I Tried Internal Double Crux

This post is from my ‘Showing My Workings’ section: More frequent extra bits and pieces that don't feel complete or meaty enough to post to main newsletter.

If this blog post contains only this sentence and a bullet list, or is otherwise weirdly half-finished, it’s because it was showtime and this was all I’d written.

• Last week when I was trying to work out this problem of avoiding uni, I tried using CFAR’s Internal Double Crux technique:

1. Find an internal disagreement

• A “should” that’s counter to your current default action

• Something you feel you aren’t supposed to think or believe (though secretly you do)

• A step toward your goal that feels useless or unpleasant

2. Operationalize the disagreement

• If there are more than two sides, choose two to start with; focus on what feels important

• Choose names that are charitable and describe the beliefs as they feel from the inside, rather than names that are hostile or judgmental (e.g. the “I deserve rest” side, not the “I’m lazy” side)

3. Seek double cruxes

• Check for urgency

  • Is one side more impatient or emotionally salient than the other? Does one side need to “speak first”?

  • Is one side more vulnerable to dismissal or misinterpretation (i.e. it’s the sort of thing you don’t allow yourself to think or feel, because it’s wrong or stupid or impractical or vague or otherwise outside of your identity)?

• Seek an understanding of one side

  • Let whichever side feels more impatient “explain itself” – why does it feel right or important to react in this way?

  • What things does the other side not understand about the world, that this side does? Why can’t the other viewpoint be trusted – what’s bad about letting it call the shots?

• Seek an understanding of the other side

  • Check for resonance with what the other side just said – did any of it ring true from the second perspective?

  • What things does the first side not understand about the world? Why can’t it be trusted – why would it be bad if only its priorities were taken into account?

4. Resonate

• Continue to ask each side to speak and summarize the perspective of the other, until both models have incorporated the rationales underlying the other’s conclusions

• Imagine the resolution as an if-then statement, and use your inner sim and other checks to see if either side has any unspoken hesitations about the truth and completeness of that statement

• Didn’t actually follow the technique strictly, but kind of ended up doing my own version of it lol

• When I went to try the technique I actually felt resistant to even trying the technique, so I used the technique to work with this resistance first, though this kind of blended into working with the resistance to doing uni work

• Conducted dialogue between two parts of me: The “crash and burn” part that didn’t even want to try doing this exercise to address the issue, and the “I should try” part that wanted me to try this exercise and try to work through my resistance

• Discovered that the Crash and Burn part didn’t trust that this process of ‘working through it’ would give enough weight to certain things that were important to it, it thought these things would get disregarded, misunderstood.

• went back and forth between the parts, noting their ‘responses’ to each other’s points of view in a notebook.

• At end of exercise didn’t feel like I’d ‘fully solved everything’ but felt like these different parts of me had (a lot?) more sympathy and understanding for each other, less of a sense of being internally at war.

• Looking back (it’s hard to be sure but) I think this exercise might have caused a reasonably large internal shift, might have been a big cause of me feeling less in ‘panic mode’

• Writing this up I find myself thinking “I should try IDC more then”