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This association between "micro aggression" and "reverse cognitive behavioral therapy" seems pretty accurate to me. I made up a game a couple of years ago call
by javajosh 5y ago
This association between "micro aggression" and "reverse cognitive behavioral therapy" seems pretty accurate to me.
I made up a game a couple of years ago called "Take it Personal", which is played between two people and in turn each person makes a statement, and it must express outrage about the last thing said. If you don't express outrage, you lose. There is always a path to outrage. It is an unpleasant game, but instructive.
- fellowniusmonk 5y agoI would love for this to be an actual game.
- erikerikson 5y agoAs an official member of the actual game declarers consortium... I must ask with what authority you deign make such an informal game classification! Join a council for goodness sake! Please accept my condolences at your loss of this round.
- rootusrootus 5y agoHow dare you sully the sanctity of the HN comment section with such a frivolous game!
- DarylZero 5y agoYes, and generally we must give cover to the aggressors because we need them on our side. Cognitive behavioral therapy is about adjusting the individual to society's demands. The individual must be made to tolerate indignity.
- javajosh 5y agoI have a great deal of sympathy for this argument, as one who sees speaking truth to power as one of the highest goods, and CBT (or the Buddhist concept of detachment) seems on its face a tool to pacify people - or better, to pacify themselves. But in truth the emotional reactivity is itself a source of great suffering, and disables the person from taking real action anyway. In extreme cases, the reaction eclipses the original injustice entirely. In the case of real indignity, what is better, to lose your shit and become angry, depressed, upset, for days or weeks, or to pause and recognize that its not about you, it's about them, and to consider what your options are for a response? Who is more powerful, the person who winces, and then stands up and speaks clearly and eloquently against the aggressor, or the person who crumbles? CBT protects you from manipulation. Consider someone who's in emotional turmoil from something they've heard. Maybe they heard CRT is in their schools, or MS13 is moving into the house next door. Rather than encourage them to examine their emotions, and pause to examine the motive of the speaker, the speaker instead encourages the emotion further and offers "solutions" to these problems. It is a manipulation on a grand scale, and yields power. Or perhaps they've heard that racism is everywhere, all white are racists, all black people are victims, all men are violent. In this case the emotion is righteous indignation, greed, envy and an appeal to power, and is no less emotionally manipulative.
- DarylZero 5y agoI'm going on your own example here of what kind of "cognition" we're dealing with: do you interpret a racially insensitive comment ("microaggression") as targeted and hostile ("personal"), or untargeted and oblivious ("impersonal")? If you choose the latter as a kind of cognitive "assume good faith policy," you may "suffer" less emotionally. But your cognitive strategy makes you vulnerable to abuse. People can take advantage of your charitable assumptions. You may end up experiencing even more emotional suffering after that happens (and you might not even understand what happened afterward). I'll also point out that the emotions go both ways here: if someone powerful offends you or someone else in this way, your reaction will be suppressed (however much) by fear at the thought of the retaliatory exercise of that power. This is by far the more powerful controlling emotion in the society at large. Not racial outrage or self-righteousness or anything like that. I think you won't see CBT employed to control that emotion though.