- The reason people don’t make massive progress on every dimension of life is that they get stuck by hang-ups/traumas/memes/blind-spots/coping strategies that narrow behaviour (including thought) to avoid pain or fear.
- These hang-ups/copes typically target creative thought, since that can take you—unpredictably—into the situations you fear. Predictable pain can be managed. Unpredictable pain requires new coping strategies to deal with. If you don’t create them, the suffering may be endless.
- Example: Afraid of writing in public due to fear it won’t be good enough and what this will say something about you as a person and people will attack or ignore you because that’s what happened as a kid. If you stay in your lane you can avoid all that.
People don’t like letting go of their conditioning
- From Sasha Chapin’s “How I Wish Trauma Had Been Explained to Me” Substack post
Note that people, in general, do not like letting go of their conditioning—it is painful and confusing to let go of your conditioning. Like if you’ve been brought up in a culture that tells you that gay people will go to hell, and then you make a gay friend who you don’t feel should be tortured eternally, this is going to be horribly confusing. With your old authority figures called into question, it’s not going to be clear who’s right or who’s wrong anymore, and it will thus be harder to figure out how to live.
This same dynamic can also be true of psychological conditioning—your ideas about who you are, and why you suffer. If you have been living, to some degree, as a stranger to yourself, or an enemy to yourself, that’s the safe place for you, that’s the condition to which you are accustomed. And perhaps you bristle at the idea of healing this divide because you feel like it would be dangerous to be other than you are, like your life would fall apart if you weren’t contained by your fears and fixations.
A bunch of Lulie tweets
- Fixation = “not wanting to look”
- https://x.com/reasonisfun/status/1470442553283682307
- https://x.com/reasonisfun/status/1789985657303060843
- https://x.com/reasonisfun/status/1765331996299932009
- https://x.com/reasonisfun/status/1766739668786155755
- She’s a big fan of Alexander Technique for getting unstuck
- “Something happens which shuts those down as we enter adulthood, so only a small number of people make progress.”
- https://x.com/reasonisfun/status/1652638216174854145
- “The biggest thing I discovered in the last 5 years is that there is a theory & method for freeing oneself from stuckness/autopilot/unease… The poorly-named “Alexander Technique” (which is more of a theory, plus a set of techniques).
- It is the idea that:
- We get stuck because we habitually shut down awareness of other options, and thus the possibility of taking them.
- Along with techniques to free oneself.”
similar to Confusion and feeling bad and Tension and avoidance