there can genuinely be a cost to using self-help / mind-hacking / therapeutic / transformative techniques that are okay but not that good; they can sorta help you while also causing subtle forms of damage you have to deal with using better techniques
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part of the issue is that very few people in this area, that i have seen, actively acknowledge the possibility of damage here ( is the best counterexample i know of). obviously if you are trying to sell a book or a course it is disincentivized
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the techniques you might call “hacky,” in the sense of being kludgy / inelegant / unprincipled, operate by “adding spaghetti code” to the bodymind. uses the term “layering” here which i really like and have gotten a lot out of; UtEB uses the term “counteractive”
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eg let’s say you’re trying to stop being so angry at your partner. a “counteractive” or “layering” approach to this is to try to install a new habit of noticing when you’re getting angry and doing something else, e.g. going for a walk, or “communication skills”-type stuff
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this is not bad, exactly - it can be a helpful band-aid - but it’s brittle and hard to maintain because you aren’t addressing the underlying source of the anger. “transformative” or “delayering” approaches would instead address that - eg in IFS, working with protector + exile
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techniques like IFS are in principle capable of addressing the underlying source of the anger; once you do that you don’t need to counteract it anymore, it just effortlessly happens less if at all. you’ve “delayered” instead of “layering”
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what kind of damage can you do to yourself the counteractive / layering way? let’s say you also have a strong inner critic, for example. when you notice yourself failing to properly counteract your anger, that can become another thing for your inner critic to latch onto
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“jeez look at you, can’t do anything right, can’t even stop yourself from being angry the way the therapist told you to”
part of the damage here is the idea that these techniques are supposed to solve your problem; easy to conclude that if they don’t then it’s your fault
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failed attempts at self-transformation can also produce resistance to future attempts at self-transformation, as various parts of the bodymind conclude that it’s unsafe and will not actually help them get their needs met. not a great place to be in! better to use good tech!
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further reading: UtEB is most of the core of my framework for analyzing and comparing and debugging techniques, would still highly recommend as a read for anyone who wants that:
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