Circling as practice for “just be yourself”
I mentioned on Twitter that to a significant extent, Circling taught me what “just be yourself” means to such an extent that I have a consistently good time on dates because I don’t feel like I need to perform. Somebody asked me to elaborate, so here’s what I wrote in response:
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For those who don’t know, Circling is… a practice that’s infamously hard to try to describe or define. That’s because it’s structurally anti-structure and anti-expectation, which is what allows for “being yourself”.
(At least, that’s my experience. There are different schools of it; my experience is from the Circling Europe style and may not apply to others.)
Many activities have rules: “soccer is played by two teams that…”. Circling mostly does not have rules, though it does have principles.
It’s done by people coming together and sharing their experience of what’s happening.
One description is “sharing what it’s like to be you, while finding out what it’s like for others to be themselves”. In any social event, a person will be thinking and feeling many things, and only sharing some of them. Circling is an invitation to share more of one’s experience. For example, if I was at a party, I might have thoughts like
“Oh I’m glad that he said that”
“I’m a little bored by this conversation”
“I think she was annoyed by that comment”
“I have this funny anecdote but I have to wait to say it, I hope the moment doesn’t pass by”
Normally I would keep all of those to myself. But Circling is an invitation to share my experience, so I might say some of them. And it’s also an invitation for me to ask about someone else’s experience, if I e.g. say something and then wonder what they felt about it.
Important caveat: there’s no obligation to share more than what you’re comfortable with. There’s a common misunderstanding of Circling as obligatory openness. But “I don’t want to answer that” is also a sharing of your experience.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not. I once heard someone say that if you’ve Circled once and think that you now know what Circling is like, that’s like having seen a single movie and thinking that you now know what all movies are like.
This is because things may go completely differently in different groups.
In one group, I ignore a question and the conversation moves on.
In another, I ignore a question and someone shares that they appreciate me following my interest.
In another, someone gets annoyed at me.
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
- If someone asks me a question, I should answer.
- If it’s quiet, someone should speak up.
- If someone says they’re upset about what someone else said, someone should apologize.
Circling is a group conversation about your current experiences where you all adopt the convention that no statement is ever an implicit bid. E.g. if I say “I feel angry at you”, that usually implies all sorts of bids, like “You should apologize” and “Others should take my side”. In circling everyone agrees to interpret it merely as “I am contributing to the conversation by reporting my current experience”.
This is what makes Circling both freeing and difficult. You don’t need to say anything you don’t want to. But if there are no social conventions dictating what you _should_ say and it’s your own choice, what will you say?
This can be excruciating. A form of Circling that takes the freedom to an extreme is called Surrendered Leadership, where the facilitator imposes minimal control.
If some people want to break off from the rest of the circle and go do their own thing? They can do that.
In one SL event I was at, everyone just arrived and sat down. For several minutes, nobody said anything; there was no intro, no preamble, no nothing.
I forget what someone’s first words were, but they might have been something like “I’m feeling impatient for something to happen”
Someone may have shared their gratitude for having another express the same thing they were feeling, and things went on from there.
I tend to be sensitive to social expectations and things like turn-taking in conversation. With no rules for that, I could speak as much as I wanted, if I was okay with taking the space from others… but I also couldn’t use those rules for guidance on how much to speak, nor could I rely on those rules to make sure that others would give me the space I wanted.
That got excruciating. One part of me wanted to take up space and another wanted to regulate it, but didn’t know how.
But, it also got magical. There’s really no other word to describe it.
Something very peculiar can happen if a brain realizes that none of its normal expectations apply and it has no idea of what to expect. The mind can drop into a state of just not knowing, and simply being open to anything that arises.
With no expectation of being judged by others, there is no fear.
With no expectation of needing to say the right thing, there is no self-judgment.
With no expectation that the next moment will be dull, there is no boredom.
With no expectation that the next moment will be predictable, there is curiosity of what it will be.
It feels like an altered state. I like to imagine it as a throwback to a young child’s state of mind, where experience hasn’t yet calcified perception and everything is novel.
It’s hard to maintain. Any expectation, including “I’m going to be without expectation” will bring in structure that the mind coalesces around. Trying to explicitly maintain it brings in the expectation that it needs to be maintained.
Even in Circling, I’ve experienced it rarely.
But having experienced it, my bodymind carries a memory of the vibe involved. An echo of what it’s like to drop any self-imposed expectations and demands, to drop into a state where I can just report on my experience and share and say what feels natural.
Since then, whenever I’ve been on a date with a stranger, I’ve been able to drop back into that. With no need for the date to lead somewhere in particular. No need to present myself in a particular way. Simply relaxing into a sense of just being and enjoying their company. (And I daresay that they’ve enjoyed those dates, too.)
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At this point, for anyone who thinks that Circling sounds really scary: I’ve focused on describing the most extremely free version of it. I wouldn’t suggest starting out with that. There’s “birthday Circling” with some more structure, that’s easier to begin with.
A good Circling group will also start out with warm-up exercises that help you get into it, so you don’t need to dive into the full thing right away with no idea of what to do or how to be.
(The term “Circling” also got recently trademarked so if you want to try it, it’s also being done under other names like “relatefulness” and “transformational connection” these days.)
My 10-year retrospective on trying SSRIs
In 2014 I got on SSRIs the first time, and they were amazing. I wrote online about how I suddenly had energy to do things, could concentrate on stuff, and generally just felt better and happier.
I now got a message from someone who’d found my writings and was wondering what my experience with antidepressants was now, 10 years later.
I wrote this reply to them, and thought I might as well share it with others:
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Hi, that was indeed me!
I was on SSRIs for about a year after writing that comment, after that it felt like they started losing some of their effect but I also thought I felt better for other reasons, so I stopped using them. Then I was off them for about a year or two and started feeling bad again, so I got back on them. They had similar effects so I kept using them for a year, until I again got to the “I think they’re losing some effect and I’m also feeling better for other reasons” stage, so I again stopped them.
Eventually my old problems started coming back again, but I also started making more progress on those problems with therapy. By this time I had the feeling that even though the SSRIs were great, to some extent they suppressed my problems rather than solving them.
For example, deep down my self-esteem was still based on getting others to like me to an unhealthy extent – of course everyone wants to be liked, but *most* of the things I was doing had some undercurrent of “how could I get others to like me more this way”. The SSRIs didn’t really change that, but they shifted me from being very pessimistic about that ever working, to feeling more hopeful that “okay I just need to do this thing and then more people will like me”, and then I had more energy to keep doing things again. But the things that I was doing, still had an unhealthy obsessiveness going on.
Since then therapy-type approaches have helped me fix more of that underlying issue. (I had one particularly big breakthrough in 2017, which I described here, and a later follow-up to it here.)
I still struggle with some of my old problems – particularly anxiety, loneliness and occasional depression – but quite a lot of them have gotten better to the extent of being non-existent, e.g. my self-esteem is much better and on more healthy ground these days.
On a few occasions when I’ve had particularly rough patches I’ve tried antidepressants again, most recently for a brief period last year, but they don’t seem to have the same effect anymore. Maybe I could have just increased the dose, but I was afraid that that’d make it harder to access the core of the problems therapeutically, if the SSRIs ended up burying it deeper.
I’m still very glad that I originally got on them though, since they viscerally showed me that life could be much better and gave me hope!
One thing worth noting is that at some point, the level of physical pleasure I experience from orgasms seemed to have dropped quite a bit. I’m not entirely sure when exactly that happened – I was single for a while, and then at one point when I got into a relationship again, I noticed that sex with my next partner didn’t feel as satisfying as it did with my previous one (and this never recovered), so the decline must have happened sometime between those two relationships.
I can’t know for sure that it was caused by the SSRIs, but a long-term loss of sexual pleasure is a known side effect and the timing would roughly match. Another side effect that I got, that persisted even after I stopped using them, is grinding teeth at night (but I got a mouth guard from a dentist that prevents the worst off it). Personally I feel like these side effects were worth it – I was really, really badly off when I got on the meds – but I could easily imagine someone feeling differently, if they weren’t equally miserable.
Games of My Childhood: The Troops
The Troops (Finnish “joukot”, could also be translated as “the armies” or “the forces”) was a game of pretend that I played the most with my friend Eero; I believe Aleksi also joined in.
The central premise was that each time that you played a video game and killed, recruited, rescued, built, or otherwise destroyed/obtained an enemy, character, or unit in that game, it went into an alternate dimension where it became loyal to you. In other words, it joined your troops in that dimension. The same was true for buildings that you built or destroyed, equipment that you found or bought, cities that you conquered, etc..
This meant that whenever we were playing a game, we were not just playing a game: we were also accumulating resources that persisted between games. We could also combine resources from different games. For example, I might kill a number of soldiers in a game such as Snake’s Revenge on the NES, and then produce a number of laser rifles in a game such as X-Com for the PC. I could then decide that the soldiers I’d gotten from Snake’s Revenge were now armed with the laser rifles from X-Com, making them significantly tougher.
At first, my and Eero’s troops were separate, and we would occasionally trade units. For example, he had beaten the game Star Wars on the NES and destroyed a Death Star; I had beaten the game Snake’s Revenge and destroyed a Metal Gear, a walking robot armed with nuclear missiles. We agreed to trade one of his Death Stars for one of my Metal Gears. He later commented with amusement that this was probably not a great deal for him, given how much more powerful a Death Star is.
I took these trades seriously. Once, I traded a number of tanks from the NES game Top Gun: The Second Mission for something that I’ve forgotten. After we had already agreed on this trade, I became worried – exactly how many tanks had I destroyed while playing Top Gun? I wasn’t sure if I actually _had_ as many tanks as I had agreed to give to Eero. So then I had to load up the game and start destroying tanks in it, until I was sure that I had at least as many as I had agreed to trade. This clashed against my bedtime, but when I explained the situation to my mom, she somehow agreed to let me play until I had satisfied my objective (though I’m not sure if she really understood what it was all about).
Different games had different scales, which was an obvious problem. Unlike me, Eero wasn’t very much into strategy games. He complained that it wasn’t particularly fair that in a strategy game, you might acquire lots of units such as tanks at the click of a button, while in an action game you might need to spend a lot of time fighting them one by one.
I agreed that this wasn’t fair. But I still wanted to keep the units that I got from the strategy games. I thought that as compensation, units acquired from strategy games would be weaker than corresponding units acquired from action games. How much weaker? Compared to action game units, strategy game units would be able to take one less hit from the weakest weapon in _any_ video game.
Of course this was a ridiculous “weakness” that wasn’t actually any compensation at all. So I’m not sure if I actually ever told Eero of this compensation, since he would obviously have objected. It can be that I just thought of it in my head and figured the matter settled that way, even while feeling slightly guilty about it.
We both knew a bit about programming and used QBASIC to make simple text adventures. By mutual agreement, it was forbidden to just make your own game where you could kill 99999999999999999999 planets at the click of a button, or whatever. However, any units or resources gained from “real” games while using cheat codes or the Game Genie cheating device still counted, because we did cheat a lot and liked to keep those resources. Though I suggested a special case where, if you used a cheat code to instantly create resources from thin air, those didn’t count. I think this was mostly for the Heroes of Might and Magic II cheat code that instantly gave you 5 black dragons, which felt a bit too cheap even for me.
There were some other special case rules too. I think that unique named characters (such as Grand Admiral Thrawn from the PC game Star Wars: Rebellion) could only join your troops once, even if you played the game multiple times. But more generic “unique” units, like the end boss of a particular level, could be acquired many times if they didn’t have very much of a unique personality specified. I think the intent here was just something like, would it feel weird if there were several instances of a particular unit running around? Having several Grand Admiral Thrawns running around would feel weird. But having several different Killer Moth assassins (a level boss from the Batman game for the NES) would not feel weird, we could just think of them as generic Killer Moth assassins. However, troops belonging to different people could each have their own copies of Grand Admiral Thrawn.
Any units acquired directly from a game would always be completely loyal to us, even if that game had some kind of loyalty mechanic where units could become traitors. However, once they were a part of our troops, some of them might have children together. Any children born this way would _not_ be automatically loyal, but would just have their views and loyalties determined by normal psychological factors.
I think it was also so that any units or technology acquired from a game would not need active maintenance or food, but anything that was separately built or otherwise created by our troops would require it.
Eventually me and Eero agreed to join our troops together, so we no longer needed to trade and any games we played would benefit both. (I don’t think we ever thought about what happened to overlapping unique characters when we merged our troops. Possibly they got merged, too.) This led to a common joke when playing a game together – “what use will our troops have for X”, where X was some silly thing that really only made sense within the context of that particular game, or was obviously very underpowered. Later we also merged our troops with those of Aleksi; we also explained this thing to a few other kids in our neighborhood and asked if they wanted to join their troops to ours, and they agreed. This was often an easy gain, since they weren’t actually invested in our game so they might just say “oh okay whatever”, and then we’d have everything from the video games they played.
One kid who we did _not_ join our troops together with was a particular boy who was a bit of a bully. Neither of us liked him very much. Instead, we thought of different ways in which we would attack his troops and completely destroy them. (We never told him about this game nor about the fact that we were destroying his troops within that game, but rather just kept our revenge to ourselves.) I forget most of the different ways in which we destroyed him – nuclear missiles might have been involved in one – but at one point we decided that he had rebuilt his surviving forces in an underwater base. I remember the mental image of us sending submarines to that underwater base and shooting torpedoes right through its windows, destroying it as well.
The scale issue from strategy games caused some other conceptual issues as well. The original idea was that everything we acquired from games, we collected into a single enormous base on a massive planet where the units from everyone’s games went. But what about strategy games like Master of Orion II or Star Wars Rebellion, where you could get entire planets from? Or for that matter games like Civilization II, that would give you cities? I don’t think I ever reached a fully satisfying answer to this question, and instead just concluded that those planets and cities were located “somewhere else” in the Troop Dimension, outside the Main Planet.
I also remember thinking about the fact that different games clearly had different laws of physics (or different laws of magic). How would e.g. technology from two different sci-fi games with different underlying physics work, if they were both brought to the same dimension? The answer I settled on was that each unit would basically create its own pocket universe that moved with it. So that the laws of that universe applied to that unit while laws of other universes applied to other units. I also had some thoughts about how damage by weapons from different universes would be converted to a common scale, but I don’t remember what I concluded about this.
Finally, we ourselves could also travel to the dimension where our troops were located. I don’t think we made much use of this, but I did have a text document where I had compiled a list of various equipment that I personally carried with me while in the Troop Dimension. Some items included various magic items from Might & Magic VI, a portable shield generator from X-Com Apocalypse, a lightsaber from a QBasic “lightsaber creator” program I’d written (slightly bending the prohibition on text adventure gains here), as well as a plasma pistol from either Fallout 2 or the original X-Com. Had to be ready to defend myself, after all.
Indecision and internalized authority figures
A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure (the writer is a Jungian therapist so attributed it to looking for the approval of an internalized parent, but I think it can be broader) but is unable to predict what action they would approve of.
I feel like that has some intuitive truth to it, in that when I don’t care about anyone’s opinion (or if nobody ever finds out) then it’s much easier to just pick one action and commit to it even if it might go badly. But one of the main reasons why I might struggle with that is if I fear that anyone would judge me for doing things incorrectly.
Or it can be a conflict between different internalized authority figures. “If I do this then X will be angry at me but if I do the other thing, then Y will be angry at me”. Or just the expectation that X will be angry at me no matter what I do.
This also reminds me of the way I think a big part of the appeal of various ideologies and explicit decision-making systems is that they give people a clear external ruleset that tells them what to do. Then if things go wrong, people can always appeal (either explicitly or just inside their own mind) to having followed The Right Procedure and thus being free of blame.
The most obvious external example of this is people within a bureaucracy following the rules to the letter and never deviating from them in order to avoid blame. Or more loosely, following what feels like the common wisdom – “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
But those are examples of people trying to avoid blame from an existing, external authority. I think people also do a corresponding move to avoid blame from internalized authority figures – such as by trying to follow a formalized ethical rule system such as utilitarianism or deontology.
Of course, if the system is one that easily drives people off a cliff when followed (e.g. extreme utilitarianism demanding infinite self-sacrifice), this isn’t necessarily helpful. Now what was supposed to give relief from the pressures of constant inner judgment, turns into a seemingly-rigorous proof for why the person has to constantly sacrifice everything for the benefit of others.
At one point I also wondered why it is that being very confident about what you say makes you very persuasive to many people. Why should it work that you can hack persuasiveness in that way, regardless of the truth value of what you’re saying?
Then I realized that extreme confidence signals social power since others haven’t taken you down for saying clearly wrong things (even if you are saying clearly wrong things). And that means that siding with the person who’s saying those things also shields others from social punishment: they’re after all just doing what the socially powerful person does. And given that people often project their internalized authority figures into external people – e.g. maybe someone really is trying to avoid their father’s judgment, but when seeing someone very confident they see that person as being their father – that allows them to avoid internalized blame as well.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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