What is roughness?

Love is that which enables choice

Jan 30, 2023

Category: Virtue ethics, group dynamics, hippie stuff

Epistemic status: My own views

Dall-e: “The path of ascension, a spiraling staircase made out of prismatic light, radiated by the brilliant light of love, digital art”

After writing my latest post, a lot of people have asked me how to make people smoother. Fuck if I know. I have some general ideas, but it’s very hard to tell how well they apply to others. It’s also not something that’s easy to put into a post. I know, because I have made two draft attempts that end up going nowhere.

I think I got stuck due to sloppy fundamentals. The smooth/rough framing is good for identifying the destructive pattern, but it’s not that conducive to actually helping people. The question “how do I make rough people smooth?” carries with it a confusion that blocks its own answer.

The confusion stems from the very model I presented in my last post. I knew it was simplified, but I still went ahead and used it as a basis for exploration.1 So, what’s the issue with the smooth/rough framing?

The problem is reification. Roughness is a relationship, not a character trait.

If we make “roughness” all about the person that people react aversely to, we turn blind to the ways rough/unskillful behaviour patterns involve multiple people. Let’s turn to some other perspectives that might be more useful :)

Conditioning

Your actions, perspectives, and experiences shape the person you are becoming. As a human, you are also open to interpersonal influences, with other people affecting who you are.

Patterns of behaviour spread from person to person through interpersonal influences. A sociopathic great-grandma can affect her great-grandchildren indirectly, trauma inherited from childhood to childhood.2 A friendship web with careless handling of vulnerability can form a cascading pattern where emotions are hidden and empathy withers away.3 This way, trauma and neurosis echoes through social connections.

The person you perceive as rough is acting out their conditioning, replaying old traumas and coping mechanisms. Most dysfunctional patterns you encounter are likely to be resilient to change, and unlikely to be improved by “standard” reactions such as irritation, judgment, etc. If a pattern is fixed by “normal” reactions, then it’s likely to die out quickly. Long-lived patterns are resilient.

If standard reactions spread patterns of “roughness”, we need to start reacting in non-standard ways. Reactions stem from conditioning. If you want to react in non-standard ways, you need to take charge of your own conditioning and train yourself to respond with more skill. My preferred framework for structured self-reconditioning is virtue ethics.4

Using virtue ethics, you can recondition yourself to respond in ways that don’t feed the rough patterns. If you embody virtue, you can inspire people by being a living example of healthy functioning.

But wait, there’s more! :D

IFS & Self-love

When I suffer from an inner conflict or act in ways that cause problems, I apply perspectives from Internal Family Systems. I view my cognition as being made up of different parts, with their own wishes, stratagems, and habits. Inner conflict happens when my parts don’t get along and start to work against each other.5

Parts that make a mess of things are usually doing the best they can. They mess things up because they formed in a different environment, and fail to adapt. Risk-averse parts are slowest at adapting, due to avoidance of trial-and-error. These parts tend to hide away their true intentions, using shame and fear to keep certain thoughts hidden inside "ugh fields".6

Risk aversion increase when parts feel threatened. Maladaptive parts that are under pressure don’t want to be vulnerable and honestly consider their options. They want to survive and lock themselves in short-term & low-risk ways of being. Getting them to move requires increasing their subjective safety, giving them space and confidence to engage in trial-and-error.

I increase my subjective sense of safety using self-love. By showering my maladaptive parts with love, I give them slack to explore new ways of being. Given a bit of breathing room and safety to experiment, maladaptive parts can shift their conditioning and get unstuck.7

Some parts are harder to change than others. The most resilient ones spend most of their time within “ugh fields”, only surfacing occasionally to make a mess of things. These parts can be uncovered using practices that make “ugh fields” go away. I’ve found Radical Honesty very helpful here. When I adopted it as a practice, and started facing the truth head-on, I made rapid progress in seldom-talked-about areas such as sexuality and social anxiety. Clearing away the ugh fields reveals maladaptive ways of being, allowing them to be tinkered with and resolved.

Now, what has this to do with roughness in groups?8

Internal Family Systems → Group dynamics

Internal Family Systems is all about applying group counselling techniques to inner work.9 This relationship goes both ways. Inner-work practices based on internal family systems might be useful when it comes to group settings.10 Is it possible to help others by adding honesty and love?11

My hunch is “yes!”.12 This idea resonates with a Twitter thread sent to me by a dear friend (check footnote=13), as well as experiences of "holding space" from hippie circles.

Showering someone with love increases their sense of safety, opening up for experimentation. Honesty works to bring about trust and does away with socially-enforced “ugh fields” that stunt many people’s development in “taboo” areas.

Many people that are perceived as “rough” are simply awkward as fuck.14 I've been there. I think of awkwardness as extreme risk-aversion which inhibits natural action.

Walking on a tightrope while looking down, fearing the fall. Being told to smile “like you normally do” while taking a photo. Being in a new social context, hyper-vigilant against minor mistakes. Defending against perceived slights and imaginary attacks.

Awkwardness closes down experimentation and trying out new ways of being. Getting out of awkwardness required me to practice vulnerability,15 and start loving myself. This was a basic skill that helped me with all the personal development that came after.

This “showering people with love”, reminds me of the Christian concept “Agape”16 Agape is the love from parents to their children, a kind of unwavering support that provides a framework for growing up.17 In Christian teachings, agape is what turns "lost sinners"18 into "whole beings". Born again, raised again etc.

This is relevant because getting hooked on “Jesus” has led to some quite remarkable transformations, with people “being saved”. In most cases, I assume Jesus uses some stand-in for the agapic administrations,19 an older convert that passes on the agape.20 It might be possible to skip the Jesus part,21 and just pump out the love.

Using virtue ethics, you can make sure that your love actually comes from within, and is not a pretence. This is an important aspect of honesty/authenticity, and therefore a sense of safety. Which is the entire idea of this approach.

Ending notes

There is a delicious paradox in this post. Loving someone means accepting them as they are, including the behaviours that trigger you. Loving someone because you want them to change seemingly goes against the whole “loving them as they are”.

This is an apparent paradox that crops up in a lot of discussions of self-love and non-coercion. It goes away as soon as you realize that happy and safe people are prone to go exploring. Giving someone the means of flourishing opens up a world of possibilities.

Love is that which enables choice.

Ontological sloppiness tsk tsk

Source. Please use the comments for any nature vs nurture debates

I couldn’t find any sources for this claim. I would be shocked if it wasn’t true. Inspired by:

Though I love virtue, I have a long way to go here. Last week I got mad at someone for writing that vegan soy consumption is a key driver for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. I wrote some sarcastic messages and left the group chat after a day and a half of anger. I am not a sage (IANAS)

if this is too woo for, you, check out this post.

Q: “What happens to the male chickens?”
A: “ugh…”

Note that this is a reasonable mechanistic interpretation of why MDMA therapy might be useful. MAPS seem to be going at it:

FDA has designated MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD a Breakthrough Therapy.

MAPS’ Phase 3 clinical trial of MDMA-assisted therapy demonstrated statistically significant improvement in PTSD symptoms after three sessions.
MDMA has been administered to approximately 1,700 human subjects with only one serious adverse reaction.

Guess three times ;)

If this is too woo for, you, check out this post.

Seems like a viable heuristic for inspiration at least.

Seems very reasonable, but here’s a source anyway: https://mind.help/topic/love/love-mental-health/

I picked up radical honesty & kindness for introspective reasons, great thing that they seem to improve the groups I’m part of.