i was once at a workshop with a guy who started the workshop by cynically bringing up a bunch of PUA talking points about hypergamy etc. and ended it sobbing inconsolably on the floor about an 11-year relationship that ended where he felt like he’d been taken advantage of
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i don’t remember the details but it was something along the lines of he paid her way through school and then she cheated on him
this kind of shit is happening all the time. people get mad about generalities when they’re actually heartbroken about specifics
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i talk to a lot of people about things they’re upset about and usually the conversation goes better if i ask them to go down levels of abstraction and talk about, ideally, specific memories. e.g. instead of “the patriarchy” asking about specific times men hurt them
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abstraction can be a kind of defense. it sort of feels like it’s addressing your pain but it shields you from most of the emotional charge that specific memories of specific experiences bring up
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you don’t even really have to search for the memories. ime i can start with “i feel upset about X” and relevant memories will just start bubbling up as long as i take a second to notice and not flinch at them. undigested bits of the past triggering microflashbacks
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once you’ve touched base with specific memories you can then go back up by asking “what meaning did i make of these experiences?” what did i lose trust in? what did i stop believing was good or possible? what did i get confused about that i wasn’t confused about before?
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(otoh some memories can be retraumatizing to visit, so sometimes working with the material sideways and indirectly is the best you can do. many nuances about creating safety and so forth)
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this will take you back up to abstractions in some sense but they’ll be re-grounded in your experience. PUA guy wasn’t a player trying to get laid, he was wrestling with heartbreak and a deep loss of trust in women and PUA stuff was the best stuff he’d found to address that
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but PUA stuff wasn’t what he actually needed. ultimately i think what he needed was a way to express the pain of confusion and uncertainty coming from betrayal: “i don’t know if i can ever trust a woman again. i don’t know how to tell whether i can trust a woman”
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motherfucker, i wrote this entire thread as a message to myself 🙃
took my own advice, 5 seconds into talking about my feelings and i got a flash of two specific people’s faces
mother*fucker*
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related
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Rationalism, nihilism, and depression: I’ve spent today reading review articles on cognitive deficits in depression, and pieces of an understanding are falling in place. Fascinating!
Depressive cognition simultaneously recruits and degrades rationality.
twitter.com/Meaningness/st
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nice
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It seems to me that people rage and rant against political figures, against sports teams, against publicly visible things – as a substitute for dealing with their deeply personal wounds. Hurt people hurt people, right? Hurt people (specific) also complain about abstractions
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nice
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instead of making general proclamations about populations, you could focus your time and energy on finding specific solutions to your specific problems
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"like 3 specific guys"
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Everyone should get to know someone well enough and long enough that, when that friend generalizes that all [men] are [x], you know for a fact that they are referring to like 3 specific guys.
And then realize that that’s what everyone’s up to.
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read the next tweet after this one and you’ll realize this tweet is about one specific guy
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Friends don’t ask friends to help move.
Hire movers or do it yourself. Period.
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"a decades-long argument with someone who is not present"
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Life makes a lot more sense once you realize that practically everyone you meet is engaged in a decades-long argument with someone who is not present.
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"casually drops some personal context... that totally explains their out-there take on something else"
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every so often someone on Twitter casually drops some personal context – usually in someone else’s mentions – that totally explains their out-there take on something else, but it would seem so fucked up for me to point it out when everyone’s basically/mostly moved on
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“Do not let a woman who decorates her buttocks deceive you, By wily coaxing, for she is after your granary”
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“Sometimes the mf inciter left the building years ago”
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the weirdest record scratch freeze frame moment is when you notice you’re perpetuating a drama wherein the inciting incident is no longer even in the scene. Sometimes the mf inciter left the building years ago
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