I dont recall any notion of personal truths when i received CBT last decade.
There is a related aspect though, called ‘consider alternative interpretations’ roughly translated from Norwegian which i always found to cohere well with liberalism: An idea that your interlocutors intentions do matter, not our potential misreading of what they said—which has zero veridical purport.
Yes, CBT doesn't talk of 'personal truths' but of perceptions (thoughts/feelings) - under the explicit understanding that these are often fleeting, partly or wholly wrong, in mutual conflict, even in our own head (feeling/thought, good mood/bad mood), and need to be contexualised (I hate you sometimes.... and love you deeply)
Ah, so you did! Utter was not paying full attention. I'm just so used to strawman critiques of CBT - 'CBT says (dumb thing) so it's dumb'. To quote Lennon, 'I should have known better with a girl like you'.
Perhaps the therapist would be more correct if he refereed to it as a ‘personal conviction’ instead of truth, as we implicitly understand that holding conviction doesn’t necessary entail any justified warrant-unlike truth.
It is rather frightening to see even clinical psychology succumb to the vocabulary of post-modernism.
Could be - though it's not clear that this came from clinical psychology (as opposed to social worker/psychotherapy/counselling/nurse practitioner etc). No-one, nothing is perfect, but I think psychologists are doing a reasonable job resisiting the bull (Stephen Pinker, Pail Bloom, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt ...)
Unfortunately, there appears to be quite the methodological chasm between clinical psychology and the more scientific paradigms such as cognitive science and neuroscience which Paul Bloom and Steven pinker represent.
Clinical psychology is mainly split between a psychodynamic approach which tracks more along Freudian paradigm— which was and remains quite dubious and the more scientific behavioural approaches. In particular when it comes to social psychology, a significant ideological opposition to cognitive science, intelligence research etc has been documented.
I am very happy to hear that your “will to argue passionately for evidence-based epistemology and liberal principles of individual autonomy” is back as it is something that you do so well and that the world so needs. However, I can totally understand why you felt the need for a temporary retreat from such argumentation as, from my own experience, there seem to be so many potential ‘battles’ to be fought in defence of such principles that it can easily become overwhelming and lead to the sort of OCD and insomnia you mention. I find regular periods away from ‘the frontline’ to be absolutely essential in maintaining a healthy sense of balance. Glad to hear that you have once again found yours. Take care.
Ooh, I have a quibble with your main point here (first time for everything!). I agree that the language 'I don't recall saying that" etc is clunky and can be received as humouring-patronising - a maddeningly cheesy American therapy speak cliche. Really it's just a textbook example of a strategy - i.e. where the person's anger is based in a misconception (of what you said), point that out in a gentle way; 'Oh, I think there might be a misunderstanding here. It seems like you think I said/meant {xx} - if that's so, I can see why you are pissed off; I would be too. What I actually mean/think is {xx}'. If they persist, 'no, that's what you said', you respond with 'well tbh I can't remember my exact words, but I do know my mind, and this is what I think'.....and even, 'I get that's what you think I meant, but I do live in my own head, which gives me a unique insight into my own thoughts!'.
As with comedy, the delivery is an art, flexible according to speaker and listener - textbooks & flash cards can't do that. The method is a version of 'Non Violent Communication" - a great idea, but one that is (ironically) not always well communicated. Or at least it is a simple idea that takes a bit of wrangling to actually get right.
'Oh, I think there might be a misunderstanding here. It seems like you think I said/meant {xx} - if that's so, I can see why you are pissed off; I would be too. What I actually mean/think is {xx}'
This article hit home. We have a mentally ill daughter, and this is how we have been trained to talk to her so that we minimize psychotic episodes. It is called LEAP - listen, empathize, agree, and partner. This is to get past the anosognosia (a neurological and psychiatric condition where a person is unaware of their own mental or physical illness or deficit, often preventing them from recognizing symptoms, understanding the need for treatment, or acknowledging the illness itself). When we learned about it, my husband and I said - This is how we have to talk to the woke. The agreement part gets tricky because we don't agree with the delusion, yet we agree that her perspective is valid. It becomes so tedious. As I read this article, I just became tired.
That sounds incredibly hard and painful, Eileen. I have had to agree with and validate the beliefs and perceptions of people with brain disease - particularly dementia with lewy bodies - to keep them feeling calm and safe. They cannot benefit from being disagreed with or having the truth argued to them because they no longer have the capacity to consider or retain the information. It would be cruel and pointless to keep bewildering and frightening them. There is no justification for doing this to anybody who can consider that they might be wrong.
I agree. And yet to disagree with a person who cannot entertain that they might be wrong feels like talking to a thought-disordered brain. A loop. A rabbit hole. Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and essays. Your work stands out in the clutter and helps us so much with our other three adult children. Two of them are recent college grads. They are liberals with both progressive and traditional values intact, and they are pretty clear-headed. Thank you a million times!
As a retired member of the nuthouse staff, I agree with your critique Helen. But it is wise to find a soothing start when engaging with nuts or normals. Plus, while I too have publicly ranted at colleagues’ love of total relativism to guide their practice in nuthouses, there are (other) kinds of carefully set up “reflective practice” that are brilliant for creating rich new understanding and steps forward.
Well, I'm sure there can be respectful and honest approaches to conveying that you care about how somebody feels before getting down to the issues. I get very angry when people tell me they respect my truth. But people also seem to find me soothing in my manner. That's actually something of a problem. They tell me my voice, in particular, is soothing when I read my stuff, but I'm actually trying to convey a sense of urgency!
I “hear” you Helen (as they say)! What’s more I (think I) understand and even agree with all five of those sentences! Especially I agree that you address urgent problems so comprehensively that it can be all too soothing!!
Thanks! Interesting stuff as I think we are approaching the crux here of effective social philosophy in our practical modern world.
I think you see the answer as a continuous process of rooting out illiberalism. Correct?
That old balance between individual and societal responsiblity for our situation eh?!
I think I regard myself as an ex-democratic-soft-socialist and now a democratic moderated classical liberal (including the Christian values of individual human dignity and worth, love thy neighbour, judge ye not, human fallibility so I cant assume i'm right and impose on you - while defending myself against those who would impose on me.
Ok, fine and good to know. Economically (I'm a Econ/Stats joint honours UCL), I see that post WW2 Democratic social democracy tends towards an insatiable, increasingly inefficient State that eternally borrows more in its flabby weak essence and complacency. The fact the State now spends 45%+ of GDP and its never enough, is insane to me.
So i'm for big corrections/redistributions to the 'deserving' from the market (eg disabled benefits, education/medical for impoverished, environmental etc etc) but in a small State (in employment and the social re-engineering sense).
But does this classical liberal basis for society mean that minorities (let's say race but there are many) always have to swallow an unfair situation, because they suffer the flaws of the majority? (eg lack of real understanding, lack of awareness of their own biases, lack of empathy, motivated reasoning when challenged).
Yeah, we can only make things fair on the level of access. People with minority views cannot force everybody else to understand them. They must be allowed to express them and we can hope people will care enough to listen to them, but we cannot force them to. At the moment, in therapeutic professions, we have people trying to train everybody in one set of theories about what members of minority groups think and experience. When I’ve helped people push back at this in the workplace, black people have always been the most overrepresented in coming to me for help with that. Anti-racist training is worse for them because they don’t only have to be told what they think because of their skin colour, they also have to deal with everybody else being told this is their ideas.
Do you agree that a limit to the benefits of classical liberalism on minorities (eg race) is that it ignores what might be genuine systemic disadvantage? (eg unconscious bias of white-majority judges sentencing black people more harshly on average, or whatever).
I struggle to reconcile classical liberalism with
"The idea is that once a person has access, their success or failure is a result of their own efforts, talents, or choices, not because of a systemic disadvantage".
No, unequal sentencing is illiberal and needs overhauling.
I am actually writing a piece on the belief that all societal disadvantage is caused by an individual’s lack of hard work or ability right now. It’ll be out at the end of next week, I hope.
“For conservatives, personal responsibility is a particularly important value and so conservatives are prone to the opposite bias of assuming that nearly all disparities are a failure of personal responsibility rather than of social disadvantage. They too, generally concede that individual advantages and disadvantages exist and, indeed, the concept of meritocracy, which they typically support, is defined as a system which enables people to rise based on their own abilities and talents which relies on an acceptance of these as variable. However, conservatives frequently speak as though they believe that by studying hard, making wise career decisions and working hard enough, nearly everybody can achieve an equal chance of success. Thus, they tend to gloss over individual disadvantage, be sceptical of the existence of social disadvantage and speak as though we already have a fully functioning meritocracy and those who have not risen in it have only themselves to blame. In this, they are often reacting to the left-wing tendency to put too much responsibility on society and not enough on personal responsibility.”
(I’m not a classical liberal. I am a left liberal or what, in the US, would likely be called a liberal socialist)
Excellent thank you Helen...plus they have to live with the resentment caused against them in the majority population from anti-racist policies? (eg sense of two-tier)
I love your writing, I’ve loosely followed you since your audacious punking of academia with James and Peter came to light… can you reference a post or posts that walks through how you came to the conclusion that reality exists independent of those participating in it? I’m interested in how you reached that conclusion, as a lot of what you wrote here seems to hinge upon it.
Well, it might not. We might all make our own individual realities but if so that would be a reality that exists independently of the majority of us who don’t believe that.
If I might ask further… are you saying, “if we make our own reality then the reality that we do that is reality”..? This is reminiscent of “absolute truth exists because it’s contradictory to assert that there is no absolute truth” … making reality then something only accessible ‘via negativa’ - ie., when you exclude all that is unreal.
Seems elusively semantic, gives me cognitive dissonance.
I’ve thought and read about this a lot because it seems a kind of important epistemological substrate that has been often murderously over-leveraged throughout history.
I think is very interesting your comparison to such a smooth listening as way to talk to a child. Indeed, in condition of vulnerability, as in a therapeutic session, we all maybe need to be treated with extraordinary care as children. Makes sense. And also, makes sense if we want to be treated as adults, but this implying be responsible and have the spirit to support criticism and civil opposition. And it is actually good, I mean: only if I know that you are sincere in your judgements toward what I said, I can really build an interesting discourse with you, right?
Helen, your musings are like medicine that help keep me out of the nuthouse.
Hope you are feeling better and resting at home with a nice cup of tea by the time you read this. Take care.
I am! 😊
I dont recall any notion of personal truths when i received CBT last decade.
There is a related aspect though, called ‘consider alternative interpretations’ roughly translated from Norwegian which i always found to cohere well with liberalism: An idea that your interlocutors intentions do matter, not our potential misreading of what they said—which has zero veridical purport.
Yes, CBT doesn't talk of 'personal truths' but of perceptions (thoughts/feelings) - under the explicit understanding that these are often fleeting, partly or wholly wrong, in mutual conflict, even in our own head (feeling/thought, good mood/bad mood), and need to be contexualised (I hate you sometimes.... and love you deeply)
Yeah, that’s why I said it was claiming to be CBT.
Ah, so you did! Utter was not paying full attention. I'm just so used to strawman critiques of CBT - 'CBT says (dumb thing) so it's dumb'. To quote Lennon, 'I should have known better with a girl like you'.
😀 the most elegant retraction and compliment to HP! Nicely done, Utter!
Perhaps the therapist would be more correct if he refereed to it as a ‘personal conviction’ instead of truth, as we implicitly understand that holding conviction doesn’t necessary entail any justified warrant-unlike truth.
It is rather frightening to see even clinical psychology succumb to the vocabulary of post-modernism.
Could be - though it's not clear that this came from clinical psychology (as opposed to social worker/psychotherapy/counselling/nurse practitioner etc). No-one, nothing is perfect, but I think psychologists are doing a reasonable job resisiting the bull (Stephen Pinker, Pail Bloom, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt ...)
What's the basis of Pinker/Haidt etc's bull in your view?
Unfortunately, there appears to be quite the methodological chasm between clinical psychology and the more scientific paradigms such as cognitive science and neuroscience which Paul Bloom and Steven pinker represent.
Clinical psychology is mainly split between a psychodynamic approach which tracks more along Freudian paradigm— which was and remains quite dubious and the more scientific behavioural approaches. In particular when it comes to social psychology, a significant ideological opposition to cognitive science, intelligence research etc has been documented.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-57934-001.html The aforementioned article
I am very happy to hear that your “will to argue passionately for evidence-based epistemology and liberal principles of individual autonomy” is back as it is something that you do so well and that the world so needs. However, I can totally understand why you felt the need for a temporary retreat from such argumentation as, from my own experience, there seem to be so many potential ‘battles’ to be fought in defence of such principles that it can easily become overwhelming and lead to the sort of OCD and insomnia you mention. I find regular periods away from ‘the frontline’ to be absolutely essential in maintaining a healthy sense of balance. Glad to hear that you have once again found yours. Take care.
Ooh, I have a quibble with your main point here (first time for everything!). I agree that the language 'I don't recall saying that" etc is clunky and can be received as humouring-patronising - a maddeningly cheesy American therapy speak cliche. Really it's just a textbook example of a strategy - i.e. where the person's anger is based in a misconception (of what you said), point that out in a gentle way; 'Oh, I think there might be a misunderstanding here. It seems like you think I said/meant {xx} - if that's so, I can see why you are pissed off; I would be too. What I actually mean/think is {xx}'. If they persist, 'no, that's what you said', you respond with 'well tbh I can't remember my exact words, but I do know my mind, and this is what I think'.....and even, 'I get that's what you think I meant, but I do live in my own head, which gives me a unique insight into my own thoughts!'.
As with comedy, the delivery is an art, flexible according to speaker and listener - textbooks & flash cards can't do that. The method is a version of 'Non Violent Communication" - a great idea, but one that is (ironically) not always well communicated. Or at least it is a simple idea that takes a bit of wrangling to actually get right.
'Oh, I think there might be a misunderstanding here. It seems like you think I said/meant {xx} - if that's so, I can see why you are pissed off; I would be too. What I actually mean/think is {xx}'
Yes! Do that instead!
I’m a pretty agreeable person. And I’ve never realized how damaging it has been until it was too late.
This article hit home. We have a mentally ill daughter, and this is how we have been trained to talk to her so that we minimize psychotic episodes. It is called LEAP - listen, empathize, agree, and partner. This is to get past the anosognosia (a neurological and psychiatric condition where a person is unaware of their own mental or physical illness or deficit, often preventing them from recognizing symptoms, understanding the need for treatment, or acknowledging the illness itself). When we learned about it, my husband and I said - This is how we have to talk to the woke. The agreement part gets tricky because we don't agree with the delusion, yet we agree that her perspective is valid. It becomes so tedious. As I read this article, I just became tired.
That sounds incredibly hard and painful, Eileen. I have had to agree with and validate the beliefs and perceptions of people with brain disease - particularly dementia with lewy bodies - to keep them feeling calm and safe. They cannot benefit from being disagreed with or having the truth argued to them because they no longer have the capacity to consider or retain the information. It would be cruel and pointless to keep bewildering and frightening them. There is no justification for doing this to anybody who can consider that they might be wrong.
I agree. And yet to disagree with a person who cannot entertain that they might be wrong feels like talking to a thought-disordered brain. A loop. A rabbit hole. Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and essays. Your work stands out in the clutter and helps us so much with our other three adult children. Two of them are recent college grads. They are liberals with both progressive and traditional values intact, and they are pretty clear-headed. Thank you a million times!
As a retired member of the nuthouse staff, I agree with your critique Helen. But it is wise to find a soothing start when engaging with nuts or normals. Plus, while I too have publicly ranted at colleagues’ love of total relativism to guide their practice in nuthouses, there are (other) kinds of carefully set up “reflective practice” that are brilliant for creating rich new understanding and steps forward.
Well, I'm sure there can be respectful and honest approaches to conveying that you care about how somebody feels before getting down to the issues. I get very angry when people tell me they respect my truth. But people also seem to find me soothing in my manner. That's actually something of a problem. They tell me my voice, in particular, is soothing when I read my stuff, but I'm actually trying to convey a sense of urgency!
I “hear” you Helen (as they say)! What’s more I (think I) understand and even agree with all five of those sentences! Especially I agree that you address urgent problems so comprehensively that it can be all too soothing!!
Thanks! Interesting stuff as I think we are approaching the crux here of effective social philosophy in our practical modern world.
I think you see the answer as a continuous process of rooting out illiberalism. Correct?
That old balance between individual and societal responsiblity for our situation eh?!
I think I regard myself as an ex-democratic-soft-socialist and now a democratic moderated classical liberal (including the Christian values of individual human dignity and worth, love thy neighbour, judge ye not, human fallibility so I cant assume i'm right and impose on you - while defending myself against those who would impose on me.
Yes, I consistently oppose illiberalism.
Classical liberals tend to be continuous with libertarians and foreground freedom of markets. I am least liberal economically.
Ok, fine and good to know. Economically (I'm a Econ/Stats joint honours UCL), I see that post WW2 Democratic social democracy tends towards an insatiable, increasingly inefficient State that eternally borrows more in its flabby weak essence and complacency. The fact the State now spends 45%+ of GDP and its never enough, is insane to me.
So i'm for big corrections/redistributions to the 'deserving' from the market (eg disabled benefits, education/medical for impoverished, environmental etc etc) but in a small State (in employment and the social re-engineering sense).
But does this classical liberal basis for society mean that minorities (let's say race but there are many) always have to swallow an unfair situation, because they suffer the flaws of the majority? (eg lack of real understanding, lack of awareness of their own biases, lack of empathy, motivated reasoning when challenged).
Yeah, we can only make things fair on the level of access. People with minority views cannot force everybody else to understand them. They must be allowed to express them and we can hope people will care enough to listen to them, but we cannot force them to. At the moment, in therapeutic professions, we have people trying to train everybody in one set of theories about what members of minority groups think and experience. When I’ve helped people push back at this in the workplace, black people have always been the most overrepresented in coming to me for help with that. Anti-racist training is worse for them because they don’t only have to be told what they think because of their skin colour, they also have to deal with everybody else being told this is their ideas.
Do you agree that a limit to the benefits of classical liberalism on minorities (eg race) is that it ignores what might be genuine systemic disadvantage? (eg unconscious bias of white-majority judges sentencing black people more harshly on average, or whatever).
I struggle to reconcile classical liberalism with
"The idea is that once a person has access, their success or failure is a result of their own efforts, talents, or choices, not because of a systemic disadvantage".
No, unequal sentencing is illiberal and needs overhauling.
I am actually writing a piece on the belief that all societal disadvantage is caused by an individual’s lack of hard work or ability right now. It’ll be out at the end of next week, I hope.
“For conservatives, personal responsibility is a particularly important value and so conservatives are prone to the opposite bias of assuming that nearly all disparities are a failure of personal responsibility rather than of social disadvantage. They too, generally concede that individual advantages and disadvantages exist and, indeed, the concept of meritocracy, which they typically support, is defined as a system which enables people to rise based on their own abilities and talents which relies on an acceptance of these as variable. However, conservatives frequently speak as though they believe that by studying hard, making wise career decisions and working hard enough, nearly everybody can achieve an equal chance of success. Thus, they tend to gloss over individual disadvantage, be sceptical of the existence of social disadvantage and speak as though we already have a fully functioning meritocracy and those who have not risen in it have only themselves to blame. In this, they are often reacting to the left-wing tendency to put too much responsibility on society and not enough on personal responsibility.”
(I’m not a classical liberal. I am a left liberal or what, in the US, would likely be called a liberal socialist)
Excellent thank you Helen...plus they have to live with the resentment caused against them in the majority population from anti-racist policies? (eg sense of two-tier)
I love your writing, I’ve loosely followed you since your audacious punking of academia with James and Peter came to light… can you reference a post or posts that walks through how you came to the conclusion that reality exists independent of those participating in it? I’m interested in how you reached that conclusion, as a lot of what you wrote here seems to hinge upon it.
Well, it might not. We might all make our own individual realities but if so that would be a reality that exists independently of the majority of us who don’t believe that.
Ok, thank you for responding.
If I might ask further… are you saying, “if we make our own reality then the reality that we do that is reality”..? This is reminiscent of “absolute truth exists because it’s contradictory to assert that there is no absolute truth” … making reality then something only accessible ‘via negativa’ - ie., when you exclude all that is unreal.
Seems elusively semantic, gives me cognitive dissonance.
I’ve thought and read about this a lot because it seems a kind of important epistemological substrate that has been often murderously over-leveraged throughout history.
No answers here, only questions. Thanks again.
I think is very interesting your comparison to such a smooth listening as way to talk to a child. Indeed, in condition of vulnerability, as in a therapeutic session, we all maybe need to be treated with extraordinary care as children. Makes sense. And also, makes sense if we want to be treated as adults, but this implying be responsible and have the spirit to support criticism and civil opposition. And it is actually good, I mean: only if I know that you are sincere in your judgements toward what I said, I can really build an interesting discourse with you, right?