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Thread: Does "tough love" motivation work on you?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Animal View Post
    I think I've probably been reading too much psychoanalysis, which has a tendency to pathologize people.
    I've also read a bit of psychoanalysis, so I understand where you're coming from. I used to be into Karen Horney a lot, and I think the idea about attacking the subjective premise that everyone essentially has in interesting (everyone's behavior is a result of some sort of a subjective premise, perhaps an emotion). The idea of self-criticism is interesting, and learning to tone down the dial of self-criticism is something that you can practically apply to your personal situations. A person whose too critical of oneself might take most criticisms as devastating, but people who are not very self-critical may take most criticism in stride. They don't accept it or they don't register it.

    However, over the years I've learned that it was more like "Socionics 2.0", or "pre-Socionics", depending on which you started from. There may be some genuine insights on human nature that may be interesting, but in the end they're usually just the opinions of the psychoanalyst, and shouldn't be taken as gospel truth. Actually it's kind of similar to Socionics in that it start out with educated guesses or conjectures of the psychoanalyst, but it's lacking in the critical approach.

    Anyway, tough love is usually just a way to justify and rationalize love by saying that it's a form of love.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
    I've also read a bit of psychoanalysis, so I understand where you're coming from. I used to be into Karen Horney a lot, and I think the idea about attacking the subjective premise that everyone essentially has in interesting (everyone's behavior is a result of some sort of a subjective premise, perhaps an emotion). The idea of self-criticism is interesting, and learning to tone down the dial of self-criticism is something that you can practically apply to your personal situations. A person whose too critical of oneself might take most criticisms as devastating, but people who are not very self-critical may take most criticism in stride. They don't accept it or they don't register it.

    However, over the years I've learned that it was more like "Socionics 2.0", or "pre-Socionics", depending on which you started from. There may be some genuine insights on human nature that may be interesting, but in the end they're usually just the opinions of the psychoanalyst, and shouldn't be taken as gospel truth. Actually it's kind of similar to Socionics in that it start out with educated guesses or conjectures of the psychoanalyst, but it's lacking in the critical approach.

    Anyway, tough love is usually just a way to justify and rationalize love by saying that it's a form of love.
    I agree. I don't regard it as "true", any more than I would regard Socionics as "true." I've found that it presents a useful lens through which to get a handle on some of the experiences within that don't make much sense with either modern science or ancient religion. For example, we don't have a much better explanation of a trauma victim's attraction to situations that recreate the traumatic experience than what Freud conjectured (repetition compulsion; "we repeat to complete"). But, in the end, it's just a blunt instrument for trying to get at things that are much a more complex interaction of many things. I like the precision of psychoanalytic language and I like that it takes a critical eye toward the larger society, and the way it can have negative effects on a human being. People are talking about such things now (like the influence of technology on young people, etc.), but not with as much depth as I'd like.

    Quote Originally Posted by Luminous Lynx View Post
    I appreciate this distinction, given that this thread is inquiring into "Tough Love" I understand where You're coming from. I would also argue that not all valuable lessons in life are presented benevolently. Often in life, we can grow too comfortable. For some, having their mettle tested is productive, and even for those who find it grating, there can be a reordering of priority and focus. It is true that hot iron can bend to the point of breakage, but cold, unused iron rusts. A ripple is a ripple, and even those making waves can teach us important lessons. Our attitude is as important to our own benefit as that which is seen as done onto us. Growth and clarity sometimes comes from the most unexpected of places.
    I agree. The attitude we bring to life can make a big difference in our ability to make use of the lessons that are available. My main issue with a lot of the "tough love" going around these days is that it starts with the basic assumption that people are inherently lazy and that they wouldn't do anything if they weren't coerced into doing it. In particular, I'm uneasy with the substitution of externally-imposed goals for those that come out of a person's weighing their own wants/desires and what others need of them. I think laziness is an attempt to get an unmet need met. Even people who act self-destructively or are suicidal are trying to get a need met. Those needs will have to be acknowledged at some point, or else there will be reckoning later on, in some other form. Rude awakenings can be useful, like you say, but only if they don't overwhelm the organism's inborn inclination towards actualization.
    "How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
    -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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    Quote Originally Posted by Animal View Post
    I agree. I don't regard it as "true", any more than I would regard Socionics as "true." I've found that it presents a useful lens through which to get a handle on some of the experiences within that don't make much sense with either modern science or ancient religion. For example, we don't have a much better explanation of a trauma victim's attraction to situations that recreate the traumatic experience than what Freud conjectured (repetition compulsion; "we repeat to complete"). But, in the end, it's just a blunt instrument for trying to get at things that are much a more complex interaction of many things. I like the precision of psychoanalytic language and I like that it takes a critical eye toward the larger society, and the way it can have negative effects on a human being. People are talking about such things now (like the influence of technology on young people, etc.), but not with as much depth as I'd like.
    Well perhaps a more constructive approach would not be to ask "Why does the person recreate his traumatic experiences?", but to ask "Does the person want to recreate his traumatic experience, or not?". And given the basic premise that humans basically want to be happy and healthy, probably not. It could be that the thought-processes and the behavior of the person is compulsive, and he may not have much conscious control over it. So perhaps we can try to see and analyze how the person may no longer behave in such a compulsive pattern in the future. And that ultimately requires the ability to eventually control his own destiny.

    I don't think there is much use in saying "I am this way", and just end it at that. You can describe a certain pattern of behavior, such as Borderline Personality Disorder. But I don't it's much use to just say that you're Borderline, but you can't really do anything about it. It only brings the power to be able to change it, if you understand the cause behind it. So if we could understand the cause behind "Why does the victim recreate his traumatic experience?", then that would be helpful. But I would think that it would require a different approach to get to the direct answer to that question, even if we initially asked the wrong question.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Animal View Post
    I think that's a good point, and part of my own problem with some older psychoanalytic writing. It had a tendency to corner human beings into a dead end: "Well, you're fucked in the head, and this is probably why. Good luck sorting yourself out!" That specific example of trauma is one that I actually pulled from my own experience, and I actually found the psychoanalytic explanation helpful, rather than demoralizing. I had tried other approaches like CBT and such that tried to just deal with the habitual thoughts and behaviors at face value, but I found they left something to be desired. When I read about repetition compulsion, I realized there was some inherent logic to the seeming madness: that the reason I was drawn to people who would hurt me in the same way people in the past had hurt me was because there was something I was wanting that I hadn't got in the original situation. That old concept helped me to articulate a personal experience that was there, and actually pointed for me the way out, which was to have a corrective emotional experience that contradicted what I'd previously learned about myself and the world and other people. Newer forms of psychodynamic therapy are much more hopeful than old school psychoanalysis, I think. They get to places that other explanations of people's behavior don't, and can help you feel less alone and weird. Personality typology played that role for me once, but it didn't offer effective tools for deep change and healing like the psychodynamic work did. Actually, FWIW, dynamic therapies like that actually have shown some of the best results for people with BPD, except they tend to call it "complex trauma/C-PTSD", which is less pathologizing.
    Indeed, you may not be able to change the behavior by just knowing what causes that behavior, because what you're trying to do is to not have to do that behavior! In short, you're trying to create a new behavior that is currently unknown to you. And the problem is that you currently don't know how to, because you haven't figured out a way of knowing how. So that may be where the "repetitive compulsion" comes from, which you can only understand in hindsight. But while you were doing that, you may simply had been looking for a solution of a kind.

    I would think that the reason why that "works", is that it may negate the trauma by having been countered by a positive or neutral experience. It seems to be a human thing to just keep expecting the same thing to happen that has happened before. It's understandable that if you had a traumatic experience, then you might want to avoid it, even if it's not entirely rational to do so. Or you might deliberately seek it to be proven wrong. Nevertheless, people can't quite intellectually understand it, but they can only experience it.

    I think the interesting thing about humans is that they try to imagine doing something in the future that has never been done before. So perhaps the answer to the question "Why does the person keep reliving his traumas?", is because of a failure to do something where he would no longer have to live through that trauma, and only because he does not yet know how to. This can't exactly be understood in a strict causal sense of analyzing the past. It's true that the trauma is caused by childhood abuse or whatever. But we'd also have to get at what the person is trying to do in the future, which is presumably to live in peace and not having to live through that trauma.
    Last edited by Singu; 01-03-2019 at 12:31 AM.

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