Nice. I also used your critique prompt and got something useful:

A smart, knowledgeable critic—likely coming from a background in neuroscience, trauma-informed care (The Body Keeps the Score), or structural/materialist analysis—would likely attack the voluntarism at the heart of Adlerian theory.

They would argue that while this framework is a powerful heuristic for high-functioning individuals, it dangerously over-rationalizes biological and systemic realities.

Here is what that comment would look like:

The Critique: "Not Everything is a Strategy; Some Things are Just Mechanics"

"This is a beautiful, compelling, and operationally useful framework for a specific subset of the population (neurotypical, materially secure, distinct sense of self). However, it commits the Teleological Fallacy: the assumption that because a behavior has a utility, it was designed for that utility.

By framing every symptom as a 'creative tool' of the ego, you risk collapsing three distinct categories of failure into one:

1. The Hardware Problem (Biological Determinism) Adler treats the human organism as software that can be rewritten with 'Courage.' But neuroscience shows us that 'Incapacity' (Strategy 1) is often not a choice but a mechanical reality. If an individual has a dysregulated nervous system (e.g., CPTSD, POTS, Autism burnout), their 'withdrawal' is not a maneuver to manipulate a judge; it is a metabolic necessity. To tell someone whose amygdala is hijacking their prefrontal cortex that they are 'using anxiety to avoid work' is not just scientifically inaccurate; it is iatrogenic. It adds shame to injury. Sometimes a broken wing is just a broken wing, not a 'Broken Wing Strategy.'

2. The Rigged Game (Material Reality) Your critique of the 'Scorched Earth' strategy (Strategy 4) assumes that the 'Game' (Society/Work) is fundamentally fair and worth playing. For marginalized groups or those in poverty, 'Cynicism' is not a neurotic defense against intimacy; it is Bayesian accuracy. If the market is actually rigged, then 'destroying the value of the outcome' is a rational adaptation, not a neurotic defect. Adlerian theory presupposes a functioning community (Gemeinschaft) that often does not exist for the subject. Asking someone to have 'Social Interest' in a predatory system is asking them to be exploited.

3. The Masking Trap (The Cost of 'Acting As If') The prescription to 'Act As If' and 'fake it' effectively encourages Dissociation. For neurodivergent people, the 'Courage to be Imperfect' often translates into 'The Courage to Mask Harder.' You describe 'Entanglement' (Strategy 2) as a defense, but for many, it is a survival mechanism for navigating a world they cannot process alone. Breaking these mechanisms without addressing the underlying sensory or cognitive load doesn't lead to 'contribution'; it leads to psychotic breaks or autistic burnout.

Conclusion Adler allows us to reclaim agency in the gray areas of life, which is valuable. But by viewing all suffering as a 'private logic' or a 'lie,' we drift into a kind of psychological neoliberalism: the idea that every structural or biological problem is actually a personal failure of courage.

Sometimes the court isn't rigged by the ego; sometimes the courthouse is actually on fire."

How the Critic would classify this post

The critic might even cheekily classify your Adlerian post using your own typology:

"Ironically, this entire Adlerian framework is a Strategy of Elevation (Strategy 3).

By framing all human suffering as a 'strategic game' that can be solved with 'courage,' the author places themselves in the Ivory Tower of the Stoic Observer. It feels good to believe that we are the masters of our symptoms, because the alternative—that we are biological machines subject to forces we cannot control—is too terrifying to face."

Thanks for the feedback, tbh I didn't especially like the examples and names either but since that's the part that's hardest to write it's where I went with the suggestions more often. I think what I should do is ask for brainstorms of many more examples and then pick and rewrite the ones I actually feel resonate best.

Lots of spiritual bypassing in woo communities. Often by people who didn't finished the psychological development phase of differentiation due to lack of support and now self sort into communities that excuse that pattern.

Greatly enjoyed that post!

Not directly attributable, no. I think of most of these things as bringing up the floor rather than raising the ceiling.

This is an appealing story, but I haven't really observed anyone get noticeably better at epistemology as a result of their practice. I remain confused about this for similar reasons to this story.

All of this is not to be confused with the Buddhist doctrine that every form of negative internal experience is your own fault for not being Buddhist enough.

Not really, but it's a long explanation and at this point I'm pretty sure some of the inference steps have to be confirmed by laborious trained processes. Nor is this process about reality (as many delusional Buddhists seem to insist), but more like choosing to run a different OS on ones hardware. The size of the task and the low probability of success makes it not worth the squeeze for many afaict. For the record, in case it is helpful to anyone at all, there are three types of dukkha, and painful sensations are explicitly the ones one can do nothing about (other than mundane skillful action). It is the dukkha of change (stuck priors) and the dukkha of fabrications (much more complicated) that Buddhist training eliminates.

But the thing I actually want to comment about is related to a point I've had a really hard time communicating to people about the deciding to be sane thing. It's a kind of scale-free mental move where people seem to have a really hard time with self-reference, thinking it's some sort of gotcha when it isn't. Not quite on the level of 'if you kill a murderer the number of murderers remains the same' but close. Like 'don't negotiate with internal processes that are acting like terrorists' must, in the limit, turn you into an internal terrorist. It seems motivated by a strong aversive distaste for any top down mental moves, because their training data for that kind of move was always used adversarially. For example, in school, to disrupt and gaslight their own sense making, learning function, and value seeking, rather than helping them cultivate their own. Thus people seem to have a deep prior to regard all such with suspicion and not engage with the idea that a non-horrible version of this move is available.

I've spent a lot of time with the self-therapy modality of Core Transformation for this reason as it seems to cut directly at it, and the short version is something I think that most people can see the value of, Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic style:

1. What is the situation I am confronting?
2. What are my beliefs about myself and the situation?
3. What are my attitudes and feelings about the situation?
4. What do I want to do (not necessarily what I can, or should do)?
5. For what purpose do I want that?
6. What would having that mean for me?
7. Recurse (5,6) until terminal goal is uncovered (if objections come up, rebase the stack on the objection)
8. Who wants that?

Credit to Opening the Heart of Compassion by Martin Lowenthal and Lar Short for this version. To me, this is a generator that eventually can help cut at the root of 'unable to do recursive sanity checks' as the moves are more deeply internalized and the internal processes come to trust the resultant structure more.

An altered state beyond the 8 jhanas at which all perception ceases.

note sanna, typically translated perception, is a technical pali term, one of the 5 khandhas. Nirodha-sampatti is specifically described as the 'cessation of sanna and vedana.' This has implications for how it is perceived as an insight vehicle.

Hmm, agree this sounds like a useful distinction.

Not MECE, just more useful mental categories.