🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (9 tweets)
A big part of what integration like work for me has looked like is finding the ways in which I've "swallowed a contradiction" the problem with totalizing mandates is that they are often accepted without regard to the rest of your psychic landscape https://t.co/a2lgIvvxy7
an individual unconscious contract in isolation can seem heroic or noble. i still want to treat other people better than my father treated me the problem, and the connection with depression, is when you accumulate so many "avoid at ALL COSTS" that no actions feel possible
contradictions create "perpetual motion machines"! Like the Escher staircase, you just go downhill forever! You can "easily" bounce from one constraint to the next without exerting "effort" Except perpetual motion isn't real, so the energy comes from *somewhere* https://t.co/N2kCwcdkzC
when I started tracking what was going through my mind when I had energy slumps, I was really wigged out to find that almost every non caffeine related slump was directly preceded by swallowing some low-key contradiction
it's like my mind has some background process that can't SOLVE contradictions perse, but can notice looping and tries to being the problem to conscious attention (highest level of conflict resolution) via turning everything off
Escaping these loops requires zooming out and *seeing* the contradictory nature of the set of constraints I'm working with. Sometimes this requires an external memory boost I generally have to really SEE the impossibility of the problem before I'm willing to lossen constraints
More concisely https://t.co/6CuNWWuRz3
"impossible" shapes are made possible by maps having different constraints than the territory. you can have impossible shapes (sets of constraints) in you mind with local coherence that have more twists than this shape, and you need memory to notice it's globally incoherent https://t.co/uwYBC6Pzb6
Slightly less concisely https://t.co/YczDqqdVah
this. sometimes the "contradiction" is as simple as having aversion around all actions you can see. You can loop through a handful of possibilities, all have some aversion so you don't pursue them, and might not notice until you expand working mem https://t.co/W8b4jzMBIe
PSA: If you keep thinking about it, write it down, set an alarm, emotionally process it (somatically, not narratively), make a decision. Looping is a sign of something that doesn't fit in working memory. Ignore your own assumption that it is trivial.