I’m writing to let you guys know I’m running a Kegan stages-inspired online course Sept 14–Oct 12. It’s called The Subject-Object Move.

People get stuck in problems all the time because what they *see* as the problem isn’t the *actual* problem. (e.g. I just need to work harder! I need this person to understand me! Why is everyone getting in my way!)

Meanwhile, the thing actually driving the problem is still “subject” - you’re looking through it (being controlled by it, under its spell) rather than at it (where you can make changes).

So with some subject-object moves, you might go:
“I need her to listen to me!”
-> “Oh, I compulsively want everyone to like me”
-> “Wait, in this situation, this person’s opinion of me genuinely doesn’t matter”
-> “I no longer feel triggered by this at all”

The whole course is basically us getting reps in doing this move over and over. Compassionately noticing the thing under the thing under the thing. Until mysterious behaviors and stuck patterns start becoming visible and workable.

“I’m procrastinating” -> “What am I actually avoiding?”
“I need this to go well” -> “Wait wut, why does this feel necessary?”
“This is just how it is” -> “Huh, how did I conclude this?”

Starting basic (e.g. “I notice I’m angry”) and moving into progressively deeper and deeper layers.

There’ll be a WhatsApp community and optional weekly Zoom Q&A. I think it’s going to be super fun!

Because September 14 is fast approaching and I want to get a headcount and start making plans as soon as possible, I’ve made an early bird discount that ends TODAY. So if you’re in, be sure to sign up before the day’s end!

Link to learn more and sign up is here: https://annpierce.com/som

Hope to see you in the course!

Just wanted to send an update about a few projects I launched recently:

Book of Kegan

Maybe you’ve heard of Robert Kegan’s stages of adult development (“the Kegan stages”)? This is a psychological framework I’ve been obsessed with lately.

I realized I couldn’t find one resource that explained it clearly, so I made my own at bookofkegan.com.

I also published a couple of blog posts there:

Stage 4.5 nihilism (my story)

People ask me how I became so obsessed with the Kegan stages. This is that story. It will also explain a state that David Chapman calls “Stage 4.5.”

The way out of ‘Stage 4.5’ nihilism

A Q&A for people experiencing a breakdown of meaning between Kegan stages 4 and 5.

Since this is a bit of a niche interest, my plan is to gather these Kegan-related posts into digests (as opposed to emailing you about every one), so I’ll let you know if there’s a bunch more!

Harp AI

In 2024, I made some AI tools for navigating interpersonal conflict. They were okay, but the AI-generated assistance often failed in annoying ways. Since AI’s capabilities have expanded so much, I fed Claude the old Flutter files to bring them back to life.

The tools are based on my original research, and I think they are deceptively powerful for how simple and quick they are to use.

It would mean a lot to me if you gave them a try and let me know what you think. (Once I iron out the kinks, I’ll lean on them more as a resource.)

In some ways I’m more excited about negative feedback than positive (what steps felt hard or confusing? in what ways was it disappointing?), so please do not be shy! You can write me here, through Twitter, or by email (hello@annpierce.com).

There is more in my pipeline to share, so I’ll be in touch again soon!

-Ann

P.S. Yes, the main photo is AI.

While my 10-years-long marriage was breaking down, I was caught in a spiral of “how to make him understand.”

The books I read about communication in marriage gave these very prim and proper step-by-steps that did little more than mask our critiques of each other in therapy language.

We tried couples therapy, but this turned into a “rig the jury” situation which was about choosing the therapist that believed our version of reality. The first one didn’t sympathize with my ex, nor the second with me. The third was spotty, sometimes aloof; she scolded my pleas for structure in a kindergarten sing-song voice.

I sent him text messages. Sweet messages about our future children, angry and self-righteous messages speculating about his psychological condition, long bullet-pointed justifications, sad pleading messages to PLEASE JUST HEAR ME, THEN I’LL DO ANYTHING YOU WANT FOREVER.

Even after we separated, even after the divorce papers were filed, I couldn’t stop searching my mind for those magic words that would make him see. Make him care. Restore his love. Return me to wholeness.

I eventually regained sanity, channeled my despair into intellectual curiosity, and figured out a lot of stuff. The following is one of the most important pieces.

Objectivity

Truth is a virtue.

Seeking truth pays off in prediction power. The more accurately you can model the world, the more accurately you can predict it. This is the foundation of science and technology.

There’s a paper lying on my desk that’s 8.5” x 11”. That’s objectivity. It is true no matter who is measuring it. Our shared material world lends itself to scope, measurement, and replication.

But when you try to measure someone’s internal experience, you change it/them. An example is self-fulfilling prophecies: if you believe something, you then create it, making the original supposition look like truth. e.g. If I believe I am unwanted in a group, I will self-exclude or act cagey or aggressive, until I become an outsider.

What’s worse is language is the measuring tape we use to quantify our internal experience. This forces categorizations that never feel perfectly true or false (like I can say that an experience was “positive” and simultaneously feel like there were sad or regrettable parts).

And because words are just abstractions, their meanings fluctuate person-to-person. The constellation of meanings in your head that you’re trying to point to with a word or phrase are not universal. Like maybe when you said you wanted a “chill time,” you meant you didn’t want to plan ahead or stick to a schedule, but the other person heard something akin to, “They want to have a quiet, slow experience.”

I’m not saying we can’t observe patterns and probabilities related to people and their experiences, but there is error baked into our understanding of each other.

Subjectivity

Your brain is your interface to the world. Your brain is the apparatus you’re thinking with. You can’t out-think it; you *are* it.

Our brain employs many heuristics, and these give us the illusion of more objectivity and processing power than we have.

For example, your eyes are not cameras; what you see is largely made up. If you’re looking at a complicated cityscape, most of what you see isn’t real - it’s a patchwork of cached images you’ve seen before, inserted by your brain based on prediction. You only actually “see” the objects in your direct focus.

Your ears are not microphones. Your brain edits and interprets sound - like how the sound of your hair rustling against your ears is filtered out so you don’t hear it.

Your mind is not a computer that processes inputs uniformly. Your mind filters and interprets information based on threat and desire.

This affects your attention - what you notice, what you don’t. This is how ten people can go to the same parade and leave with wildly different impressions of it: one focused on the structural integrity of the floats, another the music and dancers, another the beauty queen waving from the car. You can leave feeling offended, inspired, connected - depending on what you focused on and the meaning you gave it.

Where we direct our focus determines what we see → which determines what we believe/the meaning we make → which determines what we predict → which determines what we see.

People express shock about social media algorithms manipulating reality through attention, but our brains naturally work like this.

Or like the old adage: we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Finally. The real kicker (or at least it was for me):

Our working memory can only consciously hold around four chunks of information at a time.

Four! Chunks! Of! Information! At! A! Time!

Imagine that every decision ever made in human history was limited to such a tiny context window of conscious awareness.

And that’s at our best (healthy, well-rested, etc.). Tired, stressed, sick people make do with less.

Should I leave my partner? Well, I’m starting to feel really dissatisfied. I remember feeling this way three months ago, around the time we had that talk about time management. I don’t want to be this person who is jumping from relationship to relationship, but my friend said when it’s right you “just know.” Boom. Threshold reached. Just try to hold more concepts than this without dropping one. If you’re smart, you’ll start condensing them and writing them down, so instead of 4 “trees” you’ll be looking at 4 “forests.” But notice how your mind wobbles and seeks focus.

So even if we are thinking “objective” thoughts (e.g. measuring a chemical in a lab), we can never shake that it is *us* thinking them - an animal whose brain filters for what will help it survive, seeing predictions in place of physical reality, orienting largely by feel, from our tiny conscious workspace.

This is subjectivity.

We don’t even see it, because we are fish and this is the water we’re swimming in.

Switching

I did this mental exercise that messed me up.

Until then, I thought I could train my mind to hold opposing views at once.

I had just seen the movie Bonhoeffer and was stewing on its moral message. After reading others’ takes about the film, I decided to sit for a while with my eyes closed, observing opposing arguments in the same moment, allowing for ways they could all be true at once.

There’s a popular metaphor about some blind men and an elephant. The blind men are all touching the elephant. One has its tail and declares, “an elephant is like a rope.” One had its tusk and says, “no, an elephant is like a spear.” One at its side argues, “no, an elephant is like a wall.” All of them are correct. It’s just that each man has a limited range of focus, and the elephant is so big. As with our tiny brains and big, complicated world.

So I thought, maybe my disagreement with the other people who saw Bonhoeffer isn’t actually a disagreement. Maybe it feels like we’re disagreeing, but we are all saying true things about a larger whole.

After all, you see it all the time. One person tweets something like, “Don’t think, just trust your body knows what’s right.” Another tweets, “Stop and consider whether the decisions you’re making today actually align with your values.” Are only one of these takes correct? No, they are probably both true - for different people or situations. It’s like they disagree at human scale but agree in the grand scheme.

So I sat there, eyes closed, trying to expand my conscious awareness enough to see how all of these opposing views on Bonhoeffer could be right - but it was uncomfortable. After a few minutes, I felt something really weird and remember thinking, “My brain is out of RAM. I’m powering down.” For the next couple days, I experienced what psychology calls “derealization.” I worried I’d seriously injured myself.

This was the last straw.

-

Post-divorce, my first research rabbithole was about empathy. Empathy means taking the point of view of another person, with both your heart (affective empathy) and mind (cognitive empathy).

I quickly learned that cognitive empathy is computationally expensive for our brain. What’s much easier - kind of an 80/20 for empathy - is emotional validation.

Emotional validation means expressing acceptance and compassion toward people’s emotional reactions, even if you disagree with what that person says or does. This calms people quite a lot, promoting cooperation, and is absolutely worth practicing in any and all situations.

But I noticed that, in more charged interactions, people still really, really, really wanted me to AGREE. Not just with how they were feeling, but with their logic, what they believed to be true, their model of the world.

But you can’t always agree. Sometimes someone wants you to agree with a thought or belief or decision that hurts you. In that case, agreeing with what they say feels dangerous. It is very difficult to move toward an idea as your body and mind shouts NO STOP DANGER AGHHHH.

Fortunately, I figured out the way to solve this problem:

“Agree” and “disagree” presume one shared reality. e.g. We are both standing in the same place, pointing at the same thing, making judgments about it. This is true for material reality, like the ever-8.5” x 11” sheet of paper. But when you’re talking about thoughts, beliefs, feelings - we are in two separate worlds, using an imperfect shared language to try to point at the structure of our experience, but often failing to see the same thing.

And so, our multiple perspectives are best conceptualized as frames. Frames are human-sized lenses through which to see. Like an actual picture frame, our frames can only encompass a small bit of the world at a time.

Up until my Bonhoeffer experiment, I thought it must be possible to create a super-frame big and complex enough to hold paradox. But now I know that the brain has hard limits on the amount of complexity it can hold at once, and that the answer instead is switching between frames.

Switching frames - back and forth, or cycling among many - is how we can safely relate to each other. That is, how we can relate to others without losing our own perspective or failing to protect ourselves.

-

There’s a concept called “the wisdom of the crowd.” Research says if you ask a lot of people a question, their answers in aggregate will out-perform even highly specialized individual experts’.

So like the blind men, we intellectually benefit from aggregating the views of other people to see the whole elephant.

Or, in the absence of others, we need to remember that truth and wisdom don’t come from standing in one place, looking in one direction.

You can’t expand your brain’s tiny context window to see the whole world at one time, but you can pick up a frame that shows the elephant’s tail, then swap it for one that shows the elephant’s tusk…

At any given time, someone needs to be told to be more yin or more yang, to explore or to exploit, to give or to take. You can only do one at a time, but you need both - at different times, in different situations.

By switching back and forth between opposing frames, or cycling through many varied ones, we become savvy to nuance and complexity.

Are we capable of pure objectivity on subjective topics like philosophy, morality, or justice? No. But intersubjectivity - seeing things from many sides - is the closest we can hope to get. This is wisdom.

Lies

Even lies can be useful frames.

A lie meant to obscure someone’s true thoughts or feelings can still help you understand them better. And you can hold it lightly, because it’s just a frame after all!

Sometimes people have squished themselves so long into one frame that they need an especially aggressive counter-frame to crack them back into alignment - like switching from “the lower the number on the scale, the higher my worth” to “fatter is more beautiful” to settle the nervous system for a while.

Threat, Desire, and Resolution

I mentioned before that the mind naturally filters what it sees based on threat or desire.

Arguments are all about threat.

Arguments happen when what you’re saying is perceived as threatening to each other’s safety, self-concept, or deep desires. (I say “each other’s” because it’s never just one person alone, or else the thing would quickly fizzle out. It’s the threat-against-threat that escalates a disagreement.)

Some threat is very real! e.g. There’s likely someone on this planet who would chop you into little pieces if given the chance. There are many more whose closely-held desires would bump against your own in the context of a friendship or marriage or business partnership.

But if expressing care for someone’s emotions (emotional validation) takes you like 80% of the way from a would-be fiery argument to a kind conversation or calm collaborative problem-solving…

I’d say that the ability to hold someone’s frame, see the concerns in it (or ask questions until you do), and express care for those concerns will get you virtually as far as agreeing would.

And you can keep yourself safe by knowing you will soon be putting down their frame and returning to your own, where your own threat or desire is accounted for.

I’m not saying that every situation calls for this or that you necessarily owe everyone your time and attention, but these are incredibly powerful tools. And when used reciprocally, they will strengthen any type of relationship.

All you need to remember is that the truth in front of you is never complete… there’s always more than you can presently see.

*

FAQ

Q: Tactically, how does “switching frames” deescalate conflict? Do you have a toy example?

A: It’ll look different if you’re just trying to deescalate a one-off interaction vs. in the context of a relationship.

If you’re in an argument with someone at a party, you can calm yourself with the knowledge that you don’t have to compromise your own perspective for theirs. You can even jot down a few quick notes to yourself, so you remember your own frame later. Then turn your curiosity towards their frame - either by pondering to yourself or by asking them gentle questions. You’re not trying to understand their logic as much as their underlying concerns. Just like, in their anti-polyamory frame, what are they afraid of, what do they want? Are they concerned they’ll never feel special? That their partner will find someone they love more? Acknowledging those fears will calm the person down, so you can maintain civility. And you’ll come to understand their patterns of thinking better.

In a relationship, this can be a spoken, agreed-upon thing. You can take turns applying curiosity to each other’s frames, knowing you’ll both have a chance to be heard. That it’s not a contest about who is right - both frames get to exist. The important part is acknowledging each other’s underlying fears and desires.

Q: “Switching frames” comes across as intentional and conscious. How do you see the subconscious factoring into it?

A: I think of it as a conscious thing - especially in conflict but even day-to-day. Like I keep a collection of frames (in a text doc) I can cycle through to help me make a decision. Often, these frames are opposites. Like I can give my mind the frame of: what’s the absolute worst that can happen, and if I’m assuming that it will, how will I recover? Then I can switch to a frame of: what evidence do I have that everything is fine actually, or the things I’m worried about aren’t real? It wouldn’t be possible to think through both of these at the same time, but by taking turns with them I can cover an enormous amount of ground. Talking to other people can also naturally do this, because they’ll surface frames that aren’t top of mind for you.

It seems to me that the brain prefers simplicity/stasis by default, so it takes effort to redirect your attention from one frame to another.

However, you’re always training the subconscious. So your conscious thoughts get filed away and become your future intuition. And whatever you do repetitively eventually becomes automatic. So when a new frame is presented me, I find that I naturally “test” it (by flipping it to an opposite statement) to gauge how truth-y it is or to look for edge cases. When you can train this into your subconscious, it takes less of your working memory, so your powers compound.

The most hellish looping arguments are actually misunderstandings at their core.

To be understood, know this:

People often aren’t saying what we think they're saying. Language fails us because, in truth, we’re just throwing symbols at each other. When you first learn a word or phrase, you don't just store the dictionary definition of it. You hear it in context: the person who said it, what you think *they* meant by it, how others responded. This is cultural. For example, in the US, the word "penny-pincher" has a negative connotation i.e. is considered an insult when used to describe someone. But it's also individual: the word "marriage," for example, might point to different concepts in your brain than in mine. Like maybe I think of marriage as a stuffy legal formality, whereas you think it's the step a couple takes before having kids. Therefore a sentence like "marriage is important" can mean entirely different things to different people. I might respond to it with a question about tax advantages; you might interpret this as me prioritizing money over family.

We interpret actions differently too. e.g. If you’re throwing up, I might think I’m doing you a kindness by giving you privacy, whereas you might think I'm abandoning you. This is why you always want to get clarification before assuming the worst of someone.

The anatomy of a looping going-nowhere argument is repetition without clarification. If someone is repeating themselves, it’s time to define your terms.

In a perfect world, we’d all have mutual curiosity for each other - seeking to understand each other, being slow to jump to conclusions, collabing through clarifying questions.

Mutual curiosity is not always accessible, though, and here’s why. Under most heated arguments that go on and on, at their deepest root, is really a question of whether we are Good (moral, worthy, deserving of love) or Safe (from harm). People on Twitter aren’t vehemently arguing whether "sex is a need" because they’re interested in semantics. For some, saying "sex is a need" qualms fears and insecurities (that asking for sex is unreasonable, or that wanting it makes them bad). For others, it does the opposite (inflaming the fear that if sex is a need it means I owe it, or that not needing it means I'm broken). And so thousands of people end up in a going-nowhere argument about the definition of a word, fighting as if something is at stake.

From a young age, we build elaborate armor around our insecurities. If I think physical attractiveness = Goodness, I’ll continually seek affirmation that I am attractive or could become so. To learn that my Goodness does not hinge on being super attractive would be a WHOLE ORDEAL involving corrective experiences, grieving my past, relearning who I am, doing life differently. To avoid the pain of all that unraveling — and especially the initial terror of "WHAT IF I AM ACTUALLY [thing I think means I'm Bad]?" — when I come across an issue that is a proxy for my insecurity, my brain will helpfully bolster my confidence that I Am Right and blind me to opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, we all have insecurity like this, whether it's about intelligence, competence, earning potential, being a good friend, or whatever else.

There's also an incentive to obscure our feelings socially, which makes understanding and being understood all the more difficult. That's partly because it's not safe for everyone to know our deep fears and insecurities, and partly because, in much of society, emotions aren’t well-understood. When emotions aren't given their proper place, we end up with a strange kind of pseudo-intellectualism where care is earned by being “right.” Consequentially, people attempt to package strong feelings into logical arguments - consciously or unconsciously hoping that this will win them care and concern. But sound logic is hard and not always compatible with expressing emotions! And many people won’t recognize when an "argument" is actually a bid for comfort or connection. So instead, intellectual-speak begets intellectual-speak: litigative questioning, corrections, *other people's* pseudo-intellectual counter-arguments covering for *their* tender emotions. Not care, not concern, not love.

Where clarification isn’t possible or effective, the best thing you can do for yourself and others is to give up and look elsewhere. I hear talk about "finding your people," but I don't think it's ever stated urgently enough. Finding a safe person to confide in is the answer to almost any question. Safe people don’t have to scale psychological mountains to understand your POV or affirm that you are Good. Find people like this, with whom it’s safe to explore even the hidden truths about yourself, and watch your tolerance for maddening looping arguments wither away.

See/share the tweet version of this essay here.

If you want to fight less in relationships, work on your self-esteem.

But keep in mind that the way to increase self-esteem is... through relationships. Breaking it down:

Disagreement in a relationship is normal and healthy. Disagreements don't have to become fights. The way disagreements escalate into fights is when one or both people feel threatened.

Some people are characteristically threat-sensitive, though, which means they might see threat that isn’t actually there. Or their response might be out of proportion to reality. Threat-sensitivity is typically caused by deep insecurity or fear.

People with low self-esteem are unstable in the sense that they’re always looking for something to prop them up - like a chair with broken legs. Fears of unworthiness or abandonment make us feel urgently over-exposed and vulnerable. So we want to hide, fix, or forget our (real or perceived) flaws. (Or more broadly numb out emotionally. Or more broadly dominate others to feel in control.) But these strategies all require continual effort and vigilance - which requires focusing on and feeding the insecurity and fear. They have you walking around covertly monitoring “Am I good? Am I okay? Do I belong?” And this sets the mind on a quest to SEEK evidence that you are bad, not good enough, or don’t belong. Even in places where it might not exist.

This is especially unfortunate because "good" and "bad" are highly contextual. Are you a "good" match for this guy on Hinge? Are you "good enough" to charge $10K/hr as a freelance deep-sea diver? There is no way to reach a positive blanket conclusion outside of heavily shielding or gaslighting yourself.

And as long as your attention is consumed by whether or not you're good enough, you don’t have any leftover attention for other people. So to the degree that you are worrying about yourself, you are prone to misunderstanding, triggering, or abandoning others to that same degree.

To see the way out of this knot, consider the extreme example of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)... People with BPD didn't have an attuned caregiver at an important developmental stage in their childhood. That means, when they were sad, there wasn't someone there mirroring their sadness back to them, saying words like "aww poor sad baby" in a sorrowful tone. This is the primary way that human beings learn to mentalize -- which means to feel and understand their own feelings, and consequentially have a model from which to understand and relate to other people. Okay so here it gets super friggin crazy: people with BPD, as a result of having never learned to mentalize properly, DON'T HAVE A STABLE SENSE OF SELF. Rather, they take on other people's feelings as their own and vice versa. While everyone in the world struggles to truly empathize with people that are different from themselves, people with BPD struggle the most to make sense of why others are not sharing their exact thoughts and feelings or behaving in the precise way that they expect. And chaos follows. Intense mood swings, reckless actions, viewing things in extremes, and above all, an overwhelming fear of abandonment. Like a rudderless boat that's swept away by any gust of wind, frantic and desperate for safety. Chaos and misery are what happens when someone doesn’t have a strong sense of self. And a strong sense of self comes from… a loving relationship.

They say "you shouldn't care what people think." I think that's false. I think that's gaslighting that sets humans up to fail. After all, what do words like “worth” or “belonging” even *mean* except in relation to a tribe? Sociologist Charles Cooley said: "I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am." Humans are social animals. Would we tell an ant or a bee that it doesn't matter what other ants or bees think?

What's truer is something that's hard to hold in your mind all at once: There needs to be a "you" inside your mind that is differentiated from others, that is seen to possess goodness and value, and that belongs here on earth with other people. And that one-of-a-kind, worthy, belonging "you"... is learned by seeking out the particular kind of people and experiences that will complete the developmental milestone that unlocks a sense of safety in yourself. A safety unlock that I will call "self-worth".

Self-worth boils down to acceptance. It's the idea that there is *not* something defective about you that means you need to try harder than others to be worthy of love. It is the realization that - actually - your problems are not unique to you. There are a lot of people on earth, and you are one of them. You are normal and okay. You may have just gotten a bad break at a particularly sensitive time which resulted in a mental pattern of unworthiness. You may even be putting yourself in situations that replay and reenact this.

Experiences known to build self-worth: sharing vulnerable thoughts and feelings with someone who listens and cares. Beginning to notice and accept feelings (yours, others). Attuning your life decisions to what brings you joy -- especially as it relates to people and communities.

People with high self-worth develop a superpower for seeing the world as it truly is, because they are no longer running scripts to shield themselves from it. Rather than clinging to rigid ideologies or gaslighting themselves, a high self-worth person has mental flexibility. Which comes in handy when empathizing with other people, who will inevitably have different frames of reference for viewing the world.

People with high self-worth are no longer confused about where they end and another person begins. So rather than frantically grasping at others for safety, they experience a "someone" inside their own mind who can provide safety in between positive encounters with other people. A "someone" who is capable of seeing and loving another someone.

If you seek external validation without first developing self-worth, it doesn't stick, because there's no stable "you" for it to stick to. Self-worth is the groundwork upon which healthy self-esteem becomes possible. It puts you in the game. And once your internal thermometer is returning accurate readings, it's much easier to run the necessary experiments to: develop skills, accumulate resources, or face any other earthly challenge.

Overcoming challenges, then, creates the memory of success (self-confidence). Plus it makes you exceedingly useful to others. And there is no greater reinforcement of one's value than service to others. This is self-esteem.

And so it goes: loving relationship -> self-worth -> self-esteem -> loving relationship. And on and on again.

A conflict is a disagreement. Not all disagreements escalate into fights.

Fights are caused by threat (real or perceived). Some people are more threat-sensitive than others and will even read into neutral situations to see threat -- especially related to a core insecurity or fear. People who are highly threat-sensitive can be scary and controlling, but it comes from a tender and hurt place. Still you should probably steer clear of them if you don't like fighting.

The most ubiquitous threat most of us encounter day-to-day is invalidation. Invalidation = communication that conveys you are bad or wrong. Even if we are logical people, our body processes this like "you should not exist." It takes a strong sense of self and skill in emotional regulation to remain stable when someone is invalidating us.

We invalidate each other all the time though, and here's why. Perspective-taking is computationally expensive for our brains, so what we do instead is called projecting. Projecting is when you assume other people are like you. The problem is, because we're constantly projecting instead of empathizing, everyone appears to us like failed versions of ourselves -- doing things we would not do for reasons that are not immediately obvious. So we bucket this confounding behavior into catchalls like "bad" and "wrong."

Because our projecting brains give us the illusion that we understand others more than we do, we misunderstand each other constantly. Like just about always.

If you want to collaborate with people effectively, you need to reduce threat and create safety. This isn't "kumbaya" nicey-nice stuff; the world's top negotiators teach this exact thing. Threatened people are defensive, calculating, focused on "winning." They are limited in what they can see and think. People who feel safe can be honest, objective, creative, collaborative.

Fights are almost never about the thing they appear to be about on the surface. When people feel safe, they can start to tap into their subconscious and communicate what they really care about. So if your spouse wants to move to a new city because they desire adventure, but you fear losing touch with your family, you can begin to surface possibilities related to increasing adventure and keeping in touch with family. The deeper you go into these underlying concerns, the more you realize there are many more than 2 options here, and you can both have what you want.

Emotional validation is a near-panacea for decreasing threat and increasing safety. Validation means approval. Sometimes you don't approve of what someone is doing, saying, or the conclusions they've reached. But no matter how much you disagree, you can always validate someone on the level of feeling. That's because emotions are just bodily functions. Emotions originate as changes in our body (slowed digestion, increased heart rate, diverted blood flow) brought on by perceived threat. These signals eventually travel to our brain where we attempt to interpret them intellectually. But all things said, they're involuntary. So there's no reason for judgments like "You shouldn't be angry." We say things like this when we want to control the other person. But this just increases threat, intensifying the feelings. So instead you should show acceptance and concern for emotions (e.g. nod, mirror someone's frustration back to them on your own face).

The other thing is to make room for multiple perspectives to exist. Most people inherently take a "monologue stance" about conflict. They practice what they will say with the intent to deliver it as a declaration about the other's badness/wrongness. But the truth is, as sure as you feel, you just don't have all the information. People are incredibly surprising when you seek clarification from them. Turns out, you misinterpreted what they meant. Or there was a reason for their behavior you would never have guessed. So it's much better to approach people neutrally like, "Here's what I was feeling and thinking and the way I interpreted this. What was it like for you?"

Ultimately, if you invalidate someone, they'll invalidate you back. If you try to control someone, they'll try to control you back. You win by letting go. Even in an extreme case e.g. someone you love is diagnosed with schizophrenia and is not taking their meds because they don't believe they're sick. You could try to force them to believe they're sick, but you'll fail. Disagreements will escalate into fights. If instead you allow them to be who they are, feel how they feel, think what they think.. you can start to have an honest relationship, and then you're not so stuck. e.g. They tell you that the thing they can't stand about the meds is fatigue. So you can start to address that together.

Conflict is the test by which people learn how much they matter to each other. Disagreements will happen. The more you interweave your life with someone, the more likely that is. Voicing that disagreement is a risk. It's scary. The other person could judge you, dismiss you, label you "not worth it." But dealing with disagreement is an investment in the long-term potential of a relationship. When both of you take that risk and invest energy into hashing things out, a deeper level of intimacy is unlocked. The relationship is stronger than it was before. When your friend knows that you won't make them bad/wrong, invalidate their feelings, or push your perspective on them, that safety feels a lot like love.

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Sometimes it feels like love does not exist.

That no one really cares about anyone else.

That we’re all just trying to get things from each other.

Sex.

Affection.

Help meeting our goals.

Entertainment.

Social status.

Assessing:

What is your value to me?

What is my value to you?

Transactional — Unconditional

It’s scary to be without the care of other people.

I think men are socialized to chase money because, deep down, they believe it will make everyone love them.

The same way women are socialized to chase beauty.

A guarantee that people will want you around.

A safeguard against embarrassment, judgment, rejection.

A shield.

I think about relationships as being on a spectrum between “transactional” and “unconditional.”

In truth, all adult relationships are at least somewhat transactional.

They ought to be.

A truly unconditional relationship could be fatal. See: abuse.

In any case, all non-family relationships begin as transactional:

Someone wanting something from the other.

Dating apps are the transactional side of the spectrum slapping us all in the face.

Like trying to order a person from a menu.

“Will this one make me look good, entertain me, give me financial stability, have my children?”

Not the end of the story, though.

Have you ever met one of those married-for-50-years, cute old couples who recounts the way they met like – “He whistled at me from his car”?

Sexual attraction, infatuation.

Attachment, entanglement.

Family traditions, grandkids, death beds.

“I like your butt.” Then, “I’d die for you.”

Transcendence

I think the marker of a close relationship is grace.

Here’s a few dictionary definitions of the word:

• A disposition to kindness and compassion

• Favor or good will

• Mercy; clemency; pardon

Brene Brown, the researcher and author, uses a metaphor of a marble jar: marbles put in in good times, taken out in bad.

You build up a store of goodwill and trust. You cash out when you need to.

In essence, this describes earned grace.

Tit for tat.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

But there’s something else too.

The way it feels to be a steward of something.

The Little Prince who loves his rose more than any other because it’s the one he waters.

How it feels to take care of the people who are “ours.”

Which brings me to that thing that happens. Between two people.

The attachment bond.

How with familiarity and escalating exchanges of attention, disclosure, and reliance, you become “we.”

You can watch a guy in a movie get his head blown off and feel bored. But the people we become attached to —

The people we love —

To lose them is like losing part of yourself.

In one light: selfishness. The desire to claim them, to find safety in them.

(To our sensitive nervous systems, co-regulation – to be near and assured and comforted by another – is strong medicine.)

In a different light: selflessness. To feel concern for something outside yourself.

Why is almost all of our music about love?

Why does all our happiness research converge around it?

We are these threat-sensitive, twitchy creatures programmed to survive. To cooperate insofar as it promotes our survival.

But love is a taste of something other-worldly.

Our attachments to each other are the closest thing we have to self-transcendence.

Insecurity/Stability

I read a paper recently about unfaithful romantic partners – why they do it.

Many of the terms the authors used were cutting:

“Relative mate value.”

”Relationship load.”

Our tenderest human fears seared into black text on a white page.

“You’re not enough.”

“You’re too much.”

I’ve found that a healthy life often requires holding two truths that seem contradictory on the surface.

This is one of those:

Relationships are everything. Relationships can end.

Some partner choices are more conducive to lasting love.

But even still —

Anyone can die.

We need both interdependence and a strength that comes from within.

Not codependence.

Codependence is like needing another person to inflate and deflate your lungs.

Without the other person, you crumble.

Healthy interdependence is when one capable, autonomous being reaches out to another.

Two people standing on their own feet. With the occasional fall and lean and limp. But no one is perpetually propped up by the other.

To be strong enough to stand up on our own, we have to love ourselves first. Give ourselves grace. Be our own faithful steward.

I used to think that talk like that was a cover for self-centeredness.

But now I see that the people who do this best read as the exact opposite.

Now I see that if I treat myself transactionally – as an object to control and “get” from – I treat others that way too.

When I show grace to myself, I prove that love is possible.

I set a standard.

I change, and the change in me changes others.

Love becomes real.

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I used to think there was something wrong with me, deep down.

I didn’t spend any time trying to pinpoint what it was.

I just had this impulse to either fix or hide everything about myself. To perform.

If someone asks you, “How do you like Boulder?” and your first thought is, “What is normal to say right now?” —

Not going inside for an answer.

Not wondering about the person asking.

Going instead to that calculating third place – the PR desk. The middleman.

Making the assumption that if I don’t carefully craft my response, I will do or say something… strange? Unlikeable? Undeserving of love?

I will out myself for what I really am.

I will be cast out.

Like an alien playing human.

Sometimes I’d leave an interaction feeling like I’d just barely escaped death.

I think of this now as The Shame Stance.

Invalidation I

One of the most impactful books I’ve ever read was How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

It was written by mother-daughter parenting researchers Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.

They say that kids are constantly told what they feel is wrong.

“You’re not hungry. You just ate.”

“It’s not cold in here. Stop whining.”

“You love your brother.”

When your inner signal is invalidated long and hard enough, you start to doubt it yourself.

You lose the ability to make determinations for yourself.

You become dependent – tethering your sense of what’s true to others.

“Is it cold in here?”

“I shouldn’t be hungry, right?”

“Can you read this text and tell me if I should be mad?”

It seems that others have a sense that you’re missing.

Invalidation II

Growing up in the church, I was told to tether my sense of what’s true to men.

Pastors and heads of households could only be men.

God’s voice sounded a lot like their own self-interested opinions.

When I was a teenager, our church had a booth at the local fall festival.

I was told that the devil wanted to stop us, and the devil was in my feelings.

I was told that if I felt uncomfortable with what I was doing or saying there, I was doing it right.

We got kicked out of the fall festival.

Later, I found the rationalists. And pop psychology. I read all the books.

They were all about bias.

Look at how dumb we are when we are left to our own devices!

You cannot trust yourself. You can only trust science.

Makes sense, okay. But I am trying to decide what to do with my life. Or how to be. Who to be. What is meaningf–

Are you meditating? Are you eating healthy? Are you–

Yes, I try so hard. I’m unhappy.

Therapy.

Yes, but the last one had me read that book about ACT, and I impressed her so much she didn’t have any more goals for me. This one is obsessed with me calling my mother. She just had a baby. That seems related, don’t you–

Anxiety/depression. Basically everyone has it.

But–

💊

Invalidation III

I got sick. Different ways in different years.

Every time, I did all the testing.

Every time, the tests came back negative.

Every time, they said, “It must be in your head.”

Every time, no one offered to do anything about my head.

Emotions I

Emotions are like smoke alarms.

Sometimes they chirp inconveniently.

There are false alarms.

But they won’t stop until you attend to them, apply curiosity, and troubleshoot.

Ignoring or shutting them off is 🔥dangerous🔥.

Emotions II

Defining my terms:

Emotional validation meaning: tuning into, being curious about, trying to understand, and/or expressing acceptance of a person’s emotional experience.

Emotional invalidation meaning: avoiding, ignoring, dismissing, denying, judging, or rejecting a person’s emotional experience.

Shame meaning: the feeling that you are wrong, bad, or defective, deep down.

Outlining my theory:

Emotional validation —> sense of safety inside oneself –> resilience and self-actualization —> emotionally validating of self and others

Emotional invalidation —> shame —> inner chaos or shutdown, desire for control —> emotionally invalidating of self and others

And so it goes, round and round.

Emotions III

Emotional invalidation is an attempt at control.

You want someone to do what you want.

But what if they say no?

Better to control what they think.

But to control what they think, you have to control what they feel.

Turn off their inner signal.

We do it to ourselves too.

It doesn’t make sense to be upset right now. Suck it up.

There’s no good reason to be so tired. Get your fucking sneakers on.

Tears, really? You’re embarrassing yourself.

Tune out the inner alarm. Tether to this thing outside yourself.

My Vision I

There was a Johns Hopkins study on magic mushrooms.

A participant said the experience was as transformative as the birth of their child.

I recreated the conditions at home.

My trip sitter told me I cried for several hours straight.

After a while, the vision started to repeat. I thought it over and over.

When I took off my eye mask and headphones, I wrote down the following (edited for brevity):

Everyone screams for a mother. [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name]. We scream at each other to be our mother.

I use the understander. I practice saying. I try to get them to understand. I try to get good at screaming for mother.

[redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name]. We were embarrassed because we were not cared for. We needed a mother.

When I was embarrassed there was harsh talking. The harsh talking was [redacted name]. Then the harsh talking was me – to [redacted name], to [redacted name]. The harsh talking is interchangeable. The sweet talking is mother.

There was a mother. She was real. [redacted name] holding my hand while I was crying about [redacted name]. She cares for me and I instantly change. Like sunshine. Before: embarrassed. After: the same but in sunlight, cared for.

I am mother (me in my bedroom mirror, no makeup, braid). Not in the bandaid, hold-it-together-for-other-people way. My older self for my younger self. It’s tender. It’s a rescue. It’s love.

Because mother is real. We do what she does. She regulates our nervous system. She puts her warm attention on us. She takes all the time it takes to care for our physical body. And for the full mother, she shows you how to be in touch with yourself.

My Vision II

I got divorced and bought out of my startup at the same time.

I didn’t have to work again if I didn’t want to.

I was free. Like a leaf in the wind.

At first, I rejected everything from my Old Life. I said I hated tech. I said I wanted to make music, like when I was young.

In truth, all I did all day was analyze my marriage.

Like a puzzle.

Like a plane crash.

Like a crime scene.

All I could watch, listen, read, think about was relationships.

I got myself a ticket to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.

I got a music badge, thinking I’d marinate in art.

Instead I walked into a tech talk.

And I felt like I’d come back to life.

Like the existentialists Sartre and Nietzsche, I concluded that one makes their own meaning in life.

I ached for it.

Purpose.

I moved to California with plans to start another tech company.

There’s “social” apps, but what if they could address real social problems?

My Vision III

When I feel again like an alien playing at being human, I remember feet.

My feet are not so different from most people’s feet.

I belong here with the other feet-havers.

Really, feet or no feet, none of us are all that different, deep down.

I have a vision of eradicating The Shame Stance at scale.

Of creating the conditions for everyone to find safety in themselves.

To feel grounded and whole.

For couples, parents and children, landlords and tenants, managers and employees, cashiers and customers…

To connect to themselves and another at the same time.

To negotiate wants and needs on the level of action, while allowing for everyone to maintain their own inner signal.

For allowing what is to be.

Emotions – our own, other people’s – don’t go down without a fight, anyway.

Apply curiosity.

Or go up in flames.