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could you clarify the difference between externalizing and internalizing please?

isn't feeling like a victim the very definition of externalizing?

wouldn't internalizing mean to blame yourself instead?

doesn't accept personal responsibility translate (crudely) to: don't blame others, it's your own fault. (i realize that this is not the intent, i actually understand the article to mean that i should take responsibility for changing the situation, not just for getting into the situation in the first place. so this is just exaggerated to draw out the point)

so yes, i agree this is for externalizers, but that's because internalizers would never see themselves as victims. (well maybe one can see oneself as a victim of ones past self)

sorry, if i sound confused, i am trying to work this out as i write.

so basically, the advice to not feel as a victim is a no-op for internalizers because they don't do that already. but what follows still applies: take responsibility to get yourself out of that situation

likewise internalizers are also not immune to self-pity.

externalizers feel they can't do anything because everyone else prevents them. internalizers feel they can't do anything because they themselves are lacking the necessary capacity.

but the article says that neither is true. you can take responsibility and make your situation better. i think that applies equally to both.

an externalizer can say: yes, that happened to me, but i can fix it, even though it's not my fault. and the internalizer can say, yes, i got myself into that situation, but i can also get myself out of it.

so i don't really see much of a difference there, and why the advice would be terrible for internalizers.

I think GP's point might be that, if you tell an internalizer who is miserable -- and thus seeing the fault in themselves -- that it's bad to feel victimhood or a fault in others or in their circumstances, you might push them further into self-blame even if their misery was brought by bad luck, or if they're disproportionately seeing a failure in themselves already.

What you say makes sense from a solutions point of view that assumes people presently have the mental capacity to improve their lives and circumstances. Sometimes it works, and it's always attractive to think of and offer solutions, but it can be a two-edged sword. If you say that to someone who's burned out (for lack of a better expression; doesn't have to be burnout), out of capacity and miserable and disproportionately blaming themselves for that, you might just increase their self-blame rather than positively encouraging them towards solutions even if your intention is the latter.

i believe recommending solutions to someone is not really a good idea. rather i'd encourage the person to look for for their own solutions and then help them validate whether those are a good.

AFAIK, in therapy, the therapist's focus on giving advice correlates negatively with success. I imagine the relationship between the two might depend on the problem, interpersonal chemistry and various things I can't think of, but especially if the problem isn't something absolutely concrete, advice probably isn't something that helps. Most people aren't stupid, and if a psychological or emotional problem were just a simple solution away, they'd probably have thought of it already.

Friendship or other "normal" relationships and interaction aren't therapy, of course, but the negative correlation might be an insightful observation nevertheless.

yes, exactly, because it is not advice that people need, but validation of their feelings and ideas. good friends validate and support. therapy of course goes beyond that by for example pointing to new ways to think about your situation, and recognizing problems that friends may not be able to see.

Not necessarily. Validation of bad state is harmful.

A therapist shouldn’t, for instance, tell someone it’s ok to feel uncontrollable rage because the mail was 5 minutes later than normal yesterday.

Noting it is happening is of course important. But challenging the client is also important.

Is that helping them? Do they know why they felt that way? Are there tools we can use to discover why, if not? Are there actions that can be taken to put them in a place where they can feel something that IS helping them, for instance.

Friends who always encourage or validate are toxic, just like those that never do. It’s contextual.

you are right. i didn't mean it in the extreme like that. in that mail example, the late mail isn't the problem. so i'd validate that something has you upset, and maybe recognize that the late mail was a trigger. then help you figure out what the actual problem was.

i meant validation in contrast to just dismissing their their feelings or pushing them to your solutions.

also, validation is not encouragement. if you come up with a bad solution to a problem, i'd have you walk me through it and explain to me why that is the best option. and if i am not convinced, but neither you or me can come up with a better solution, then i'd be very hesitant and validate cautiously.

and even in the best case an enthusiastic validation is less useful, if at all. if i get that from a friend it feels like they have not even thought about the problem and they are just trying to be nice without taking me seriously.

What does modern science say about these theories? E.g. wasn't most of Freud's psychosexual work debunked?

I framed it psychoanalytically, but locus of control was coined by Rotter so its probably grounded more in behaviorism and social learning traditions.

> wasn't most of Freud's psychosexual work debunked?

No, it wasn’t.

Has anyone tried to replicate his results? Psychology got a lot of shit thrown at it during the ongoing replication crisis.

I thought he didnt have results in the modern sense, more like personal interpretations and generalisation of individual patients. There is nothing to replicate.

Not debunked in the same way that religion was never debunked :p

Nah. That's just nonsense pop psychology with no real scientific basis. Avoiding seeing yourself as a victim is good advice for everyone, regardless of their perceived locus of control.

Rape victims would vehemently disagree.

Rape victims dont like falling into a black hole where they are 'marked' as victims. They dont like when most people in their life relate to the rape event as the primary subject and not the person who was raped.

> Internalizers do the opposite. They will place immense burdens upon themselves to unrealistically adapt and change when most people would confront the challenge directly. [...] An internalizer works around everything, always pushing the problem inward and never forcing the world to change. Internalizers can be harder to identify as they silently suffer in an absence of self-kindness.

This blew my mind. Thank you for that.

Internalizers shouldn't work around things, they should turn away from evil.

The Missing Stair metaphor was started from talking about a rapist in a bdsm community. Sexual immorality should be removed from the communion.

Generalizing the Missing Stair metaphor to any given Challenge, opens the user up to studying evil and spreading the fire by challenging it.

Turning away from evil "missing stairs" works better as a generalized concept as it works better in most cases and gives the missing stair person, a chance of redemption by turning to the good by following the internalizer.

Your distinction is irrelevant.

Owning your problem will always result in a better outcome than focusing on victimhood and blame. Blame places control and solutions outside yourself.

I'm getting at the difference between people that give up because they feel they have no control and people who feel like they can only change themselves. Both of those are maladaptive in their extremes. Figuring out which sort of tendencies one has and adjusting that is a step toward owning your problems. The steps toward ownership looks different for these two types.

> This is really good advice - for externalizers. For internalizers however, it is perfectly terrible

I wish I could upvote you 10 times.

The "don't feel like a victim" advice is a very dangerous when a person really is a victim and needs to get away from an aggressor.

Besides, advice that works very well for 50% (or even 90%) of the population and harm the others is terrible advice. We need nuance.

feeling like a victim and being a victim are different concepts. the latter is reality, the former is a feeling, and how you deal with it. to me feeling like a victim implies that i can't change my situation. which exactly means that i feel that i can't get away from the aggressor. in order to get away from that i need to not feel like a victim, but take responsibility to better my situation by getting away.

at least that is how i read the article.

> The "don't feel like a victim" advice is a very dangerous when a person really is a victim and needs to get away from an aggressor.

Did you even read the article?

By not feeling like a victim, you own your problem, and this enables you to solve it. In this case, by getting away from the aggressor.

Is it possible for an internalizer to snap and become an externalizer? In which case would the advice apply?

That's what's known as a "halfternalizer". They've got their own special way of doing things. Totally different nomenclature.

It's my personal belief that people have the capacity for change and it is largely dependent on desire and willingness. Having the words to conceptualize one's self can catalyze the process of self transformation and that's why it's important to talk about it. No one can snap change nor is a willing person's mind immutable. Maybe they find it possible to change one aspect of their life more than others. There's also therapy.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough before, but what I'm trying to ask is whether or not being an internalizer that acknowledges oneself as a victim (through burnout or a shocking epiphany) could lead to becoming a pessimistic externalizer. That because this ex-internalizer has recognized he has been victimized, he will try to study how he's been wronged and come to the conclusion that he had little control over his life. Or perhaps that staying quiet was what made one a victim in the first place, so that one should do the opposite.

At that point, would "don't be a victim" be useful advice or an empty platitude?

That's certainly possible. Someone who has tried every possible way to direct their agency inward without results can simply burn out and feel helpless to affect change. By process of elimination, they've shifted their locus of control outward.

This isn't a given though. I know plenty of people who overinternalize to the point of burnout and don't become cynical externalizes[1].

In my experience "dont be a victim" means "please stop complaining" more than anything else. A friend who truly does wish to help might start with getting curious about why the externalizing victim feels like they cannot affect change, but this is tricky. Often people don't want to be offered unsolicited advice or be made to feel like they have to prove that they have exhausted their options before being offered sympathy. It's a fine line.

1. Before someone else chimes in with it being a useless model because it does not make predictions - that's not the point. It's a mode of interpretation/critical lens, not a predictive model.

> That's certainly possible. Someone who has tried every possible way to direct their agency inward without results can simply burn out and feel helpless to affect change. By process of elimination, they've shifted their locus of control outward.

That's a clear and concise summary of what I meant. What, in your experience would the solution to such a Catch-22 be? I'm sure most reasonable individuals would want meaningful and effective agency but denying the reality and pretending they have sufficient agency isn't helpful either.

Sorry, I don't think I'm the right person to give that advice. That genuinely sounds like the start of a healthy and productive journey with a therapist.

It seems like in both cases, the relevant portion of the advice is just fixing that missing stair step in the most effective way. Work on what's broken inside your house, before complaining about the world.