when it was, and a lot of things have changed since then! Given that it was over three years ago, that's really a good thing.

In very rough chronological order:

• I started a relationship with the Canadian guy I met online, and we visited each other several times
• I exited the PhD Linguistics program with a Masters, because academia is a terrible place for me
• I started volunteering for an online peer counselling service
• I moved to Canada to be with Canadian Guy
• After a couple of years of that, things weren't going so hot, and so when he got a job offer in Hungary I took that as my cue to initiate a break up and move back to Sydney. (the breakup didn't entirely take, but we get along so much better now that the relationship expectations aren't hovering)
• I started dating a boy in Melbourne. Still long distance, but at least it's only a relatively cheap 1.5 hour flight to see each other 
• I enrolled in a Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy
• A friend of mine who owns a company in the UK has hired me to do technical writing stuff, and the income from that is good enough to keep me afloat without eating into study time

So obviously the thing I'm most excited about in there is enrolling to become an official counsellor person. Classes just started a couple of weeks ago and so far everyone and everything is lovely. (Except for their admin. My friend commented that I have Siderea-like powers of getting into weird administrative situations, and this definitely qualified.) Also, everyone here seems to dislike CBT, which I find kind of hilarious given its position as the gold standard everywhere else. I'm a little nervous about things like 'eye contact' and 'making legible expressions' as so much of my social experience has involved either the Internet or interaction with people who were just as socially anxious/awkward as I was, but I think that'll pass as I get more into the program. I'm also nervous about my placements, since some of the students are counsellors who've already been practicing for years and how can I compete with them for placements? But I suspect that will be fine too, since those other people probably don't want to do their placements at the kind of places that I do.

So apparently this is a thing I'm doing now?

Actually the main reason I wanted to post Siderea's Patreon page here is because reading her descriptions of what each pledge will get you fills me with amusement and joy. Also, I've missed her posts too - she writes group dynamics and psychology and various other things that are harder to pigeonhole, but it's all deeply insightful and I've learnt a lot from contemplation of the thoughts her writing stirs up in me. I intend to fund her as soon as I have a few spare minutes today that I'm not procrastinating from studying for a midterm.


The second signal boost that I promised a friend is for her friend's RPG maker game on Kickstarter, over here. I'm told it has a female protagonist and a canon genderqueer character and is lots of fun even though at the moment it's still in alpha. I probably won't be funding it personally because I already have a stack of games that I'll never play as long as my arm, but if I was in the unusual position of having both spare time and money, a game like this would be right up my alley.

One of the more perplexing/annoying things about moving to the US is that nothing actually costs its stated price. You go to a restaurant and you're obligated to add 10-25% extra as a tip. You go to the supermarket or one of the big chain stores and it's all about specials and coupons and joining their stupid club or getting their special credit card or whatever. And then there's the joke that's medical insurance, where procedures are billed at something like a 10x markup, if your insurance company covers it then you pay some kind of flat rate, and then the insurance company and the hospital have an agreement where they only pay the original price rather than the ridiculous marked-up price. Anyway, it recently occurred to me that all these different pricing schemes make for excellent case studies in incentives and anchoring.

Restaurants

At restaurants the price of the food is considerably less than the price you actually pay, thanks to tax and tipping. This makes sense because by the time you're paying you've already consumed the product and are committed to forking over money for it. You get lured in by artificially low prices, and then when it's too late to leave you get hit with extra charges. For bonus points, tipping isn't thought of as being part of the cost and so people still think of restaurants as being cheaper than they are.

Supermarkets/chain stores

At these places the situation is the opposite of restaurants - you get no use from the product until after you've left the store and you can put the product down and leave without paying anything at any time before you actually hand over the money, so there's no incentive to add extra costs in. Instead, they start with a high stated price and then add discounts through various means so that you get to feel clever and/or lucky for paying less.

Medical costs

I'm less sure about what's going on here, but I'm tentatively going to say that the high stated costs of medical procedures are intended as a disincentive to stop you from getting anything done that you don't need desperately enough. Or alternatively, they're intended as an incentive to get insurance since the average person doesn't even come close to being able to afford them, and I've heard rumours of hospitals and insurers colluding on this sort of thing. And then if your insurance covers the procedure then you get the same feeling as from the previous case, where you're lucky/clever for having gotten the insurance instead of having to pay those ridiculous bills yourself. Hospitals can also afford to have higher costs in general because unlike restaurants and fancy chain stores, when you need medical care you usually need it RIGHT NOW and don't have time or energy to quibble or shop around. Basically, you precommit to paying them before you have any idea what the price is, and so they're free to hike the price up as high as they want.

Relatedly, I'm now thinking that hospitals and big chain stores might contain the formalised vestiges of haggling culture, in the sense that in shops and countries where haggling is how commerce generally works, only foreigners and idiots pay the full price. Similarly, there's a sense that if you get hit with the full cost of a medical bill or you overpaid for a piece of clothing, it's because you didn't work the system properly, not because the price shouldn't have been that high in the first place.

www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2014/07/sondheim-symposium-on-friendship-sequence-index.html

Leah (who is an excellent blogger who came up with the Ideological Turing Test), has a whole mini-sequence of posts about the nature and importance of friendships. As someone whose fantasy future involves living in the same house or just next door to my best friend(s), I am highly in favor of encouraging good strong friendships.

aka, a distinction that people don't make nearly often enough or in the right ways

siderea.livejournal.com/1147219.html

A couple of relevant excerpts:

"an awful lot of people get themselves hung up on the idea that the party who is at fault Should be the party to be responsible. "I'm not the one who broke it, I shouldn't have to clean it up!"

It's a nice prescriptive principle for organizing morality, ethics, and law: where it can be implemented it makes the world more fair."

"But we don't live in a world like that. One of the fundamental facts of human existence is that you're going to take responsibility for a lot of things that aren't your fault. In fact, the vast majority of things you are responsible for in your life are not going to be your fault, but, nevertheless, you will be responsible for them."

"Taking responsibility feels good because it's empowering. Because it makes you feel less impotent against the vagaries of life. In fact, it feels so good, some people wind up taking too much responsibility, such as codependents on a loved one's addiction, taking responsibility for preserving the addict's lifestyle, or over-protective parents trying to sheild their kids from every averse experience in life, or the battery victim who takes on responsibility for molifying their abuser. It's important not to take too much -- or the wrong -- responsibility, either.

It can be hard to figure out how much responsibility to take, and which responsibility to take, especially if one grew up with people who were bad at it, or deliberately obfuscated issues of fault and responsibility to get away with things (and there is a whole post worth on the topic of what we in the pshrink biz call "parentification" of children and its relationship to assuming inappropriate responsibility.)"

Anyway, go forth and read the whole thing. It's very well-written and lays it all out in a way that an over-responsible person like me can't easily ignore.

(emotional congruency being the thing I talked about in my last substantive post, for anyone reading this in the future who didn't also see the previous one)

In one of those strange 'the universe is paying attention to me' moments, two of the people I read recently posted on topics that touch on the need for emotional congruency. One about how when someone close to them died unexpectedly, they think it might have been a comfort to them if there had been the kind of mass grief and hysteria involved as there was for people like Princess Diana. The other about how a lot of fans have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that the thing they love may not be loved by others and may in fact have problematic aspects and that this doesn't in any way diminish their capacity to love it anyway, rather than feeling the need to start a flamewar every time someone implies that they don't like the thing enough.

A third related phenomenon is outrage-blogging, where the point (besides generating traffic) is to get validation by writing inflammatory posts about things that bother you. Once you get sufficiently good at this, your audience will consist of 90% people who violently agree with you and enjoy the shared outrage, and 10% people who violently disagree with you, who get their own outrage-fix by fighting against the 90% in the comments section. And yet another related phenomenon is the 'release the winged monkeys' effect, where bloggers who have enough popularity have to be careful about how they share outrage, because if they're not careful a certain portion of their audience will swoop over to the source of the outrage and attempt to bury them in hate/counterarguments/etc. And if the source of the outrage has their own sufficiently large audience... well. But the relevant point here is that even if the blogger is not habitually an outrage-blogger and their audience is fairly reasonable, there's something about someone you respect expressing outrage that seems to incite other people to start feeling the same way and to jump to their defense.

I'm still mulling this over way too much to have a coherent mini-essay here about the common points and what it all means and all that, so instead here are some disjointed thoughts on the topic:

1. There seem to be a couple of magic ingredients here: strength of emotion, and level of status/respect
2. The stronger the emotion, the more unacceptable it feels for other people not to share that emotion
3. And when witnessing strong emotion in someone else, the higher their perceived status (to you, the witness) the more likely you'll hop on their emotional bandwagon
4. It follows from points 2 and 3 that if you feel a strong emotion and other people don't validate it, you must have low status. Now you have two problems: you're upset *and* you're not important enough to have your emotions respected, which is going to feed into your upsetness
5. I'm tempted to draw some kind of line from low self-esteem or relatively weak personal identity to the desire for emotional congruency, because feeling temporarily disrespected is only a major problem if you feel it implies certain things about you in the grand scheme of things
6. I'm also tempted to draw a line from extroversion to the desire for emotional congruency, because my experience suggests that the more extroverted you are the more passionate you tend to get about things in general, which would correlate to the 'strength of emotion' part (NB: my subject pool has a major confound in that almost all the introverts I know are NT types on the MBTI)
7. There's a psych concept called 'locus of control', where if you perceive it as being outside yourself then you're going to feel helpless and like you have no control over your life and if you perceive it as being internal then you feel like you have agency and so forth. I'm going to guess that there's a similar sort of 'locus of identity' concept, where if your sense of self is anchored on a small number of external things like 'is a good parent' or 'Star Trek fan' then you're going to feel massively threatened if one of those things is challenged in some way, such as getting into a fight with your adult child or hearing someone talk about why Star Trek kind of sucks in some ways. Whereas if your identity is more diffuse (parent + fan + athlete + writer +...) or you happen to be one of those lucky people who don't need any kind of external validation at all, then a threat to one of the things you like isn't going to faze you so much.
8. And obviously the more threatened you feel the stronger your emotional reaction to the threat and the more important it becomes to you that other people at the very least acknowledge your emotions
9. But none of this fully explains to me why there's the split between belief-congruency and emotional-congruency verbal fight styles. I'm fairly neurotic so it's not like I haven't had my share of strong negative emotions. So why haven't I ever had the urge to start saying hurtful things to get a rise out of the other person?

A while back I read this post. Short version: When people get into verbal fights, their styles can be roughly split into truth-shouters, who say the truths that they would normally hold back or find themselves unable to express, versus cutlery-loaders, who say all kinds of things that may or may not be true in order to blow off steam and get a reaction out of the other person* - in effect they just load whatever's handy into their cannons and then fire that off, hence the term. I think there might be a more useful way to reframe the concepts: Truth-shouters are aiming to make people know/believe the same things as them. Which is why when things get stressful, the uncomfortable facts start coming out. Cutlery-loaders on the other hand are aiming to make people feel the same things as them. Which is why when they're angry/upset, they'll say whatever they think will cause the other person to feel a similar emotion and often get even more upset if the other person doesn't take the bait, because it makes them feel like their emotions are being treated as invalid or overreaction.**

I can't help wondering whether these are more general interaction styles and are just a lot more obvious during arguments because those tendencies get blown up to several times their usual size.


* Obviously this is a bit of a simplification. Lots of people are not purely one or the other, there are probably styles that don't allow neat categorisations, etc. But I think it's still a useful abstraction

** It's probably obvious from my explanations that I'm a truth-shouter, hence my less-than-charitable description of cutlery-loaders.

The insight for this post came from a Facebook argument where I ended up being accused of acting as if the other person wasn't entitled to their emotions (which was my own fault really - I didn't share their outrage and instead jumped to objecting to part of the factual content of their post). During the ensuing exchange they then expressed a view that can be summarised as '[bad thing] happened to me, and I hope it starts happening to others so that the situation will be addressed before [worse thing] happens to me". After applying the principle of charity, this reads to me as "[bad thing] has caused me to worry about [worse thing], and I wish other people felt the same way as me because then they would take action to help avert the chances of [worse thing] happening". But on first reading, boy did that sentiment get my hackles up.