Introduction

Declaring commitment to Crocker's rules means that other people can optimize their messages to you for information, disregarding our cultures normal rules against potentially causing offense. The reason why one might commit to said rules is to maximize growth - in order to change yourself, one must first acknowledge that you're currently insufficient, which is made easier if someone is allowed to tell you so.

However, being able to abstractly reason that accepting blunt criticism is good does not allow you to accept criticism. When someone directly critiques you, it hurts. For most people, blunt criticism is net negative because the emotional state it induces is not conducive to change. For some people, normal criticism is also net negative for the same reasons.

Deflinching is a technique that attempts to create space to listen to criticism and Lines of Retreat is a technique to create the mindset to accept it.

Deflinching

At its core, Deflinching is just a TAP. It goes like this:

Trigger: notice that you're triggered/offended/bristling
Action: make space

The heart of the technique lies in "making space". This is akin to a micro-focusing move, where the goal is to determine what part of you got triggered/offended/bristly.

In general, there are good reasons for you to get offended. If someone I respect tells me I commited a social faux pas, the internal wince I experience is real. In my case, it's because I don't like being told that I hurt someone because I don't like hurting people. The temptation is to respond "no, I didn't do that" because I obviously didn't intend to hurt them. If there's something your instinctive reaction is trying to defend, you want to surface that thing. You don't want to squish it down and let it eek out the sides, but you don't want to let it dominate either.

The generalized temptation is to direct the wince-type-feeling back at the person who gave you the criticism. This is bad for a few reasons, but one of the main reasons is that this negatively reinforces people giving you criticism, which means you stop finding out about possible improvements you can make. The point of "making space" is to figure out what the wince-type-feeling is actually directed at. In many cases, it's directed at the world state in which the criticism is true - in which case, don't kill the messenger. In other cases, it can be directed at the f

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Aversion

Blog posts

See also

Aversion

Blog posts

See also