…existing code…

Initial notes from the ORI discord

“My research project is — can I heal my family?”
It feels like the typical “healing” journey involves leaving, doing various psychotechnologies, asserting boundaries, countering alexithymia & left-hemisphere capture, etc
- E.g., see Amanda Ngo’s “Sherpa” (collection of healing journeys)
& Sasha Chapin’s “How I Attained Persistent Self-Love, or, I Demand Deep Okayness For Everyone” & “10x happiness increases are possible, and this is an underrated fact”
It feels radically easier to disappear and work on yourself, than to try and heal your family from within

Such an obvious project!

This feels like a “smack yourself on the forehead and exclaim ‘of course!!!’” thing - such an incredibly obvious problem, in hindsight
Coming from a family where
- ~every family member is moderate-to-severe traumatised (in the Sasha Chapin “steelman of trauma” sense
- This is top of mind for me pretty much always, especially when I go on walks, especially as I’m living with family right now so I’m really in it
- Thinking about helping has always just felt so intractable
- But, this is clearly such a profound thing. To get my family to a happier place would be a huge source of pride and happiness for the rest of my life, a really profound project

(Or, maybe there’s an “easy” path, but it feels very difficult to find, and very easy to fall off the path and make things worse)
I can imagine this being a very novel, and deeply impactful project, if I pull it off
I have this image of a very dangerous, hard-to-navigate territory, where there is a genuine path out there that leads to an oasis, but it’s very very difficult to know the way
I want to make sure I plan diligently rather than being rash, because I have a sense that there are mistakes you can make in this space that make further progress much much harder
(E.g., triggering a family member to the point where they are much less likely to be able to receive any input from you in the past)