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cahnI devoured The Coddling of the American Mind and I have a lot of probably-incoherent thinky Thoughts about it. I read the Atlantic article it was based on and wasn't really expecting much more from the book, but indeed the book is so much better because it's able to expand on and discuss things that an article isn't able to.
I read The Righteous Mind earlier this year and I can't believe I didn't talk about it here; well, I won't talk about it now except to say, I won't say it changed my life but it gave me a framework in which to put a lot of free-floating things I'd been thinking about. (Due to the particular demographics of my life, I know a lot of people from both sides of the (US) political spectrum.) This book is similar, except that it actually did a lot more of changing my thinking than I was expecting it to.
The idea of the book is that the authors (Greg L. in particular -- I will refer to both authors by their first names because that is how they refer to each other in the book) have been seeing a lot of specifically college events that make them believe that campus atmosphere is fostering unhealthy mental habits. In particular, there are three unhealthy mental habits they are seeing a lot more of:
1. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Many of the things they cite in the book as examples of this -- trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, intersectionality, common-enemy identity politics -- are interesting because they're staples of fandom/online discourse as I have seen it over the last several years. Their point is not that these are ethically or morally bad ways of thinking about these things (which they don't think at all), but rather that they can be dangerous to the thinker because they promote specific cognitive biases that can often result in increased anxiety and depression.
For example -- intersectionality. They don't quibble with the principles of intersectionality (I should point out that Greg and Jon -- I call them this because that's what they call each other in the book -- are both liberals (which I think is good because it seems to me there's no way a conservative could have written this book and not got torn apart, which is also a problem but for another time), so although a lot of the ideas they bring up are ideas I associate with liberal spaces, they are careful to say that they don't disagree with the ideas or the principles involved; their whole thrust with the book is different) but they point out that the end result, for the person who is thinking about it in these terms if that is their primary framework for thinking, is an us vs. them, dominant vs. subordinate way of looking at the world, and that this promotes anxiety. That although this can be a useful framework in which to think about various things, if one is always thinking about everything in an us vs. them framework that anxiety and depression is more likely to occur.
(Also: oh God, I need to make that post about my ward and Gospel Doctrine teaching and old ward vs. new ward, and maybe I will... someday?... when I have more time?... it's really REALLY easy to slip into us vs. them in my religion. REALLY EASY. Members vs. non-members. Believers vs. apostates. Righteous vs. sinners. That was one of the spiritual geniuses of ex-Bishop (and also one of our Relief Society presidents (who was actually called by the bishop before him), she was amazing, and I absolutely tried to do this too in my class), that they utterly refused to do that, with at least two major consequences: (a) it promoted not slipping into us vs. them within our ward (which Greg and Jon also cover -- the concept of witch hunts that actually turn on members of the group) which is also a Really Really easy thing to slip into for those of us who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and also made it much more comfortable for those of us who feared we might be on the "them" side if/when this happened (why hello there from person flirting with the apostate line since grad school); and (b) encouraged us to keep open hearts in general, both within and without the church boundaries. And I can testify to you right now that it made us -- both the ward as a whole and all of us individually -- way happier and mentally/spiritually healthier to be doing it like that.)
And trigger warnings/safe spaces. I see trigger warnings everywhere now, including, hilariously, in a mom's message board I sometimes read -- those are hilarious because they'll be like "So then Person X *trigger warning* died *end trigger* and..." and it's like... how would that be even at all helpful? But anyway, their contention here is that the idea of, say, safe spaces where ideas that one disagrees with will never be mentioned (as opposed to a safe space where you'd be, well, physically safe, which are noncontroversial) promotes a mindset that people are really fragile and can't take the exposure to difficult ideas. In fact, they contend, people tend to be "antifragile" -- exposure to things that might be difficult and challenging helps us grow and makes us better off than if we hadn't been exposed to those things, and so a mindset that causes people to avoid challenging ideas isn't a healthy one. (Anyone who knows, but specifically I knowrachelmanija will know -- they say, "Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it... Cognitive behavior therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting. Is this true/not overly simplified? I trust them when they talk about papers in depth, and I mean this sounds good to me, but it only got a paragraph and I don't think either of them are anything like experts on trauma.)
...I have a couple of thoughts about this. The first is that I think it depends? Like, I think there must be an antifragility threshold -- past that line, one is fragile, and before that line, one is antifragile. I think this a lot about parenting... For example, my parents did some things I think were maybe not great choices, but some part of me thinks that some of these things were not that bad for me; it helped me develop skills that I would probably not have otherwise. My sister, I think, may have been fragile on these particular topics, because she had some issues greatly exacerbated (ironically given the subject of this post, often dealing with mentally unhealthy habits) by the same parenting by the same people. (Although to be honest, I also think being the older kid, and having specific character traits that were highly valued in my culture, helped me a lot.) I think to a certain extent one just doesn't know where that line is and so you have to guess, and this is why parenting is So Hard. (Greg and Jon also obliquely refer to this, but they don't spend a lot of time on it.) And also I definitely parent my older one differently than my younger one -- with A. I'm much more likely to be "eh, deal with it" (when something goes wrong) because I know he can, and sometimes E can't -- and I definitely think there are times when I've made the wrong choice there. (For example, when A is hungry he CANNOT deal with it. He just can't. He needs food and until then he can't even come close to dealing with whatever it is.)
That being said, my second thought is that I've seen things like this in my own life. It's become really clear to me, from E's journey and the fact that she's basically identical to me when I was a small person (except rather more so), and also because of one too many canonically-Aspergers people in media that I immediately thought were the Best Characters Ever Can I Be That Person, that I've probably got (subclinical?) Aspergers-ish tendencies. And it's useful and interesting as a way to understand why I think differently and work differently than other people, a lot of the time. (I was totally staggered when D and I were having a conversation when E was young, about eye contact, and D revealed that he didn't think constantly about maintaining eye contact when having a conversation. I legit thought this was a thing all geeky people did!) But if I try using it as an excuse -- "oh, I'm This Way so I don't want to pick up the phone"("I'm too fragile to pick up the phone!") -- I can feel myself giving up, being like "ok, yup, let's not talk on the phone." It's better as an explanation: "ok, I'm This Way and so I don't like initiating phone conversations as much as [e.g. super-Extrovert boss], but I'm going to anyway, and I might use [X] hack to help me do that if I need help with it" is a lot more useful way of framing it, for me.
The last bit of the book is on parenting, and they discuss why they think that the rise of helicopter parenting / resume-building and the loss of play is leading to the rise of anxiety and the rise of these trends on college campuses. Their hypothesis -- and it's definitely not a settled thing, but it seems to me that it could be true -- is that it used to be that kids were just left to their own devices and playing with each other all the time and that served as a sort of laboratory where you could get hurt, both physically and emotionally, and that by and large made kids stronger and more resilient. And now that kids instead have their time filled with activities where one is ferried from one place to another (*raises hand guiltily*) or else screen time (*), and even at school there's less in the way of recess and non-structured time, there's nowhere for them to gain that experience, and they get to college and they don't know how to deal with things like being confronted with someone who thinks totally differently than they do. (I mean -- there are clearly lots of kids who are just fine, but they're specifically trying to address the problem of the ones who are on the edges and maybe falling into anxiety and depression that maybe wouldn't have before.)
Again I wonder if this is a threshold kind of thing... Bullying, for example, is something I imagine there was more of with unrestricted free play than now, and I think is likely to be terrible enough that it is more likely to send one into a tailspin than to make one tougher. But I can see how for smaller bumps and bruises, it would actually make one tougher. And it clearly depends on the kid a lot.
So in conclusion, Parenting Is Hard and maybe we parents have a large chance of mucking up the thresholds and all Doing It Wrong but we won't find out about it for another thirty years until our kids go to therapy :) ...In the meantime, I'm trying to bite my tongue when I pick E up from school and the kids are rolling this large plastic tube (I don't even know where they got this from) around the playground with kids inside it! (The kids think this is the best thing ever.)
(*) The authors think that in-person socialization time is in general better than screen socialization time, which in e.g. Facebook can run to carefully curated versions of people's lives that invite negative comparison. I don't disagree with them in general, although more specifically I was kind of like, "but what about having really interesting discussions about books and opera that it's much harder to get in my real life?" :D And they do address that -- they say that in some cases, when screen time results in building real relationships, it can be a good thing. And I vehemently agree. (hi all you guys!) But I think it's also true that (as they say) as human beings we're wired to need actual in-person socialization as well.
I read The Righteous Mind earlier this year and I can't believe I didn't talk about it here; well, I won't talk about it now except to say, I won't say it changed my life but it gave me a framework in which to put a lot of free-floating things I'd been thinking about. (Due to the particular demographics of my life, I know a lot of people from both sides of the (US) political spectrum.) This book is similar, except that it actually did a lot more of changing my thinking than I was expecting it to.
The idea of the book is that the authors (Greg L. in particular -- I will refer to both authors by their first names because that is how they refer to each other in the book) have been seeing a lot of specifically college events that make them believe that campus atmosphere is fostering unhealthy mental habits. In particular, there are three unhealthy mental habits they are seeing a lot more of:
1. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Many of the things they cite in the book as examples of this -- trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, intersectionality, common-enemy identity politics -- are interesting because they're staples of fandom/online discourse as I have seen it over the last several years. Their point is not that these are ethically or morally bad ways of thinking about these things (which they don't think at all), but rather that they can be dangerous to the thinker because they promote specific cognitive biases that can often result in increased anxiety and depression.
For example -- intersectionality. They don't quibble with the principles of intersectionality (I should point out that Greg and Jon -- I call them this because that's what they call each other in the book -- are both liberals (which I think is good because it seems to me there's no way a conservative could have written this book and not got torn apart, which is also a problem but for another time), so although a lot of the ideas they bring up are ideas I associate with liberal spaces, they are careful to say that they don't disagree with the ideas or the principles involved; their whole thrust with the book is different) but they point out that the end result, for the person who is thinking about it in these terms if that is their primary framework for thinking, is an us vs. them, dominant vs. subordinate way of looking at the world, and that this promotes anxiety. That although this can be a useful framework in which to think about various things, if one is always thinking about everything in an us vs. them framework that anxiety and depression is more likely to occur.
(Also: oh God, I need to make that post about my ward and Gospel Doctrine teaching and old ward vs. new ward, and maybe I will... someday?... when I have more time?... it's really REALLY easy to slip into us vs. them in my religion. REALLY EASY. Members vs. non-members. Believers vs. apostates. Righteous vs. sinners. That was one of the spiritual geniuses of ex-Bishop (and also one of our Relief Society presidents (who was actually called by the bishop before him), she was amazing, and I absolutely tried to do this too in my class), that they utterly refused to do that, with at least two major consequences: (a) it promoted not slipping into us vs. them within our ward (which Greg and Jon also cover -- the concept of witch hunts that actually turn on members of the group) which is also a Really Really easy thing to slip into for those of us who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and also made it much more comfortable for those of us who feared we might be on the "them" side if/when this happened (why hello there from person flirting with the apostate line since grad school); and (b) encouraged us to keep open hearts in general, both within and without the church boundaries. And I can testify to you right now that it made us -- both the ward as a whole and all of us individually -- way happier and mentally/spiritually healthier to be doing it like that.)
And trigger warnings/safe spaces. I see trigger warnings everywhere now, including, hilariously, in a mom's message board I sometimes read -- those are hilarious because they'll be like "So then Person X *trigger warning* died *end trigger* and..." and it's like... how would that be even at all helpful? But anyway, their contention here is that the idea of, say, safe spaces where ideas that one disagrees with will never be mentioned (as opposed to a safe space where you'd be, well, physically safe, which are noncontroversial) promotes a mindset that people are really fragile and can't take the exposure to difficult ideas. In fact, they contend, people tend to be "antifragile" -- exposure to things that might be difficult and challenging helps us grow and makes us better off than if we hadn't been exposed to those things, and so a mindset that causes people to avoid challenging ideas isn't a healthy one. (Anyone who knows, but specifically I know
rachelmanija will know -- they say, "Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it... Cognitive behavior therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting. Is this true/not overly simplified? I trust them when they talk about papers in depth, and I mean this sounds good to me, but it only got a paragraph and I don't think either of them are anything like experts on trauma.)...I have a couple of thoughts about this. The first is that I think it depends? Like, I think there must be an antifragility threshold -- past that line, one is fragile, and before that line, one is antifragile. I think this a lot about parenting... For example, my parents did some things I think were maybe not great choices, but some part of me thinks that some of these things were not that bad for me; it helped me develop skills that I would probably not have otherwise. My sister, I think, may have been fragile on these particular topics, because she had some issues greatly exacerbated (ironically given the subject of this post, often dealing with mentally unhealthy habits) by the same parenting by the same people. (Although to be honest, I also think being the older kid, and having specific character traits that were highly valued in my culture, helped me a lot.) I think to a certain extent one just doesn't know where that line is and so you have to guess, and this is why parenting is So Hard. (Greg and Jon also obliquely refer to this, but they don't spend a lot of time on it.) And also I definitely parent my older one differently than my younger one -- with A. I'm much more likely to be "eh, deal with it" (when something goes wrong) because I know he can, and sometimes E can't -- and I definitely think there are times when I've made the wrong choice there. (For example, when A is hungry he CANNOT deal with it. He just can't. He needs food and until then he can't even come close to dealing with whatever it is.)
That being said, my second thought is that I've seen things like this in my own life. It's become really clear to me, from E's journey and the fact that she's basically identical to me when I was a small person (except rather more so), and also because of one too many canonically-Aspergers people in media that I immediately thought were the Best Characters Ever Can I Be That Person, that I've probably got (subclinical?) Aspergers-ish tendencies. And it's useful and interesting as a way to understand why I think differently and work differently than other people, a lot of the time. (I was totally staggered when D and I were having a conversation when E was young, about eye contact, and D revealed that he didn't think constantly about maintaining eye contact when having a conversation. I legit thought this was a thing all geeky people did!) But if I try using it as an excuse -- "oh, I'm This Way so I don't want to pick up the phone"("I'm too fragile to pick up the phone!") -- I can feel myself giving up, being like "ok, yup, let's not talk on the phone." It's better as an explanation: "ok, I'm This Way and so I don't like initiating phone conversations as much as [e.g. super-Extrovert boss], but I'm going to anyway, and I might use [X] hack to help me do that if I need help with it" is a lot more useful way of framing it, for me.
The last bit of the book is on parenting, and they discuss why they think that the rise of helicopter parenting / resume-building and the loss of play is leading to the rise of anxiety and the rise of these trends on college campuses. Their hypothesis -- and it's definitely not a settled thing, but it seems to me that it could be true -- is that it used to be that kids were just left to their own devices and playing with each other all the time and that served as a sort of laboratory where you could get hurt, both physically and emotionally, and that by and large made kids stronger and more resilient. And now that kids instead have their time filled with activities where one is ferried from one place to another (*raises hand guiltily*) or else screen time (*), and even at school there's less in the way of recess and non-structured time, there's nowhere for them to gain that experience, and they get to college and they don't know how to deal with things like being confronted with someone who thinks totally differently than they do. (I mean -- there are clearly lots of kids who are just fine, but they're specifically trying to address the problem of the ones who are on the edges and maybe falling into anxiety and depression that maybe wouldn't have before.)
Again I wonder if this is a threshold kind of thing... Bullying, for example, is something I imagine there was more of with unrestricted free play than now, and I think is likely to be terrible enough that it is more likely to send one into a tailspin than to make one tougher. But I can see how for smaller bumps and bruises, it would actually make one tougher. And it clearly depends on the kid a lot.
So in conclusion, Parenting Is Hard and maybe we parents have a large chance of mucking up the thresholds and all Doing It Wrong but we won't find out about it for another thirty years until our kids go to therapy :) ...In the meantime, I'm trying to bite my tongue when I pick E up from school and the kids are rolling this large plastic tube (I don't even know where they got this from) around the playground with kids inside it! (The kids think this is the best thing ever.)
(*) The authors think that in-person socialization time is in general better than screen socialization time, which in e.g. Facebook can run to carefully curated versions of people's lives that invite negative comparison. I don't disagree with them in general, although more specifically I was kind of like, "but what about having really interesting discussions about books and opera that it's much harder to get in my real life?" :D And they do address that -- they say that in some cases, when screen time results in building real relationships, it can be a good thing. And I vehemently agree. (hi all you guys!) But I think it's also true that (as they say) as human beings we're wired to need actual in-person socialization as well.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 08:59 am (UTC)This is EXTREMELY oversimplified. Exposure therapy for trauma is done specifically within a safe context, with a lot of patient control over the degree and type of exposure, and discussion before and after. Being abruptly, nonconsensually exposed to a trauma trigger in a place where you aren't prepared for it, can't deal with it in the moment, and can't necessarily process through the experience afterwards is the opposite of therapeutic.
"Difficult and challenging" and "triggering" are also not synonymous. For something to be triggering, there needs to be a chronic ailment to trigger. Some people have those ailments. Others don't.
I sometimes use physical examples because they can be easier for people to viscerally grasp than psychological ones. It is not difficult or challenging for most people to write a postcard by hand, but it will trigger my chronic tendinitis and leave me in pain for 24 hours or longer, depending on whether the injury has been aggravated recently and how much I can rest it and take care of it. That's what chronic injury means—being prone to both sudden and lingering pain after doing activities that physically hale people find unremarkable. PTSD is a chronic injury of the mind—it means you are more prone to be in (mental) pain after exposure to something that ordinary people might find slightly unnerving but quickly move on from.
Like my chronic injury, PTSD and other mental illnesses that can be triggered in the literal sense require cautious, targeted, specialist care for recovery to be possible. Every time I've tried to go to a gym and work with a personal trainer who isn't a specialist in injury recovery, I've been reinjured—no matter how slowly they go or how little they push me, it's more than my body can handle. But when I work with my wonderful occupational therapist, I get stronger and am less prone to reinjury when I inadvertently encounter a trigger (like trying to pick up something that's unexpectedly heavy) or am required by circumstances to do things that are damaging (like needing to drive a long distance or complete a big work project on a tight deadline) or get careless and don't pay attention to my body's signals that it needs rest and care.
A random college professor assigning a reading that contains material someone finds triggering can be as harmful as a random personal trainer telling me to "just" do five push-ups. You bet I avoid those triggers. Do I work toward being able to someday do five push-ups? Of course! (I can't tell you how much time and money I and my various insurance companies have spent on occupational therapy and personal training and workout equipment and gym memberships and anti-inflammatories and supplements and icyhot and kinesiotherapy tape and...) Does believing that I'll be able to do five push-ups someday mean that I can do them right now? Absolutely not! "Avoiding triggers is a symptom... not a treatment" is technically correct, but it misses the part where you avoid triggers while in treatment, until the treatment gets you to the point where the triggers are less triggery and you don't have to avoid them anymore.
Much of the treatment for my injury is not about the tendon directly—there's very little you can do for an inflamed tendon other than put ice on it and bathe it in NSAIDs or steroids. It's about making the surrounding muscles stronger so they can take on more of the load and relieve the tendon of its burdens. But the tendon is inevitably involved in working out the muscles to strengthen them, so there's a very delicate balance to be maintained, and it's a slow, slow process. Psychotherapy works much the same way; it can't take away trauma, but it can strengthen the parts of your mind that are healthy, so you rely more on those than the parts that are constantly screaming about danger.
Trigger warnings make space for preparation. I'm using a workout app now that tells me all the day's exercises in advance; I can go through them and swap out potentially harmful ones for ones that will help me get stronger without making me hurt, or adapt them with different positioning (doing those push-ups against a wall is much easier than doing them against the floor), or just brace myself and be sure to keep checking in as I go, even if I think I can handle it.
As for identification with injury leading to avoidance: yes, absolutely that can happen and is a problem. But the solution to that problem is to treat the injury, not to act as though people with injuries are whiny babies who need to suck it up. And some degree of avoidance is necessary—there are things that chronically ill and injured people simply cannot do. I miss knitting terribly, and have signed up for a knitting ergonomics class in hopes of figuring out a way to do it that doesn't hurt... but an hour of knitting can leave me in pain for a week, so I don't knit. The other day I glanced at a website for helping women get into the construction trades and then closed the tab, because my body cannot ever become strong enough to work in construction. It's no different from being "chronically short" and therefore not trying out for the basketball team.
Everyone has different capabilities, and there is a sweet spot between cocooning yourself in anxiety and flinging yourself against the ceiling of your limitations. That might look like improving your capabilities with the help of a professional, or finding clever workarounds (I've started dictating a lot to spare myself typing), or simply being slow and cautious while you figure out what you can and can't do. It does not look like throwing a snake at someone with a snake phobia and then being surprised that it didn't help them become less phobic.
None of my strong feelings on this topic are directed at you—I appreciate that you caught that and went "Hm, this doesn't sound right". They are entirely directed at people like these authors who blithely dismiss an entire field of psychotherapy as unnecessary because all you really need to do is scold injured people until they stop being so fragile.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 09:04 am (UTC)I think there must be an antifragility threshold -- past that line, one is fragile, and before that line, one is antifragile.
You are correct, in that this is essentially a definition of chronic injury/illness.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-22 05:13 am (UTC)On the other hand, I will also apologize for doing a very, very poor job of explaining their actual argument in terms of trigger warnings (so some of your strong feelings should in fact probably be directed at me for being incoherent and misrepresenting them :( ). They don't, I think, object to trigger warnings in principle, nor do they object to content warning or the concept that some people might have to be treated sensitively for some subjects. Their argument is that by always calling things specifically "trigger warnings" (as opposed, I think, to content warnings -- here I am extrapolating a bit, but I'm fairly confident in it) that it can cause a sort of tendency to think everything could be a trigger, or to "cheapen" the idea of a trigger, blurring the lines between -- in your analogy -- injury and soreness when confronted by a particular action. In your analogy, it's as if your workout app said, for each exercise, "Overextension warning: could overextend [muscle X]." Some people, faced with that for every exercise, could potentially start worrying that they were overextending all the time, even if what they were feeling was ordinary pain from exercising the muscle. Better to say "this exercise is for [muscle X]" and one person might be overextended and another might not be.
(Also, ugh, I'm sorry. I had RSI to the degree that you describe in college, and it was awful. It's better now, but I still have to be very careful, so your analogy was a very strong one for me.)
and there is a sweet spot between cocooning yourself in anxiety and flinging yourself against the ceiling of your limitations.
Yeah. So part of the issue, I think, is that the book is specifically about the former, and so it doesn't spend a lot of time on the latter, and does tend to simplify some things about it.
people like these authors who blithely dismiss an entire field of psychotherapy as unnecessary because all you really need to do is scold injured people until they stop being so fragile.
I realize my post came across like this, and I honestly don't think that's what they meant -- one of the authors comes to this from a history of being depressed and having to do a lot of psychotherapy. So again apologies for misrepresenting :(
no subject
Date: 2018-11-22 06:09 am (UTC)And of course there is the thing where schools were traditionally "safe spaces where ideas that one disagrees with will never be mentioned", as long as the "one" in that sentence is coming from a position of relative power and societal privilege. See the endless stories about students who were shut down by teachers for saying things like "I think our textbook glosses over the extent to which the Civil War was about slavery" or "why are all the books for our English class written by white men". Part of what's playing out in these arguments about safe spaces and freedom to speak out against the mainstream view is the leftward shift in education, especially college-level education, that's been going on since at least the 1960s–70s and has scared the shit out of a lot of people on the right. All this language about "don't you want to be exposed to new ideas, it's good to be tolerant of difference, there's value in being shocked out of complacency and familiarity" gained momentum with hippies and second-wave feminists and is now being weaponized against us because it was so effective, a tactic that's used so often by far right and fascist commentators and internet argumentators that "So much for the tolerant left!" has become a joke.
(But I digress.)
(Except that I think you really can't effectively talk about this stuff without context that goes back further than the Clinton administration.)
Anyway, no apologies needed and no worries. Your summary looked an awful lot like an argument I've seen made very badly many times, and I'm glad the book is not that bad.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-25 04:15 am (UTC)