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This is great. I love your writing. I want to disagree a bit but I also want to convey that I can tell you have thought about this a lot more than me. So please see this as more of a student raising their hand than a colleague critiqueing the post.
I think concencus right now is that for an anxious person, talk therapy, Cognitive behavior…
This is great. I love your writing. I want to disagree a bit but I also want to convey that I can tell you have thought about this a lot more than me. So please see this as more of a student raising their hand than a colleague critiqueing the post.
I think concencus right now is that for an anxious person, talk therapy, Cognitive behavioral therapy, some sort of IFT approach at tackling the anxiety is best approach. I agree, anxiety often thinking the world is better than you but I don't think most professionals would approach this as "try to make everyone else seem worse". I think most professionals try to inflate your self-worth by tackling the issue.
Same for anger. Anger management, talk therapy, and all the other therapies above seem to be the prescription, not "have you considered you aren't as great as you think you are"
That being said I think your outlined approach works. It might not be healthy though. If okayness is equanimity then anywhere on the path of equanimity will feel "okay". Therefore if you are in the bottom left quadrant but dislike others as much as yourself you might feel "okay" with your place in the world. This can lead to a downward spiral where you feel okay but hate everything. So I think everything you say here is 100% true, it will work. But it's not the BEST way to get okay?
Yeah this is a good point--current therapeutic practice does *not* recommend this.
Especially the anger one--above I linked to a study that showed intentionally tapping into anger tends to produce more anger. Which this model would suggest is true for about 50% of people.
This strategy is hard to put into clinical practice, because it needs to be calibrated to the individual. You have to (a) figure out which side of the Path they're on, and (b) how much of a push they need to get back to center. IME it takes a *very* light push to get back to centered, and there's a serious danger of overdoing it.
For me, it's the fastest path back to well-being, much better than pushing in the positive directions. Is it a clinically viable strategy? Is there a therapy here that could be repeated across millions of patients? Maybe! But definitely not today, and it'd be hard to create.
My flavour of therapy (Gestalt therapy) has historically been much in favour of aggression and it's expression, surely overdoing it in the process.
While dialing back on that - and interestingly becoming more interested in Shame - we still maintain some positive regard for expressions of aggression and anger, if it serves to protect one's own boundaries.
At least I work like that with the clients who need it (co-dependent and over-conforming types).