Beef-only thinking isn’t a problem when strangers you dislike do it. Just ignore/avoid getting in their sights. It’s a big problem when close friends/family who you want to keep get into beef-only mode. Because the only way you can help them heal is join their beef.
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Ie the reason for the beef-only behavior is that there is a load-bearing identity bridge with an active bottleneck narcissistic wound on it in your past that you cannot let go, route around, or repress. So anytime you access any memory that crosses that bridge you feel pain.
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The *only* way to relieve that pain in the moment is to lash out at people (or present-day representatives thereof) who ate the omelette of your broken eggs back then. Sorry for the terrible mixed metaphor of bridges, wounds and eggs.
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People who don’t have conflict-seeking personalities adapt by becoming extremely future oriented. They simply don’t look back much, and when they do, stop at some positive rebirth memory past the bridge. And so they avoid picking at the scabby identity bridge.
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This is better than beef-only but not ideal. You’re tossing precious identity anchoring memories over a single “bad” patch. Aggressive future-orientation and extreme beef-only thinking are two sides of the same coin. Neomania/paleomania.
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Last year I thought for a while that Adlerian psychology might help but it doesn’t. Asking “what present-day function does holding on to the bridge solve?” sounds clever but doesn’t in my experience cure beef-onliness.
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The reason is that memory is a general rather than special purpose factor in all problem solving. You automatically and unconsciously associatively search through all memories to find salient ones. You don’t have a specific reason. It’s just “bad sector” in sequential access.
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Ie your memory is functionally organized not as random-access with arbitrary addressability but like a tape or hard disk, with the continuity of your identity serving as the “head” that seeks out useful ones, driven by automatic associative search. You CAN’T avoid the bridge.
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That’s all I have so far. If you have ideas on how to help beef-only people you care about without being roped into their beefs, I’m all ears. I’d say at least a third of people are like this, so a third of your close relationships probably pose this challenge.
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