the fundamental theorem of psychology

after a multi-year deep dive into psychology and adjacent fields, I think there's a single principle under ~everything that works. it sounds stupidly simple.

feelings about a situation can get stuck. similar situations bring them back up. when they come back up, you can get them unstuck. that usually involves crying, and always involves letting the feeling run its course.

that's it. the rest is analysis.

take "trauma". whether the concept ever helped you or not, at some point you had the thought: wtf do you mean all these umc kids are traumatized, how are more people traumatized by objectively safer childhoods? the answer is we lost the social tech for getting unstuck. the feelings pile up and nobody around you knows how to help them move.

stuck feelings are an unpleasant state, so you seek out the situations that bring them up. you want them unstuck, so you keep surfacing them. but you never finish the job, because no adult taught you how. if one had, the feeling wouldn't be stuck. this is most risk-seeking and born-to-lose behavior. always dating cheaters, self-sabotage. it's the feeling trying to get out.

my mom was bad with time, and in retrospect ashamed of it. stuck feelings from adolescence, I'd guess. so we were always late, and she'd blame me. it's irrational to blame a kindergartner for not getting himself ready when you didn't leave enough time. I didn't know that, so I just felt bad about myself until I learned to do it fast. there's still a stuck sense of "or else you're a fuck up". it comes up when I'm running late and I get tense, expecting to get yelled at. everything is like this.

the worst version: your parents are uncomfortable with their own emotions. you felt things as a kid and expressed them, the way kids do. that reminded them of being a kid and expressing emotions, which is when their parents got upset with them, which hurt. so what surfaces when they watch you emote is that old fear and hurt, stuck from their parents getting mad. they don't know that's what's happening. nobody likes feeling that, so they shut down the cause: you, expressing emotions.

that's the theorem again, one generation up. and it guarantees stuck feelings in you, because it kills the system that would clear them. you end up alexithymic, with some of the cluster that tracks ACE score. depression, anxiety, ocd, adhd, alcoholism. you might get somewhere in therapy and then get stuck again.

you need to feel your feelings. even the stupid ones. this is why some people are happier than you. they just feel their feelings. it's a micro-movement. you can learn it.

this started as a thread: https://x.com/himbodhisattva/status/1974510364697198631