Psychological autoimmune disorders

I fixed my brain. Um, a couple weeks ago. I think this is how I did it.

This will make sense later. Source: casualphotophile.com

Disclaimers

(1) In this article you will find novel psychological theories and talk therapy interventions based in large part on the author’s own autobiographical anecdata. I am developing, testing, and validating these ideas, which may lead to them being overhauled or even rejected entirely. What I write here is not established science and should not be treated as reliable knowledge at this time. (2) While I am working in the frame of Rex Riepe’s eristic theory, my theorizing should not be confused with his. We are in communication, but we do not vet each other’s work. (3) Here, the term “sufferer” denotes a hypothetical person with the condition whose existence we have posited. The term is not meant to imply that this is a real, professional-quality medical case study. (4) None of the claims you will read here are approved by any medical or psychological authority. Read and use at your own risk.

Hi, I'm just a 40 year old dad doing amateur psychology because I need to know how I healed myself… last month

For those of you just now joining the saga of New Normality, I am a dad of two, pushing 40 years old, who recently developed a rather serious hobby centering around a new psychological theory known as eristics. I got into eristics because it, along with a gifted amateur psychologist who specializes in the Enneagram, catalyzed within me an extraordinarily powerful and unexpected personal transformation. This occurred in what I am now, with absolute sincerity, calling my July awakening, July 2024.

Yes, the month that we just finished. Last month. The one we were in four days ago. July 2024 is my personal 0 AD. I am not the same person. I never will be. Every single person who has experienced my presence for more than ten minutes in the past two weeks has remarked upon this transformation, from my wife and children to my friends and coworkers. They are often initially frightened and incredulous, but have slowly come to accept my stance that the change is extremely positive and the downsides only temporary in nature, due to the volatility of adapting to a suddenly, vastly expanded personal psychological living space. The positive consequences are too many to list in this post, but some can be found in the Highlights tab of my X account. The latest one is complete comfort in being seen and making eye contact, the lack of which has been a universally acknowledged, defining attribute of my demeanor for almost my entire life prior to July 2024.

The theory I'm going to present is formulated from an eristic starting point, but the concept can be formulated on more traditional psychological grounds as well. In fact, it is very similar to a theory published in May 2020 by Omer Van den Bergh et al. and promoted by psychiatrist Scott Alexander in February and March 2021. I hope to draw attention to these theories by presenting myself as a case study of the potentially life-transforming insights they can provide to the right person. I am but a single data point, but an extraordinarily unique one, fresh from the fight and rich in minute-by-minute written detail from my own X account. Perhaps I can even offer myself to interested psychologists who may wish to dig into my story and get their own personal questions answered.

The problem: out-of-control inner critics

According to the recently developed eristic theory of emotions and personality, I have a personality archetype known as The Fixer. In eristics, each person is theorized to have a characteristic mixture of different complex emotional patterns called beats. The Fixer's top beat is envy, which is written as guilt » disgust. In formal beat grammar, envy is a sort of internal command that says “you should contribute to humanity by improving, and especially cleansing, yourself.”

Unlike traditional envy, which is thought to target other people, eristic envy characteristically wraps back on itself. The envier targets a counterfactual “better” version of themself, a version the envier feels is possible but not yet attained. The germination of this counterfactual is often triggered by the example of another person considered admirable, but can also be triggered by purely internal psychological processes. In this post, I will describe a psychological condition, a sort of psycho-spiritual autoimmune disorder, that tends to afflict individuals with a strong envy beat, whom I will shorthand as envyists.¹²

In an envyist, the persistent recurrence of the envy beat can be conceptualized, Inside Out style, in terms of an inner personality agent which I call the inner critic. Inner critics motivate envyists to improve themselves and contribute to their communities with an unusual depth and intensity. As a result, envyists tend to be especially concerned with finding fault in actions which inconvenience, confuse, pain, neglect, or otherwise cause harm to other people — either directly through mistreatment of fellow humans, or indirectly through damage to our shared earthly and civilizational resources. As Rex says, Fixers/envyists are more motivated to keep society from falling apart than anyone else.

However, there is a risk that the critic's powerful emotional responses to negative conditions will overwhelm the person, causing them to become trapped in fear of their own powerful critical reactions to external and internal stimuli. At the extreme end, the critic's attacks become a form of internal trauma, a sort of psychological autoimmune disorder (PAD) overlapping heavily with OCD and the Catholic concept of moral scrupulosity.³ Symptoms can include:

1. Low self-esteem despite objectively impressive achievements. This paradoxical mindset occurs because the PAD sufferer is much less interested in past accomplishments than their self-assessed capacity to continue improving themselves, to continue contributing to their family, organization, or community.

2. Endless rumination over life events where the PAD sufferer harmed others, lost status due to perceived social missteps, or even simply failed to fully capitalize on an opportunity to gain status or make a contribution to society.

3. Withdrawing from life into engagement with an abstract world with no real consequences, e.g. the anonymous digital world, helplessly externalizing their internal critic trauma via unproductive behaviors ranging from a vague, irritable, unaware hostility to perhaps even outright trolling.

4. Excessive irritability when contributions by the sufferer, their family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, or even distant figures like national politicians fall short of the internal critic's standards.

5. A general hesitancy to exert meaningful agency in life. The PAD sufferer has a preference to sit on the sidelines and criticize rather than getting into the arena and trying their best to make their family, world, and community a better place.

The solution: reviewing and tuning up the inner critic

Carousel slide projector ready to serve up some cringe. Source: casualphotophile.com

PAD sufferers tend to take the judgments of their inner critics at face value. Even if they are deeply pained by and resentful of their compulsive inner critics, PAD sufferers implicitly view their critics as well-intentioned authority figures who have kept them safe throughout their lives. Each inner critic sustains this image by serving up a Kodak Carousel of cringey memories of the PAD sufferer’s clueless, imprudent, or accidentally cruel behavior. I’m doing this for your own good, the inner critic says to the PAD sufferer. The critic says this with authentically good intentions, the very best.

At this point, you might be expecting me to say that the inner critic is a tyrant who needs to be recognized for what it is and destroyed, but that isn’t where I’m going. Most of our moral psychology is adaptive in nature. Our inner critics are trying to help us avoid mistakes, not cruelly lord over our lives. The best response to an out-of-control inner critic is to look rationally at what it’s saying and whether it makes sense.

An analogous regulatory function occurs in our adaptive immune system. Our bodies generate endless proteins capable of latching onto foreign agents, but 98% of them are destroyed in the thymus because they latch onto things in our own bodies. In the moral psychology realm, what we want to know is whether our moral antibody systems are latching onto the elements of our character that we want to remove, or are actually flagging our most treasured qualities and abilities for disruption and restraint.

Here are the two major ways to rationally review an inner critic’s concerns:

• The empirical method: Seek out a talk therapist or other caring person. In either case, it should be someone whose moral fiber you respect. Confess your “sins” and ask for, if not forgiveness, at least perspective. Does this caring third party see your behaviors as deeply troubling, or just common foibles that people normally live and learn from? This person may offer a way for you to norm your behavior against the human average, rather than demanding from yourself a paralyzing, arbitrarily high standard of perfection.

• The logical method: Apply a widely accepted moral framework, such as consequentialism or deontology, to get some objective perspective on your behavior. You may be surprised to hear that religious moral theology can be useful here. For example, the Catholic Catechism points out that moral errors done in a condition of invincible ignorance — that is, when we not only didn’t know any better, but couldn’t have reasonably known any better — are not morally blameworthy. Sometimes you do things that have bad consequences, but there was no way for you to have known any better, so you do your best to make amends, learn and move on. When I first started thinking about psychological autoimmune disorders, I called them spiritual autoimmune disorders. When I Googled the term, expecting no prior art, I was quite surprised to find that a church had already coined the term in a sermon from a couple years ago, using it in much the same way that I do.

A successful review and tune-up leads the inner critic to recognize its strengths and weaknesses and adapt its critique to your current areas of moral strength and weakness, rather than spamming paralyzing criticism indiscriminately over every area of your life.

The impact: a life-changing discovery of full-spectrum personal confidence

To illuminate the value of reviewing and tuning up your inner critic, I'd like to make an analogy between geographic territory and psychological territory. Psychological territory is the space of possible situation-action pairs. Whenever you’re in a situation and do something, that corresponds to you being at a particular point in this space. Mathematicians have no issue making everything a space because all sets of possibilities have a quasi-spatial structure that works the same in some sense. You can think about becoming aware of this space, motion in the space, etc.

So, imagine being placed in this psychological space which is like a geographic space. Initially you have little awareness of your surroundings. You can explore, but exploration comes with risk. If you find something⁴ while exploring that hurts you, you will avoid that area in the future. Hopefully you aren't harmed catastrophically, and are able to determine the places where harmful things are. However, you may have difficulty with this if the places where harmful things are change over time, or you keep going into new spaces — maybe you have to for some reason, to find resources or escape mobile dangers — and as a result you find yourself unable to predict where the harmful things will be. In this case, you may slow down to a near-freeze,⁵ becoming very cautious to avoid running into the harmful agents and better monitor and manage their interactions with you. On the other hand, if you find that you are able to predict the locations of harmful things, you can then plan to avoid them, and you don't necessarily need to go slow anymore.

Let's take a more specific example, an extreme hypothetical. If you are bicycling on a road that has potholes in it, you would normally be cautious because of their random distribution, your poor knowledge of it, conditions such as wetness, difficulty steering precisely, etc. However, suppose that you had extremely detailed knowledge of the locations of potholes and very precise actionable knowledge of how to steer to avoid them. Under this condition, you could move very aggressively where others would be much more cautious, because your mental model enables you to avoid the harms reliably even at high speed.

After you do an inner critic tune-up, you are empowered to acknowledge the level of detailed information that you have about an environment that you are currently trying to navigate. You are empowered to have a relatively unbiased, accurate awareness of this, rather than a uniformly biased downwards, underconfident assessment, which is what a PAD sufferer typically has.

Conclusion: my personal treatment

What happened in my case of PAD was my inner critic had me convinced that there was unpredictable danger everywhere, even within myself. I was unwilling to acknowledge that my map actually did have very high resolution, highly actionable information that would enable me to move much more aggressively than I was. Prior to July 10th, 2024, I let this general fear, this general bias that everything is much less predictable than my knowledge really "warrants" it to be — I let this fear/bias intrude across my entire life. Starting on July 10th, I've quieted that fear rapidly. Today, I seem to fear uncertainty only where I really ought to. My inner critic is now properly calibrated, rather than generally biased.

1. I’ve changed this term from “envious” to “envyist” to emphasize the psychologically active nature of the envy of interest.

2. The emotional labels of eristic theory seem to be a boon to the novice and a curse to the expert. Initially, they help to make sense of beats and the wide range of familiar complex emotions beats can account for. With more experience, they start to get in the way, and it helps to consider the formal definition.

3. Martin Luther was famously afflicted with scrupulosity. His method for treating it had some… notable impacts on history.

4. The concept of mobile agents in psychological space may be the reason for the coining of psychofauna by writer

visakan veerasamy

.

5. Freezing is not the only option. Others may choose a chaotic, always-ready-to-fight type strategy.