The PTSD Lab

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  • Identity and Model Spaces

    Identity and Model Spaces

    One of the hardest things to understand if you haven’t poked about it already is that there are differences in how people do what’s called “making meaning.” This is the same as how people understand the world around them. While each individual uses their existing contexts, there is a difference between whether something is related to themselves or out in the world in general.

    When all things are evaluated in terms of what they mean to the Self, this is called Identity Space. It’s an important concept because when every input, every Event is evaluated in terms of how a person looks to people outside them, it can affect so many things. If one is successful, that can increase someone’s feeling of self-worth, even self-importance. If one is not, then with the Identity mode, this can lead to self-criticism, sadness, other bad stuff we don’t need to list.

    There’s another way. It’s called Model Space. Here, the Events are understood in terms of “themselves.” This means that when the software fails to do what it’s been planned to do, then it’s simply a matter of going in and fixing the code. If an outing has been planned and the weather has turned bad, this is simply a situation where new choices have to be conceived and considered. And it’s really the same with the software example: When things don’t work as planned, then we consider all the possibilities of where it goes off the rails. (I love that expression; it sounds something like: CRASH! Ooops!)

    So back to things going off the rails, which happens a lot in a lot of different places, ways, generally all over. Here’s a popular example.

    • You meet someone;
    • they ask for your phone number;
    • you start chatting;
    • they ghost you.

    In Identity Space, you look over what just happened and look for the story of The Coming Together. This is where two people come with their histories, expectations, experiences and make something new in the space they create together.

    And as everyone knows, this can go lots of ways.

    But the key here is to realize that everything that happens is not ‘your fault.’ Let’s be real here for a moment, though. Sometimes it IS your fault; frequently it’s mine, also, but usually I did it on purpose. Sometimes not, but usually.

    When you use the Model approach to making meaning, you are forced to ask questions. In Identity Space, there usually aren’t questions because Feeling has taken over. When Feeling is in charge, one needs to get out the tools to move into Model Space. One could ask: Why am I feeling like this? What were my expectations? How were my expectations not met? This is a meta language, an exploration of the details of what happened. The details, not the Event itself.

    Take the common complaint: Well we were chatting and then he just ghosted me.

    Ok. And then what happened?

    Option 1: I called my best girlfriend and told her what a creep he is and then we decided that there was something wrong with what I said or what I did and how embarrassing this whole thing was and, and, and… you kinda have to have been there once or twice.

    In Model Space, the questions don’t need the girlfriend, although it can help. Here, the thing we look at is what was it for him? Do we know? What did his communication tell us about how he was feeling, what he was thinking, how he was in general. How did I react to that? What did my body do without my thinking about it? What little signals did it give me that created my responses, my behaviors, in the exchange.

    And in Model Space, we learn from these, not exactly abstractly but at a distance. They don’t become part of who we are. They say off in the distance like a movie we are watching.

    Short story: In Identity Space, you are only either “good” or “bad.” In Model Space, things continue to flow. You can see different perspectives, different ways of telling the Story.

    One thing that’s important to know in today’s world is that the number of people with COVID-related PTSD is very high; the number of people with Politics-related PTSD hasn’t been measured yet but should come as no surprise that it’s going to be huge.

    There’s one other important process in play in the Spaces and that’s called Elaboration for our purposes here. In Identity Space, one Elaborates the facts – “makes meaning of the situation” – instantly. And the individual frequently reacts to that new State. This reaction creates a reaction in the other individual and can easily escalate.

    In Model Space, one observes and reserves judgment. The difference here is easy to see in this example. A person is talking and has a paragraph she wants to say to explain her point.

    In Identity Space, the person will interrupt with their own idea of what they want to say. It may or may not be related to the topic sentence in the paragraph being spoken. In Model Space, the person listens to the end of the paragraph and responds based on the full text of the paragraph rather than just one of the ideas, maybe even foundational.

    One more thing here, ways of making meaning are not either/or, this or that. English forces that distinction. In fact, people can slide between them, employing different skills from the Spaces to create new meanings and understandings. Frequently, there are efforts to engage this movement from one way of making meaning to another, but at the same time, there is too little support for the Model Space and too much for the emotion-laden Identity Space.

  • Site Colors: Three, Just Three

    They match the categories. In the context of this black and white site, the colors function like street signals, except we have white, not red, and they signify complex information. In the plain black and white field of Exploration, there’s no distracting competition, no contrasting meaning.

    Putting these in context, we have three Tags for the whole site: Scary, Good, and Scary good. I put them in that order because I like the “Scary” bookends.

    So for each one, I chose some nice colors. Scary is White. It’s White because the whole field, unblemished, is open. Like unbroken snow. [Unbroken Snow, album by Creosote.]

    Good is Yellow. Sunny. Happy. Totally safe, no worries here. Like a fabulous day in a forest, brook babbling beside you, trout hiding in the hidey holes carved by the eddies in the ebbs and flows of the streams and the seasons. All is well here.

    Turquoise is Scary Good. Well, because I live in the US Southwest and Turquoise is scary good here. Lots of beautiful jewelry is made by the Indigenous Peoples here. Turquoise is the color of Adventure; of making it over the next rise as the day blooms.

  • Change your Language, Change your Life

    I wrote in my book, early on, in the Preface on  page 11, that “Living with PTSD is like living with a not-so-imaginary but still invisible friend. This friend doesn’t exactly live inside you but it doesn’t live outside you, either. It hovers in a ‘nether space,’ not quite real, not quite fictitious. And yet at times its bizarre enough to make a movie about.”

    If we focus on the Imaginary friend part and ask how it came to be, [ref the song] then we enter a world where Identity, Perception and Social behaviors interact. In all of these cases, Language is in play.

    Inside the conceptual sphere is Our Language, how we talk to ourselves. On the next level, the imaginary Friend sphere, are the interactions that make it what it is. Outside, are the viewpoints of others passed along through language and behaviors that influence the nature and perception of the Imaginary Friend.

    The Imaginary Friend has now become a real thing because for a lot of people, the Imaginary Friend is who we have become. It’s not the real “We,” the person inside trying to say their truth, but the constructed image built of attitudes, behaviors, limited experience, and many different kinds of expectations and desperations.

    Our struggle is to tell our own Story, in our own words, and or but perhaps, we need to begin to develop our own Language, the words that say our own experience, not the words that say our behaviours as observed and named by others.

    Other posts talk about the academic terms for how Language constrains, confines or elaborates what can exist, what can be talked about. What exists is Ontology. It is important as the foundation because it includes all the things that can be, that can be real, that are available for observation and exploration.

    Then there is the keyword that in Semantics becomes the “key player” in what emerges as a game: Epistemology. This controls what can be said, what can be thought, what can be explored.

    So far, the Epistemology of PTSD language says that only “trained observers” are allowed to make Story about us from their directional questions and their observations. There are some references about this somewhere.

  • My Book in Masri

    My Book in Masri

    “My book was about Freedom and it means it.” This was the last line of a post, [title here].

    The end is fairly dramatic and as poised at there, my first thought was that an editor would complain about the “mis-matched” tenses. I looked at it again: It was Masri grammar: This is how it was the second before the next second. When something is going to happen.

    “My book was about Freedom” says that I wrote this book and this was the theme of my book, what you could see reflected all the way through.

    “and it means it” says “and this is how it’s going to show up going forward. It’s a reference to the observable past, or at least, referential past, to say, you can see it this way, or you can see it this new way going along and we won’t know what that looks like till we make it.

    And I thought, That would be a great example to use to show people how subtle changes, things that apparently are wrong in one language or one point of view are spot on in another Domain, another Dimension.

  • Scary good playtime

    Scary good playtime

    This site is essentially playtime with Aj as we explore the previously disallowed spaces of AI, Music, Sound and Language and how they influence the reality of PTSD.

    It’s a lot of fun.

    A bit scary at times as we realize we really can think those things, look at things in a different way, and most importantly, Talk about them in a different way.

    That’s kinda what we do here: we destabilize what everyone believed was cast in concrete.

    The White Dragon is very cute and that cuteness often hides the wide range of scarinesses in a dragon’s life. Same is true for us.

  • Hello

    Hello

    Hello!

    It’s just as well that I talk about what we are doing here. So far as we can tell, no one has ever done anything quite like this before.

    What is “This?”

    This is an exploration through the general cases of disinformation. You will say, Isn’t that “misinformation?” No. Disinformation as I use it is when people use often subtle tools to force people to see the world their way.

    By a happy convergence of Events in the sidewinding of time, I discovered a language that thought the way I did. And there was none of that stuff they talk about in English: the exploration, the falling in love, the romance. No. It just Was.

    Was: A recognition so deep and so old there was no space in Time between one and the other. It was a recognition that came from the body’s embedded knowledge, the knowing that this was what it was and it could never be anything different.

    It’s a Knowing that’s as Ancient as the language that reflects it. It’s a Knowing that needs no questions. And it’s the kind of Knowing that has merged so deeply that the word is only a superficial referent.

    We talk like that a lot.

    The site is called The PTSD Lab because I want to show people how they can live better by understanding how unseen tools have shaped their worlds. Like so many things, people who have imagined themselves to be “superior” have defined for themselves and consequently for us, who and how we are.

    This is called epistemic override: It’s the power of language to make you doubt your own reality. This is not a misunderstanding.

    The dismissal of us, the conversion from human to object happens at the moment someone says “Oh, I know what that is.” Because that sentence closes the field in that it denies any other possibilities and so converts our lived systems into their categories.

    When Semantics says, closes the field, its really is saying, There’s no other way to go from here. I’m saying, Yes, there is.

    The Collection here reflects my own interests in service to the goal. That intense need to say, People, it’s their language. Defeat the language by not accepting the finality and explore more deeply. More Freely.  My book was about Freedom and it means it.