i have written a follow up to this called Manipulating Yourself for Fun and Profit. If you found this neat, please do check it out.
expectation, reality, trauma, and bouldering
a vignette by @nikhilisvalid
imagine expectation and reality as two grips. when they’re close together and you don’t have support, if you’re strong enough, you can campus your way to where you want to go. but of course, it’s much safer to make sure you have support while climbing
the problems occur when you lose support and don’t have good positioning. imagine you lose support but you have good grips with both hands. if expectation and reality are so far apart that you can’t do anything but struggle until you collapse, that’s an anger stress response — you can have the best grip, but if your expectations and reality aren’t near each other, all the anger in the world can’t help
or lets say you lose grip on your expectations, but still have a strong grip on reality. so you’ll flail around trying to find your expectations, trying all sorts of different things with middling success. this is a flight response — you don’t know what you want to do, but you know that you’re not getting supported here, so you become hypervigilant. you’re always in touch with reality, but without set expectations, you still end up flailing. you can end up attaching to other people’s expectations, but that’s not really what you need
alternatively, if you lose your grip on reality, but still have your expectations, you instead become a fawner. since you don’t have your own grip on reality, you’ll just roll over and accept whatever anyone gives you. but since there are such expectations to be kind, or gentle, or good, if someone gives you a distant reality from your expectations, you end up stretching yourself thin
and finally, worst of all, when you lose grip on both expectations and reality. this is the abyss, the freeze response. all you can really hope for is to find a secure grip with either hand as you fall. but sometimes, if you’re falling too fast and grab on too hard to an expectation or a reality, you can just dash yourself onto the rocks. the seemingly safest thing to do here is to let yourself fall, so you then climb back up
but of course, you can work to become the true climber. one who not only chooses sensible expectations and realities, but also does it with support. and as you improve, you’ll discover that you can do crazier and trickier things. but you can’t start by throwing yourself on a V8 — you gotta start with support and incremental jumps between expectations and reality.
slow is smooth and smooth is fast. sometimes you need to get a grip, sometimes you need to let go. we're all going to make it.