A lot of psychology research is bullshit but the good news is you can run your own experiments and find out - same way you can run the code yourself, we don't have to trust any claims blindly
I do like these thoughts, but there are some significant problems. First, you are talking about a movie. Characters in movies are under no obligation to being depicted as experiencing realistic emotional or cognitive dynamics. This is extremely common in any film which depicts violence, doubly so for those which depict 'justified' violence. In reality, even the most righteous soldier or home protector is very commonly inflicted with deep trauma when they overcome their brains own desire to not enact great bodily harm on another human, but that doesn't make for cinematic violence which is what audiences want to see. They don't want to see how the hero is unmade by being the savior.
Rational understanding occurs in the linguistic and higher-order parts of the brain. Emotions are much lower-level and far more closely tied to the body and visceral experience. Specifically, emotions are conditioned responses which equate to predictions (not conscious predictions, but at the level of neuron activation thresholds being lowered in the associated nerves in response to a stimulus) in the brain of imminent bodily changes. In case studies of people who have experienced total facial paralysis, for example, it can be seen that shortly afterward they no longer find themselves getting angry (anger expression is primarily facial). Awhile after that, they find they can't subjectively recall what it felt like to get angry. Even later still, they lose the ability to recognize anger being expressed in the faces of others. Their condition essentially forced upon them an un-conditioning of the anger response. If the response is not reinforced by expression, or expression is consciously forced to be something different, the conditioning can be changed (although this can be difficult and take a great deal of time depending on many factors).
You can (most likely) experiment with this yourself without much difficulty. Rationally speaking it should be quite easy for you to conclude that there is no objective, reasonable justification for feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid of being nude or being seen nude by people you know and trust. So, have a discussion with someone else who might be like-minded and curious enough to experiment with this who you've never been nude with before. Sit down, fully clothed, and discuss whether you think it makes any sense for there to be any discomfort, disgrace, whatever. If you can come to a conscious, comfortable agreement with utter certainty that holding a conversation clothed and nude should feel precisely the same, disrobe and continue your conversation, paying attention to what emotions flow regardless of what decisions you made beforehand. They pass fleetingly enough, don't worry, after a couple minutes you'll wonder where that adrenaline dump and cortisol spike upon disrobing came from. After all, you figured it out and 'solved it' beforehand, right?
That verbal rational part of the brain and the emotional part generally do not talk. The emotional part is all based on associations, conditioning, and visceral experience. If you take two people, one raised in a family of naturists who attended naturist camps and beaches regularly growing up, and another who was shouted at and reprimanded from the time of being a toddler any time they were unclothed in the presence of others, who spent their life taking care to not being caught 'indecent' even around their family, and place them on a stage and 'pants' them (do not do this, it would be tremendously unethical) - one would be mildly miffed at most, while the other would experience an instantaneous and possibly life-long deep traumatic wound that would very likely cause intense life-altering PTSD.
Oh yeah, I 100% agree with this!! I think this is the key:
> That verbal rational part of the brain and the emotional part generally do not talk
So, I think you're right about "soldiers cannot avoid trauma regardless of any mental tricks they do". What I believe with great conviction, and which I think you agree with is, is that trauma forms because of *bodily* experience (which is the difference between the naturist comfort vs the discomfort with nudity in your example)
It's not about intellectual understanding, it's about having physical experience in that state, and then storing that memory. Intellectual understanding cannot override the physically stored reaction (it can fight it, but you'll still feel the feelings & trauma response). The thing that can update your "stored beliefs" are experiences.
Yes, I do agree with that. The situation with soldiers in particular who have been extensively trained to fire on reflex sets up a neurologically destructive situation where their whole life they are conditioned to not do harm, from biology through to social conditioning, but they are put in a position where they witness their body enacting harm faster than their conscious mind has opportunity to stop it. The control of ones own body and ones own body acting as result of self-directed brain activity is literally the core essence of what 'self' IS. It is some of the deepest, most destructive harm a human being can suffer, I think.
Somewhat related, and instructive, is interesting research being done with "virtual embodiment." If you haven't read about it before, you might appreciate checking it out. I'd also recommend keeping in mind the scenario of an action movie actor, walking into a real room, facing a real human being that they know, holding a real gun (loaded with blank rounds), firing it, witnessing the "blood spray" and the person "dying"... and he experiences no trauma. His intellectual knowledge that it is not real provides him with complete protection despite every sense feeding his brain with exactly the same sensory information an actual killer would experience. That is an interesting thing to account for in understanding the mind.
Footnote 2 aligns with my personal experience of trauma related to being a witness. No resolution and no realistic action plan resulted in a lot of epistemic foraging (as Karl Friston would put it). Unfortunately this led to "truth seeking" beyond my personal capacity. My instincts were overridden by the demands of the trauma response. Absolutely true that "making it to the other side" is not a guarantee. I consider myself lucky that eventually I was able find the pointers I needed to re-orient.
Considering this from a group level, I can see how a tendency to policies prioritizing "wanting to know the ugly truth" could lead to a overwhelming stagnation. Even while from inside, it feels like the only reasonable choice.
My experience with meditation stems from an obsession that started from this post titled Is Enlightenment Real? (https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/is-enlightenment-real-part-1). I then read The Mind Illuminated and binged everything I could about jhanas and Daniel Ingram's content. The previous paragraph from OpenTheory has Buddhist principles (tanha) which refer to a type suffering.
I also have seen the work of Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett who, to simplify, defines all emotions a prediction for energy requirements.
To combine these together, it seems that vasocomputation is the mind making a prediction and it's got a blood component to it. The mind releases compounds that cause tension in the body. (Hopefully I'm not over simplifying here.) And that can lead to suffering because you have physical symptoms from mental predictions, whether your predictions are true or not.
You won't find any citations here. I believe this because I can use it to make successful predictions. Which of course still means it can be "wrong" (in the same way all models are wrong), but the predictive power is real (from my POV).
I don't think you understood my claim though (which is good news, we may agree after all!) - I don't think the freeze response is set for life. It's set until you resolve it.
I think I skimmed that essay a long time ago but I found it not useful. You can verify the truth of this for yourself (find existing trauma, inspect it, resolve it).
"Citation needed" is a shortcut for "I would like to know how you came to that conclusion." It could use a bit more empathy.
It's probably better for me to ask for some more evidence. Perhaps you've got some other posts that led you to that conclusion and I've missed it.
Alternatively, maybe it's just a conclusion that you came to but asking might be useful.
My biases are also present in my reply. I just read "The Courage to be Disliked". The author claims that Alfred Adler denies all trauma. Freudian psychology is based on aeitology, i.e. there are traumatic causes that lead to your motivations, or determinism. In contrast, Adler focuses on teleology or present goals rather than past “causes”.
The example in the book is a Japanese shut-in that has anxiety / agoraphobia. Freud might say that he stays at home because he has a fear of society. Alder would say that he has the goal of staying inside - his motivation is to be special, receiving attention from his parents and avoiding going out into the world where he would be viewed as disappointingly average.
In your post, the two boys experience a trauma and need to "heal" from the trauma. In the Alderian framework, there is no trauma. They simply lack courage during one event and need to work on their self-confidence for future events. 'When the pressure is on, you don't rise to the occasion - you fall to your highest level of preparation.' -- Chris Voss
> Freud might say that he stays at home because he has a fear of society. Alder would say that he has the goal of staying inside
yeah, my bias here actually matches yours (more of the teleology approach). But it seems obvious to me that it isn't one or the other. And more importantly: we don't need to take these theories on faith, we can test them.
Human behavior responds to stimulus. When given an option, does the individual take it, or resist it? How big of an incentive (carrot or stick) does it need to be to trigger the action?
You can test these from the outside (on another human), and you can inspect it firsthand (on your own mind & behavior).
So for the Japanese shut-in that has anxiety about leaving their house, there's a few testable things about the theory here. Like:
> his motivation is to be special, receiving attention from his parents
if this is true, then finding a way for the person to be MORE special, to get 10x more attention than they currently get, if they go outside, will discern this. If they take it, then we were right about this being the primary of goal. If they still do not take it, then it suggests there's another reason.
There's often a pattern here where people will always come up with a justified reason, to avoid admitting the thing. We can test that theory: if it feels embarassing or painful to admit, we can make it less embarassing, remove the stigma, and see if he admits it.
(these examples are kind of sloppy but I think you see what I'm trying to say (1) take all the theories of human behavior (2) pick a specific action (3) see what all the theories predict will happen (4) see which ones lead to the desired outcome. And repeat)
If we can do A/B tests over millions of people (like tech companies infrastructure does) we can get ground truth very quickly on real human behavior
A lot of psychology research is bullshit but the good news is you can run your own experiments and find out - same way you can run the code yourself, we don't have to trust any claims blindly
I do like these thoughts, but there are some significant problems. First, you are talking about a movie. Characters in movies are under no obligation to being depicted as experiencing realistic emotional or cognitive dynamics. This is extremely common in any film which depicts violence, doubly so for those which depict 'justified' violence. In reality, even the most righteous soldier or home protector is very commonly inflicted with deep trauma when they overcome their brains own desire to not enact great bodily harm on another human, but that doesn't make for cinematic violence which is what audiences want to see. They don't want to see how the hero is unmade by being the savior.
Rational understanding occurs in the linguistic and higher-order parts of the brain. Emotions are much lower-level and far more closely tied to the body and visceral experience. Specifically, emotions are conditioned responses which equate to predictions (not conscious predictions, but at the level of neuron activation thresholds being lowered in the associated nerves in response to a stimulus) in the brain of imminent bodily changes. In case studies of people who have experienced total facial paralysis, for example, it can be seen that shortly afterward they no longer find themselves getting angry (anger expression is primarily facial). Awhile after that, they find they can't subjectively recall what it felt like to get angry. Even later still, they lose the ability to recognize anger being expressed in the faces of others. Their condition essentially forced upon them an un-conditioning of the anger response. If the response is not reinforced by expression, or expression is consciously forced to be something different, the conditioning can be changed (although this can be difficult and take a great deal of time depending on many factors).
You can (most likely) experiment with this yourself without much difficulty. Rationally speaking it should be quite easy for you to conclude that there is no objective, reasonable justification for feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid of being nude or being seen nude by people you know and trust. So, have a discussion with someone else who might be like-minded and curious enough to experiment with this who you've never been nude with before. Sit down, fully clothed, and discuss whether you think it makes any sense for there to be any discomfort, disgrace, whatever. If you can come to a conscious, comfortable agreement with utter certainty that holding a conversation clothed and nude should feel precisely the same, disrobe and continue your conversation, paying attention to what emotions flow regardless of what decisions you made beforehand. They pass fleetingly enough, don't worry, after a couple minutes you'll wonder where that adrenaline dump and cortisol spike upon disrobing came from. After all, you figured it out and 'solved it' beforehand, right?
That verbal rational part of the brain and the emotional part generally do not talk. The emotional part is all based on associations, conditioning, and visceral experience. If you take two people, one raised in a family of naturists who attended naturist camps and beaches regularly growing up, and another who was shouted at and reprimanded from the time of being a toddler any time they were unclothed in the presence of others, who spent their life taking care to not being caught 'indecent' even around their family, and place them on a stage and 'pants' them (do not do this, it would be tremendously unethical) - one would be mildly miffed at most, while the other would experience an instantaneous and possibly life-long deep traumatic wound that would very likely cause intense life-altering PTSD.
Oh yeah, I 100% agree with this!! I think this is the key:
> That verbal rational part of the brain and the emotional part generally do not talk
So, I think you're right about "soldiers cannot avoid trauma regardless of any mental tricks they do". What I believe with great conviction, and which I think you agree with is, is that trauma forms because of *bodily* experience (which is the difference between the naturist comfort vs the discomfort with nudity in your example)
It's not about intellectual understanding, it's about having physical experience in that state, and then storing that memory. Intellectual understanding cannot override the physically stored reaction (it can fight it, but you'll still feel the feelings & trauma response). The thing that can update your "stored beliefs" are experiences.
Yes, I do agree with that. The situation with soldiers in particular who have been extensively trained to fire on reflex sets up a neurologically destructive situation where their whole life they are conditioned to not do harm, from biology through to social conditioning, but they are put in a position where they witness their body enacting harm faster than their conscious mind has opportunity to stop it. The control of ones own body and ones own body acting as result of self-directed brain activity is literally the core essence of what 'self' IS. It is some of the deepest, most destructive harm a human being can suffer, I think.
Somewhat related, and instructive, is interesting research being done with "virtual embodiment." If you haven't read about it before, you might appreciate checking it out. I'd also recommend keeping in mind the scenario of an action movie actor, walking into a real room, facing a real human being that they know, holding a real gun (loaded with blank rounds), firing it, witnessing the "blood spray" and the person "dying"... and he experiences no trauma. His intellectual knowledge that it is not real provides him with complete protection despite every sense feeding his brain with exactly the same sensory information an actual killer would experience. That is an interesting thing to account for in understanding the mind.
Footnote 2 aligns with my personal experience of trauma related to being a witness. No resolution and no realistic action plan resulted in a lot of epistemic foraging (as Karl Friston would put it). Unfortunately this led to "truth seeking" beyond my personal capacity. My instincts were overridden by the demands of the trauma response. Absolutely true that "making it to the other side" is not a guarantee. I consider myself lucky that eventually I was able find the pointers I needed to re-orient.
Considering this from a group level, I can see how a tendency to policies prioritizing "wanting to know the ugly truth" could lead to a overwhelming stagnation. Even while from inside, it feels like the only reasonable choice.
Some interesting ideas, here.
Don't really have time tonight to unpack whether I'd encountered them before.
The Body Keeps Score is bullshit: https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/the-body-keeps-the-score-is-bullshit
I'm also not sold on this idea that your fight, flight, freeze response is set for life.
Therefore I'm going to have to ask for some citations on your opening claims purely from a skeptical perspective.
Side note, is vasocomputation on your radar at all?
Oh, very cool! I landed on an OpenTheory post (https://opentheory.net/2023/07/principles-of-vasocomputation-a-unification-of-buddhist-phenomenology-active-inference-and-physical-reflex-part-i/) and realised I'd been on the site before. Some background...
My experience with meditation stems from an obsession that started from this post titled Is Enlightenment Real? (https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/is-enlightenment-real-part-1). I then read The Mind Illuminated and binged everything I could about jhanas and Daniel Ingram's content. The previous paragraph from OpenTheory has Buddhist principles (tanha) which refer to a type suffering.
I also have seen the work of Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett who, to simplify, defines all emotions a prediction for energy requirements.
To combine these together, it seems that vasocomputation is the mind making a prediction and it's got a blood component to it. The mind releases compounds that cause tension in the body. (Hopefully I'm not over simplifying here.) And that can lead to suffering because you have physical symptoms from mental predictions, whether your predictions are true or not.
You won't find any citations here. I believe this because I can use it to make successful predictions. Which of course still means it can be "wrong" (in the same way all models are wrong), but the predictive power is real (from my POV).
I don't think you understood my claim though (which is good news, we may agree after all!) - I don't think the freeze response is set for life. It's set until you resolve it.
I think I skimmed that essay a long time ago but I found it not useful. You can verify the truth of this for yourself (find existing trauma, inspect it, resolve it).
I owe you an apology for a hasty reply then.
"Citation needed" is a shortcut for "I would like to know how you came to that conclusion." It could use a bit more empathy.
It's probably better for me to ask for some more evidence. Perhaps you've got some other posts that led you to that conclusion and I've missed it.
Alternatively, maybe it's just a conclusion that you came to but asking might be useful.
My biases are also present in my reply. I just read "The Courage to be Disliked". The author claims that Alfred Adler denies all trauma. Freudian psychology is based on aeitology, i.e. there are traumatic causes that lead to your motivations, or determinism. In contrast, Adler focuses on teleology or present goals rather than past “causes”.
The example in the book is a Japanese shut-in that has anxiety / agoraphobia. Freud might say that he stays at home because he has a fear of society. Alder would say that he has the goal of staying inside - his motivation is to be special, receiving attention from his parents and avoiding going out into the world where he would be viewed as disappointingly average.
In your post, the two boys experience a trauma and need to "heal" from the trauma. In the Alderian framework, there is no trauma. They simply lack courage during one event and need to work on their self-confidence for future events. 'When the pressure is on, you don't rise to the occasion - you fall to your highest level of preparation.' -- Chris Voss
> Freud might say that he stays at home because he has a fear of society. Alder would say that he has the goal of staying inside
yeah, my bias here actually matches yours (more of the teleology approach). But it seems obvious to me that it isn't one or the other. And more importantly: we don't need to take these theories on faith, we can test them.
Human behavior responds to stimulus. When given an option, does the individual take it, or resist it? How big of an incentive (carrot or stick) does it need to be to trigger the action?
You can test these from the outside (on another human), and you can inspect it firsthand (on your own mind & behavior).
So for the Japanese shut-in that has anxiety about leaving their house, there's a few testable things about the theory here. Like:
> his motivation is to be special, receiving attention from his parents
if this is true, then finding a way for the person to be MORE special, to get 10x more attention than they currently get, if they go outside, will discern this. If they take it, then we were right about this being the primary of goal. If they still do not take it, then it suggests there's another reason.
There's often a pattern here where people will always come up with a justified reason, to avoid admitting the thing. We can test that theory: if it feels embarassing or painful to admit, we can make it less embarassing, remove the stigma, and see if he admits it.
(these examples are kind of sloppy but I think you see what I'm trying to say (1) take all the theories of human behavior (2) pick a specific action (3) see what all the theories predict will happen (4) see which ones lead to the desired outcome. And repeat)
If we can do A/B tests over millions of people (like tech companies infrastructure does) we can get ground truth very quickly on real human behavior