Conversation

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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