This post made for fascinating reading and I´d like to say something insightful in response, but since I can´t think of anything I guess I´ll just eat a croissant.
(Eating croissants, as you might imagine, much like writing or boxing, is not an unmitigated good. They taste delicious but there are health-related tradeoffs. Still, I can´t stop; I´m the one in my friend group who eats croissants.)
This made me wonder about "personal" identity. Maybe I'm the person in my (not friend group, I don't have a friend group just several 1 on 1 relationships) community who "doesn't care that much about fitting in" ;))) Every WEIRD community needs one.
The vision of therapy you present seems tad pessimistic tho: in addition to making problems colorful and worthwhile, surely it helps (should help) people handle the suffering they chose in their tradeoffs better? So not just soothe in a 'there, there, you're indeed stwong and bwave, well done you against the scary world' but provide some tools to manage it all? Considering that most people suffering "real" adversity won't be in therapy, it seems like a worthwhile project and arguably a form of change, even if not "changing life".
And finally (this seems an inspiring post, I WONDER WHY) it's very interesting what you say about people underestimating their ability to adjust to (potentially difficult) change. I vastly overestimated mine. A sudden and unexpected bereavement broke my brain (unrelated to grief/loss) into something akin to "PTSD adjacent" beyond any reason or proportionality. If you asked me 7 years ago what would the effect of such an event be on my mind I'd totally underestimate it. I'd have expected a period of acute grief followed by adjustment within a couple of years, not a wholesale mental collapse with significant lingering effects (bordering on personality change in some ways) 6 years on.
I guess it's overconfident arrogance ("I can deal with any normal even tragic life events short of atrocity/war/torture and it will be interesting anyway")* that got me more than anything, but I wonder if there are individual differences factors that correlate with over/underestimating? For what it's worth I score very high on "Openness" and used to be "psychological experience hunter" before the Broken Brain event.
*PS. It HAS been interesting, tbf. Just very unpleasant.
You make a great point that one way of fitting in is to not care about fitting in.
I'm genuinely unsure about the whole "tools" thing. I go back and forth between believing that I've never given anyone a tool, ever, to thinking that maybe I dispense tools and techniques all the time. I have an article in their works on this, so hopefully I'll come to an answer before it's done.
Two things about your bereavement. First, I'm guessing you didn't think much about it beforehand? Like you weren't worrying about the potential consequences because it was an unexpected thing? In the article I am mostly talking about stuff that people worry about beforehand. Consequences imagined are usually worse than consequences experienced. Or, maybe a better way of putting it is that we can imagine the consequences quite vividly, but not our responses to them, so all in, we think the outcome will be worse than it will be.
But, secondly, I hasten to add that that's just on average. Of course the consequences can be much worse than imagined. The way you described your Broken Brain event reminded me of this article, which I'd highly recommend: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/its-very-weird-to-have-a-skull-full
This post made for fascinating reading and I´d like to say something insightful in response, but since I can´t think of anything I guess I´ll just eat a croissant.
(Eating croissants, as you might imagine, much like writing or boxing, is not an unmitigated good. They taste delicious but there are health-related tradeoffs. Still, I can´t stop; I´m the one in my friend group who eats croissants.)
Somehow you made me laugh twice in two paragraphs :)
This made me wonder about "personal" identity. Maybe I'm the person in my (not friend group, I don't have a friend group just several 1 on 1 relationships) community who "doesn't care that much about fitting in" ;))) Every WEIRD community needs one.
The vision of therapy you present seems tad pessimistic tho: in addition to making problems colorful and worthwhile, surely it helps (should help) people handle the suffering they chose in their tradeoffs better? So not just soothe in a 'there, there, you're indeed stwong and bwave, well done you against the scary world' but provide some tools to manage it all? Considering that most people suffering "real" adversity won't be in therapy, it seems like a worthwhile project and arguably a form of change, even if not "changing life".
And finally (this seems an inspiring post, I WONDER WHY) it's very interesting what you say about people underestimating their ability to adjust to (potentially difficult) change. I vastly overestimated mine. A sudden and unexpected bereavement broke my brain (unrelated to grief/loss) into something akin to "PTSD adjacent" beyond any reason or proportionality. If you asked me 7 years ago what would the effect of such an event be on my mind I'd totally underestimate it. I'd have expected a period of acute grief followed by adjustment within a couple of years, not a wholesale mental collapse with significant lingering effects (bordering on personality change in some ways) 6 years on.
I guess it's overconfident arrogance ("I can deal with any normal even tragic life events short of atrocity/war/torture and it will be interesting anyway")* that got me more than anything, but I wonder if there are individual differences factors that correlate with over/underestimating? For what it's worth I score very high on "Openness" and used to be "psychological experience hunter" before the Broken Brain event.
*PS. It HAS been interesting, tbf. Just very unpleasant.
You make a great point that one way of fitting in is to not care about fitting in.
I'm genuinely unsure about the whole "tools" thing. I go back and forth between believing that I've never given anyone a tool, ever, to thinking that maybe I dispense tools and techniques all the time. I have an article in their works on this, so hopefully I'll come to an answer before it's done.
Two things about your bereavement. First, I'm guessing you didn't think much about it beforehand? Like you weren't worrying about the potential consequences because it was an unexpected thing? In the article I am mostly talking about stuff that people worry about beforehand. Consequences imagined are usually worse than consequences experienced. Or, maybe a better way of putting it is that we can imagine the consequences quite vividly, but not our responses to them, so all in, we think the outcome will be worse than it will be.
But, secondly, I hasten to add that that's just on average. Of course the consequences can be much worse than imagined. The way you described your Broken Brain event reminded me of this article, which I'd highly recommend: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/its-very-weird-to-have-a-skull-full