Recalibration

I think I need to recalibrate what I want to read. I've now had several instances of looking at a book's summary and thinking "That sounds really interesting; I want to read it!" and then actually starting and going "No, no, DO NOT WANT".

It's important to note this isn't an instance of bad marketing copy; they're usually exactly what they claim they are-- it's just I have this self-perception that I really want to read Difficult Works With Heavy Abuse Underpinnings and every time I actually *try* to do so they're well-written, engaging, and horribly, horribly triggering such that I can't get more than a couple of chapters in.

This has now happened enough times that I think I need to stop and really interrogate whether I think I'm going to *like* a book before adding it to my list. And also think really hard about what causes me to like a book. (The book in question in this instance is "Still Missing" by Chevy Stevens, which I think Jessica Jones fans will really enjoy, as the villain appears to be basically Kilgrave without the superpowers.)

Empathy, In Meme

I saw a meme today that said that if you say to your child "That hurt Mommy's feelings" or "That made Mommy sad," you are teaching them to focus on the feelings of the people around them instead of their internal feelings and thus setting them up for codependency.

The problem here is that one is not necessarily equivalent to the other. As with many things, it's all about how you do it. If you *never* suggest to your children that the people around them, including parents, are humans with feelings, you raise children who don't have any ability to determine that other people have different feelings from them. As someone who has neurodivergences that make that a skill I learned later in life than most people, believe me, you are doing your children a favor by teaching it to them early. That is a *necessary* skill. (And as someone who's helped out in a preschool, they're not going to be able to have social lives if you're not actively teaching it.)

However, teaching them to focus on the feelings of the people around them to the exclusion of what they're feeling inside is indeed bad! The meme isn't wrong about that. It's just that Part A doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Part B.

It's possibly not a coincidence that this was shared by Circling Guy-- which brings me back to my questions about the circling movement in general, because I actually find it much more questionable now than I did when I first encountered it (and him) a couple of years ago, particularly since they don't seem to offer up a "not for people with trauma histories" warning label, and when I brought up "trauma history" to Circling Guy, this had never occurred to him as a possible thing to be dealing with, suggesting it's a community that's made up of a very specific demographic. He then went on to display that all that circling isn't actually giving him any better understanding of other people's emotions by suggesting that he'd be interested in trying circling with me if I could keep any emotional fallout from it to myself and not make him deal with it afterwards. Which seems to me like it sort of defeats the stated purpose of circling, quite aside from the trauma vampire aspects.

I've never done it, but one of my friends apparently did go to one of the circles once and said that when it's your turn you sit in the center of the circle and they ask "Yeah, but what are you *really* feeling?" over and over.

(Has anyone here-- particularly the psych professionals in my audience-- dealt with the circling movement? Do you have opinions on it? I've heard it classified as "oh, the rationalists have discovered feelings with the same disdain for prior art they give to everything else" which... seems not far off, honestly, but I've also only interacted with that one guy.)