…ie an obvious and accessible attractor for smart people trying to figure out how to direct their resources (money, time, attention, intelligence) towards pragmatic care for each and every being they care about.
Ignoring your present distrust because you trusted before is as foolish as ignoring today’s thirst because you drank enough yesterday.
Some examples where this sort of thing comes up:
There’s a common confusion people make, which is to try to hang onto some previous trusted experience, in the face of new distrust.1 Or, to try to get someone else to do so.
This is failing to treat distrust as the sense organ that, in my view, it is. This is why I like the analogy with thirst. Now, trust is more like temperature perhaps than thirst, because you don’t need a steady input of new trust-water in order to maintain homeostasis. You just need the right conditions.
But the point is, whatever trust or distrust you have in the present is your system’s current best assessment of what’s going on, that you’re encountering and dealing with. You may have some memory of trusting this person or institution or group or whatever at some other time, but that memory affects you only exactly as much as it does. Theoretically what I’m talking about here could happen in the reverse direction, but it’s rarer.
I’d like to highlight a difference between two types of moves that someone can make, in relation to such a memory.
Move 1: attempted trust-laundering: A says to B, or B says to themself, “but remember that incident/moment/etc last week? see, I’m/it’s totally trustworthy!” This is an attempt to overwrite the present distrust with some trust from another time and situation. It sees the current distrust as an obstacle to something, and attempts to bludgeon it into submission with the old trust. If it seems to work, that’s likely to be because it results in an inner-coalitional coup, bringing to power some subsystem that trusts, which is suppressing the by ignoring the distrust.
One of the reasons I’ve seen this happen is that A really trusts themself in some way, and so the world makes a lot more sense to them when B also trusts them in that way. Thus, when they encounter B not trusting them, they think “B is in a state of confusion” and they try to fix that by bringing B back into the state of trust, openness, etc.
Move 2: non-naive trust integration-encouraging: A says to B, or B says to themself, “but remember that incident/moment/etc last week? how does this situation look in light of that? does that change things at all, to bring it into awareness? maybe not, but let’s consider.” This is an attempt to synthesize the present distrust with the trust from another time and situation. It recognizes that the present skin-in-the-game is where things ultimately ground out, and offers the old trust to that present skin-in-the-game, as a resource for it to use as its sees fit.
This requires adopting a kind of epistemically neutral/spacious stance, where you honor the person’s learning system and let it do its thing. It helps also to see the other person as containing multitudes, and to be allied with all of the subsystems and attempting to welcome all of them, rather than trying to elicit your preferred face.
Relatedly, I have on occasion invited someone to basically recompute their trust in me, after I said something. I don’t demand that the result come out different—well, I don’t even demand that they in fact do the recomputation. But it’s more a chance to just say “hey, does that affect things?” and to really find out what the answer is.
Non-naive trust is all about finding out, not about asserting.
Sometimes reinforcement training gets confused with coercion—I myself had this confusion for quite some time, first implicitly then more explicitly from having read Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) books.
Then I read Don’t Shoot the Dog, a book on reinforcement training, and realized that I was approximately confusing threat and punishment and reward… with creating a good learning gradient for someone.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Aristotle
What causes us to repeatedly do things? They work. What causes us to do different things? They seem to work better. This is how learning works.
So if you want an organism—yourself, a spouse, a pet, a kid, a coworker—to learn to do something different, then you need to give them some sort of gradient along which they try new things and those things seem to work better. You need to meet them in the adjacent possible, and encourage them along it.
Video games are excellent at this—they start easy, then get progressively harder as you go. At each stage, you need to figure out what works to get you to the next stage. If you got thrown into level 48 at the start, you’d be totally overwhelmed.
This is the idea with shaping: using some reinforcer and a sequence of behaviors that work at each step.
Reinforcement is not reward. Arguably it’s a subtype of reward, but unlike the typical connotation of “reward”, here you need dozens or hundreds of little instances (or in the case of training LLMs, trillions), and more critically it needs to come immediately. Seconds is too late. So it’s a very different vibe.
When my wife and I read Don’t Shoot the Dog, we were in Australia with her family for Christmas, and her folks have a dog named Eddie. Using lentil-sized pieces of meat, we spent a couple days shaping him to lie down.
This was pretty easy, in part because we could use the presence of the meat in our hand—which got his attention and tended to get his nose to follow—to guide him from a seated position to a lying down position. Then the trick was to figure out how to get him to do that while we backed up and moved the “down” gesture so that it wasn’t happening right in front of his nose, but rather from us at standing height.
But all told we taught the old dog a new trick in a couple days, despite ourselves being totally new to the training method.
One of the skills they don’t tell you you’ll need when you become a parent is improvisationally automating and delegating things. Maybe some parents don’t do this, but I did a lot. I don’t like being a laptop employed as a nightlight. So in the first few months of parenting, when I found myself with the job of “simply hold the bottle while the baby drinks”. I figured out ways to better prop the bottle up: give it more balance points by attaching a small cheap carpenter’s clamp to it. Soon my intrepid daughter was holding it herself, merely reflexively—this is her at 3.5months, a good few weeks before she learned even to just see an object and reach for it.
Something they do tell you about parenting is that there will be regressions—the newborn who sleeps so easily becomes a 4mo who sleeps very erratically until you give them really clear consistent sleep associations and help them learn to bridge from one sleep cycle to the next. But it had not occurred to me that after my baby around 7mo learned to hold the bottle herself without the clamp… that she would some day soon become unable to feed herself with the bottle.
That day came at around 10 months, when she learned to sit up. See… she hadn’t learned about gravity. When she was laying on her back, merely holding the bottle in her mouth at all (usually at about the angle in the above photo) would result in the milk flowing. But once she could sit up, well, gravity wasn’t on her side. Suddenly she was frustrated, but she refused to drink laying down. Fair enough, but it meant I was once again employed below my pay grade.
It took me another 2 months before it occurred to me to try this, but one night it occurred to me to try shaping—at worst, I would entertain myself more than just sitting there holding the bottle up. The regime was simple:
She only has one bottle a day, at bedtime. One night, I went through that process and it took the whole 20 minutes or so of the feed to get any moments of the last step. I would back up if it seemed too hard. The next night, within 5 minutes she was feeding herself. The following night I just handed her the bottle and she grabbed it and tilted it up. And every night since, although sometimes someone enjoys holding and feeding her anyway.
I don’t know if it would have worked earlier, but my guess is yes given how fast it worked when I did it. Might’ve taken longer at 10mo—and I’m not 100% sure she was strong enough at that age but she was climbing a lot so probably. Endurance though.
So I taught my baby a skill.
I’m mostly writing for my past self here. I legit used to think that all such training regimes were coercive.
I want to suggest that the two issues with coercion are:
It’s maybe already obvious how the above situations don’t have these issues, but let’s spell it out:
I used to think that the act of giving the reinforcer conditionally was somehow coercive.
I now mostly would pay attention to whether the organism seems to be engaging in the process with interest or frustration, and as long as you’re in the interest zone, ie the zone of proximal development, the conditionality feels like a fun puzzle. And, moreover, if the learning conditions are somehow demeaning, rather than an attuned loving challenge, then even if the task is in the adjacent possible, then, well, something bad is happening. Is it coercion? It might be some other problem. Importantly, for shaping to work, the conditionality needs to be so small that within seconds of them trying different stuff, something they do is further along the path and so they get reinforced. So there’s no experience of it being withheld.
A more subtle confusion, likely held only by those who have engaged with Perceptual Control Theory and its beef against behaviorism, is that the situation required in order to do a training regime are themselves coercive or otherwise require total captive control of an organism’s environment, because that’s the only way that you can keep them ongoingly in a situation where you have control over something that they need (the reinforcer) so that you can use it to reinforce them. This one seems silly to me from the above examples. Like yes, I control the meat & milk, and the dog & baby can’t get more of them than I (or other caregivers) allow. But:
In fact, in both cases, the learning is going to go way better if the dog or baby is not hungry, because they’ll have more patience.
My impression is that BF Skinner used to keep his pigeons somewhat hungry—maybe this is necessary for some animals and not others. I haven’t not investigated. I’m not trying to say reinforcing/shaping is never coercion, just that it isn’t inherently coercion.
But also animal trainers often work with secondary stimulus—a simple click sound—for which the animal is clearly not operating in a state of deprivation. And the animal gets excited when it’s training time! I get to learn! What fun!
One reframe I found helpful for this is to think of the reinforcer as a signal of “that worked!”
It’s a more intuitive, 1st person, description of what a reinforcer is. It reinforces because it tells the organism what worked. It tells them what worked because it got them what they wanted, or it got them a sign that they would get what they wanted later, or because it got some signal that they were learning something worth learning. And sometimes the mere act of having some success with something you’re trying to do gives you that “that worked!” sign. But for forming superorganisms, we need to be able to tell each other what worked.
I have a video on this:
I also have another essay defining coercion in terms of PCT, which may be of interest.
There’s a puzzle that shows up when talking about intersubjective verification: how can I ever really know what’s going on in your head? What is it like to be you? What are your desires, goals, understandings? If I have an insight, can I tell that you have the same insight?
It seems to me that: indeed, in some sense I can’t ever know what’s going on in your head—there’s a measurement problem.
But I can come to trust things about you, and what that means is that I know it’s good enough for my purposes. It is sufficient for all the purposes that I have for now and the foreseeable future that I can just treat this as how things are. I don’t even want to say “treat this as true”—to say that it’s true is to again enter into the objective lens, which is irrelevant. It’s how things are, as far as I’m concerned, as far as I can tell.
And that’s good enough—trust is, by definition, what’s good enough. I don’t need to make a further claim that it’s true.
I’ve talked about trust as “what truth feels like in first person”—this is the dimension of trust that’s less about safety or alignment and more just about the sense of how things are. It’s your basic sense of things.
And trust is dynamic, of course. I’m trusting a bridge until one step is rotten, and then oop! Maybe I proceed with caution. Maybe I turn back, relaxedly trusting the steps that I already walked on. Maybe I observe that the ropes are clearly holding even if the beams aren’t, so I try walking with my feet towards the outside, holding onto the ropes.
To say I know something about you (or that something is true of you) is to say that others should agree. But to say that I trust something about you is to say that I’ve done the checks that I need to do, given my needs and purposes. You, who have different needs and purposes, will not in general trust what I trust. You might trust something on the basis of my say so, but you might not. It depends on, well, everything—your purposes, your needs, your sense of me and mine, your trust in my motives for speaking, and the quality of my assessments, etc. And you don’t make those choices consciously, you just find out: when I say I trust something (or say why I trust it), does it result in you trusting it, or not?
Anyway! This is one of those funny things where everybody is doing this just fine all the time, but then philosophers come along with a framework that makes it seem impossible. Wikipedia’s page on intersubjective verifiability says:
While specific internal experiences are not intersubjectively verifiable…
They aren’t if you have to force things to be objective—if you have to find the one standard for all time that you can apply. But if we’re allowed to intersubjectively verify things according to our own unverified personal gnosis (ie our trust) not an objective standard, then we can just do it, the way we always do it in order to form a common sense of things.
The most obvious cases are practical social situations—being able to trust that a particular employee understands the assignment, or being able to trust that your spouse actually gets the thing that really bothered you about what they said this morning. Or developing a share sense of why someone was being weird or whether they’re safe to invite to another party, by debriefing things. Sometimes things add up, to an experience we trust… and other times they don’t add up, and we don’t trust them.
Then there’s intersubjective verification of understanding of eg physical or mathematical phenomena—the phenomenon might be objective, but the question of whether someone understands it is not! So getting a common sense that it’s understood by a group still involves this engagement with whether it it feels like you can treat it as commonly known or whether you feel that you need to keep hedging or treating it as debatable or unclear.
Then, consider intersubjective verification of buy-in—this is very relevant to game theory. If you’ve got a stag hunt (a game where there are two options—solo-hunting rabbit, which produces a small win for anyone who chooses it, and co-hunting-stag, which produces a massive win for everybody if and only if everybody chooses it, otherwise those who choose it get nothing). If everybody trusts that everybody else will choose stag, then everybody will want to choose stag, thus will choose stag. If we only somewhat trust that, then we might. Even if it were true that everybody else would choose stag, the operative question for you is whether you trust that they would. And so the matter of buy-in needs to deal with the question of trust—each person’s trust, which may need to be earned differently. (And, as Duncan Sabien pointed out, in practice someone who can’t afford to risk getting a zero win this round is not likely to be able to choose stag, so trust will be best earned in an iterative game by having a few rounds where everybody agrees to stick to rabbit, to build up that surplus and to build up the experience of people doing what they said they would do even if it wasn’t risky.) These same dynamics apply to much more complex situations of team buy-in
This also dissolves solipsism, in a sense. Can I know that you’re really there, having experiences and dreams and so on? Moot point—acting like you are works better than acting like you aren’t, so I trust that you are. The important point is that’s all I ever have—there never was certainty anyway. It was all always just made of trust.
Where this gets really interesting is in matters of subjective science and reflexivity—when the map changes the territory. Take some insight that is of the interior, not the exterior, such as buddhist no-self, IFS Self, or the NNTD insight, or religious experiences… how can we know that each other has also experienced this? Well, once again it’s a matter of trust-building. We start simply not knowing, and as we trust-dance in relation to it (basically allowing our interfaces to come into honest contact) until we develop trust that we’re experiencing something compatible enough for our purposes… or until we start to distrust that. Or we just don’t know how to proceed any further and we still don’t know.
One open question or edge for me is that it seems pretty obvious to me that even in reflexive domains, where there are multiple stable possibilities, there can be something like objective facts about what the stable possibilities are. And eg the core NNTD insight (“you can’t trust what you can’t trust”) seems very obviously true to me, not merely one of many stable ways of viewing things. If someone said they disagreed, I’d say “we’re clearly not talking about the same thing”, the same way as someone would of a mathematical knowing. (This is less true of the whole NNTD framework that I’ve developed based on the insight—see the many meanings of NNTD—although even there I’m pretty sure most of it basically holds given some assumptions (some of which I may not be conscious of).)
So I have this sense that I can tell for myself that NNTD is true (ie not just that I trust it, but that anybody who investigated it thoroughly would also come to trust it) but the most obvious truth of it somehow routes through subjective experience. I can give reasons, and you can reason about those reasons, but ultimately the question is not “does that logically hold?” but “do you see it?”
And—just between us—the question is not “do you see it?” but “can I trust that you see it?”
I set myself a challenge, in parallel to the Inkhaven Residency, to publish a post every day of November. I’ve been calling it “inkdiehaven”, a mashup of “indie” and “inkhaven”. A few other people are doing it too I think.
It’s maybe not the optimal way to get people to read my posts in the short-term, since they’re already long, but it does feel like a good way to kind of clean out the pipes.
“The mind is like an engine—it stops working if it has no exhaust” — source I can’t be bothered finding rn
I have a LOT of drafts. This has been true of me for a long time. Someone I talked to recently asked me how long I’d been blogging and I paused and considered that my first blog (on blogspot) goes back to when I was ~13. So 20 years. I am a blogger. I also sometimes did “1 post a day” challenges for that blog, although sometimes it’d just be a napkin sketch or a single tweet-length musing. Back then I didn’t have oodles of drafts.
But as I started writing longer stuff, it became more common for something to get stuck on the way out for whatever reason.
Sometimes I get stuck on wanting a better example, or a better name for the phenomenon, sometimes a draft becomes 6000 words long and I still haven’t said everything, so I back up and I realize that the first 2000 words are just a tangent of a simple premise I wanted to state before getting into the meat of things, so I peel them off but by the time I’ve edited that it’s 3000 words. Conversations are Alive was this for Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within and How my liberating insight became a new ruling coalition, which also each grew from 2000 to 3000 words as I edited them. The “I can tell for myself” sequence likewise began as a single piece intending mostly to get to the final point, whose preamble got way too unwieldy.
Sometimes it’s blocked on some timing thing, where eg I don’t want to publish other posts about my mating dance/courtship ideas while I don’t have a version of the course available for sale.
» read the rest of this entry »The “Non-Naive Trust Dance” is, at present, the main topic of this site, malcolmocean.com, albeit obliquely (only some of the relevant posts use “NNTD” or even the word “trust”, but even many of the ones that don’t are still pointing at it or generated by it). It’s a bit of an overloaded term, ie a term that means a slightly different thing depending on context. These usages below are non-exclusive—often it means several at once!
Usually, it is: my bespoke personal insight, framework, a generally-available insight, a perspective, a practice, or a deep law. Sometimes it’s a game or a process.
So I figured it might be helpful to investigate these and make them a bit more explicit.
Generally, on my blog, I mostly refer to NNTD, because it’s not in the commonground space between us—I’m forever explaining it again. But in general we don’t actually usually learn words by reading explanations or definitions. We learn them by seeing them used.
So for this post, I’ve done an archaeological dig to include quotes where I’ve just used the phrase “NNTD” as part of my thinking/journalling or communicating with someone else who already gets it well enough for that to work (often my friend and collaborator Michael Smith, whose NNTD intro you can read here.)
It’s a funny time to write this: I’ve been seriously thinking about renaming the framework. I’m confident that “trust” and “trust-dancing” continue to be central to my thinking, but the core of what I’m trying to say isn’t that well-captured by “non-naive trust”. Better would be “non-fake trust” or “non-pretend trust” or “non-bullshit trust”, perhaps. If I do rename things, this blog post will help archaeologically translate earlier ones; if not, it’ll help disambiguate when people keep asking “wait what exactly does NNTD mean?”
Sometimes NNTD means “a particular insight Malcolm Ocean had in 2020”. Unverified personal gnosis.
I’ve found it helpful, for understanding the nature of insights, to reference a frame John Vervaeke uses (tho he probably got it elsewhere—Piaget?) of insight being what happens when you go from systematically making a certain class of error or mistake, to systematically NOT making it. This very much fits that quality, although also it hasn’t propagated fully into my system, so while I’m always capable of identifying the error, I still do sometimes make it.
I’ve found references in my notes/messages to “before NNTD” or “since NNTD”, and these all refer to that insight. I often treat it as if it happened in a distinct moment in July—and it’s true there was a particular internal coup and new worldview order established then, but the first clues showed up in March, and the seeds were sown the previous year with BioEmotive and Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
Sometimes NNTD means “the whole framework Malcolm developed based on that insight”, including theories, practices, phrases, etc. Put a different way, NNTD feels kind of like a body of work. I certainly speak of “my NNTD writing”.
Sometimes, I would say somewhat accidentally, I’ve lumped under NNTD “all of the subsequent ways in which Malcolm came to have his own perspective on culture stuff, following that insight”. I wrote about the feeling of an iron curtain falling away in my mind such that I could now develop my own views about what’s going on with culture, group flow, etc. And that framework/worldview is personal and particular, and is not the core insight.
About a year ago I texted Michael and wrote:
shared this convo recording of me & Jess with you. the first chunk involves us exploring some of the tradeoffs I made in developing NNTD in the context of what I needed it to do while I was trying to relate to Jean/LSA. and directions for it to mature more.
it feels like a cool moment in my development to be able to differentiate “NNTD as I’ve constructed it” and “my best sense of things”
That’s definitely taking it as a framework with limitations, not simply a self-evident deep law. I don’t expect the law to be violated, but I do expect to realize ways in which I was confused about its limitations.
» read the rest of this entry »Come sing with me!
Let us sound the holy mysteries of life and love and laughter.
Music, as a language transcending time and space,
…is a place to begin—to be as one body,
…offering wholeness, presence, and power.
Come laugh with me!
Let us celebrate the absurdities of life with open hearts.
Welcome to the paradox of welcoming all that is, as it is—
…including our own relatable reluctances
…to welcome that which knows not how to welcome us.
Come love with me!
Let us slowly, softly surrender our loneliness into God’s care.
We know what matters to us, in our own hearts,
…and what joy and relief to discover how we matter to each other,
…and that any kindness we could force was never kindness in the first place.
Come learn with me!
Let us take many tries, make our own best mistakes, and shed the shoulds that shame us.
Our desire to be more capable is motivation enough,
…and we can tell what’s working—or we can tell that we can’t tell,
…so we can come to trust our inner learner and inner teacher.
Come repent with me!
Let us be willing to see where the costs of our mistakes are borne (willingly or not).
As that pure unpretentious pain passes through us,
…we take in what we need to know for next time,
…while remaining ever free to flow.
Come forgive with me!
Let us taste God’s grace, as we embody it for each other and the world.
I am what I am, you are what you are—
…there is no escaping that, only false pretense,
…and reality is relentlessly ready to rediscover what’s possible.
Come pray with me!
Let us long for what our hearts desire—small and large and immeasurable.
We are made whole by gratitude and letting God handle things,
…knowing that we are not the source of all the goodness we’ve received,
…and knowing that our will ripples outward, far beyond our grasp.
Come question with me!
Let us not be fooled into thinking we have it all figured out.
This sacred soul—mine, yours, and everything’s—is inexhaustible,
…each answer, each solution, births new questions and new problems,
…we are not here to know or do “right” but to participate in the unfolding of it all.
Come know with me!
Let us dedicate ourselves to directly discerning and to the dance of dialogue.
With words of wisdom as a trailhead,
…we can walk the path together to our own sense of what is so,
…and widen the path as we go, making new living signs.
Come sing with me!
Let us sound the holy mysteries of life and love and laughter.
Music, as a language transcending time and space,
…is a place to end—when words once again fail us,
…we can always still speak to the stars together.
Context: my wife (Jess) and I spent 4 months last year running weekly “Experimental Church” services, going on hiatus when our daughter was born. Part of what led into this was checking out different churches and finding them lacking, following which I started drafting this document… and then a month or so later we started the services. I iterated on this doc a bit during that time and somewhat after. It was originally called “Vision for a Viable Christianity” but as I got into the church project I found it surprisingly liberating to feel free from anybody’s concept of what Christianity is or was (my concepts or others’)
I still resonate with most of what’s written here, but as I stare more at the nature of faith (as a key counterpart to trust), and as Jess & I get further into reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age I’m sure my thinking will evolve a lot further—not, I suspect, to outright disagree with the content of what’s below, but to new senses of what I’ve missed below and where I’m confused about the center or the question to even be asking. It feels good to publish this now as documentation of my 2024 view of this journey. At some point I’d also like to write up a short retrospective of the experiments we ran, which this is not.
The church I envision…
Has a sense of being “one church” (even with many different places and practices) unified not by top-down creed or belief or dogma, but via the ability of its members to recognize each other as fellow people who are open-mindedly resonating with a similar shape in godspace.
Supports the development of gnosis / direct-knowing of people within and without the church—on a mainstream level, not merely for the mystics. Does not appeal to authority, but respects that there are lots of ancient sources of wisdom that are worth drawing on.
The church I envision is memetics-conscious/literate, ie, recognizes that:
Aims to not rationalize or justify. Is not about pretending we all believe things we don’t believe. Isn’t about faking belief til we make it—at least, not propositional beliefs. Maybe “believing in” in the sense of putting one’s weight behind something.
Is open-ended (draws on Vervaeke and Kauffman and Romeo Stevens). The opposite of eg Islam claiming that while it comes from a lineage, it finally found the final prophet and has the final word of God.
» read the rest of this entry »Yesterday I published hostility is a sign of too-closeness, which featured my response to a friend from my former community, about his desires for the logistics and culture of a co-living house he was creating. In that post, I talked about how blame can be downstream of people pretending they are a good fit for living together (or working together, or whatever) when they actually have some real conflict or incompatibility that they’re trying to convince themselves they have to put up with, but on some level they know they don’t have to… which turns to hostility.
In this post, I continue my response, reflecting on a more specific phenomenon central to the puzzle of living together: how do you talk about the dishes? …and have it work out. And not just the dishes but the dozens of other places where your patterns of life will need to interface smoothly for living together to feel good. Even for people who are very compatible, there will still be points of tension and friction, and you’ll need to figure out how to talk about those.
So. One of my friend’s desires for the shared purpose / culture of the space was:
impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
And below is my response:
First of all I want to name how vital this is for sane living—how crazymaking it is to be living with someone and unable to acknowledge simple impacts without it either turning into “so you hate me” or getting rounded to “nbd whatever”. And largely we all know this in the extended upstart scene, but since I’m a bit of an apostate these days it feels worth making explicit that YES, THIS MATTERS, and I see that it matters, and am speaking from there.
So then given that this bullet as described is clearly ideal, how do you handle situations where that isn’t working? What does the pathway look like to get from not-flowing to flowing? Merely intending this doesn’t necessarily make it happen.
It seems to me that the situations where blame comes up can be described in a few different ways, both as distinct situations and as distinct understandings/framings of those situations, where the language used to understand them has an effect.
So: a few ways impacts can be received:
Breaking these down a bit, with their implications:
» read the rest of this entry »I was recently talking to a friend who was navigating a situation where he was frustrated that his girlfriend of a few months kept implying that something that had just happened might be grounds for breaking up… something that seemed to my friend pretty minor, or even just a misunderstanding.
“She keeps threatening the connection!” he would say, and at first I thought he meant something about emotional warmth, but it was more about this sense of security. And implied was that somebody more mature or more collaborative, if they were in the same situation, would be able to convey the sense of “this is a problem” without the sense of threat. And I agree the move is problematic (not just unpleasant) but I see it as (usually) a symptom of a deeper problem: you got too close. The coalition that draws you together is facing coup attempts by the subsystems it’s oppressing, which were not consulted on the distance.
It’s not that there’s supposed to not be tensions, is that those tensions need to be included at the negotiation table—welcomed into the coalition, rather than forced outside it.
Anyway! With this basis, I want to explore the origin of this kind of blameful relationship-threatening. I used to see it as a behavior to be addressed, but now I see it, as I said, as more like a symptom of a situation to be addressed. “This isn’t supposed to be happening” can be viewed as a failure of spiritual acceptance or equanimity… or it can be viewed as a sign that, well, maybe you’d be better off if you made something else happen.
As the central case study for this piece of writing, I’m going to share some replies I made to someone in the extended network of the culture incubator I was part of in my 20s—the one whose magic I boggled at in Wtf is the Synergic Mode? He had put out that he was looking for people to come live with him, and listed out elements of his vision, including a dozen bullets about various “practical house things” about windows, AC, aesthetics, bikes, kitchen., as well as “shared purpose” items that referenced some of the cultural resonances of that scene:
- desiring the information of what others’ experiences are like
- an inviting space for grief to be felt, and for feelings in general to be felt and not suppressed – also, freedom to experience grievance as a pathway into grief when grief cannot easily be accessed – also, a context-sensitivity in expressing grievance, and an awareness of the impacts that grievance can have in a space
- impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
- blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame – I don’t want this to sound like I’m creating a “rule”, rather I’m sharing that I just find it uncomfortable to be around people who are feeling entitled to their blame-mindset. This goes both ways – I also wouldn’t want others to egg me on if I’m finding myself on the edge of going into blaming someone for anything.
And I wrote a response!
blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame
I’ll make a general comment from my own experience that while I’m hugely in favour of shifting out of blame and not feeling entitled to end up in a conclusion that is based on blame, I’ve sometimes found that trying to shift the blame away too early makes it hard to even think the thought that I’m trying to think—to access the wisdom in/under the blame. Sometimes there’s something sacred that I care about, whose first way of expressing itself involves blame, but if I can welcome it fully without trying to change how it articulates itself, then it finds a clearer perspective, beyond blame etc. And that this is the kind of failure mode that can show up in a mindset learning community, that is focused on “avoiding blame” instead of something more like “welcoming everything that arises”.
» read the rest of this entry »
