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[methylatedspirit]

-snip-

Strange? Must be my bias (I mean, guy who seems knowledgeable, very scientific, says stuff that agrees with my beliefs...), but I wouldn't call that strange. If anything, your strategy reads like an enforced Pollyanna principle. It's optimistic, but it uses reason as the anti-negative force, rather than just a nebulous "everything was hunky-dory, so it is now" feeling in the classical principle. I can see why it's hard to do. People in general don't particularly enjoy thinking (hell, I'm guilty of this most of the time; look at my YT watch history).

I think my shrink may have taught me structurally the same thing. All this stuff about "you can't change what happened in the past, but you can change your reaction to it", "no such thing as mind control", and "expect only the bare minimum out of others", it's making use of reason to challenge negativity. Must be why I'm agreeing wholeheartedly with you here.

But then again, you seem to expose yourself to fucked-up shit on a weekly, if not daily basis, and you seem perfectly fine. I can't do that. I don't have that kind of resilience. I filter out a lot of content (in the general sense), and I wonder if I'm stunting my own emotional and intellectual growth by making a conscious effort to avoid things I don't like, even if they may provide further context and prepare me for when people do eventually oppose me. It will happen, so why am I not acting like it?

[wierd]

It is not "strange", in the modality of "It twists comprehension, or understanding into difficult or unfamiliar forms."

It is strange, in the modality of "Out of the ordinary; not normally encountered."

[Flying Dice]

It certainly fits that definition, given that most people are unwilling even to acknowledge their own hand in their negative experiences, never mind rationally analyzing the degree to which they overemphasize those experiences in their lives.

My own reaction to trauma, and to less dense negative experiences, is to emotionally detach and focus on problem-solving (including faking appropriate emotional responses when necessary), and to compartmentalize afterwards. Part of why I maintain a lack of accessibility to people from my professional life outside of a single burner phone is specifically to aid that delineation between my largely sanguine personal life, where I have no ethical or professional burden to deal with other people's shit, and everything else.

It's not just for the benefit of my own state of mind, I've also found that cutting as much professional stress out of non-work hours as possible has improved my ability to retain some capacity for genuine empathy when working with the public or managing interpersonal relations.

I've seen and had to work around a living example of exactly what you're talking about, wierd, in terms of an individual who has fallen so deeply into their negative memories that they basically don't live in the present at all except for chaining more negative experiences into a continuous stream of perceived suffering and personal discrimination that is largely the product of their own inability to treat other people like people or cope with interpersonal conflict. They're what made me start thinking more consciously about managing my own stress, as a living example of what I don't want to be.

[nenjin]

I think the last few years too have just polarized everyone and the leads we take from media and politics means NO ONE is willing to admit fault or error, ever. On either side of the spectrum.

In people's current perception, there is no benefit to admitting fault. Whoever it earns points with won't help you, and people ignore the intrinsic personal benefit and growth that comes from admitting fault or being wrong and learning from it. Admitting fault is, at best, viewed as personal weakness by many and at worst, is viewed as basically giving up their right to anything.

It's like everyone now has a meta view of personal responsibility and integrity. Like if Joe Redneck OR Lilly Freebird ever admit they made a bad assumption, mischaracterized something for personal or political gain or just simply flew off the handle, they're somehow throwing the "whole movement" under the bus. Like we're all now representatives at large for our own personal political / social / cultural camps.

See for example: BLM. Or ACAB. Or QAnon. These movements will flay their own members if they don't 100% toe the line, even when it makes no actual sense to do so.

"Well that cop isn't oppressing anyone or doing anything bad."

"NO, ACAB! NO EXCEPTIONS, EVER, NO MATTER WHAT. WE'LL NEVER GET THE POLICE DEFUNDED IF YOU TALK LIKE THAT."

"How can Trump be the savior of America and slayer of the Pedophiles if it's no longer President?"

"YOU DON'T GET IT YOU SHEEPLE, STONE THEM! STTTOOOOOONNNNNEEEEE THEM!"

Monodominant thinking is prevalent everywhere now, socially and interpersonally.

[EuchreJack]

Monodominant thinking is prevalent everywhere now, socially and interpersonally.

Nah, things have always been like that.  Thinking is hard, alright?  And the only attribute a leader needs is the desire to be a leader.  No redeemable virtue is necessary.  Ergo, many people in leadership positions tend to be one sort of asshole or other.

As my defense to the whole "things are 100000% worse than they ever were!", remember the following:
When the US Constitution was founded, slavery was a Constitutionally Protected Right.  For about 3/4th of a century, the Courts enforced the rights of Slave Owners.

[Uthimienure]

This isn't the politics thread, it's the WTF thread.
My WTF is...

Why is politics being discussing here? 
WTF?

[martinuzz]

We live in a world where politics is spelled W-T-F

[JoshuaFH]

"Things that made you feel Political today"

[methylatedspirit]

I took my meds last night after having already taken them last last night (standard schedule is on-off-on-off) for mental stability reasons, and now I just feel so out of it. I'm still able to think and speak (give or take), but my judgement tells me that I shouldn't ride my bike today. Hell, even walking might not be particularly safe. I'm not even upset anymore, I did it as a preemptive measure. May have been a little aggressive on the meds this time round, though.

Oh, and I have an appointment with my shrink today, so I will have to go to somewhere relatively-secluded for a bit. Damnit. Poor planning on my part. I'll just hope I'll be there enough to explain my situation. My brain ain't as sharp as it usually is.

[nenjin]

This isn't the politics thread, it's the WTF thread.
My WTF is...

Why is politics being discussing here? 
WTF?

I'd like to live wherever you are that politics isn't a regular cause for WTF. Must be nice.

[methylatedspirit]

You're technically correct, but by convention, we do not talk about politics in the emotion threads. I don't know where that rule came from, but I think it makes sense, considering that emotions tend to cross over in politics, and things can go thermonuclear very quickly without that rule in place. Like, leave the shitshow that are the politics threads to the politics threads; it's enough of a dumpster fire as is. I don't want to see these threads become that, I'm hoping you don't want that either.

if we confine politics to the politics threads, if it ends up being a major problem in terms of being a perpetual flame war, at least Toady can lock just that thread. If the emotion threads get involved... that's, like, the bedrock of the Bay12 social order you're talking about. They're sacred. We can't even agree to start replacement emotion threads due to the Great Disorder. Would you want to see these long-running threads locked permanently? If you're not bothered, think about how bothered everyone else would be if the WTF thread got locked by Toady. I probably wouldn't be the same after that.

[Vector]

I think that change happened around the time of the Progressive Rage Thread I used to run. We used to talk about politics more-or-less anywhere but eventually we more or less agreed that if there was a beef brewing, it needed to move to another thread to get hashed out.

It kinda makes sense. I think it's less about thread locking (historically that wasn't really so much of a problem despite everything) and more about not surprising people with sudden conversations on topics they might feel ambivalent about.

[heydude6]

Thought I'd pitch in to the emotions discussion of yesterday.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I take a strange (but scientifically informed) view:

Emotions are by their innate nature, irrational things-- where people (or rather, what sets people apart from most other animals) are adapted for rationality*.

Emotions are also very strongly tied to the potentiation and weighting of memory and experience.  Negative emotions especially have very strong potentiation for the retention of memories. 

This means that the natural state of the human psyche is to accumulate and more heavily weight negative experiences and emotions in future decision making efforts leading to the potential situation where those negative experiences and memories dominate the mental landscape. Eventually, there are serious and real consequences for this. 

Since this is a kind of neural-system "tug of war", where the prefrontal cortex tries to downregulate the amygdalar response, and the amygdalar response is backfed constantly into the prefrontal cortex (via memory potential biases), an individual needs to constantly exercise their rational decision making, or they quickly become overwhelmed.

At least for me, being aware of these mechanisms gives me motivation and impetus to mentally disarm negativity, and consciously choose to override the imperatives it tries to imprint on me.  This is not the same thing as ignoring emotions-- It is acknowledging the emotions, but also rationalizing that their intensity is the result of evolutionarily vestigial biasing, present in memory storage.  The solution is to consciously reinforce positive emotionally tagged memories, while rationalizing the negative ones into submission.  Since memories are constantly being re-burned every time you recall and process them, following such a regimen slowly normalizes the bias of the negative emotional tagging, and you experience a more healthy emotional experience when recalling those memories.

The ISSUE, is that most people are neither aware of, nor willing to learn about, nor willing to enact such modulating mental discipline when they find themselves deep in the thrall of a powerfully negative emotional state.  This leads to the downward spiral of increasingly negative weighted memory retention, and increased cogitative negativity.


*The prefrontal cortex, which is a decidedly human feature of neural hardware, is believed to be the seat of conscious/voluntary action, and also plays a very strong role in regulating the amgydalae and their interaction with the thalamus-- That latter interaction is believed to be the physical hardware involved in the emotional tagging and encoding of memories cited above. Humans are pretty unique in having this structure, and this indicates that humans have experienced evolutionary pressure to become more and more rational, in competition with the intrinsic role of emotion and emotional processing in memory potentiation and encoding.

Strange? Must be my bias (I mean, guy who seems knowledgeable, very scientific, says stuff that agrees with my beliefs...), but I wouldn't call that strange. If anything, your strategy reads like an enforced Pollyanna principle. It's optimistic, but it uses reason as the anti-negative force, rather than just a nebulous "everything was hunky-dory, so it is now" feeling in the classical principle. I can see why it's hard to do. People in general don't particularly enjoy thinking (hell, I'm guilty of this most of the time; look at my YT watch history).

I think my shrink may have taught me structurally the same thing. All this stuff about "you can't change what happened in the past, but you can change your reaction to it", "no such thing as mind control", and "expect only the bare minimum out of others", it's making use of reason to challenge negativity. Must be why I'm agreeing wholeheartedly with you here.

But then again, you seem to expose yourself to fucked-up shit on a weekly, if not daily basis, and you seem perfectly fine. I can't do that. I don't have that kind of resilience. I filter out a lot of content (in the general sense), and I wonder if I'm stunting my own emotional and intellectual growth by making a conscious effort to avoid things I don't like, even if they may provide further context and prepare me for when people do eventually oppose me. It will happen, so why am I not acting like it?

I'm gonna be honest Weird, as an emotionally stable person, your approach sounds like a recipe for depression. You use big words, but it can be summed up as, "Bury the negative, and reinforce the positive". I don't have a problem with the latter, active gratitude is a useful technique that shines a spotlight on the things we take for granted, but negative emotions should not be ignored, they should be processed and understood. I know you say you aren't ignoring the negative emotions, but you aren't really addressing them properly either.

For little things, this could be as simple as acknowledging their lack of importance and meaning in the grand scheme of things. The example I often think of is when one trips, or drops something on the ground. Whenever this stuff happened to my parents, they often enter into swearing fits which I find kind of dumb. It was a moment of clumsiness that has now passed and all one needs to do is pick themselves up and move on. There is no need to focus on it further and create drama out of that.

But a lot of the stuff that makes us upset actually matters. Whether it's be being mistreated by a friend or loved one, or working a job that we don't find fulfilling, the emotion is a call-to-action to fix our problem. Unfortunately, a lot of the time we end up feeling this way without really knowing why, leading us to redirect our rage onto something unworthy of it until we figure out the true cause. That's why it's important to take some time to think and be introspective. Sure, you can learn to spot your emotional "episodes" ahead of time and shut them down before they cause too much damage, but problems tend to get worse the longer you leave them unresolved. You're gonna crack eventually.

Not every problem can be fixed, unrequited love usually stays unrequited for example, but I find that developing a deeper understanding of these things is an essential step in coming to terms with them. In my own experiences with love, no matter how much time and distance I spent apart from these women, I was never able to move on until I finally pieced together what our relationship together actually was. I was unable to skip that step, and even if I could, it wouldn't necessarily be what was best for me. You usually learn something useful about yourself when you take the time to introspect, which eventually builds to emotional maturity.

And isn't that what started this whole discussion in the first place?

[wierd]

Again, as I outright stated the first time, it is not ignoring emotions.

Rather it is more like this:

Say you have claustrophobic reactions, stemming from some vaguely remembered event in your early childhood. You do not even properly remember the experience, you just know that now, later in your life, you have profound feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and fear when you are in a closely confining space.

Rather than go "No, I do not feel that way, I am fine! FIIIINNEE!!!" and stomp your little feet, (which is what actual ignoring of emotions is)-- you instead go "No, I am not fine. Why am I feeling this way?  Is there something in this situation that warrants these feelings? Is there some way I can moderate these feelings, so that they are not an oppressive burden to me?"

EG, combating those feelings with pure reason.

This is because, as I cited, negative emotions are more strongly tagged and retained by your brain.  This makes some evolutionary sense, as things that harmed you, or terrified the bejesus out of you in the past, are things you are going to want to avoid in the future, and having severe anxiety about those things will help you ensure you stay the hell away from those things.   In the modern world however, this does not really serve us very well.  We are no longer little tree monkeys, fearful of the big bitey things on the ground below.

For the hypothetical claustrophobia situation, if I were the sufferer, here is what I would do:

I would leave the door to the confining space open, then place things that are fun and enjoyable inside (then avail myself of the fun and enjoyable things).  I would acknowledge that I have anxiety and apprehension about the confined space, while simultaneously rationalizing that the fear is unjustified-- I would combat the anxiety by having a clear and unobstructed means of egress, and reinforce positive experiences (with the fun and enjoyable things in the enclose space) inside enclosed spaces, to slowly re-modulate my emotional experiences with such environments.

I would likely never stop having a pang of anxiety in such a circumstance; It would just become tolerable and not oppressive.


Again the issue, is that this requires a person to override the intrinsic program that the emotional tagging in memory retention is theoretically there for-- To protect you from stressful, harmful, or painful circumstances or environments, by dissuading you from doing or going to those things or places. To do that, requires that the person strongly use strong reason to  evaluate the emotional imperatives they experience, and then rationally determine if they are justified or not.  Most people simply trust their emotions and emotional responses, without question. This is why anxiety and depression are so horrible for most people. 

I have indeed grappled with depression.  Several times.  That is not unusual however; the statistic is quite alarming.  I have been able to honestly evaluate that I have experience depression, (and can evaluate when I am feeling depressed), then engage in conscious self-modulation to alter the cycle that normally transpires with depression.  (That cycle being increased degrees of inward isolation, and increased premeditation on negativity and negative emotions and feelings.)  The last time I suffered a bout of depression, I hopped in my car, and went to visit a friend for a week. We did all kinds of fun things, and had a great time.  10/10, highly recommend.

It is important to understand that this is not a magic bullet;  the mechanisms at your disposal are slow and gradual, where the impact of a negative experience are visceral, rapid, and often quite pernicious.  Do not expect to just well-wish your emotions away; that is not how this works.  You will feel all that anxiety when you sit in that small cubby with your pizza rolls and your PS5.  However, if you saturate the experience well enough with positive feedback, you will want to go back in there and do it again-- THAT is the cycle you want to foster, since that cycle will make you able to tolerate other, admittedly less fun, confined spaces later.

[MrRoboto75]

I just remember my dad constantly asking me "what's the matter" no matter what actual state I was in.