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Comment by amatic | Hacker News Reader

> I believe trauma instills scientific-type knowledge that is factually false but locally adaptive. False beliefs need more protection to be maintained than true beliefs, so the belief both calcifies, making it unresponsive to new information, and lays a bunch of emotional landmines around itself to punish you for getting too close to it. This cascades into punishing you for learning at all, because you might learn something that corrects your false-but-useful model.

This sounds pretty deep. I immediately remembered other people who I suspect had such false-but-useful beliefs. How to identify areas of false beliefs in yourself?

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There’s actually a proposed scientific model for this system of beliefs called Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics (REBUS): http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316 In Buddhism we just call these beliefs “conditioning”.

Good therapy can be a great method for finding and exploring these limiting beliefs. In Hakomi therapy in particular you relax the mind to a sensitive level using mindfulness (open attention to present moment) and then run experiments seeing the subtle ways your body and mind react to situations habitually. For example after hearing you talk about your life and problems the therapist might think of a probe like “You’re safe here” and the person notices their reactions to this probe — maybe their jaw tightens. Those reactions are indications of beliefs and associated memories. Through the process of therapy these implicit beliefs become apparent which is often very emotional and when fully integrated results in greater freedom. More on Hakomi here: https://hakomi.com/history

Your blog is terrific, by the way.

Friston has a paper on free energy and psychedelics? Huh. Funny guy.

Thanks for the link to hakomi therapy. The technique seems powerful and I see similar elements in different schools of therapy: If you’re in mindfulness and I say, “Dogs are friendly” and you react with fear and disbelief, there’s no question about what model you’re holding. As soon as you’re in touch with those beliefs and those emotions, clear memories are likely to follow. And when memories are present, explanations aren’t needed. Even more important, when beliefs are conscious, doubt becomes possible. Change becomes possible. The key thing is to get the connection between the beliefs and the experiences.

I don't particularly like the eastern philosophy backstory, though. Lots of therapies have silly backstories.

If the proposal is true, looking at places where you have strong emotional reactions would be a place to start.

Next time you find yourself getting angry over some group's wrong thinking, make note of it for later review. Sit down and figure out why you got angry about it, and honestly consider whether it shows a spot in your psyche where such an idea may have taken hold.

A strong reaction is not an indicator that an idea is necessarily wrong, obviously - just a place where your strong emotions could be clouding your judgement, if you haven't learned how to process your emotions and understand where they're coming from (that sounds easy but at least for me it has been surprisingly difficult).

That's so not true and obviously complete bullocks! ;)

Joke aside: great insight. I am actually going to try this. btw: there is also a case to be made where your strong emotions over others' wrong thinking protect you from doing stupid things (again).

CBT, somatic psychotherapy and mindfulness are all modalities that ask you to see things as they really are, so that you can break through false beliefs. Somatic psychotherapy is interesting in that it allows you to find the physical armoring that is a manifestation of the protections and anxieties that one develops because of trauma. Each alone, or in combination, may be beneficial. And the work of Gabor Mate is also worth exploring, especially with respect to early childhood traumas and the concept of reframing.

Very nice to see a mention of somatic psychotherapy here on HN. Are you referring to the body of work that includes Alexander Lowen? (His books on Amazon are phenomenally interesting to anyone who’s interested in checking out more)

I wouldn't include/exclude anything related... I did some graduate work in a somatic psychotherapy program for students intending to go into clinical settings, or therapy practices.

That said, the friendliest way to get started in reading about this field would be Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky.

There's also a significant body of work related to somatics and those suffering from PTSD. "Somatic psychotherapy" is a way of healing the mind through the body -- we live in embodied experiences, and working with the body is a great way of unlocking the way we live with our thoughts, feelings, responses, reactions, experiences, etc. If you wanted to "do the work" and dive into what you think (and why), the body shouldn't be ignored.

> How to identify areas of false beliefs in yourself?

I don't know how to answer this question in general, but as a teaching assistant I thought about this in relation to the classroom. Obviously as I teacher I wanted students to be able to identify false mathematical beliefs.

I ended up performing an experiment based on this paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.934...

First I asked the students to rate how much they agree with a set of statements like: world hunger is a serious problem that needs attention.

Then I asked how frequently they perform such actions, such as: do you personally do anything to lessen world hunger?

I didn't prepare them for the experiment very well and it went pretty awkwardly... I wish I would have tried it more than once.

The idea is to get people familiar with the feeling of dissonance or discomfort. Because the human brain is supremely lazy and has all sorts of tricks for suppressing dissonance, how would you navigate your social interactions otherwise?

In the classroom you have the additional problem even if you think you don't understand something you don't want to admit that in front of your peers.

False-but-defensive beliefs as a result of traumatic experiences? This is the entire subject of "therapy", especially sub-areas like "cognitive behavioural therapy".

Interesting. If I'm in distress as a result of some event that would obviously make a reasonable person feel distress, I don't think I'd make the leap to "my brain needs healthcare." I think of therapy as debugging thoughts and emotions that have come unglued from reality, or where the intensity has spun out of control and taken on a life of its own.

it is the nature of thought to be entirely unglued from reality.

any experience which takes place while in a state of identification will leave behind psychological imprints.

and ultimately all psychological imprints veil us from our true nature.

There is no need to try and identify false beliefs because at some point, you'll finally ask 'what is false?' and then you'll reach a satori of sorts - beliefs are not binary (true/false), they're a gradient along the axis of usefulness, if you believe in evolution.

Coherence therapy is a pretty concise approach: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17054323-unlocking-the-e...

Internal family systems is a more elaborate, but thorough approach: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6969927-self-therapy

I think it comes down to get past your emotions primarily and secondarily you need some internal mechanism of curiosity and critical thinking.

By mechanism I mean a habit, which is something you practice deliberately until it becomes automatic. And then you keep practicing still.

Of course you already knew that, but It helps to remind ourselves, because that is in of itself the very practice I tried to describe.

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