How my liberating insight became a new ruling coalition

On the previous episodes of Fractal Coalitions Theory…

• I laid out some groundwork about how Conversations Are Alive: they exhibit cybernetic/homeostatic properties, maintaining their nature even in the face of attempts to change them—including by their participants. And they have a variety of kinds of unconscious life, that can be hijacky or vibey or dull/numb or thrashy/conflicty.
• I shared an insight about how Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within: that when we make agreements (including simply “to have a particular kind of conversation”) often those agreements are not made fully with the assent of all parts of us, and that the agreement (seen as a living agent) then exerts its will to keep the part of us that made the agreement in power, so it can stay in force. And this is part of the mechanism by which conversations maintain themselves.

In the second post, I tell the story of a group of people attempting to create a kind of all-welcoming evolving meta-coalition, but which was systematically unable to welcome certain perspectives, and instead seemed to incentivize me to repress those. In this post I’m going to talk about what happened when I noticed this was happening, and how that played out over the following years.

(This post may not make much sense without the previous one; the first one is less critical.)

My two warring coalitions find a new allegiance

Up until my “Non-Naive Trust Dance” insight in 2020, I had oscillated between two broad coalitions:

1. One of these called itself “collaborative” because it was the one that knew how to participate in this collective flow that we were aiming for, which we referred to as “collaborative mindset” or “collaborative culture”. (More on the flavour of this in Wtf is the Synergic Mode?)
2. The other was more amorphous, but represented my critiques or distrusts or judgments of our particular approach to all of that—sometimes those critiques came from a specifically-rationalist perspective, later they came from BioEmotive or Coherence therapy, and other times they were personal or represented someone else’s experience that it seemed to me had been left out.  In any case, they were things that I didn’t know how to include in what was otherwise my best way-of-seeing-and-being—and the group mind didn’t either.

This structure maps loosely onto what The Guru Papers calls “goodself” and “badself”.  This is ironic because part of the whole aim of the culture was be post-dualistic, not talking in terms of good or bad, but it turns out that if you try to get rid of certain ideas on a conceptual level, you don’t necessarily get rid of the underlying dynamics of social power and perspective.

(Of course, there were other moments when if you asked why I was doing what I was doing, the answer would have been orthogonal to this: eg “I’m trying to win this ultimate frisbee game” or “I’m figuring out whether today is a good day to get groceries” or “I’m trying to grow my business”.  Although sometimes even in such cases there would have been some sense of “and I’m doing this collaboratively (or not)”.)

And in spring of 2020 I realized that I was going kind of crazy oscillating between these two views, and desperately prayed for some sort of way to hold them both at the same time.  And, after a few months of grappling with my confusion, I was graced with an insight that I’ve come to refer to as my “NNTD insight” (NNTD stands for “non-naive trust dance”).

The NNTD insight in large part consisted of:

• realizing the obvious falsehood of “if there’s collaborative flow between people, that means each person’s internal ecosystem must also be one of collaborative flow”
• realizing, moreover, that mindset choice is a confusion; specifically, that the act of choosing one mindset against some resistance to it meant I was compartmentalizing parts of me
• realizing that it was obviously going to be saner to more stably focus on welcoming everything in me than continuing to try to connect with the group in this way that had me compartmentalizing myself
• realizing that while those experiences of collective flow were not what I thought they were (complete fractal collaboration) they were still a taste of what collaboration feels like on a given level (in this case the level between people—wait!  that’s the confusion again!  it is interpersonal in scale (vs eg international or internal-to-a-person) but importantly it’s inter-coalitional in type-of-participant)
• realizing that the reason we’d been oscillating was that we were excluding subsystems, yet these subsystems had the power to pull the plug on the collaboration regularly, and did so!
• realizing that they were doing pulling the plug because their concerns were not being handled by the interpersonal large-sensemaking collaboration
  • (As I wrote in The Parable of the Canoe Sandwich: “It seems to me that egos emerge in order to take care of our needs in contexts where we don’t trust the strategy of surrendering to the We.”)
  • but also realizing that often what was really pulling the plug on the collaboration was not these excluded subsystems but the fact that we were interpreting their demands as interrupting our attempt at collaboration, rather than interpreting them as being the subsystem’s best expression of what it would need in order to join the collaboration
• realizing that in order to have stable and actually-sane complete fractal collaboration, we’d need to go through a process of trust-dancing: welcoming all of the distrusts into the conversation (recursively: welcoming whatever gets in the way of welcoming other distrusts, and whatever gets in the way of that, etc)
• realizing, therefore, that it made no sense to try to get into collaborative flow with this group of people (who I was still living with for another few months) as long as these distrusts were present in me and didn’t know how to be welcomed by them—at least not in any form I yet knew how to articulate them

A ton of this clicked basically all at once (not quite in these words) and seemed to me immediately very important both for how I could go about creating a sane inner landscape for myself, and for the overarching puzzle of how to create cultures that were conducive to profound ecstatic collaboration—but stably, because they wouldn’t involve repression.

The experience of this insight cascade was epic—it felt like an inner iron curtain coming down, and suddenly the Soviet physicists and mathematicians could swap notes with the American ones, and the two sides could complete each others’ puzzles.

I initially had the sense that I’d fully integrated two big perspectives: “the collaborative” and my dissent again it.  Given that premise, it seemed clear that it should only take a few substantial conversations to explain it all to the others, and then we’d all be able to do this new trust-dancing thing.  But this didn’t happen at all.  It was not easy or straightforward. My theory was borne out to the extent that there were a few small new kinds of moves I was able to make that finally seemed like non-naive ratcheting (irreversible) progress, rather than naive fake destined-to-backslide apparent-progress.

But beyond that, I gradually came to realize that while I definitely had integrated two perspectives within myself—the one that used to participate with this group mind, and the one that distrusted its approach—I hadn’t incorporated all of the relevant factors from everybody else’s perspective.  There were pieces about post-blame and post-judgment that I underappreciated at the time, and which I appreciate more now but still not as much as the folks there did and do.  And surely others.

Fortunately, I can now investigate them on my own terms, at my own pace, rather than feeling the need to understand and align with them immediately in order to participate in my social context.  Insofar as I seemed to be understanding these things…  was I pretending?  Or was it just that some part/coalition of me had a surface-level understanding, which seemed solid since it never needed to subject itself to contrary views since those were all suitably repressed?  Or did I understand it deeply with parts of me that are now still repressed, thus making my current conscious self unable to access those understandings?  Probably a mix.

Almost everything I’ve written above was basically obvious to me from the moment I had the NNTD insight in 2020.  In many ways, this is just a rearticulation of what I realized.  However, when I started looking at it in this new light, it helped me understand a way in which I was profoundly confused from the beginning.

A new coalition that thought it wasn’t one

Interestingly, the Non-Naive Trust Dance insight was one of the extremely rare times that I’ve had a big insight and known immediately—and accurately—that I wasn’t going to forget the insight.  Most other insights I’ve had in my adult life have been characterized either by an overconfident sense that I would always live in light of this new truth, which was proven false hours or days later, or by a grasping fear that I would lose the insight, which was proven true hours or days later.  (In those cases though, I would often rediscover the truth again and again—it’s not that it was false! And when I’ve been lucky or persistent, I’ve eventually managed to integrate something about it into my ongoing sense of things.)

I wonder, as I write this, whether the fact that I knew it would last is a sign that it was the construction of a new stable internal ruling coalition, much like a religious convert has a sudden recognition that they need to devote their life to God—and more specifically but usually taken for granted, to a particular church—and there’s a sense of “everything is different now and it will stay different” (although of course in many of these cases, while the conversion of identity might be stable, there’s an ongoing struggle with desires or temptations or whatever, which ARE the same underlying phenomenon, but the strength of the shift in identity generally keeps their goodself/badself structure stable).

Unlike that scenario, there was no external authority to which I (well, my new ruling coalition) was now subject.  This was stated as a central aim of the project and the group-mind—for me to develop my self-trust.  And yet, confusingly, my experience was that the process of undergoing this change required tremendous fortitude against the will of the group mind as I experienced it, which continued to do things that felt like pressure to surrender naively to it. I wrote about some of this in my open letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam.

But I sort of assumed that because I had a new worldview that was all about decompartmentalization, I was no longer doing the coalition thing.  (I wasn’t using the frame “coalition” at the time, but I had a similar implicit model.)

Logically, this doesn’t follow at all—the old worldview was also in favour of integrating parts, in principle.  It had a method for doing so, and the method was somewhat workable, somewhat merely inadequate, and somewhat damaging. Likewise my new worldview had an implied method, and while that method contained a new key about how not to get stuck (and how to get unstuck) which I’ve been able to deploy successfully in many situations (internal and interpersonal) over the years…

…I got stuck. In a new coalition.

This time a basically stable central one, rather than before where I had a giant tension between two coalitions.  Not to say I didn’t still have oscillations, eg around productivity or other things I was conflicted about, but on a worldview level I’ve been roughly the same guy for nearly 5 years now, even as I’ve explored other seemingly-big shifts like starting to pray every day from having previously been kind of loosely atheistic.

The Trust-Dancing™️ coalition

The Non-Naive Trust Dance insight already contained a model for how someone could get stuck: to the degree that my [ruling coalition’s!] model of how collaboration works failed to incorporate aspects of how collaboration works (whether from other subsystems of mine, or other people) it would face resistance from those systems. And the insight included some meta-level clarity about how to effectively navigate that, which is what makes NNTD a lens on the meta-protocol, not just a protocol. But, like any instantiation, it’s still incomplete.

I knew what I had was incomplete, but what I wasn’t expecting was that it would be so closed. I sort of thought that there would be a gradual self-opening & self-welcoming process—and there has been—but 5 years later there are some dimensions that I sense have gotten nearly completely stuck.

I don’t really understand why.  Despite it being “me”, I’m assessing this as a black box system from the outside.  It says it wants to do one thing, but it does another.  What’s going on?

I have a few random theories, of which a bunch of the coalition stuff above is part of it, but that doesn’t explain the specifics. Let’s think out loud about it.

There is a particular blindspot though that I would expect the Trust-Dancing coalition to have, as part of the deals it made to get enough buy-in to govern.  In emphasizing the validity of all perspectives, even the judgmental ones, it pushed back against the previous order where a certain kind of perspective or mindset was seen as more…  something.  More respect-able?  More right? It’s complex; there’s no single word for it. (And it pushed back against the idea of mindset choice, and various other things emphasized by the scene I’d just left.)

And there was something good about this pushing back—it restored a kind of wholeness to my system, to see how every thought I was having made some kind of sense and was part of my whole sensemaking system, not at odds with it—although it might be at odds with some other part of my sensemaking.

But I suspect that in the process, I also shadowed something about there in fact being perspectives or modes of being that are categorically more spacious that others.

IFS Self as a frame

One fresh angle on this, outside of the frame of the “mindset choice” I’d been oscillating around for years, is the “Self” from Internal Family Systems aka IFS:  the subjective science discovery that by default for most people, the voice speaking from each person is one or more of their parts, but if you can get each part to step aside, then when all the parts have stepped aside… the person doesn’t cease to have a voice, but rather speaks from a more integrative place, that is inherently curious, creative, courageous, and many other lovely properties…  and that this mode exists for each person, no matter how traumatized.  And the clients with whom this was discovered would typically say “this isn’t a part talking right now, it’s just me.” So Richard Schwartz, IFS founder, called this the “Self”.

Over the years since leaving the culture incubator, I’ve tried now and then to do some IFS therapy, but the question of “am I in Self?” activated this basic sense of desperation that if I wasn’t then I would be rejected and wouldn’t be able to be heard—clearly from some pattern-matching onto the dynamics I described above with the collaborative mindset stuff.  It’s quite unclear to me the extent to which these are the same thing—in some ways it seems like obviously they are, but the different approaches make them feel very different, and in dealing with reflexive loopy stuff, that creates a real difference.

In 2021 I was even experimenting with the idea of “Internal Trust-Dancing” (ITD) which I commented that unlike IFS it didn’t privilege any particular view, but was about getting any two perspectives to respect each others’ lack of trust for the other, and observed how the act of truly respecting distrust tends to bring about some of the qualities of IFS-Self.

The IFS folks talk about how the Self is the natural choice to have as a leader for the parts.  The parts don’t automatically trust the Self—sometimes there’s a bunch of healing that has to happen first.  But the Self is sort of exquisitely capable of listening to the parts and relating to them in a way that can earn that trust.

I suspect “Self” is a confused word for this phenomenon.  Schwartz even literally says that as far as he can tell, the phenomenon he calls “Self” is the same as what the buddhists call “no-self”.  Perhaps it would be better to think of it as “space” or something like that.  “Space” is kind of a funny noun because it refers to an absence.  The vessel is created by its emptiness. “Consciousness” as a field within which things happen, not a thing.

I’d gotten in touch with something related, from the NNTD insight—a vast space of curiosity towards other perspectives, with nothing to defend.

One narrative would be that as the months and years went on, the Trust-Dancing coalition went from being a temporary Union, freely chosen by its members who felt it represented them better than the previous autocrat, to being an ossified regime.  A tolerable regime, but one that had ceased to be in a creative dynamic living flow.

With my new frames around coalitions, though, I’m actually more compelled by a narrative that from the very beginning, there were parts that had been forcefully ejected from the new ruling coalition. In a democratic frame, the new ruling coalition won by an overwhelming majority, at the time, but there were other facets of my experience that knew they weren’t represented already. And the new majority claimed to want to welcome everything, but in fact didn’t know how, in part because its whole basis for legitimacy was around distrust of the previous approaches I’d had.

And to some extent, I predicted this.  The theory predicted this.  But it’s still weird to have it actually happen, and to experience it in first person.

This put me back to the drawing board: what do I need to do to further the all-welcoming coalition I sense is possible? It’s tempting to think it’s a kind of binary thing… that I kept falling for fake versions, but somehow next time I’ll get the real version, but each lesson makes me more and more clear that no, I am making progress but also I may never be done, and that while welcoming-all is an crucial wayfinding aim to avoid certain traps, the path may look more like focusing on welcoming the specific thing that feels unwelcome right now.

“The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way.”
— Marcus Aurelius

And, while it’s been way slower than I might have hoped and that I think must ultimately be possible, I realize that I have been doing that. Last year I started turning towards the matter of “faith” and the question of: while retaining my insight that mindset choice is a confusion, can I come to simultaneously see the ways in which mindset choice is not a confusion? And turns out: yep, I do seem to have a generalized skill (from NNTD) for turning a blindspot into an insight, even when the blindspot came from NNTD itself. (What’s the skill? It’s a secret.)

(PS: I was excited by the idea of Inkhaven, but I ended up taking on a different project this month. But then I got inspired by a friend’s participation and the fact that I have so many almost-finished drafts to see if I can publish a post every day for the month of November anyway! Some of them might be elsewhere than malcolmocean.com but a lot of them will be here. Subscribe to my newsletter if you want them in your inbox.)

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