“no one ever goes looking for IFS or attachment theory or shadow work or whatever else because they're just curious. we all know that we're here to try to understand the heartache at the center of our being” - qc
i. functionality
at some point during college i decided it would be smart to avoid thinking about peoples’ internal states and instead reason about them purely behaviorally. i think this happened in part because i was studying functional programming (which focuses on function application rather than state as the basis for understanding programs), and also because i was studying psychology (which tries to explain human behavior without understanding neuroscience or how the brain actually works)
it wasn’t just the subjects i was studying though. the functional perspective also felt grounded in a meaningful way: i could observe other peoples’ behaviors but would never be able to access their thoughts or consciousness, so why not focus on the behaviors in front of me instead of speculating on variables i would never be able to measure?
i don’t think i was being entirely stupid here; the functional perspective has some benefits. one of the big ones is that you don’t punish yourself for having intrusive or taboo thoughts - sometimes people will think of something negative, think oh shit i shouldn’t have had that thought, and then beat themselves up over it, which is usually not healthy. meanwhile a behaviorist would simply go well, that was just a thought, you didn’t act on it, nothing to worry about here
i think the other major benefit of this perspective is that it pushes you towards direct action. as in, there are no moral victories for having good thoughts or plans with no action; nothing counts until you actually start doing your chores or being nicer to people or whatever else. i’m prone to spending too much time thinking and not enough time doing, so this was a helpful mentality to have
Bojack: well, do you think i'm a good person deep down?
Diane: that's the thing. i don't think i believe in deep down. i kind of think all you are is just the things that you do
and then of course there are the obvious drawbacks to pure behaviorism - it’s harder to understand people, it’s easier to accidentally hurt their feelings, models of people become more convoluted than necessary, you lose access to a wide range of conversation topics and ideas
ii. fungibility
everything i listed above is an issue, but i think the most important problem with pure behaviorism is more subtle: if you see people purely as a bundle of functions, it’s very easy to start viewing people with similar bundles as fungible, in the sense that you can swap them out for one another
i’ve found the idea of fungibility appealing ever since i was a kid. i think this may be due to spending too much time solving puzzles where the key insight is to notice that objects can be exchanged freely. one of my favorites was this ant puzzle:
(if you try to trace out the path of each ant this puzzle becomes very complicated. the key insight is to note that the ants are identical, so two ants colliding and turning around is equivalent to them walking past each other, and then it’s obvious that 20 ants reach peter, 50 ants reach cynthia, and there are 1000 total collisions)
anyway puzzles aside i think fungibility is core to anxious attachment, or at least it was for me. and attachment style is difficult to change because it’s not just a set of behaviors, it’s also a philosophy and lens that you view all your experiences through. it becomes extremely obvious that you are replaceable and when other people try to tell you otherwise it also feels extremely obvious that they only believe that because they haven’t found someone sufficiently similar to you yet; and these kinds of statements never feel like they need justification, they just feel like universal truths in the same way that 2+2=4 does
this is not the kind of position you can reason your way out of because it’s not actually incorrect - everything is self-consistent, there are no logical contradictions to find, it’s simply a valid though disempowering way of seeing the world
iii. fallibility
and so for the longest time i believed all my friends were deeply fallible. specifically, i thought that my friends genuinely liked me and wanted to be friends with me, but i also thought they didn’t realize they were friends with me out of convenience and that they would stop once they found a fungible person who was more convenient. i think i became very good at reaching out and keeping in touch with people in part to make myself a more convenient option for others
a couple months ago i woke up at 3am for an early flight and was also slightly not-sober, ie. it was the confused but self-aware state of mind which is ripe for putting together old ideas in new arrangements. and then suddenly i could see how i was not as secure as i wanted to be and how this functionality / fungibility / fallibility chain of thought was reinforcing my insecurity, and i saw that this was one perfectly reasonable story about the world but there could be perfectly reasonable alternative stories as well. like: what if friendships do last? what if people don’t always abandon you? what if “everyone chooses friends out of convenience” is just a statement about people from high school and not people you currently know? what if it’s true that your friends are worse than you at maintenance and reaching out, but also that you can inspire them to improve at it over time? what if people actually do love you? what if when your friends say to keep in touch they really mean it?
there’s this meme about how “the most effective way for an anxiously attached person to become more securely attached is to date a securely attached person.” in my case i did not date anyone but i did need very close friends to help me understand just how infeasible it is to replace someone you know extremely well, and i also needed a manager who kept reminding me that some of my stories about the world were both self-limiting and mutable
When they drew apart Connell looked her in the eyes and said: I love you. She was laughing then, and her face was red… How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. She knows he loves her, she doesn’t wonder about that anymore.
this summer someone told me they didn’t want to promise anything about the future of our friendship because they weren’t sure what would happen. at the time i agreed but nowadays i think this is a rather silly statement. nobody makes promises about the sun rising tomorrow; the whole point of promises is that they’re uncertain and we make them in part as a form of prioritization. so make promises like let’s be friends forever that you’re not certain you can keep - of course don’t do it if you don’t care or know you’re unlikely to follow through - but if you really want it to happen then why the hell not
Love the ants'theory! And the whole text I will definitely work more on my limited believes. Thank you