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· Jan 25

guys can we talk about this completely insane thread where oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an autistic guy not autistic temporarily? i'm gonna be fucked up about this for days twitter.com/punished3liza/…

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first, a few people expressed skepticism about whether this story wasn't just made up. personally i find it very convincing. i read the whole thing and he includes way too many details of things i've experienced (through therapy tools and the occasional psychedelic)

things i especially do not think a faker would have thought to include in a fake story: pleasant dreams, tremors associated with sexual fantasizing, "now i don't get grossed out when my wife does certain things that my rapist did," "a very slow muscle relaxation event"

What trauma does to you: Muscle Armoring

i have experienced the muscle relaxation thing he talks about, multiple times! it's not a thing people know about! the term if you want to look up more is "muscle armoring," it's a big complex PTSD symptom

dianesherlock.com

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash We’re always tense, always on guard, those of us with CPTSD. Braced. Tight. Clenched. Muscle armoring goes along with hypervigilance. The body is perpetuall…

which leads into my next point: i have no idea what autism is really, i actually don't know if the oxytocin did anything for his autism per se - but what he seems to me to actually be describing is that oxytocin led to the healing of his complex PTSD

i don't talk in these terms often because i think a lot of people don't like the framing but in my own mind i am sort of a complex PTSD maximalist; i think almost every serious psychological issue is basically a subtype of complex PTSD pete-walker.com/fAQsComplexPTS

in any case i believe that basically all of my own psychological issues are downstream of complex PTSD, or at least that that's one way of looking at them. so this is a topic of major interest to me personally and i've done a lot of self-experimentation in this direction

i believe there's a lot of potential for extremely good therapy to basically completely resolve complex PTSD so what i'm excited about here is oxytocin as an aid to such therapy, not as a miracle cure by itself which it is apparently clearly not

anyway, should you try oxytocin? what else should you try if you're gonna try it? what's its deal anyway?

oxytocin guy's story is worth reading carefully, there are really significant events that he describes very briefly like talking to his wife for *multiple hours* (in addition to all the sex, there's a lot of sex). he doesn't emphasize this but i believe this was critical

2:13 AM · Jan 26, 2022Twitter Web App

(i want to take a second to emphasize here that i am not a doctor or a psychologist or a biochemist, i am spitballing and pulling things out of my ass here based on having some experience with the phenomenological side of things and reading therapy books)

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so let's spitball: oxytocin helps you bond with your ingroup, reduces fear and anxiety, reduces depression, increases trust, generosity, and romantic feelings. it's naturally released by hugs and sex, and has something to do with contractions during labor

the pop psych gloss on this is that oxytocin is the "love hormone" but that doesn't sound quite right to me. what all that sounds like to me is that oxytocin is the "social safety hormone," that it means "you are safe among your people." love (and sex) is downstream of that

The role of oxytocin in social bonding, stress regulation and mental health: An update on the...

but apparently that's not quite right either. googling "oxytocin and social safety" turns up the following paper containing the following sentence:

sciencedirect.com

In this review we summarize the results and conclusions of five studies as presented in a symposium at the 42nd annual meeting of the International So…

"When social cues in the environment are interpreted as “safe” oxytocin may promote prosociality but when the social cues are interpreted as “unsafe” oxytocin may promote more defensive and, in effect, “anti-social” emotions and behaviors."

this is fascinating and really puts the "oxytocin makes you more racist" stuff into context. what this paragraph suggests is that oxytocin is the "social salience hormone"; it turns up the salience of what's going on in your social environment, good and bad

googling "oxytocin social salience" gives us a name: this is called the "social salience hypothesis of oxytocin." nice. let's run with it for now

"oxytocin turns up social salience," to my mind, already strongly suggests why it can't be a miracle cure for anything: it won't do much for you if your social environment *actually sucks*

oxytocin reddit guy was extremely lucky that he was in what appeared to be a basically happy loving stable marriage already, and it sounds to me like the oxytocin let that sink in at a deeper level: deepened his appreciation for and ability to relate to his wife and kids, etc.

this is why i find it significant that in the early parts of the account he spends so much time touching, having sex with, staring at, & talking to his wife. that's a lot of reconditioning he can do now that various things about his wife and their relationship are *more salient*

otoh if your social life kinda sucks, if you feel like the people around you basically don't understand or care about you, if you don't have a partner or you have a bunch of unresolved conflicts with your partner... maybe oxytocin will just highlight that? idk :/

so, we can't expect oxytocin by itself to do much for people in tough situations socially. the people most likely to benefit might be people with safe happy stable loving social lives who can't seem to really let that stuff in; still feeling unsafe, etc.

(this is, i want to emphasize again, completely untested speculation on my part) the next most likely to benefit might be people willing to use the oxytocin to have difficult conversations with the people close to them, and unbury all the buried resentments, hurts, etc.

and then the next most likely to benefit after that might be people willing to use the oxytocin to have difficult conversations with *themselves*. idk how oxytocin shapes your relationship to yourself but i'd love to know if it makes IFS easier, for example

if anyone is feeling up for taking on the risks of doing oxytocin self-experimentation and wants to do it solo i would be very interested in seeing people test something like the following: 1) take the oxytocin 2) look at your face in the mirror 3) talk to yourself

i think talking to your loved ones is likely to be even more powerful if that feels like an option but it might not feel like an option. in conclusion, this all seems enormously complex but i'm still very curious and i still want to hear about people's experiences