Well, I did start my comment with "also", and ended it with "additional". ;-)

(i.e., I didn't say you missed anything or that you should've put them in the article, it's just "btw, here's some other stuff that might be interesting/relevant for readers of this article".)

In general, humans also tend to be satisficers/prediction-error-minimizers rather than utility maxmizers. When a human behaves like a utility maximizer, we tend to regard it as addiction or other dysfunctional behavior. So we don't so much have "utility" as a collection of dimensions of satisfiable appetites, whose priorities depend on how strong the appetite is (i.e. how long since last fulfilled).

On top of that, some research (see Ainslie's Breakdown of Will) suggests that our appetites are conditioned on differential availability of opportunities to pursue or satisfy them. That is, our hunger becomes more salient in the presence of food (or hints it will be available).

More precisely, human brains triage appetites, so as to prioritize exploiting infrequent opportunities when they come up, and to bother us less for things known to either be completely impossible or trivially available. This is a heuristic behavior that's pretty much nothing like utility maximizing, even if it aims at increasing utility by prioritizing infrequent opportunities and directing effort at places where effort will produce greater rewards.

So appetite triage and satisficing are additional reasons that utility maximizing seems counterintutive for humans, even before one deals with approval reward.

It's TheEffortlessWay.com, but there's no public listing of the recordings; you have to be a paying member to access them and you get sent one link a month along with my newsletter. People who are doing 1:1 with me are the only folks that get an actual listing of the recordings (which is itself not 100% complete if you go back too far in time).

I've been thinking about putting some of this stuff up on Skool and maybe offering some of it for sale outside of my subscription programs, but it's kind of on the backburner at the moment. (I have a bit of a tendency to neglect the older stuff while I work on newer stuff: for example, of late I've mainly been focused on refining a new rapid reconsolidation technique for addressing various kinds of self-doubt, self-hate, and self-criticism.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "testing" here. Other coaches and therapists have reported similar things, though.

My own interpretation is that excitement about the idea of a change or the epiphany involved in it, is an indicator that it has only been processed intellectually, not viscerally. (And thus represents a change in thinking/talking about the problem, rather than a change in values, feelings, or behavior.)

The other emotions are hard-to-fake signals of actual change or learning, in that 1) surprise equals learning something you didn't realize before (usually a realization that one could in fact do some simpler better thing than one is doing, without negative consequence), 2) the grief/loss stuff is a natural response to recognizing some pursuit as futile, and 3) the relief or release is a natural response to realizing one no longer has to engage with a painful pursuit of some kind.

So which one you experience is very situationally dependent on what kind of change is actually being made, but them arising spontaneously is a good short-term sign that some kind of change has taken place. Longer-term signs are spontaneously behaving differently in a situation to how you did before (i.e. finding yourself acting differently without conscious intent to do so), or forgetting you had a problem to begin with. (Or in the case where you're both acting differently and forgot the way you acted before, having other people comment on your changed behavior!)

The forgetfulness thing is perhaps one of the most widely-reported phenomena, perhaps because it just seems so weird. Lots of therapists also talk about the importance of grief in working through various things, but they're usually not as systematic or aggressive about inducing it as I am, I don't think. I find a strong correlation between successfully inducing a grief response regarding experiences of personal rejection, and an immediate reduction in the perfectionistic or self-critical impulses that were linked to that class of rejection. (Which is why I consider it a positive sign.)

Your examples seem pretty modern and not that similar to what the emotion evolved for, which is likely more about things like injury, illness, loss of allies, failed hunts, etc., where compensatory action by allies to literally care for you (in the sense of "taking care of") is quite immediately survival-relevant.

In this context, alerting your allies that you need extra help and/or backup to deal with your setback or loss of capacity seems quite valuable. Your examples don't really require material support from friends to help you survive, but in the ancestral environment, having people able to provide assistance could easily be a life or death difference even in the very short term, depending on the loss.

the title of this article is not “Emotions are always good.”

Good, because a lot of them are very much not. Even if in some sense they "make sense", this doesn't even mean they're useful. Many emotions exist to perform social signaling that won't actually do anything useful for you as an adult. And most negative-valence emotions are unnecessary except for very niche, specialized social signaling uses (such as dealing with being in captivity or under the control of an abuser or oppressive society).

On top of that, emotions are quite often learned behavior and subject to incentives, and may themselves be conditioned on the triggering of other emotions. It's not uncommon for people to be taught to feel e.g. ashamed of being happy! Our brains trigger emotions on the basis of its predictions of what it believes will be beneficial to us on the whole, often making the decision that feeling bad is better than risking disconnection with caregivers or getting punished for noncompliance with their emotional directives. These decisions can then sit around basically forever making us feel bad for really stupid reasons. (Like needing to be stressed or anxious to show that one is working hard, doing somehting important, or "taking things seriously".)

So even though emotions may have evolved for what might be sensible purposes before humans were able to "think things through", they usually aren't required for that purpose. For example, one can rationally decide on a policy of deterrence through "irrational" levels of revenge without needing to actually experience anger. Or decide that some behavior isn't producing good results and decide to do somethig different, without needing to feel guilt or shame.

Like, there are situations where "something is wrong, and I'm sad about it, and with help the wrong thing can be fixed and then I won't be sad".... And then there are situations where "something is wrong, and I'm sad about it, and it can't be fixed".... If we're saying the value of sadness is "it signals people to come help us", then it doesn't make so much sense in the second case, right?

The functional purpose of sadness is to summon allies who show they care about you. That's not the same thing as solving/fixing the problem, but ensuring that you aren't as harmed by your loss, and confirming you still have a place in/support from your community despite the loss.

IOW, sadness is like filing a claim on your social insurance policy to get recompense for the loss, not to have the insurance company un-burn-down your house.

Which are these workshop recordings you're talking about?

The ones in my membership site. There's rather a lot of them.

Eh, I wouldn't say you're necessarily not a coach, in the same way that an emu or ostrich isn't not a bird, it's just that I don't think your approach is a central example of the genre. Short-term coaches do exist, after all, just like flightless birds.

If you're asking from a marketing perspective, I wouldn't use consultant or practitioner, I'd either say "specialist" or "coach", i.e. secure attachment specialist or secure attachment coach. If you hardly ever work with anyone for very long or only work with people to solve a specific problem, I'd lean towards specialist. (Then again, I'm not sure I'd say "secure attachment" unless the people you work with already know that term and are looking for that. But I'm not the best person to ask marketing questions, anyway.)