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I'm addicted to being useful

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Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#141

Post by xnx »

tclancy wrote: post #7

> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…

Classic treatise on this topic: "It's not about the nail" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#142

Post by [deleted] »

n4r9 wrote: post #24
tclancy wrote: post #7

> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…

I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver. Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. You can help by being curious about what they're say…

[deleted]

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#143

Post by saghm »

embedding-shape wrote: post #115
Aurornis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot. If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then vali…

> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not". The point is th…

This is super important. I'd argue that a huge part of learning to process feelings healthily is being and able to tell the difference between how one feels (which is an involuntary reaction that isn't controllable) and the actions taken as a result of that feeling (which require explicit choice to take). It seems obvious in the abstract, but I think it's almost a universal human condition for the line between them to get blurred. People will often say something like "I'm sorry I got mad" as if being angry is something that can be controlled, when what they should instead be apologizing for is the actions they took while mad (e.g. "I'm sorry for yelling"). There's a reason that "anger management" is a known term rather than "anger prevention", after all. If someone asks why you did something, "because I was mad" is not a healthy explanation; it removes your choice from the equation and paints yourself as a helpless victim of your emotions rather than someone with agency and the ability to act better even in the face of extinuating circumstances.

While it might seem like these are just linguistic quibbles, I've seen so many cases of people genuinely thinking that trying to suppress their emotions is the correct way to handle tough situations, and I don't think that ever works well in the long run. At most, it's sometimes beneficial to avoid expressing strong negative emotions immediately in certain situations, but that's only a short term tradeoff to avoid exacerbating whatever is currently going on, not a long term solution to avoid consequences of taking actions under the duress of heavy emotions. I believe that people would learn to act better by mentally framing their emotions separately from their choices and allowing themselves to feel them fully and ideally express them in a healthy way. Venting to a sympathetic family member or friend can be a good way of doing this, but that's also why therapy is something that would be benefit pretty much everyone in my opinion; having a trained, neutral professional to be able to talk through emotions without having to worry about overburdening them or worrying about having to interact with them in any other part of life is hard to beat in terms of a strategy for dealing with tough emotions in a healthy way.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#145

Post by Aurornis »

embedding-shape wrote: post #115
Aurornis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot. If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then vali…

> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not". The point is th…

> In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".

If you say "that sucks" the other person is going to assume you're agreeing with them that the thing they're angry about sucks. They're not going to think you're saying "that sucks" that they have an emotion, as an isolated feeling that happened for no reason.

This is where the overly academic concept of "validating emotions without endorsing them" falls apart in the real world.

In actual human interaction, people don't debate if the other person actual feels an emotion. Angry people don't need other people to agree that they feel angry. They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.

Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#146

Post by justsomehnguy »

ambicapter wrote: post #73
zhisme wrote: post #45

giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)

> I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”. Is this correct? From the footnotes.

Nope.

>> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations

Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_ca...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#147

Post by Aurornis »

hypeatei wrote: post #110
Aurornis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support. I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a w…

Venting all the time can actually be quite harmful to the venter. Negative energy drives change and if all you're doing is offloading then you're going to get stuck in a loop of feeling bad -> vent -> repeat while the underlying problem doesn't get solved.

Being stuck in any emotional overreaction state is harmful.

There are a lot of people reciting the academic concept of validating emotions without endorsing them in this thread, but in the real world when you consistently "validate emotions" of someone who is over-reacting, it becomes an implicit endorsement.

In the real world, the people I've known to get stuck in negative emotion states did much worse when they surrounded themselves with people who constantly validated their emotions in the academic speak that's being used in this thread.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#148

Post by Aurornis »

n4r9 wrote: post #91
Aurornis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. If “validating” someone’s emotions comes down to simply saying that, yes, I agree you felt that way, then I suppose that’s true. But when people talk about validating other people’s emotions it implies that they’re saying the emotional response was valid for the circumstances. I have someone…

I quite like the definition on Wikipedia: > Emotional validation is a process which involves acknowledging and accepting another individual's inner emotional experience, without necessarily agreeing with or justifying it, and possibly also communicating that acceptance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_validation It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the e…

I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition.

In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.

The overly academic definition doesn't reflect how people communicate in the real world.

There's also a factor of consistency over time: It's no big deal to go along with someone venting from time to time, but when someone you're close to is overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time, validating those emotions consistently is going to be viewed as an implicit endorsement.

> It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right.

Not in this case. Just going along with it.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#149

Post by GMoromisato »

css_apologist wrote: post #122

does it not bother you that your company is not useful to society?

I thought this meant he worked for a blood diamond trader or maybe Ticketmaster, but no, he works for GitHub.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Philip Dick novel where the world is not what I thought it was.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#150

Post by _DeadFred_ »

Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.
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