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loserthree comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong Discussion
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My issue is that I don't have a good procedure in place for constructive blame: by default, when I blame myself for something mostly what happens is that I rehearse to myself what a terrible person I am without trying to figure out what I could do differently in the future (and then actually making sure that that happens).
Current theory: rehearsing to yourself or to other people what a terrible person you are is a natural, self-protective response to what seems like an impossible demand. Sometimes the demand actually is impossible, sometimes the demand is understood correctly and falsely believed to be impossible, and sometimes the demand is defensively interpreted as impossible because the reasonable part is felt to be not worth doing but it doesn't feel safe to just refuse it.
I think this analysis is helping me to break the cycle of rumination about being a terrible person because it lowers the intensity. It's much better than "you shouldn't think you're a terrible person"-- that just becomes another failure.
I'm not sure I follow. What demand?
This can be a response to any demand which is felt to be impossible.
Here's an example which is going to be a little vague because there's some privacy I want to maintain, but recently I demanded that someone not repeat the huge social mistake he'd just made. He started talking about what an awful person he was.
In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn't sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn't sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already.
Since then, he's apologized in a way which I think means he understands the issues and will do better.
This is very enlightening. I'm going to probe this by modulating my response to it, and see what I find. Thanks; one karma point feels insufficent.
I think a post on this (?and related) would be much apprecaited if you and/or someone with similar experience could put one together.
I fear you lost me agian. What is this evidence for?
I may write something up when I'm more sure that I'm right and have resolved more of my difficulties. At this point, I've toned down a lot of the self-hatred, but there's an underlying difficulty with doing much of anything that's still a serious problem for me.
That last sentence was mostly included because I imagined people wanting to know what happened next. However, it's also evidence that what I was asking of him wasn't as impossible as he initially thought it was.