Tag: Neurosis

Complex mind, simple thoughts

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I strongly believe a major cause of neuroticism, emotional agony, and mental illness is our minds are more complex than much of our thinking and most of our communication.

This causes us to be like prisoners trapped in small space when we are capable of much greater freedom.

A new study illustrates why this happens.

The study show how auditory hallucinations can be induced in people who are not otherwise prone to hearing them.

Pairing a stimulus in one modality (vision) with a stimulus in another (sound) can lead to task-induced hallucinations in healthy individuals. After many trials, people eventually report perceiving a nonexistent stimulus contingent on the presence of the previously paired stimulus. (Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors)

Since this effect can be induced fairly simply it shows that:

These data demonstrate the profound and sometimes pathological impact of top-down cognitive processes on perception… (from the study itself: Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors)

Note that these hallucinations “result from overweighing perceptual priors.”

A “perceptual prior” is, in these cases, a mistaken assumption about reality.

If our auditory and visual “realities” are susceptible to mistakes like these, how much more is our psychology?

Due to our generally very simple ways of interacting with other people, we are essentially forced to hallucinate who they are and at the same time who we are.

That is, our complex minds are essentially forced to see ourselves and others in simple, hallucinatory terms that cannot possibly be true.

I believe this is the cause of great mental and emotional distress for all people everywhere.

I also believe that this problem can be largely overcome by practicing FIML

FIML allows us to remove our psychological hallucinations about our FIML partner as they remove theirs about us.

FIML works because it allows partners to escape the simplicities and many hallucinatory traps of ordinary communication.

As far as I know, there is no other method for doing this. FIML is practical psychotherapy that will optimize your mind and psychology by providing the data you need to overcome hallucinating most of your life.

In this respect, FIML is a preeminent Buddhist mindfulness practice done by two (or more) people working together.

I hope the day comes when Buddhist Sanghas will practice FIML among themselves and teach it to lay followers when they have mastered the technique.

FIML is deeply human and not something AI will be able to do. It is very well-suited to this Human Realm because it shows us how delusions are formed, where they lie within us and how to extinguish them.

Linguistics and psychology meet in FIML

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FIML is a practical technique that optimizes communication between partners by removing as much micro ambiguity as possible during real-time interpersonal communication.

FIML will also greatly improve meso and macro understanding between partners, but the basic FIML technique rests on micro analyses of real-time communication. (See Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding for more on this topic.)

Real-time micro communication means communication within just a few seconds. If we are reading we can focus on a word or phrase and think about it as long as we like. If we are listening to someone speak, however, we normally cannot stop them to analyze deeply a particular word choice, a particular expression, a particular tone of voice, or anything else that happens quickly.

This missing piece in the puzzle of interpersonal communication is of great—I would argue massive—importance because huge mistakes can be and often are made in a single moment.

FIML practice corrects this problem. In other posts I have referred to psychological morphemes, which are defined as:

The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

The theory of FIML claims that psychological morphemes arise quickly and if they are not checked or analyzed can have massive influence on how people hear and think from that point on. This is why the practice of FIML focuses greatly on the initial arising or manifestation of a psychological morpheme. The morpheme may be habitual, having origins in the distant past, or it may have first arisen in the moment just before the FIML query that seeks to understand it.

The important point is that the person in whom the psychological morpheme has arisen, or has just begun to arise, realizes that it has arisen due to something that seems to have originated in the other person, their FIML partner.

This is the reason a basic FIML query is begun—because one partner notices a psychological morpheme arising within themself and wants to be sure it is correctly based on objective data shared with the partner. If the partner honestly does not support the interpretation of the inquirer, then the inquirer will know that the psychological morpheme that had arisen in their mind is a mistake. By stopping that mistake, they further stop a much larger mistaken psychological or emotional response from taking hold in their mind.

The stopping of a much larger mistaken psychological or emotional response from taking hold in the mind is the point at which FIML practice greatly influences psychological well-being. If we can see from the honest answers of a trusted partner that some of our most basic emotional responses are not justified—are mistakes—we will in most cases experience a rapid extinction of those responses.

In some cases of deep-seated mistaken interpretations, we may need to hear many times that we are mistaken, but extinction will follow just as surely even though it takes longer. FIML can’t cure everything but a great many people who are now dissatisfied or suffering with their emotional or psychological conditions will benefit from FIML practice. With the help of a trusted FIML partner it is easier to extinguish mistaken interpretations than it may seem upon fist hearing of this technique.

In addition to the above, FIML practice itself is interesting and will lead to many enjoyable discussions. Furthermore, FIML practice can also find and extinguish dangerous positive mistaken interpretations. A positive mistaken interpretation is one that feels good but that can lead to dangerous or harmful actions due to overconfidence, false assumptions, and so on.

FIML cannot remove all ambiguity between partners. That may be possible one day with advanced brain scans, but I suspect that even then ambiguity will still be part of our emotional lives. FIML can, however, remove enough ambiguity between partners that they will feel much more satisfied with themselves and with how they communicate with each other. When micro mistakes are largely removed from interpersonal communication, meso and macro emotions and behaviors will no longer be undermined by harmful or neurotic subjective states that have not been analyzed objectively.

Non-FIML sociology and Buddhism

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Non-FIML sociology cannot but be based on and imbued with vagueness and uncertainty. Individuals make their ways in this foggy social environment according to their upbringing, experiences, and the different ways they have learned to negotiate ambiguity. Each non-FIML individual cannot but conform to or accept a position somewhere on the spectrum of private neurosis-public semiotics.

This is so because non-FIML individuals cannot attain interpersonal certainty; they can only attain a semblance of interpersonal certainty that is necessarily made up of many erroneous interpretations of the world around them, their loved ones, and themselves. Their understanding of themselves and of others will necessarily be made up of either private interpretations (that are sure to be largely false and thus neurotic) or public/cultural interpretations that are similarly just as false and/or too narrow or generalized (science, mainstream psychology, professional societies, religious or ethnic allegiances, etc.) to be fully satisfying to the profound needs of the individual. This is not to say that many individuals living in conditions like that are not happy, but rather that their sense of who they are and what they are doing is false, utilitarian, exploitative, slavish, or otherwise limited in one way or another. Individuals in conditions like that cannot but offend their deep-seated needs for interpersonal honesty/certainty by compromising their individual understanding of what the world around them means by accepting either prepackaged public explanations (public semiotics) or making up their own (private neurosis).

Most individuals in the world are, thus, contorted in some way. Some are deeply unhappy because they can sense something is wrong but have no way to grapple with it. Others decide to make their way in the world as it is, fully accepting, even enjoying, their perceived “need” to deceive themselves and others, to manipulate others, to take advantage of them, etc.

I think the above roughly describes a big part of what is meant by delusion and suffering in Buddhism. Delusion and suffering constitute the first two of the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth says unenlightened life is characterized by suffering or dissatisfaction. The second explains the first by saying, briefly, that people suffer because they become attached to delusions. Delusions can be egocentric, sociocentric, or both. They can be a private neuroses or the very public madness of a whole society, or both. However you look at it, individual human beings will suffer and experience discontent under these conditions because their core sense of what is true is almost constantly being violated.

In the Buddha’s day, you fixed this problem by becoming a monk. You can still do that today, or you can practice Buddhism as a lay person. My feeling is that if you only practice Buddhism and do not do FIML practice, you will make a lot of progress but remain unsatisfied. Societies today are so large and complex, it is nearly impossible not to be influenced constantly by them. If you can join a monastery or build a cabin in the woods, lucky for you. Most of us, though, will continue to live among unenlightened people and will continue to have deep needs for highly satisfying interpersonal communication with our loved ones and close friends. FIML practice fits in right there. Since so many monasteries today are burdened with the weight of their own semiotics, FIML practice probably would be a very good practice even for monks, if it can be arranged.

In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, there is a story about heaven and hell. In hell people sit at a dinner table to eat but are forced to use chopsticks that are so long they cannot put any food in their mouths, and so they go hungry and feel miserable. In heaven, conditions are exactly the same, but people there use their long chopsticks to feed each other, so everyone if well-fed and very happy.

FIML practice is like heaven. By doing it we feed each other and grow more satisfied as we come to understand what the real conditions of this world are.

How the Science of Memory Reconsolidation Advances the Effectiveness and Unification of Psychotherapy

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Abstract

Memory reconsolidation research by neuroscientists has demonstrated the erasure of emotional learnings.

This article reviews these historic findings and how they translate directly into therapeutic application to provide the clinical field with an empirically confirmed process of transformational change. Psychotherapists’ early use of this new, transtheoretical knowledge indicates a strong potential for significant advances in both the effectiveness of psychotherapy and the unification of its many diverse systems.

The erasure process consists of the creation of certain critical experiences required by the brain, and it neither dictates nor limits the experiential methods that therapists can use to facilitate the needed experiences. This article explains memory reconsolidation, delineates the empirically confirmed process, illustrates it in a case example of long-term depression, indicates the evidence supporting the hypothesis that this process is responsible for transformational change in any therapy sessions, describes the differing mechanisms underlying transformational change versus incremental change, and reports extensive clinical evidence that the basis and cause of most of the problems and symptoms presented by therapy clients are emotional learnings, that is, emotionally laden mental models, or schemas, in semantic memory.

link

FIML practice works most of all because it focuses directly on memory formation and reconsolidation, thus allowing beneficial changes to be made quickly in real-time. Discussions of how this is done can be found here: Memory reconsolidation as key to psychological transformation and here: Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice.

Below is an excerpt that explains how memory reconsolidation works. FIML does precisely what is described below in real-time, real-world situations as they arise between partners, or when they are together and something else arises. ABN

The Erasure of an Emotional Learning

MR research by neuroscientists has demonstrated that an emotional learning is nullified by the following set of three experiences, which have therefore been termed the empirically confirmed process of erasure (ECPE) (Ecker 2018). Hundreds of MR research studies have used a vast range of different procedures and protocols to produce these experiences (reviewed by Ecker 2015, 2018), which means that what the brain requires for erasure of an emotional learning is not any particular external procedure, but rather the internal occurrence of these three subjective experiences, whatever may be the external procedures that create them. Therefore the ECPE does not dictate or favor the use of any particular therapeutic techniques, and psychotherapists are free to facilitate these critical experiences using any of the therapy field’s vast array of experiential methods.

  1. 1.Reactivated, Symptom-Generating Target Learning Experienced in Awareness This is the deliberate use of salient cues or contexts that reactivate the target emotional learning or schema underlying the client’s presenting symptom or problem. For example, a woman in therapy for depression and absence of motivation was cued into reactivation of her lifelong schema that had newly come into awareness and was verbalized as, “Mom sees and knows everything I ever care about or do, and then takes over and takes away everything I ever care about or do, which feels devastating for me, and my only way to be safe from her pillaging is for me to care about nothing and do nothing.” To assure that the schema is being directly accessed at its roots in the emotional learning and memory system and is not merely a cognitive insight, it is critically important that the emotions accompanying the reactivated schema are fully felt affectively and somatically while the schema also is cognized verbally and conceptually. Note that the schema is at core a mental model, from which are generated particular emotions, which in the example above would include helplessness, hopelessness, fear, desperation, despair, aloneness, and the deep pain of feeling used, pillaged and eclipsed in this way by her own mother. How that schema was found, brought into awareness, and then disconfirmed and unlearned is described in the case vignette in the next section.
  2. 2.Experience of Mismatch/Prediction Error Destabilizes the Target Learning’s Neural Encoding While the target schema is reactivated in awareness as described above, this is an additional, concurrent experience or knowing that contradicts what the client knows and expects according to the schema. This is termed a memory mismatch or prediction error experience by memory researchers. In response to this experience of the world differing from the target learning’s expectations, the client’s brain rapidly transforms the neural encoding of the target learning from its stable, consolidated state in long-term memory into a destabilized, de-consolidated, labile state, which is susceptible to being updated and re-encoded by any relevant new learning that may occur next. This destabilization, which requires and is triggered by the mismatch/prediction error experience, begins the reconsolidation process.Footnote2 The labile, destabilized condition persists for about 5 h, widely termed the reconsolidation window, after which the neural encoding automatically reconsolidates, that is, it returns to a stable state in long-term memory. The case vignette below describes how a contradictory knowing was found for the schema of the depressed woman, creating the needed mismatch experience.
  3. 3.Experience of Counter-Learning Drives Unlearning, Nullification, Re-encoding and Replacement of Target Learning This experience consists of just a few repetitions, during the rest of the therapy session, of the same mismatch experience created in the previous step. Each mismatch is a juxtaposition experience, in the sense that the client experiences both reality according to the target learning and a contradictory perception or knowing, with both in the same single field of awareness. Two or three repetitions of that juxtaposition experience serve as counter-learning that functions as an experiential disconfirmation of the target learning. Because the counter-learning is occurring while the encoding of the target learning is labile, the counter-learning rewrites and replaces the encoding of the target schema in memory. As a result, the target learning no longer exists in memory, so it cannot be reactivated and cause a relapse. The target learning is a model of the world in semantic memory, not an episodic memory of specific events and experiences; the latter is not erased. The unlearning of the target learning’s version of reality is the profound resolution of a core emotional issue in the client’s life, as noted earlier.Footnote3 Successful erasure of the target learning is then verified by observing the markers of transformational change beginning to appear immediately: the symptom(s) driven by the target learning cease to occur; the target learning itself, which previously was felt as a potent and horrible truth of the world, no longer feels true or real and is not reactivated by situations that formerly did so, eliminating a problematic, distressed ego state; and those changes persist effortlessly and permanently. If the same counter-learning occurs without first finding, reactivating and destabilizing the target learning (steps 1 and 2 above), the counter-learning only creates its own encoding separate from that of the target learning. In that case, the two learnings compete for control of behavior and state of mind, producing at best only incremental change that is prone to relapse when the emotionally more intense target learning becomes newly retriggered by current circumstances.
ibid

An advantage of FIML as therapy for unwholesome or unwanted schema is FIML is mostly done in real-time, real-world situations so the schema is right there in front of you clear as a bell in your own mind. You can see it and see very clearly how it is distorting reality.

Therapies that work by recalling unwholesome schema in a professional settings have the advantage of: 1) relying on a professional; 2) avoiding doing this work with your spouse or best friend; and 3) aiming for wholesale erasure of the schema once and for all.

FIML practitioners could use a schema method to do this but generally FIML works by focusing on the unwholesome schema the moment it arises and whenever it arises in the real-world (conditions permitting). This method erases or extirpates the unwholesome schema by observing its maladaptive dysfunction as many times as needed.

FIML is also able to deal with more than one maladaptive schema, and in real-life there are many, without causing confusion because when unwholesome schemas are encountered in real-world, real-time, their structure and origins are generally easily seen for what they are.

Many unwanted schema can be extirpated with just a few FIML exchanges. Some are more stubborn and may require more time and multiple occurrences.

Another advantage FIML has is it prevents new schemas from arising and taking hold. Unwholesome schemas do not all come from the deep past or from childhood. Schemas also arise later in life and often are based on serious misinterpretations. FIML is very effective at stopping schemas of this sort immediately, before they can consolidate and cause harm.

I would add that unwholesome schemas exist in virtually everyone and often we are dealing not with our own schemas but those of others. FIML partners can eliminate problem schemas between themselves, but often can do no more than recognize them in others. However, understanding ourselves through FIML practice does help us understand others much better, and how deal with them more compassionately due to that understanding. ABN

Most people misunderstand everything

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Why?

Because language is necessarily often ambiguous.

So?

The ambiguities are rarely fixed.

So?

Unfixed ambiguities lead to errors in interpretation. The errors accumulate and snowball. All people have been raised in environments like that and continue to live in them.

This causes pain because our minds are capable of communicating unambiguously, but we don’t know how.

We are semiotic animals, beings that live in semiotic jungles.

Our pain and error-ridden communication makes us mean, simple, greedy, stupid, violent, selfish, crazy.

Communication errors, misinterpretations, cause ghosts to form in the mind. We need to imagine a role for ourselves and others, but since we experience so many errors, our imaginings are fundamentally wrong. They are like ghosts in our minds.

We are as ghosts speaking and listening to each other.

Psychology as ‘signs of something else’

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When we see a human behavior as a “sign of something else” we begin magnifying it.

When we live in a culture where people normally do this, we tend to think it is right to do this even to ourselves.

People often feel relieved when their “signs of something else” have been analyzed—either professionally or by self-administered questionnaires—to reveal what that “something else” is.

Once analyzed and categorized, the “something else” itself becomes a sign, or a meta-sign, a diagnosis that explains behavior while directing us to a cure based on whatever that “something else” is.

The DSM reads like a Ptolemaic system of circles and spheres. In it signs are identified, quantified, and classified to indicate what they stand for, what their “something else” is.

Professionals are needed to do this work of course, and though the manual rests on “scientific” tests and other measurements, it changes every few years and very few people are getting better because of it. Moreover there is very little consensus among thoughtful people, including psychologists, about what the classifications of “mental illness” or “personality disorder” actually mean.

This is a sure sign that something is wrong.

I submit that what is wrong is our systems of classification of mental disorder do not describe the actual disorders because these descriptions exist on a different level from the disorders themselves.

It is widely observed that many disorders as currently classified blend into each other, share attributes, are co-morbid. It is also widely known that when disorders are extreme, sufferers can exhibit symptoms of all of them.

This indicates that the human mind is a complex system that becomes disordered by over-emphasizing or under-emphasizing parts of its system.

And this may be why drugs, psychedelics, shock therapy, or shamanic rituals sometimes help. Because they reset the entire system.

If you don’t want to use drugs, can’t get psychedelics, don’t want to undergo shock therapy or shamanic ritual, I suggest you try FIML practice. If you have a good partner, are fairly intelligent, and want to truly optimize your psychology (not just terminate your ambiguous disorder), FIML will probably do this for you. In fact, even if you can get psychedelics, FIML is better.

A disorder is unique to its system and though we can speak of some generalities that may apply to it, these generalities exist at a different level from the disorder itself and cannot provide a cure.

To cure a disorder the disorder must be experienced as it is happening by the sufferer. If too much of the disorder is revealed at once or the sufferer is simply confronted with its classification, more harm than good may result. If small bits of the disorder are revealed over a longish period of time, however, the sufferer will be much more likely to gain beneficial insight into the disorder.

In my view, all people everywhere are deeply disordered and thus all people everywhere would benefit from FIML practice. People who may not benefit from FIML include, among others, those who cannot self-observe, who are severely alcoholic, whose disorder prohibits self-analysis (narcissism, for example) and, sadly, those who cannot find an honest partner.

The role of the ‘truth teller’ in a narcissistic family

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I was unfamiliar with the idea of the scapegoat also being a “truth teller” in a narcissistic family. The truth teller might also be called a witness; it’s the child that knows something is not right and thus threatens the vulnerable narcissist. Many if not most traditional cultures have very large narcissistic components. Their moral strictures, religions, duties, values, manners, etc. almost all contain elements of narcissism. So there is an important historical dimension to this diagnosis.

Aspects of Buddhism as it is traditionally practiced even today can also be seen as being narcissistic or fostering narcissism. Same for all the Abrahamic religions, Confucianism, Aztec beliefs and so on across the globe. Just as consciousness is fundamental to our human reality so are the many ways of interpreting it, almost all of which historically have tended toward narcissistic systems.

Truth tellers typically are most likely to escape the web of the narcissistic family even though their role in it was to be the most despised, the scapegoat. Sometimes I see the Buddha as a truth teller who freed himself from his father’s make-believe world despite the power and luxury it offered. In this vein, Jesus can be seen as an outcast black sheep who was tortured and grossly humiliated. Both embody the hardship of earning freedom from delusion.

Muddled intentions, specific intentions

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One important thing FIML practice has showed me is that people very often—more often than they realize—attribute specific, clear intentionality to the speech of others when that speech actually originated out of a muddled state and was not clear or specific at all to the speaker.

I think we do this because as speakers we have better knowledge of the rich ambiguity that is our mind, while as listeners we know, for the most part, only what the speaker has said, or rather what we think we heard them say.

In many other posts we have discussed hearing words incorrectly and the consequences that can follow from that. In this post, let’s confine ourselves to a listener’s attributing a more specific intentionality to the speaker than the speaker intended.

A crude example might be a drunk at a bar mumbling to himself. Another drunk walks by with his girl on his arm. Hearing the mumbling, he asks, “Did you say that to her?” In saying that, he is attributing intentionality where there was none.

Sometimes, the drunk at the bar will explain that he was just mumbling. And sometimes he will own the intentionality being attributed to him.

In that case, he might say, “Yes, I did. What are you going to do about it?”

Misconstrued intentionality surely leads to many fights.

But those of us who don’t get drunk in bars like that never do anything similar, right?

Not so. We do it all the time. We frequently hear the speech of others as having more specific intent than they meant.

Whenever we listen, we do so with the network of semiotics and language that subsumes our perceptions. Thus, whatever we hear will tend to confirm or be contextualized by that part of our subjective network that is most active at the time or that seems to apply best to what we are hearing.

Our use of that network for understanding the speech of others is hurried, quick, and often wrong. Our listening makes sense to us, but is almost never in full accord with what the speaker said, especially as so much speech initiates in vague or muddled states of mind. Speech is often groping while listening often is less so.

For example, if someone expresses a political view that we have recently been thinking about and that irritates us, our listening will very likely attribute a more specific or pointed intentionality to the speaker than is justified.

If we agree with what the speaker said under the circumstances described above, much the same thing will happen though our attribution of specific intentionality will be favorable rather than unfavorable.

These examples are the polite forms of the barroom brawl versus barroom camaraderie.

Notice also, the tendency we humans have to frame these sorts of errors as dichotomies. Either you are insulting my girl or we are all best friends.

Furthermore, notice that we also have a strong tendency to own the more specific intentionality being attributed to us by the listener. In the bar, you might decline the fight, but in another location you might lock horns with someone who attributed a specific intention to your muddled or idle expression of a vague political “view.”

Next time you think you heard a specific intent in the words of a friend, ask them if that was indeed their intent. Be careful when asking because if they are not experienced FIML practitioners, they may agree to own an intention they never had or that was far more muddled than it had seemed to you (or them in the moment of speaking).

My guess is a great deal of what we say is sloppier or more muddled than even we ourselves realize. This is simply how we are and how we really use language. You can’t make speech perfect.

Signals and subliminal signal associations

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Signals sent between people are almost never simple, single entities devoid of ambiguity.

Indeed, even very clear communicative signals, especially in interpersonal communication, are often fraught with subliminal associations. These “extra” associations are a primary cause of interpersonal error and ambiguity, and deriving from that, of individual, personal discomfort or neurosis.

We have mentioned this general problem many times and claimed that FIML practice is probably the only way to successfully remove the bulk of dangerous ambiguity and misunderstanding that inevitably accrues in almost all interpersonal relationships.

A study on visual perception from the University of Arizona—Your Brain Sees Things You Don’t—reasonably confirms these statements for visual perception. I would argue that many other brain functions work in similar ways, including listening, speaking, and our overall perceptions of human behavior and what it “means.”

The study found that participants subconsciously perceive “meaning” in visual images flashed quickly before them. It took about 400 milliseconds for this perception of “meaning” to show on an fMRI machine.

I have put the word “meaning” in quotes because this word could also be understood as “contextualize,” “associate with,” “frame,” or even “anticipate.” When we listen to someone with any care, our minds are always roving slightly as we adjust, readjust, and anticipate what the speaker means, meant, and is meaning. Listening is a dynamic process that draws heavily—even completely—on semiotic associations that hover and come into view as our sense of what the speaker is saying unfolds.

The UA study provides pretty good evidence that we do something similar visually and that it happens quickly.

Mary Peterson, an adviser on the study, said of it

This is a window into what the brain is doing all the time. It’s always sifting through a variety of possibilities and finding the best interpretation for what’s out there. And the best interpretation may vary with the situation.

Pay close attention to that word best.

Firstly, I completely agree with Peterson’s statement. And secondly, I see a massive problem in interpersonal communication lurking just beneath that word “best.”

Whose best? During interpersonal communication, if the listener does not have the habit of directly asking the speaker what is meant, then the listener’s brain will decide the issue on its own based on its own autocthonous “best” sense of what the speaker “means.”

How often can anyone be right under those conditions? This is why FIML practice micromanages some aspects of communication by  requiring quick interventions to be sure the deep meaning is being transmitted correctly. If partners do not do FIML, they will be forced to do all of the following—make many wrong assumptions about what is being communicated to them, rely on general rules of listening (the bane of authentic individuality), rely on statistical assumptions about how the speaker “generally” more or less “is.” That is a formula for interpersonal disaster and likely a major factor in the very high incidence mental illness in industrialized societies.

FIML demands some effort and it takes some time, but I prefer it any day of the week over the static role-playing and error-prone guessing that is the only other alternative.

Another way of saying all of the above is this: when we communicate we often send and receive ambiguous messages. Our minds handle ambiguity (often subconsciously) by choosing what they perceive as the “best” interpretation. But this “best” interpretation happens very quickly and is frequently wrong. Nonetheless, this “best” interpretation if accepted, which it often is, will get fed back immediately into the communicative exchange, quickly (or gradually) distorting everything that is happening.

Unemotional visual perceptions, such as those used in the linked study, will not be problematical for the participants. But similar brain functions will be and are problematical in all of their interpersonal relationships. There is simply no way around the fact that we rapidly perceive and misperceive “best” interpretations, especially since we are accepting them based on subconscious processes.

____________________

Edit: Here is a paper on the dangers of inferring too much from neuroimaging: Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? I don’t think too much has been inferred from the UA study, but some readers may disagree.

The human brain is characterized by semiotic networks that are held together through a variety of associations between the “nodes,” or individual signs, that comprise them. We use these networks to understand everything and they are remarkable beautiful, even if fraught with danger when employed (as they always are) during acts of communication with people we care about.

Denial and self-deception

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Robin Hanson has an interesting post—Dark Pain, Dark Joy—about pains and joys “…we don’t let others know, and are often are in denial to ourselves.”

“Why do we hide and deny pain?” he asks. “Some pain makes us look bad. We’d look weak to complain of pains that many folks put up with without complaining.”

Hanson also describes “dark joys”—secret pleasures that would embarrass us if others knew about them.

I am glad to see Hanson expanding our sense of what the “unconscious” may hold and/or what we feel we must repress within our conscious minds. It is important to do this for, as he says, “consciousness…is a matter of degree, and repressed pain [or secret pleasures] can infect our mood and feelings in many indirect ways.”

In FIML practice, partners will discover a great many subconscious and semi-conscious misinterpretations of themselves and others that “deeply infect [their] moods and feelings in many indirect ways.” I would add that they also infect and affect us in many direct ways that can, and often do, have massive consequences.

Most of us are in denial about our misinterpretations of ourselves and others. Our denial is a complex form of self-deception that may be conscious or unconscious. Entire cultures are built upon a foundation of interpersonal misinterpretations. The central misinterpretation is that we understand each other better than we do.

We use very crude and ambiguous signs and symbols (language, gesture, tone, etc.) to communicate meanings that are frequently fraught with ambiguity. Then we pretend that we have been understood and that we understand how we are being responded to.

In a science lab when speaking about an experiment, the technical parts of exchanged messages may get sent and received without too many problems, but once at home, those same scientists will not be capable of communicating with their spouses with anything near the same clarity.

The “repressed pain” that stems from ambiguity and misinterpretation experienced during communications with significant friends and spouses is the herd of elephants in the room of human civilization from ancient times to today.

To compensate for our terribly poor understanding of each other (much of it deriving from inevitable and completely unavoidable ambiguities in communication), we are forced to adopt stock roles, to have unfounded beliefs about our “selves” and others, to make unsatisfying vows, to adhere to public semiotic standards that cannot possibly reflect or embody our authentic beings.

To correct this problem, we have to learn how to communicate with far more detail and far more accuracy than is normally possible in any culture in existence today. If you could communicate with minimal ambiguity (orders of magnitude better than now) and with great clarity with the people you love, would you not want to do that?

The “dark pains and pleasures” described by Hanson are a significant part of being human. But the corrosive and very harmful dark pain that comes from the bad communication of semiotic babies (us) is even worse.

Some basic ways to understand FIML

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FIML practice first generates and then depends upon clear communication between partners.

When clear communication is established, FIML increases mental clarity and positive feelings. Another way of saying this is FIML practice reduces both mental confusion and neurotic feelings.

Thus, FIML can be fairly easily explained or understood by referring to these three basic outcomes:

  • clear communication
  • elevated or enhanced mental clarity
  • increased positive feelings

Stated in the negative, these same three basic outcomes of FIML practice are:

  • elimination of communication blockages
  • reduction or elimination of metal confusion
  • reduction or elimination of neurotic feelings

FIML practice does not emphasize a difference between private confusion (neurosis) and public confusion (irrational semiotics of a culture or society). We do recognize that there is a difference between the public and the private, but this difference lies on a continuum: a private neurosis is often shaped by cultural semiotics while cultural semiotics are often grounded in the neurotic feelings of many individuals.

A good deal of psychological reasoning today is based on what is “normal”, what “most people feel”, and/or what deviates from that or interferes with an individual’s ability to function within “normal” ranges. FIML recognizes social norms, but partners are not asked to judge themselves on that basis. Nor are partners encouraged to label themselves with psychological terms. Rather, partners are encouraged (and shown how) to discover for themselves how to understand themselves based the three outcomes described above. We are confident that the high ethical standards required to do FIML successfully will show partners with great clarity that sound ethics are essential to human fulfillment.

FIML is a liberative practice because it frees partners from mental confusion, emotional suffering, and the hardships of unsatisfying communication. Since FIML works with real data agreed upon by both partners it avoids idealism and wishful-thinking.

FIML enhances traditional Buddhist practices because it allows partners to share their introspections while checking each others’ work. When we speak an inner truth to someone who we know will understand and who cares about us, that inner truth will deepen and benefit both partners.  Based on the three outcomes described above, FIML partners will be able to create a sort of subculture of their own founded on standards that they both (all) find fulfilling and right.

In most of our descriptions of FIML, we have tried to use ordinary words while providing clear definitions of them if they have a special meaning in the context of FIML. One word that is especially important is neurosis. By this term, we mean “mistaken interpretation” or “ongoing mistaken interpretation.” We use the word this way because it is a basic tenet of FIML that most, if not all, mental and emotional suffering is generated by communication errors. We proudly use the words error, mistake, wrong, erroneous, incorrect and so on when describing communication problems because communication problems almost always are grounded in mistakes: someone heard wrong, interpreted wrongly, spoke wrongly, and so on. FIML practice shows partners how to identify and correct these mistakes the moment they appear, thus forestalling the generation or perdurance of full-blown neurosis.

FIML is less concerned with long explanations about the past and more concerned with the dynamic moment during which partners communicate and react to each other based on real data that can be retrieved and agreed upon by both of them. The mental and emotional clarity that results from this practice is highly rewarding and within the reach of most people with the basic necessary conditions–a trusted partner, enough time to do the practice, mutual caring.

Being able to do FIML

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  • Being able to do FIML means that you have developed a skill or trait that did not exist in you before. The ability to do FIML is a functional “state of mind” that emerges from other states of mind–from consciousness, awareness, self-reflection, self-criticism, communication, language use, emotion, etc.
  • Doing FIML will change the way you communicate, especially with your FIML partner. It will change the way you view language and its uses.
  • Since FIML depends on real data agreed upon by both partners and since FIML can convincingly change how we perceive ourselves and our partners, it can give us new perspectives on psychology and/or any activity that depends on language/communication.
  • The use of a linguistic/semiotic vocabulary in FIML allows us to classify a great deal of human cognition, psychology, and behavior as lying on a spectrum of public—private semiotics.
  • This perspective allows us to broadly define many human behaviors, thoughts, and feelings as mistakes. For example, a private semiotic may be a “neurosis” and can be defined simply as a “mistaken interpretation” or an “ongoing mistaken interpretation.” Similarly, any public semiotic that can be shown to be wrong can be clearly identified as a mistake or an “ongoing public neurosis.”
  • What is “normal” in FIML is, thus, that which is not mistaken. Partners have great leeway to decide much of this for themselves.
  • Very often, the least mistaken view is one of doubt or traditional skepticism, the view that we may not be able to be certain about whatever is in question.
  • FIML practice accepts the basic scientific view that a scientific theory must be testable or falsifiable, based on experiments that can be repeated, based on verifiable evidence, internally consistent, consistent with what is external to itself, useful or practical, open to change, and parsimonious in its explanations.
  • New scientific theories should also say something new and interesting, something that explains data in a new way or that provides a new way of understanding old data.
  • FIML differs from a good deal of science in that it relies heavily on the experiences of two (or more) partners. FIML is a kind of subjective science that also relies on the objectivity of a truthful partner.
  • For the most part, partners alone decide what is true for them, though they cannot honestly do this without reference to other fields of science and thought.
  • FIML resembles Buddhist practice, art, or the work of early scientists in that the existential/ experiential data acquired by individuals is of great importance to those individuals and is central to what they are doing.
  • FIML can be scientifically falsified if many people do it and fail to gain any benefit from it.
  • Done properly, at a minimum, FIML practice should clear up most communication mistakes/ problems between partners. FIML also provides the means for partners to continue clearing up new mistakes as they appear.
  • By clearing up mistakes in communication between partners, FIML practice alleviates a great deal of emotional suffering.
  • By clearing up mistakes in communication between partners, FIML practice will also relieve partners of other mistaken ideas and feelings, thus relieving a good deal of more generalized emotional suffering.

Shared subjectivity

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  • FIML practice can be described as shared subjectivity.
  • The coinage, or units, of basic FIML sharing are microanalyses of communication ambiguities done in real-time, as they happen.
  • This kind of sharing prevents FIML partners from forming subjective views of each other that are based on mistaken interpretations.
  • Mistaken interpretations between partners always lead to subjective separation, unshared and unsharable subjectivity.
  • Mistaken interpersonal interpretations are the source of most, if not all, neurotic thinking and behavior.
  • It is difficult (I believe impossible) to correct neurotic thinking and behavior through generalized analyses.
  • Generalized here indicates analyses that are based on general theories that are applied to individuals, often by professional therapists.
  • FIML is not a generalized analysis. FIML is a communication technique.
  • It has great therapeutic value because it is a technique that will help partners share their unique subjectivities.
  • By sharing their subjectivities, partners will extirpate or extinguish their neuroses, their mistaken subjective misinterpretations of each other and of other people.
  • Neuroses are painful because they cause us to use our minds badly and wrongly.
  • Neurotic communication is painful because at some level we all know that we are communicating badly and wrongly.
  • We persist in neurotic behavior only because we do not know another way to be.
  • FIML shows us another way to be.
  • By slowly chipping away at neurotic (i.e. mistaken) interpretations the moment they arise, FIML frees us from neurosis itself (i.e. long-standing mistaken interpretations).

Memory reconsolidation as key to psychological transformation

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I’ll probably have more to say on this subject, but for now let me just say I am delighted to have found a psychotherapy that is highly compatible with FIML practice.

Indeed this psychotherapy is based on the same principles as FIML, though the approach is different.

In FIML unwanted psychological reactions are discovered in real-world, real-time situations with a partner.

In Coherence Therapy—the psychotherapy I just discovered—unwanted psychological reactions are called schemas. Schemas are transformed through memory reconsolidation in a way that is theoretically very similar to FIML practice.

Here is a video that explains the process of memory reconsolidation that is achieved through Coherence Therapy:

Coherence Therapy (CT) requires a therapist, while FIML does not.

In a nutshell, CT uses three steps (as described in the video) to achieve results. I will list them below in bold font and explain briefly how FIML differs and is also very similar.

1) CT: Reactivate the target schema as a conscious emotional experience. This is done with the help of a therapist.

FIML: In FIML, harmful or unwanted schemas are encountered in real-life with a participating partner. No therapist is needed, though prior training in the technique is helpful.

2) CT: Guide a contradictory experience. This juxtaposition unlocks (de-consolidates) the target schema’s memory circuits. (“Mismatch”/”prediction error” experience)

FIML: The “contradictory experience” is discovered in real-life through the FIML query. The partner’s answer to the FIML query provides the “juxtaposition” that unlocks or de-consolidates the encountered schema. In FIML, we have been calling this process the discovery and correction of a contretemps or mix-up.

3) CT: Repeat contradictory experience in juxtaposition with target schema. This rewrites and erases target schema.

FIML: Repetition of the contradictory experience happens in real-life whenever it next happens if it happens again. Generally, most schema or unwanted reactions are corrected within 5-10 recurrences. Serious unwanted schemas may take more repetitions.

Since CT uses a therapist as a guide, it is better than FIML for very serious problems and for people who are unable to find a partner to do FIML with.

Since FIML does not use a therapist, it is better for dealing with a very broad range of many unwanted schemas, not just the most serious or ones discovered by a therapist.

I am quite sure that CT will be very effective for many kinds of psychological agony. If a problem is acute, I would recommend CT based on my experience with FIML.

A shortcoming of FIML is it requires a caring partner and the transformations it induces are generally all induced in the presence of that partner. Much good comes of that and most transformations can be extrapolated to other people and other situations, but for serious problems like panic or deep anxiety, a CT therapist may be more helpful.

FIML is best for two people who want to optimize their psychologies. Partners will discover and correct many unwanted schemas and many bad communication habits.

If you can understand CT, you should be able to do FIML. If you have already done CT and had good results and now you want to go further and optimize your psychology, FIML will help you do that.

I believe the core theory of CT is sound. If that is so, it should be clear that bad schemas arise constantly in life. We start new ones all the time. Bad schemas are like trash that inevitable accumulates and must be cleaned away. FIML does this job very well.

Here is more on memory reconsolidation, which underlies CT: A Primer on Memory Reconsolidation and its psychotherapeutic use as a core process of profound change.

More on FIML can be found at the top of this page and in most posts on this site.

first posted FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and FIML

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This short interview gives a quick outline of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): Albert Ellis: A Guide to Rational Living. FIML is not REBT and REBT is not FIML but the two methods are mutually supportive and probably not contradictory in all that many ways.

FIML resembles REBT in that it is a practice that can and will reduce neuroticism and unrealistic thinking. FIML is based on real data agreed upon by both partners and in this sense it is a pragmatic, scientific approach to human psychology and communication as is REBT.

FIML is different from REBT in that it is based on a specific technique that can be taught and then used by partners without the help of a therapist. FIML works primarily with very short segments of communication. It deals with belief, cognition, and emotion, but emphasizes accessing them by being attentive to the moment in a very concrete way.

FIML is not just psychotherapy but also very much a technique for anyone who wants to optimize communication with those who are most important to them. FIML helps partners understand how emotion, semiotics, habit, personal history, word associations, and so on influence how they listen and speak. FIML is largely value-neutral in what it says, though the practice will tend to strengthen awareness, rational thinking, and sound ethical behavior.

REBT is a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).

first posted JANUARY 1, 2012