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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It involves navigating “with me or against me” or “if you respect me you’ll join me in hating them” type ultimatums etc.
No easy way out if you don’t want to hurt random others to show you value them. Introducing non-beef elements into their thinking is hard.
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No amount of love and validation can heal them since they’re hung up on a very specific shadow element of their identity represented by the beef adversaries. You have to address the intellectual content. It’s a surgical “vector love/compassion” problem, not a scalar one.
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My pop-psych theory of this “narcissistic would identity bottlenecks” — a part of their life story where they suffered a narcissistic wound AND their identity was single-threaded. There’s no way to route around it by accessing more healing parallel memories.
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“Yes you were bullied.... but you also had good memories like reading or video games” doesn’t work because the beef arises from a point in their life where all identity eggs were in one basket, all got broken, and someone else ate the omelet.
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Present-day positive things won’t work. They’ll just allow palliative. temporary forgetting. The wound is in the past, and is the precarious and ONLY bridge between the past before it and after it. You can’t repress it entirely without breaking continuity of identity.
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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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