So you want to learn about the post-rationalist "healing" space? (2025-11-10)
Dec 21, 20257 min read
2025-11-10
Note that I did this in around 90 mins of work, and I have way more in my head, and way more useful links/people I could connect you with, if you have an interest in any of this (E.g. “do you know a therapist/coach who could do x modality with me?“. Email me at alexiscreatingthings@gmail.com if you don’t have my contact details!
Intro
I have a friend who is involved in the Effective Altruist mental health space
So, he knows about e.g. CBT and cost-effective scalable interventions, but he doesn’t know about the vague space that could be called:
Post-rationalism?
Self-healing?
Meta-modernism?
And similar related things like:
Intentional communities
Authentic relating
Circling
As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a parent term that collects all of these things - I think “post-rationalism” is the best one - to be a post-rationalist (like me!) is to IMO be likely to know about all of these things
Note that “tpot” is the post-rationalist corner of twitter (it starts for “this part of twitter”, an intentionally kinda dumb name? I made a slide-deck “guide to tpot” back in Jan 2024 just to give a bit of the flavour of it). I also wrote a zeitgeist-y prose poem-y thing about what it’s like to be on tpot - 03. To be a tpot zoomer
Basically, people in tpot (the twitter post-rationalist community) often end up there because they’re ~traumatised in some way and have discovered the community as a place to learn about effective resources and share their journey and increase their agency etc
Gendlin’s Focusing → very simple and a prerequisite to a bunch of other things. Basically the ability to notice feelings in your body, give them labels that fit, and notice a shift/update/insight. Gendlin describes Focusing as the thing that differentiates people who have success in talk therapy vs those that don’t (as some will notice when something feels off in their body, investigate and update, and others just remain in narrative land for the entire session and never update)
I worked at an IFS startup for a year and have done probably 30+ facillitated sessions, I think it’s good and effective for updating limiting beliefs (via Memory Reconsolidation)
Coherence Therapy → sounds arguably more efficient than IFS? It’s Bruce Ecker’s thing, see Memory Reconsolidation
Core Transformation → Theo (the person I did IFS with, see Internal Family Systems therapy) also blends this in sometimes. Key tpot figure Romeo Stevens highly highly recommends CT
There are many crises happening simultaneously, very Molochian
We need to move beyond late-stage capitalism
This is very hard to do. There’s not much money in this scene (unlike e.g. Effective Altruism) because thinking about how to improve the way the world is set up is… very difficult (complex systems, systems theory etc), intractable, speculative, etc
The Listening Society is a really good book on this topic. Talks about “meta-modernism”, which is the thing to come after post-modernism (if we’re lucky)
Integral Theory
Theory developed by Ken Wilbur which maps humanity’s development into different stages
This is a meta-crisis-y/post-rationalist-y thing, to think about how to further humanity, how to move to higher levels of development/consciousness
Spiral dynamics is the classic model/diagram here, with colours for each stage of development. Let’s see if I can remember them from the old flashcards I made.
Purple (ritual, animism) → red (violence, domination, war) → blue (law and order, religion) → orange (rationalism, science) → green (the environment and shit?) → yellow → turquoise
Each one has key flaws, and to move up a stage is to keep all the wisdom from the previous stages
Integral Altruism
London-based community blending meta-crisis-y, Ken Wilbur-y (as he’s the Integral Theory guy) stuff with Effective Altruism (which, the main critique I’m aware of for EA is that it kind of can’t aim at things like improving the way the world works (a la the book “The Listening Society”) because stuff like that is of course not cost-effective or tractable
Essential concepts
WIP
Adult development
Kegan stages → Robert Kegan, developmental psychologist. Piaget was the genius of child development, but his framework stops at 18, “then you become an adult, the end”. Kegan developed a model of 5 stages. He says that 60% of adults get stuck at the teenage state of mind for their entire lives (stage 3, “the socialised mind”.) Then there’s stage 4 (self-authoring mind), and tbh I don’t understand stage 5. I think I got to stage 4 in the last ~6 months (November 2025 Alex here).
Predictive processing & memory reconsolidation and the Bayesian Brain
We hallucinate our reality, we are our world model. We can have limiting beliefs, strong “priors” that are frankly dumb
Johnson: “What lineage, if any, do relational/communication practices like NVC or circling belong to? How long of history? Decades? Centuries? Millenia?”
Rich: “uhoh extremely deep rabbit hole alert! you may enjoy this book written by my mentor billy matheson. it’ll help you get oriented to the field” (book is “Gather Together” by William Matheson)