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· Oct 26, 2019

coherence therapy calls this "symptom coherence" - taking the stance that every thing you do that drives you nuts makes deep sense once you get the underlying emotional reality that's driving it. it very cleanly articulates something i've been grasping at for years and years

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also relevant to questions like "why is everyone's psych book full of case studies of patients for whom that specific psych method works so perfectly" presumably there are multiple selection effects going on, and then perhaps more subtle influence stuff?

Chaos

@chaosprime

one word for this is "yoga"

hmmmmmmmm can you elaborate on this?

well

should check my ass here but it's something like getting an attractor loop running in your belly/wherever and various forms of subtle communication pulling people into an analogue of it if you watch Wild Wild Country and squint you can kinda see Osho doing it

GIF

one thing i've noticed here that seems relevant is that the inventor of a therapy modality seems to be able to run a much stronger loop than their students, and correspondingly seems to affect their clients more strongly and in ways more consistent with the modality

it frustrates me a little that i haven't seen any commentary about this. but like i've watched a video of richard schwartz doing IFS and it feels really important to me that he sort of... vibe-ly hypnotizes people into believing that IFS works, which makes it work better?

you could probably do the same thing as a faith healer and make faith healing work, as long as you were working with someone who was already inclined to believe that faith healing works (which is why i believe that faith healing works)

and the faith healing comparison is specifically b/c in this video i have in mind richard schwartz talks to this woman's parts for like 30m or whatever and in the end cures her *chronic back pain* absolutely nuts

maybe i'm moving towards a pov here where different therapy modalities are a bit less like different theories about some underlying True Psychology and a bit more like different schools of magic

6:52 AM · Jan 8, 2022Twitter Web App

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ah, ah, when a therapy modality claims "this is a scientific theory about a real objective phenomenon called True Psychology" that is actually how it taps into... the... magical structure of western civilization as a whole?

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yup in particular how it makes an invocatory claim on the stores of quintessence laid up by the miracles achieved by germ theory

😅 gosh. lots to ponder here

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this is similar to how I’ve been thinking of the “mental health” domain as like the place where our culture places its need for a semi-objective characterization of morality, virtue, vice, flourishing and disorder

Mikael Brockman

@meekaale

we can’t use that old vocabulary anymore, it’s banished and outdated—MacIntyre links that to the early modern rejection of the Aristotelian tradition which was all about virtue and flourishing as intelligible aspects of “human nature”

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Hmm so when I started telling rationalists about how IFS stuff fits their paradigm of True Objective Reality And Psychology, I was weaving a spell to harness the accumulated power of their paradigm to fuel a new aspect to be integrated to it