Empathy, In Meme
Oct. 12th, 2020 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitI 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.)
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.)
no subject
Date: 2020-10-14 06:43 am (UTC)I mean, AA is far more a content group (there is a set curriculum of information to be imparted and prescribed emotional experiences to be invoked) than a pure process group like encounter groups. If its curriculum were full of valuable material that had a proven track record of creating meaningful change, like DBT’s is, it would be a valuable source of social support and useful information.
Alas, its curriculum was written literal decades ago and doesn’t reflect modern understandings of addiction, it promotes an unsustainable model of recovery, and it has no solid empirical record of helping its members overcome addiction, so its greatest value is as a social support group. Which is great, but not actually actual treatment. In Western Canada, rehabs have started advertising “Not 12 Step Based” since there’s been a lot of publicity about the method’s failings.
But, well, 12-step is cheap and Christian, so it’s gonna stick around for a long time.