Before reading this book, I had noticed that when I'm overwhelmed I tend to crave *something* that makes all of my other concerns smaller. A crisis, a huge incentive, internal distress such that anybody who heard about it would say they *understand* why I did or didn't do "x"
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If I wanted to explain my anxiety, for instance, I might under this model say: I became anxious about X so I could believe people would give me permission to stop doing X More stories, ofc.
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Enter the idea of separating tasks. This was a really cool explanation of something I've seen other people groping at before.
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Don't take on other people's tasks. In the anxiety example, my task is, I think, to decide whether or not to do X, and act accordingly. The task of deciding whether or not I was "justified," deciding how other people feel about my decision: not my task.
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This forces you to frame *other* people as high-agency, too. I've referred to my tendency wrt other people's emotional Tasks as "emotional stage-managing" The book is pretty clear that this is a recipe for misery, and I 100% buy it.
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I think lots of people have stumbled onto the idea that we should separate these tasks, and I see it in models of communication like Guess v. Tell Culture, Crocker's Rules, etc
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An example of me trying to manage someone else's task: when I started this thread I almost included "and I have some downtime at work" to give myself a plausible story, to keep people from thinking "wtf is she doing on twitter at work"
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But managing other people's assumptions and feelings about my work ethic aren't my task. :P
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while this separation of tasks might seem cold or mutually exclusive with real connection, the book argues that you need some distance in any relationship to really obtain a sense of "community feeling."
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And this seems true? When you're constantly managing your behavior with an eye to gaining social reward or avoiding social punishment, you can end up in a knot of implicit obligations, resentments, unexpressed expectations And it binds you to a much smaller community
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Another angle here: I’ve been reading “Passionate Marriage”, which talks about “differentiation” (separating tasks) as key to intimacy. In your metaphor, if you are knot-free, you can stay close to someone without getting “tangled in” them.
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Replying to @levity @selentelechia
Tangling (“emotional fusion” in the language of PM) causes stress. It’s already complex enough to regulate your own emotional/mental/physical needs; doing it for another, when you don’t have direct access to their interior state, is much harder
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