@threadapalooza 2020

100 tweets on non-coercion

Possibly meandering via dancing, workplace teams, folding laundry and dog training

Certainly from a very personal, neurodivergent perspective.

Let's get this show on the road. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1337067968325447691
1/ non-coercion is an internal stance: a possible way of doing activities, out of many.

You can't tell from the outside (except by very subtle cues) whether someone is coercing themselves or not.

As with all things in that category this makes it hard to describe and discuss.
2/ non-coercion to me is important for two main reasons:

- I want to live life in a way that hurts less: to be in less pain
- I want to find effective, sustainable ways of motivating myself

Both problems that I have in spades, due to my neurodivergences
3/ up until recently, it was normal for me to be "in pain" mentally. It's perhaps a common ADHD experience.

There would often be a small background thread in my mind, simply screaming quietly (or loudly): aaaaaaaaaaaaaa https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1330193358434807810?s=20
4/ as with any background noise, one could choose to simply ignore and push past the "aaaaaaaa", and take a cognitive penalty

However, processes I associate with non-coercion helps me listen to that pain, and through *process to-be-described*, make it actually not hurt
5/ I've seen many people here describe that Bad Place as "aaaaaaaa", and it's certainly a term that I keep coming back to

Because that's what it feels like when I push myself to do something I actually don't want to do.

A part of me starts screaming https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1292821898867417088?s=20
6/ not everyone describes it as screaming, but I can pick out traits that resonate with the frequency of that screaming

A feeling of "stuckness" or emptiness
Self-soothing through video games, TV, social media
Persistent muscular tension https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1317749340425887744?s=20
7/ so non-coercion as a path in part came out of my realising that the screaming could stop

I could live life without hurting those internal parts of myself

I have enough stacked debuffs, that getting rid of one is a big step forward. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1321498518914301954?s=20
8/ the second reason I care about non-coercion is that I want to have effective, sustainable ways of motivating myself.

I didn't have this. At all.

At the start of the year, I was failing to open letters and regularly crying over laundry https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1338630879355269129?s=20
9/ through non-coercion, I'm now a lot better

I get through most days doing a good set of the things that I wanted to do, and only feel truly exhausted on days when I recognise that I accidentally pushed myself too hard

I probably wouldn't even be diagnosed with ADHD any more
10/ "sustainable" is key here:

It's a very common ADHD trait to be able to do things /only/ when the pressure piles up, and we feel the threat of utter failure and rejection looming.

This resulted in things getting done, but my body and mind were accumulating the damage.
11/ non-coercion helped me find another way, by finding the quiet voice of joy inside me - one that was much, much quieter than the voice of fear, but could be cultivated once I found her.

As part of a healthy diet of various techniques, I can feel myself healing, fast.
12/ at the core of it, non-coercion is "easy" to describe:

Don't make yourself do things with threats, force, punishment, criticism or through fear of catastrophe.

(When you hear a screaming, panicking child inside you, hear her out, don't make her worse.)
13/ As with all things inside our minds, non-coercion is subtle at the boundaries. Especially if we're used to pain and force, it can be hard to tell: are we coercing ourselves or not?

Another way to think about it is: "we listen to our felt sense of rightness and wrongness"
14/ To start with, listening to our felt sense of wrongness is a strange experience, because it's not coherent. It's not a single voice, and sometimes some of those voices are louder than others.

A helpful prompt for me was:

If it feels wrong IN ANY WAY
It is wrong IN SOME WAY
15/ sometimes I feel like a choice or activity "feels 99% good", but it's still worth my while identifying and hearing out the tiny quiet voice of disagreement

It's buried somewhere, accumulating mistrust, with the potential to become something bigger and more painful.
16/ the flip-side of listening to wrongness is to listen to rightness: the tiny voices of compassion, love and joy that live inside all of us, that have many names

IFS calls this the Self.
Marie Kondo calls this "spark joy".

When we ignore them, we suffer through life.
15/ so we come back to the crux of the difficulty around explaining non-coercion:

Different things have the felt sense of right vs wrong to different people.

The set of activities that count as "forcing ourselves" looks different to everyone https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1338634400049876993?s=20
18/ (oops numbering)

For example, I can entirely believe that there are people who are self-aware enough that beeminder is an accountability tool that their whole selves feel joy towards, or something close to it

But not for me. And maybe not for you. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1316079985325748227?s=20
19/ A few more angles to describe it from, because talking about subjective felt senses is hard:

Non-coercion is noticing the feeling when there's a pang of "friction" or "stuckness" in you - as if gears are jammed - and taking a moment (or longer) to ease up the pushing
20/ If you were working with real mechanisms, you wouldn't keep pushing/forcing if you felt gears get stuck and the system grind to a halt, for fear of breaking something.

Why would you do that to yourself?

Allow the time to untangle, or find a different way to push or to go
21/ The "forcing something that is stuck" metaphor describes a very specific felt sense

There are mechanisms where it's good to push hard, and some mechanisms where it doesn't, or is inefficient due to excess friction

When we push, we can instantly feel which kind it is
22/ my father used to always tell me as a child (usually when it comes to opening jars) use 巧劲儿, not 死劲儿.

Skillful, light, delicate effort in the right way
Not forcefully pushing as hard as you can, ignoring the feedback and resistance

Use DEX not STR.
23/ Another context where I hear "don't force" is in leading in partner dancing.

You can be strong, powerful, clear: but you must be sensitive to your partner's position, body and resistance.

A strong, clear, sensitive leader, not a rough, callous, blunt leader.
24/ as a dance lead, if you use too much power in the wrong way without being sensitive to the feedback, it becomes "force".

Your follower will have a bad time, they might feel confused or scared, and with too much force, you risk physically injuring them.
25/ as an aside, I've danced with followers whose dance partners are habitually too-forceful and they've had to adapt how they hold their frame to compensate

Dancing with them feels heavy, difficult. Leading them at all feels like stuckness.

I think my mind used to be like that
26/ I find that dancer a really compelling example. Because of the tension she was holding in her body, there was basically no way she could dance as expressively, sensitively and joyously as it was possibly for her to. There were moves she just couldn't follow.
27/ But she wasn't going to improve if she continued dancing with her overly-forceful leader all the time.

To be free of that tension, she needed to learn to un-do the way she is resisting so hard all the time

She could only do that with enough space /not/ dancing with him
28/

That to me is non-coercion, at its heart:

- to ease up on the force we use to lead ourselves, possibly dramatically
- so that we can learn to relax and follow our own lead easily, lightly, subtly
- so that we are not resisting and in tension ALL THE TIME
29/

In this dance analogy, joy and love and felt-sense goodness are the subtle, gentle leads.

Pain and resistance and tension are, in our minds, metaphorically speaking, loud!

When I am in that state, full of mental white noise, I can't hear those quiet voices of felt-goodness
30/

Let's zoom in on that "rightness", now, that felt-goodness

Those gentle impulses that are there within us, guiding us to love, care, fun, direction, improvement, expression, protection, aspiration, gratitude, and all that

I'll call them "joy", but substitute your own name
31/ following joy leads to a life of subtlety, of doing things that feel just-right all the time

Starting things that feel right and good
Continuing things that feel right and good
Stopping when it feels wrong
Not starting if it feels wrong

It's subtle so I'll use some ecamples
32/ Following joy looks like doing things you want to do, not things that you want to want to do https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1316077030094630912?s=20
33/ Following joy looks like doing the stuff you enjoy, not the stuff you feel meh about.

Eliminating "meh" altogether is a wonderful way of getting yourself coherent and propagating your felt-desires https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1310892967842983936?s=20
34/ Following joy looks like doing things at your own tempo, and changing speed as often and as much as you feel like you want to. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1327742851426512896?s=20
35/ Following joy means stopping precisely when you want to stop, and continuing precisely when you want to continue https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1256594130542620672?s=20
36/ Following joy looks like sometimes doing a whole lot more than you might expect yourself to do because there is only "want", there is no "should" https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1319939192525410304?s=20
37/ Following joy means finding your default pace in any activity that you do, without taking damage.

There is no "should rest" any more than there is a "should" anything else. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1256590849330352130?s=20
38/ I think it's helpful to treat these four things as a sort of checklist: are you able to use joy to start and to continue? Are you able to use no-joy to discontinue, or not start?

To truly follow yourself, you need all four https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1338777857804427264?s=20
39/ Truly following joy means effortlessly doing this at an ever-finer granularity

Continuously, gently evaluating the current state of being. Ready to change it, or continue it, and open to new possibilities.

The opposite of forcing is dancing https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1325494249027235841?s=20
40/ when we make a commitment to listen to ourselves, magical things happen to the way we interact with the world

When I engage joy (not all the time but it does happen often), I flow through my daily activity effortlessly: cleaning, work, cooking, leisure, and surprises too
41/ To tie this back to coercion, when we force, and push, we desensitise ourselves to our own suggestions and impulses. We tense up, like the follower protecting themselves from the forceful lead.

We can't find the magical state from there. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1338402644646354944?s=20
42/ There is an interesting imbalance in the way we talk about non-coercion: out of those four aspects of listening to ourselves, we focus by far the most on "not forcing ourselves into starting things we don't want to start".

Let's zoom in a bit on the other 3
43/ "Not forcing ourselves into continuing things we don't want to continue" looks like:
- taking the breaks you want
- noticing if you're bored or stuck
- noticing if you're hungry or in pain
- noticing if you've got the value you wanted already

Hyperfocus can be "forcing" too.
44/ "Not forcing ourselves into not-starting things we want to start" looks like:
- avoiding self-criticism
- not stereotyping or judging yourself as "not the kind of person who does that"
- not talking yourself out of your good ideas
- trusting your instincts
45/ "Not forcing ourselves into discontinuing things we want to continue" is the oddest to think about. It looks like:
- paying attention to your activity and flow
- not fixating on worries
- not stressing about the rest of your to-do list when you want to enjoy one thing
46/ Following joy to "continue" was the one I found the most counter-intuitive

It's easy to focus on outcomes and external actions, but "continuing" and "doing" are things where the enjoyment is entirely internal: learning to get out of my own way and just be with what I'm doing
47/ Getting out of my own way when I'm doing things can be thought of as a kind of mindfulness: neither resisting nor encouraging distractions, allowing my thoughts to come up, and handling them with grace, without allowing them to forcefully push my attention from my activity
48/ And when I practise that mindfulness, the quiet joys can come to the foreground

As Marie Kondo describes, it, when you are folding your clothes, you can notice the look, smell and feel of the clothes you love, and also enjoy the act of care and gratitude you are giving them
49/ And yes, before you get /there/ you might need to first get over your hang-ups about the idea that you "should" fold clothes, and all the obligations and moral judgements you make about it. I still get stuck there often.

Sometimes coercion is many-layered.
50/ Another way of looking at this is intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.

There is lots of research out there showing the benefits of intrinsic motivation: it makes you more creative and better at problem solving.

In this frame, "coercion" is akin to "only extrinsic motivation"
51/ doing things for extrinsic reasons when intrinsic motivation points another way is a strong sign that you're coercing yourself, your gear are grinding, getting stuck.

It might work for a bit, but people become burnt out, bored, aimless...

Procrastination and apathy set in
52/ It not only when motivations are misaligned. It's common management folklore (there are lots of books about it) that the more you apply structures which give people additional extrinsic reinforcement, the less people are intrinsically motivated, even if they originally were.
53/ And this effect is notoriously hard to undo: once someone starts doing their job because of incentives, or orders, or fear of punishment, it requires incredibly strong, clear and restrained leadership in order to get them back into a state of agency and autonomy
54/ Even if someone had the will and the drive in them to do a thing for themselves, mis-application of extrinsic motivators can cause them to lose sight of it.

To use my original frame, the incentives pushed too hard, and the joyful voices were drowned out.
55/ But what happens if we do have unavoidable extrinsic motivators?

People often ask Marie Kondo, "What do I do with my textbooks? And my tools? I pick them up and I don't feel any joy"

To which the answer basically boils down to "allow it to spark joy", but let me expand...
56/ Firstly, we allow ourselves to connect joy in our objects with the joy we find in the life they can help us lead.

Kondo is very big on "imagine your ideal lifestyle": picture yourself learning, or fixing things. If that sparks joy, it spreads through to associated objects
57/ The second part is equally important: if you're not sure, don't worry so much about accidentally getting rid of the wrong thing

If you throw away a ruler, you can change your mind and get another ruler

The fear of making mistakes is too loud, and clouding your judgement
58/ This technique is similar to what CFAR calls urge propagation, but as anecdotal evidence I find that "spark joy" worked much better for me than urge propagation ever did, I think because the explanation I heard for urge propagation didn't help me find the relevant felt senses
59/ When we center "goals" rather than "joy", we are still focusing on extrinsic motivators. If those extrinsic motivators were already causing too much friction, there's no mechanism there for reducing it.

We can only find the relevant "joy" by first easing up on the "force"
60/ When you start trying this approach, there is difficulty that arises when are internal aspects are really far out of alignment: perhaps compartmentalised away or repressed

They can cause good things to feel wrong, and ignoring them works for a while https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1265405399072636929?s=20
61/ Perhaps there are multiple goals within you, clamouring for priority, and they've got used to getting their way by shouting over each other or shutting each other out.

That's a kind of force too. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1336309740268359682?s=20
62/ For me much the worst friction and repression I suffer from tends to stem from fear-of-rejection that I learned as a child.

Healing trauma is outside of the scope of this thread, but there are many good resources around. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1274778408954802183?s=20
63/ trauma healing can be slow, so it's probably best to assume that you'll be out of alignment with yourself at some point or another.

At the day-to-day level, we can view this through the lense of healthy conflict resolution, applied to yourself.
64/ when you disagree with your friends, or one of your teammates has an objection to your team's plan, it's damaging to your long term relationship to forcefully push against their objections, disregard their opinions and do it anyway.

The same is true for parts of ourselves.
65/ it helps me to use the framing of consent, though there is a lot of cultural baggage around that. Quieten down the "force", talk it out with yourself: either you feel the reluctance lift, and a felt-sense of willingness emerges, or don't do it. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1320697464651919360?s=20
66/ if you accumulate enough trust within yourself, you can do things non-coercively despite not having agreement from all your compartmentalised parts and motivations.

But that trust has to be earned, and continuously replenished as you spend it. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1320699486415556609?s=20
67/ While I don't buy whole-heartedly into Non-Violent Communication as a prescriptive approach, it's a good conflict resolution tool and great for this context.

On encountering disagreement/friction within yourself, ask each part: "what needs do you have that aren't being met?"
68/ When you're not in alignment, treat the parts of yourself as a team whose ongoing co-operation you value.

Respect, alignment, trust, care for each other: all this can be cultivated.

But the internal equivalent of a shouting match, reprimand or retaliation erodes all of that
69/ If you've managed teams, you'll know that even with good intentions, it doesn't always work out. Sometimes the conversation isn't happening the right way, someone just isn't coming round, and the deadline is looming.

What happens if you see no other way but coercion?
70/ While I think there is always a path to agreement and non-coercion, there's no point being puritanical: we're not perfect, we have limited energy, and some situations are risky and difficult.

Sometimes self-coercion happens, and we need to minimise the damage
71/ In making a decision between multiple choices that all feel coercive, we should at the very least evaluate the degree of trust-violation that we are committing against ourselves. All violence is bad but some violence is worse than others.

(remember trust is subjective)
72/ And when we do violate our internal trust, perhaps because something urgent or dangerous is happening and the part is not able to be reasonable enough in the moment, make enough effort to heal the relationship properly afterwards

Do enough aftercare to undo the damage
73/ Ideally, allow the part that was hurting to explore the joyful world you end up in when you've taken the action you needed to. (Because you were doing that thing to end up in a good place for all of your parts, right?)

And always, always, always back it up with self-love
74/ In this context, I've been thinking about dog training and parenting small toddlers lately (read: watching YouTube clips).

There is sometimes coercion involved in discipline, which you might need to keep these small creatures out of real danger. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1335531985184333824?s=20
75/ Supernanny's naughty step is a good example:
- before using it, try to resolve needs first
- keep it short, but be firm: you need this outcome
- follow it up with love, attention, kisses and cuddles
- continue to work out the unmet needs! afterwards!
76/ I think it's easy overdo discipline, but it's possible to do it without lasting damage in a loving environment where unmet needs are proactively resolved.

But when we apply "discipline" to ourselves, how often do we remember to back it up with love, and identify our needs?
77/ and if we start convincing ourselves coercive self-discipline as a good thing, we might also stop trying to minimise the damage it causes

When really we need the minimum effective discipline to avoid the real danger effectively. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1338090896064204802?s=20
78/ As love is a prerequisite for non-damaging discipline, it's a big problem that many people live with a chronic lack of self-love

That results in a world that is full of coercion and pain, all the time. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1322218689622609921?s=20
79/ self-love is firmly intertwined with non-coercion in my world view

Without self-love, I can't do effective conflict-resolution and healing in myself
With too much internal force, I can't feel the moment-to-moment present joy that makes up self-love https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1322217850640257024?s=20
80/ When we live in self-love, coercion is not necessary. We are here, we see ourselves, we understand the world, our needs and our wants, and we simply... Do.

When that feeling seems absent it can be hard to believe.

But it is there if we look for it. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1317748634943881216?s=20
81/ For some people (and more parts-of-people) non-coercion is a value in itself. To live with less friction, less pain, less force, less suffering is good, and can be a very strong motivating force.

I also think that non-coercion is important instrumentally towards other values
82/ when your team spends the whole day bickering, they're not getting anything done.

When half the team members scare the other half into silence you're getting at most half a team's worth of output.

Building a good self can look a lot like building good team dynamics.
83/ non-coercion helps you find motivation that feels good, an fit feels good because it's what you actually want for yourself.

With that ability, rather tautologically, you can do anything you want. https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1316082901147176967?s=20
84/ For those of you who have many different motivations, as I do, building up functional, reliable, non-coercive, sustainable motivation through "joy" allows us to make steady progress on all of them. They all smoothly get out of each others' way https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1316080994215243778?s=20
85/ In the long run, non-coercion doesn't result getting less things done, unless they were things you didn't actually care about.

I think it's worth all of your motivations investing in, not simply the parts of you that want to be in less pain (those parts are important too)
86/ In my worldview non-coercion is one critical ingredient along the path of actually achieving ALL of the different things we care most deeply about, as effectively as possible, using limited our time and effort, by minimising waste through internal conflict
87/ If someone's non-coercive self-expression doesn't look like yours, maybe they don't value all the same things as you do

Or maybe they're going through a transient state, in order to heal the damage that has been done through coercion, and emerge free and powerful again
88/ When you've been "motivating" yourself with self-coercion, it's possible your true values point in the direction you're already going in. Or it's possible that it's orthogonal, or in a small set of cases, totally the opposite direction.

You can't tell if you can't hear it.
89/ Drawing back to the extrinsic vs intrinsic terminology: focus on extrinsic motivation is harmful to intrinsic motivation, REGARDLESS of whether they're pointing in the same direction.

If you don't have a felt sense for your true values/joy/goodness, that's a warning sign
90/ It's worth it. The upside is huge.

What could you achieve, if you were able to simply get out of your own way, stop procrastinating, and devote yourself whole-hearted to pursuing all of your values, all that brings you joy?

How many times more powerful could you be?
91/ People who are internally aligned, and aren't shutting parts of themselves away through force/coercion, exude a powerful charisma.

I can feel it when I interact with them, just as I can feel a sensitive, responsive, expressive dance follower as soon as I start leading them
92/ You might have met some of those people in your life, or online.

They are creative, they fill their time with things they love, they are warm and caring. Funny and charming. They do "impossible" things that other people would balk at.

They somehow don't procrastinate.
93/ If you center the high-friction frame that many of us live in or have lived in, non-coercion gives you superpowers.

But if you've been weighed down by heavy sandbags your whole adult life, normal human running would look like super speed

I look around me and I see sandbags
94/ It's not as easy as throwing off the sandbags: we've adapted to them in the way that we've learned to run. Our running stance might stop working without them, for a while.

But to re-learn how to run, we need to first lose the sandbags

And oh, how much easier it is.
95/ Children are creative, imaginative, free. They have not yet learned how to force and overpower themselves

We can get that power back, by learning to quieten those learned "forceful", fearful voices, and in doing so rediscover freedom and imagination https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1264304542369419266?s=20
96/ I care about freeing myself from pain, so I do not want the metaphorical sandbags weighing me down

I also care about pursuing goals and doing the impossible, so I want to learn to run faster

I care about creativity in its own right

These are reasons I pursue non-coercion
97/ I care about the world being a better place

I care about other sentient beings living in joy and kindness, with less suffering

I care about human beings creating more goodness together, with full commitment

These are reasons I preach non-coercion to you
98/ I care about defeating Moloch

I care about co-operation, and better incentives, and breaking out of local optima

I believe self-coercion stops us from seeing the bigger picture and working on things that are truly good, and valuable, and joyful https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1338163314057240577?s=20
99/ I want my friends to be happy, free, and successful.

I want to see that charismatic, glowing light shine out of them because their internal tension has dissolved away, and they are able to pursue the things they care about at full speed

I want you to have superpowers
100/

Non-coercion is a mindset, a stance. You can do anything with it.

Through discarding "should", you learn joy.

Through joy, you learn self-love.

Through self-love, you learn motivation.

And through motivation, you can do anything.
You can follow @captain_mrs.
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