Personality Disorders Community Check-in: November 7th–November 13th

@loftalex07

Yeah, it's pretty exciting/reassuring to come across a fictional character who's on the same wavelength in terms of what they're doing 😊

@stormieandpaws

Makes sense--so not only was it a form of internal support, but it was also a way to find other people who had something in common and connect with them (e.g. I remember the church group you mentioned that you've been participating in)

@LabeledBPD

Haha, I could have gone for a simpler answer and just said "peace is when you don't feel worried".

I do feel the same way as what you said of wanting to "further the already known knowledge" or find new things that are better. What I find most of the time is that whenever I come up with something, months or years later I'll find someone else who's already done it. And that's usually really exciting because:

1) it validates what I'm doing if someone else has already done it and described it
2) usually I'll find that other people have taken it much further than I have, so it gives me something that I can research learn a bunch of ideas for progressing in what I'm trying to do
3) it gives me something that I can use to share my ideas with other people

***

That question about subjective vs. objective interpretations of peace is really interesting. 😊 I spent some time thinking about it and this is what comes to mind for me.

1) "Peace" is subjective because it's a word and words are made-up

Language is a tool. It's not absolute truth, but people use words because they're helpful. In practical/everyday life, words are a way of getting ideas across.

Example: If I go to the store and I ask where I can find "bread", someone else will understand what I'm asking for and they'll help me get what I want. We have a shared understanding of what "bread" means in common/everyday use. I wouldn't be able to give a precise definition of what "bread" is, but as long as I don't think too deeply about it the word does what I want. I can go to the store and get my bread, lol.

2) With science, someone could come up with an "objective" understanding of people's subjective experiences of "peace"

A couple examples:
-Ask hundreds of people to describe what "peace" means, do some kind of qualitative analysis of the responses (e.g. code them into categories) and you'll have some sense of the components/factors of what the average person thinks peace is
-Come up with some kind of measure that gauges people's self-identification of how peaceful they are. Interview the people who scored highly to figure out what they're doing that works well for them, compared to people who scored lower. You'll have some kind of correlation of "people who say they're peaceful tend to do XYZ or have this kind of life". Depending on what XYZ is, it might be possible to set up an experiment of asking people to either do XYZ or not do XYZ, measure their peace before vs. after, and maybe get some confirmation of a "causal" relationship (on average, people who switch from not doing XYZ to doing XYZ experience a boost in their sense of peace). Do further research to see if XYZ works better for some groups of people than others, etc.

3) Some people might be more peaceful than average and have a deeper understanding of what peace is

I tend to believe that there are some people out there who have cracked the code on what happiness/suffering is and just understand things about experience that 99% of people don't know (myself included).

Analogy: If I've had experiences ABC of peace but another person has had experiences ABCDEF of peace, that person might know more than me about what kinds of peace are possible. Maybe I think that C is the best/highest form of peace but that person has also experienced DEF and they can say "no, C isn't the best that there is; you've only seen ABC but I've also seen DEF in addition to ABC and I can say that F is better than C and solves these problems that C has."

It's still subjective and their word against mine (and maybe what works for them might not work for me). But when I come across people who seem to know everything that I know and then they're also describing stuff that I don't know yet... I tend to trust them!