Tag: psychology

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

San Francisco — 1 in 4 teachers not credentialed

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According to a new report from the City and County of San Francisco Grand Jury, one in four teachers in San Francisco are currently uncredentialed and not qualified to teach.

Before the report came out on Thursday, the San Francisco Unified School District had already been going through turmoil this week following the release of documents finding a teacher last year had to be suspended for discriminating against white students.

While the district had many other longer-term problems going on as well, the most urgent by far was the teacher shortage.

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A core principle in school education is students do best when grouped in classes based on similar/equivalent academic abilities. Just do that and more teachers will stay because classes like that also work best for teachers. Everybody benefits, including slow students who will no longer feel intimidated. Accept reality and deal with it reasonably. That is not even hard to do. ABN

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

Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis

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…The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon. 

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority. 

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A society not based on truthful standards of excellence will crash. Almost all individuals accept their own limitations. Why don’t we just face these facts and also accept that some groups can be defined as better at some stuff than others and use those people and those groups where they can be most effective? ABN

Dissociation in FIML practice

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In the field of neuropsychology, the term dissociation is used to describe various ways of identifying the neural substrate of specific brain functions.

One way this is done is by studying “lesions,” or damaged areas, in people’s brains and figuring out how that damage affects such functions as perception, speech, memory, vision, and so on.

Neuroimaging is another method for observing particular brain regions and thus “dissociating” them from the larger brain system in order to understand their unique functions.

While FIML practice does not rely on lesions in the brain and has not (yet) been studied in an fMRI machine, it does employ a kind of dissociation.

When a FIML partner stops a conversation and makes a query, the partner being questioned is essentially being asked to dissociate a few moments of communication from the large welter of brain function that had been going on before the query.

By isolating, or dissociating, that small segment of communication, both partners gain insight into how they express themselves and how they interpret what they are hearing or perceiving.

Seeing many dissociated segments of communication teaches partners that their communication is frequently more random, ambiguous, misleading, and just plain wrong than they had realized prior to doing FIML practice.

Dissociation in FIML practice also teaches partners how to sharpen their overall communication by frequently adjusting and fine-tuning small segments of it through FIML queries and follow-up discussions.

I can imagine more advanced neuroimaging devices than we have today showing what part of the brain is being used to do the “macro-perception” required by a FIML query. I hope that a more advanced device will also show how small mistakes in communication can often lead to very large mistakes in mutual understanding.

Ideally, an advanced neuroimaging device would dissociate the initial error in both partners’ brains and show how that error then quickly spreads chemically and neurologically throughout their brains.

For now, all we have is shared self-reporting between FIML partners, but this is still a very large improvement over not doing FIML at all. By clearing up many micro-errors in communication, FIML practice improves macro-functionality in the brain.

first posted APRIL 6, 2014

Game theory and interpersonal relations

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Game theory uses models to understand how people interact under predetermined conditions or rules.

The end result of any particular model is called its “equilibrium.” Equilibrium implies no one will change their input if external conditions remain the same.

One way to make a game theory model is to reason backwards from the equilibrium you want. To keep it simple, there are two players.

Let’s say we want an interpersonal equilibrium that is honest, clear, and open to the dynamic reality of life. Here is a hypothesis: an equilibrium like that should also result in psychological optimization, psychological well-being for both players.

To achieve that equilibrium, my game model will be based on the following rules:

  1. communication will be as honest as possible
  2. communication will be as clear as possible
  3. all acts of communication (within reason) will be subject to clarification, revision, correction, and explication to the point (within reason) that there is no misunderstanding and whatever ambiguity remains is reduced to its lowest practical level

To do this, players will:

  1. focus on the smallest practical units of communication because error and ambiguity (which often leads to error) frequently begin at this level; this level includes: words, phrases, gestures, tone of voice, expressions, gasps, laughter, grunts, and so on; anything that communicates; all pertinent semiotics
  2. correcting error at the above level, which we will call the micro-level, ensures that small mistakes do not lead to large mistakes; it also teaches players how to correct errors at meso and macro levels of communication
  3. since human minds are limited in what they know and can communicate, and if players are diligent in following the above rules, players will steadily become more familiar with each other; how they speak, hear, think, what their references are, their values, beliefs, and so on
  4. if they continue to maintain these practices, they will build on their mutual familiarity, eventually achieving an interpersonal equilibrium that is honest, clear, and open to the dynamic reality of life

I have played this game with my partner for over ten years and can attest that it has worked even better than we had hoped.

Not only have we achieved an interpersonal equilibrium that is honest, clear, and open to the dynamic reality of life, but also what we hypothesized has come to pass: this equilibrium has also resulted in what feels to us to be psychological optimization and psychological well-being for both of us.

The rules to our game can be found here: FIML.

Note that initially FIML will upset your normal interpersonal equilibrium, whatever that may be. It cannot be otherwise. Note also that the rules of FIML will help you find or create a much better equilibrium.

If FIML is undertaken in a spirit of exploration, creativity, and fun, it will tend to self-generate or self-catalyze many new insights into your psychologies and how you interact with each other.

The ultimate FIML equilibrium is a dynamic one that keeps both partners open to the dynamic reality of life. With little or no “content” of its own, FIML rules allow partners to adapt to or create any “reality” they want.

Once understood, FIML is pretty much only difficult in the very beginning because in the beginning it will upset your normal interpersonal equilibrium. By doing FIML, you are choosing to change your normal equilibrium to a more efficient one.

first posted SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

‘The video is being censored everywhere’ – Shocking video of Syrian migrant stabbing children on French playground deleted across Twitter

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Twitter has mass deleted a video of a migrant knife attack in France that saw five children being stabbed on a playground

A brutal video of a Syrian migrant stabbing children on a playground in Annecy, France, that went viral on Twitter has now been mass deleted, with numerous accounts displaying the message: video deleted.

The attack, which was covered by Remix News, shows a Syrian migrant racing around stabbing children, as a mother attempts to push her child to safety. According to press reports, at least five children were stabbed in the attack, including two adults. Two of the children remain in critical condition.

A full version of the video is available below through Rumble.

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I am posting this because it is being censored and also massively downplayed. The linked article contains the video, which is very disturbing. Hate crimes against whites are consistently ignored in MSM across the Western world. This one is an attack on white children but it must not be publicized because people might become prejudiced against the race of the perpetrator. This is mass mind-control and how it works. What we need to do to defend ourselves against this is actively and consciously practice manipulating the words, concepts, thoughts, and emotions that are used in mind-control. Say the words out loud. Contemplate the concepts, move them around in your mind, analyze them. Pay attention to mind-control efforts. They are very common and can be found within seconds almost anywhere in MSM. Ignoring or deleting truths is mind-control by omission. ABN

Karma is ignorance

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A Buddha has no karma because there is no ignorance.

Karma is the “work” ignorance does, the effects it generates in the mind-stream.

Karma disappears the moment it is fully understood; that is, the moment the ignorance underlying it is ended.

Some ignorance comes from people around us, our communities, how they define us. If this sort of ignorance is figured out, its karma disappears, the effects disappear. This is why people who have suffered serious psychological trauma and/or profoundly unjust social recrimination sometimes end up saying they are better off for all of it.

This caught my eye this morning:

…I feel that as Western societies we generally tend to label and marginalise mental illness instead of seeing it as a rather normal reaction to extreme and abnormal circumstances,” said Selen Atasoy, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

“This, in my opinion, makes the recovery of a patient from trauma even more difficult, as this perspective of the society may further deepen the ‘dissociation’ – the withdrawal of the person, who experienced the traumatic event, from that painful experience.” (LSD produces a new type of ‘harmonic’ order in the brain, according to neuroimaging study)

Ignorance is less a moral factor in consciousness and much more a functional one. Good morals—that is, proper spiritual methods—lead us out of ignorance, but ignorance itself is by definition blameless.

The societal ignorance described in the above quotation is a crude response, the reasoning of a crowd. If you remove it, some other crudity will take its place.

Buddhism, as do most of the world’s spiritual traditions, honors reclusion, getting away from the crowd, going into the mind-stream unburdened by communal ignorance.

To get anywhere with karma, you have to be an individual and directly face individual realities.

first posted FEBRUARY 28, 2018

Watered-Down Blood — Laurent Guyénot

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The Medieval Origin of Western Individualism

…Here I will argue that the medieval papacy is responsible for the creation of the modern Western individual, that rootless man obsessed by his own salvation, identity, and self-realization. I will not deny that Western individualism has produced an exceptional harvest of geniuses in all fields of human culture, and unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of creativity. That, I think, is undeniable. And perhaps it was worth it. I will simply argue that the pathological—and contagious—stage that Western individualism has reached today is the end-result of a program of de-socialization written by the Roman papacy. To borrow from Joseph Henrich’s remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World, to which I will return: “by undermining intensive kinship, the Church’s marriage and family policies gradually released individuals from the responsibilities, obligations, and benefits of their clans and houses.”[2] Over many generations, this social engineering wired our uniquely individualistic psychology.

It may sound counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the loss of kinship bonds, since practicing Christians are today the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end. All established religions are conservative, that is their main social function. But Western Christianity’s conservatism is about preserving what little kinship structure it didn’t destroy in its revolutionary stage: the nuclear family, the last step before complete social disintegration.[3]

…What shall we compare the Weird West to? To a piece of ground yielding a miraculous harvest that left its anthropological soil barren and toxic? Or perhaps to a doped athlete or artist who now has to pay for his success with his health. There is no question that the almost superhuman boost in energy and creativity that the West got from its Christian-inspired individualism did come with a heavy price. We have been high, but we are now starting to experience the withdrawal symptoms. And possibly the irreversible brain damage. Anthropological reality (otherwise known as human nature) is catching up. We have constructed a new world, but now discover that it has deconstructed us as human beings.

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Guyénot is one of our most interesting and provocative writers on Western history, its downfall and the religious roots thereof. Above I have excerpted a few paragraphs that can provide the gist of his essay but I hope not a substitute for reading it and his other works. ABN

UPDATE: I should mention that I believe the importance of clans and lineages and races will go away when eugenic manipulation of gametes and zygotes becomes common. One day soon, there will also be digital manipulations of cell lines and gestation in pods which will provide perfect environments for fetal development. This technology is closer than many realize. It will produce people with IQs higher than any human who has ever lived and bodies as perfect as any that has ever existed. When in maybe fifty years, people are able to fine tune their offspring to produce the best qualities imaginable, ‘Darwinian’ lineages and relationships will become a thing of the past overnight and our concerns today will seem as important as those of homo habilis of 1.5 million years ago. Positively no one will care. ABN

Mothers of boys with gender identity disorder: a comparison of matched controls

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Abstract

This pilot study compared mothers of boys with gender identity disorder (GID) with mothers of normal boys to determine whether differences in psychopathology and child-rearing attitudes and practices could be identified. Results of the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines and the Beck Depression Inventory revealed that mothers of boys with GID had more symptoms of depression and more often met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder than the controls. Fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder on the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines or had symptoms of depression on the Beck Depression Inventory. Results of the Summers and Walsh Symbiosis Scale suggested that mothers of probands had child-rearing attitudes and practices that encouraged symbiosis and discouraged the development of autonomy.

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The connection between leftism and pathology

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Some interesting research came out recently on the relationship between people with left-wing authoritarian politics, narcissism and psychopathy.

Interestingly, it seems to vindicate many earlier thinkers who theorised about the connection between leftism and pathology.

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The left has historically and in the present always fought for control of metacognitive language, concepts, and narratives. It gains control by vehemently asserting the rightness of its definitions while violently attacking any attempt to contradict its irrational assertions. This is where it reveals deep psychopathic tendencies and why it attracts psychopaths and the morally ungrounded. The key to leftist momentum and control is their control of metacognitive thought and language. If you disagree, you are ‘racist’, a ‘running dog’, a ‘reactionary’ and must be destroyed. The secret of all mind-control is control of metacognition such that victims cannot even think another way. ABN

How we perceive and what to do about it

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Human perception is massively based on human memory, expectations, and schemas already formed and present in the brain.

A recent study on visual perception came to this conclusion:

Altogether, these results show that many neurons in the medial temporal lobe signal the subjects’ perceptual decisions rather than the visual features of the stimulus. (Source)

This study is about visual perception and it focuses on neurons in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, but it’s conclusions have been discovered in many other studies—that is, we very often perceive what we already know or expect to perceive visually, aurally, verbally, semiotically.

Humans are capable of seeing new things and forming new conclusions and perceptions, but our default brain state is that most of the time we react to what we already think we know, consciously or unconsciously.

And how could it be otherwise? We could not function if we had to reassemble every pixel in a photo or our visual field every time we looked at anything. Same for sounds, sentences, concepts, and semiotics in general. If we are unable to quickly generalize and categorize something as something we already know about, we will find ourselves utterly lost in a maze of astounding complexity every second of our lives.

We cannot live without that default state, but when we use it during interpersonal communication we frequently run the risk of applying an erroneous “perceptual decision” about what someone is saying or about how we think they have heard us.

If you make erroneous perceptual decisions at a normal pace, which can be several times per hour, you will almost certainly begin to build up bigger and bigger wrong perceptions of the person you are doing it to. If that person is a spouse or close friend, you will have problems.

How do we usually deal with or work around problems of that type?

  1. We ignore them.
  2. We spend time away from the person.
  3. We get mad openly or seethe quietly.
  4. We resort to the simple generalities of basic friendship—shared activities, safe topics, declarations of loyalty or friendship.
  5. We believe or hope that mistakes will average out and not matter much.

In order:

1) If we ignore problems that arise from erroneous “perceptual decisions,” we are merely pushing them aside where they will continue to fester. Some people are truly able to completely ignore or forget, but do you really want to do that to your memory? And what replaces what you have forgotten? Isn’t it just another false “perceptual decision?”

2) This works to dilute feeling and perception, but not to improve or upgrade it. In most cases, this is a losing strategy with close friends.

3) Getting mad is better than most responses if you have the tools to fix the problem. Seething silently is a horrible way to go, though unfortunately a very common one. The worst of all is “not getting mad but getting even.” People who do this with friends are universally idiots.

4) Sad way to go but probably the most common halfway-decent thing people do. This describes most friendships and marriages. They become  sort of lifeless card games that go on and on because no one knows what else to do. And the longer they go on, the less likely there will be change.

5) I think this is an unrealistic belief because false perceptions can go off at many different angles. They don’t cancel out. At best, this belief may produce an outcome similar to item four above.

There is a way to handle these problems and that way is FIML. With practice, FIML partners will find that they have no festering false perceptions about each other and that they have not been forced to compromise the integrity and complexity of their relationship by resorting to any of the above strategies.

If you read about morality in books and essays, it is all usually very philosophical. What is it? What are the foundations of it? How does fairness contribute? Is it emotional? Cognitive? Non-cognitive? Etc.

But how do you do it? Not how do you do it in the big sense of politics or global warming or philosophy, but how do you do it with just one other person? Can you do that? Have you ever done that? Can you conduct a complex and moral relationship with even one other person?

I don’t mean just sex, though that’s in there. I mean everything. Can you get very, very clear about all of the complexities of your relationship with just one other person? How can you be psychologically healthy if you cannot? I think most people are stuck, at best, on level four above. The reason is not that they want that but that they do not see another way.

You absolutely have to do something like FIML. If you don’t, false perceptions will accumulate and lead to one of the five things mentioned above.

first posted SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown

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Abstract

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples’ sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that the participants reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation, also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Finally, participants who reported that lockdown influenced their life to a greater extent had higher occurrences of depersonalisation experiences. Our findings may help to address key questions regarding well-being during a lockdown, in the general population. Our study points to potential risks related to overly sedentary, and hyper-digitalised lifestyle habits that may induce feelings of living in one’s ‘head’ (mind), disconnected from one’s body, self and the world.

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I would strongly add to these findings that depersonalization during covid was and still is being caused by a plethora of enormous lies promoted by governments and mainstream news media. The lies about covid, covid treatments and non-treatments were serious and deadly but there were also serious lies about election theft, the Ukraine War, prosecutorial misconduct, government malfeasance and more. Our nation’s entire mental universe has been invaded and taken over by falsehoods, mind control, deception. How does anyone not lose their bearings in such an environment? I don’t mind adding that depersonalization seems very much to have been the desired result of an asymmetric war being waged against USA and the Western world. ABN

Bill To Legalize Psychedelic Mushrooms Advances In California Senate

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A bill to decriminalize hallucinogenic mushrooms cleared the California Senate May 24, reaching the halfway point in the state’s effort to legalize the drug, despite increasing opposition by law enforcement and many citizens.

“We shouldn’t be criminalizing people for personal use of these non-addictive substances,” Wiener said in a May 24 statement.

If passed, the bill would allow the cultivation, transfer, and transportation of fungi or other plant-based materials that can be used as ingredients for the drugs, according to the bill text.

Psilocybin is found in a variety of mushrooms and can be produced synthetically. The bill would only allow plant-based psychedelic drugs for use by people 21 years old and older.

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