Empathy, In Meme

[writerkit]

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.)

Comments

[squirrelitude]

That sounds like it has the same shape as the "don't say sorry when you mean thank you" meme, often stated more strongly as "say thank you instead of sorry". It's something that *some* people need to hear, but not *others*, and it's bad advice if mistargeted. (And you can't generally target your advice on social media...)

[staranise]

I haven't been on Dreamwidth a lot lately so this is the first I've ever heard of Circling. Is that... did they just rebrand encounter groups? Is that what that is?

[writerkit]

I had never heard of encounter groups! Searching for "Circling" and "encounter group" together gets me links to history posts from people inside the movement that seem to suggest that the lineage of Circling is "encounter groups as mediated through Burning Man." Run by people who think Being Authentic as an end in itself is a viable personal goal.

[siderea]

This was exactly my thought too.

[siderea]

Okay, so, about encounter groups: all forms of group therapy and similar are wild magic. Potentially incredibly powerful and destructive, and usually controlled poorly, or not at all. There are better controlled forms of group therapy (DBT comes to mind), but absent other info, group therapeutics and group personal change thingies should be assumed to be pretty much opening up everyone to powers beyond mortal ken and just seeing what happens. Which, I have to admit, is kinda neat on the face of it, in the "this isn't going to be compassionate, but boy is it gonna be interesting" sort of way. Also, properly appreciated, blood-curdling.

I recommend envisioning, when one hears the phrase "encounter group", a group of people in black robes with hoods, standing around a salt pentacle on the floor, illuminated by a bunch of candelabras, doing the spiritual equivalent of wardialing other dimensions because they have nothing better to do on a Saturday night.

[staranise]

Yeah, I remember reading Irvin Yalom's textbook on group therapy during my training, and like, the dude loves group therapy (even though his approach is very hands-off and "let the process happen" in a way that felt like locking the participants in a cage for an hour and seeing who could still walk out) but was also like, "We tried doing group therapy for alcoholics, and then we stopped, because they got WORSE. The encounter groups were too raw and emotionally volatile."

I think, like with roleplaying groups, it really helps to have some good moderators in there to enforce rules and stop things from getting out of hand.

[staranise]

When I was doing my training almost a decade ago, they were being called something different I can't even remember (I've seen modern encounter groups called five different things in the last decade and they all blur together) in Vancouver, and the aspiration it gave clients was "to live without boundaries", which made my hair stand on end in fright.

I basically think there's a really strong culture of privileged people who want some kind of alternative practice to show them the shortcut to Deep Emotional Truths, who usually have enough money and a strong enough support system that their lives don't get totally derailed when they get sucked in by a cult. So they like experiences, like encounter groups, that remove all the safety restrictions off social spaces and take them out into the wild unknown. It's like the homebody's version of setting out into the Alaskan wilderness with only as many supplies as you can carry and seeing how long you last.

So honestly it makes so much sense to me that a) the evangelist you met seems to have had the euphoria and excitement of a newly-converted cult member, and b) your survival instincts were like NOPE NOPE NOPE.

[staranise]

Oh right I got so distracted by the Circling stuff I didn't get back to the main point.

I think with toddlers a lot of adults don't let kids know their cruelty hurt in an age-appropriate manner. When an adult doesn't react physically and just says dispassionately, "Stop. You're hurting Mommy," no shit the two-year-old won't believe them. That's not how hurt two-year-olds understand the world. So adults often find themselves resorting to ever-escalating levels of verbiage to try to convince their children of an emotional experience the child never really believes in.

It reminds me of the NPR articles about traditional Inuit parenting methods, not because I think Inuit culture is perfect or that the methods described have no downsides, but just because it's an entirely different paradigm of interacting with children that's a lot more suitable for the developmental level they're at.

[writerkit]

Interesting. I've been in group therapy, but I think it was one of the controlled ones-- we had skills worksheets and it bore some similarity to what I know of DBT, just targeted to the specific issue we were all there for. And we were prescreened and it was run by licensed psych professionals. (Well, one licensed professional and one intern getting her educational hours in.) And even then there were some incidents that in hindsight I can go "Yeah, that was probably not something they were anticipating happening, or even wanted to happen."

I'm probably going to wind up taking this information and writing a horror story about it.

[writerkit]

"Encounter groups didn't work for alcoholics" has some interesting implications for AA being the Gold Standard Of Rehab.

[writerkit]

And depending on how far you get with it you can still end up like McCandless this way!

I'm now mentally drawing lines between this and cultural appropriation of Native spiritual practices and the fluffier parts of the Pagan community.

[staranise]

Hahahahaha doesn’t it.

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.

[staranise]

I read one last year where vampires were running a cult in California promising immortality and an end to disease to Silicon Valley and Hollywood types, and there were “retreats” where they talked about the amazing rejuvenation powers of blood transfusions...

A pastel-coloured hell, forsooth.