Social Control Disorders

Mental health disorders as a means to control our social environments

Imagine you ask your boyfriend to come over. He tells you he is too tired and has to work early the next day. Later that evening, you have a call, and mention to him that you had an emotionally challenging day. He immediately offers to run over.

There is now a choice:

1. You accept the offer

2. You do not accept the offer

If you accept the offer, you now have data suggesting that when you have emotionally challenging days, you can override your boyfriend’s stated preferences. Although this likely never enters your conscious awareness, your brain inevitably still encodes this extremely valuable information. Now, an unfortunately likely outcome is that when you want your boyfriend to do something, you might end up having an emotionally challenging day. If you frequently want your boyfriend to do things, you may find yourself frequently having emotionally challenging days.

Having good social support is great! It is absolutely not my advice to never accept support from the people around you. However, people seldom consider the incentive structures in their social environments, and how they are or aren’t aligned with their personal wellbeing.

Hysteria

Prior to writing this essay, I’d been thinking a lot about the disorder formerly known as hysteria. The disorder was loosely defined by uncontrollable displays of intense emotions, general high neuroticism, and was often tied to unexplained chronic pain and inflammation problems. Although men were occasionally diagnosed with hysteria, the condition was overwhelmingly associated with women. (The vibrator, famously, was originally invented as a treatment for it.) Records dating further back than the coming of Christ reported a similar condition largely observed in women. And, following hysteria’s removal from the DSM in the 1980s due to its misogynistic history, it was promptly culturally replaced with disorders like BPD.

Sex Differences in Manipulation Strategies

When there exists a large sex difference in any health condition, that generally serves as a pretty good hint regarding the mechanism and function of the condition. I have little desire to focus on gender for this particular essay, but would like to use “hysteria-type symptoms were predominantly observed in women” as a tool for understanding some behavioral patterns.

There is quite a lot of research looking at sex differences in manipulation/deception strategies. The verdict is: women tend to employ covert (e.g., gossip, emotional manipulation, derogation, etc.) rather than overt (e.g., threats, physical force, shouting, etc.) manipulation strategies. I could go into more detail, but the most basic logic is that through our evolutionary history, men’s acquisition of resources and mates depended largely on something more akin to raw dominance (a combination of size/strength and several personality factors), while women largely relied on developing competence at maneuvering complex systems of subtle social strategies. So, women evolved to be quite competent at social manipulation.

Illness as a means to control

The models generally used to understand mental health (especially hysteria-type disorders) seem to make an assumption that people (especially women) are passive agents in their environments, and that they develop pathologies as responses to trauma or traumatic settings.

The thesis of this essay is: I suspect that quite a lot of mental health issues develop to control, rather than to adapt.

The fact that BPD-type symptoms tend to exacerbate when in romantic relationships isn’t much of a mystery, and looking at trauma has been and will continue to be a largely futile endeavor. Under this frame, it seems quite clear that with a disorder specifically designed to control, having a romantic partner would massively aggravate the (albeit subconscious) desire to employ it.

People seem to have clear intuitions in this direction. For example, I’d be quite surprised to meet someone with BPD who hadn’t ever been accused (particularly by previous romantic partners) of faking their symptoms in order to manipulate. And while I do think that accusing people who are clearly in genuine distress of faking their distress when they’re still clearly in genuine distress is unnecessarily hostile and off the mark, it is also quite clear that these emotional patterns can become self-reinforcing because they reliably elicit care from others.

It is difficult for culture to care for people whose behavioural patterns are costly, distressing, or annoying to those around them. This seems especially true if there’s an underlying suspicion that the behaviors are being feigned, or if some folk correctly intuit that the behaviors are reliably leading them to override their own boundaries. However, the overwhelming majority of people who are acting out these ways are actually suffering, and usually actually want relief. This seems quite clear given the quantity of interventions people with this flavor of disorder have generally attempted! I think we’re doing people a huge disservice by blinding ourselves to the etiology of conditions like this.

More examples

Also, to be completely clear, I believe there’s a wide range of issues people can and do have that stem from attempts to control their social environments. I just view BPD as a particularly extreme control-related condition that can be used as a case study in order to understand the other instances in which these issues may arise.

In that spirit, here are two more places where you might notice this come up and silently eat away at your life:

Example 2: Task avoidance. Imagine that you are assigned a particularly aversive task at work. You become distressed and overwhelmed, which elicits pity from your coworkers and boss. They tell you to forget about the task, they assign it to someone else, and they tell you to please come to them the next time a task induces the same emotional state. You now have this as an available strategy for whenever a task feels overwhelming. This might lead to even very small tasks feeling overwhelming due to you not really feeling like doing this and having a reliable way of getting out of them. Even if your coworkers still feel something like pity, this almost invariably ultimately results in you getting fired. Following getting fired, you get an ADHD diagnosis despite not having a real problem with your attention. Now you have (extremely) treatment resistant ADHD!

(note: do not fixate on ADHD being used in this example specifically, you might get diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or any other pathology that could explain your refusal to complete tasks)

Example 3: Chronic illness. This is similar to the previous example. Imagine that you break your leg. Prior to breaking your leg, your parents were a bit on the neglectful side. However, now that your leg is broken and you are in a wheelchair, things have really taken a turn. Your mom is taking time off work to watch TV shows with you for the first week, your dad is bringing you ice cream on demand, even your siblings are allowing you preferential dibs on dinner servings. Normal, well adjusted children, might take joy from this treatment but still realize that having a functioning leg is pretty nice and actually quite a bit nicer than ice cream. However, for some, a broken leg might be the beginning of a long physical collapse and journey through navigating inflammation-based disorders that halt healing and (coincidentally) can only be diagnosed by stated symptoms.

(note: I am not making a claim that in all cases these disorders do not genuinely stem from something physiological, just sometimes)

A usually much better strategy

While I do think that orienting to mental health under this frame is quite interesting alone, my goal here is ultimately closer to “help people notice a harmful pattern that they (or people they care about) are in and get out of it” than it is to “lay out a theory”. Therefore, I will at least make an attempt at pointing towards a direction for people to move towards.

While the strategy I’m about to describe will generally sort of work in all of the examples I’ve laid out so far, I do sincerely believe that most people would not be making these types of tradeoffs if they were aware of the fact that they were making a tradeoff. Part of the issue seems to be that the feedback loops are necessarily broken. Which is to say, the strategies generally will immediately accomplish what they are aiming for locally, but will generally slowly move you towards something that is different and often opposite to your goals.

Here is a sketch of how I’ve been able to orient to these types of problem:

1. Pay careful attention to how your emotions are incentivised by your environment. Prompt yourself with something like, “if my emotions were here to solve a social problem, what would it be? Are the people around me making it easier for me to solve this problem through my use of emotions?” Allow yourself to feel embarrassed or ashamed about your motivations. Also, try to not stay in embarrassment or shame for too long.

2. Get in touch with your needs. When you notice yourself experiencing a whole bunch of emotionality, notice that perhaps you want to spend more time with your partner, maybe you need a deadline extension, maybe you are trying to avoid a stressful trip, etc. While doing this, pretty much always look for local problems. Humans are quite bad at long term strategy by default, and it is most likely that your brain is optimizing for short-term relief from a situation (as opposed to, “you are having these feelings because of an unresolved conflict you had with your mother 22 years ago”).

3. State your needs out loud and see if one of them has some type of ring to it. (Idk how to explain noticing these rings, sorry, this might be the least useful of the points.)

4. Consider just asking! Even if it is embarrassing or feels imposing. People actively want to help those they care about! It is far more embarrassing and imposing (and inefficient) to have a meltdown and require them to guess what you need. (If the person you’re dealing with is good with meta, consider stating something like “hey, I feel an impulse to start melting down in order to communicate how much I need X from you, can we just skip that and can you reveal whether or not you’re willing to do X?” This is generally quite effective!)

5. If it turns out that the people around you do not want to help unless your situation is dire, remember that it is practically never worth it to go into a downward spiral of suffering under any circumstance. You can find ways of helping yourself, and this is easier if you aren’t in a constant state of existential agony. Also, perhaps recognizing that you are only in a constant state of agony because the people around you do not want to help unless you’re in agony, maybe this makes the whole thing better, idk!

I absolutely do not claim to have an amazing solution. However, I unambiguously have been able to make meaningful progress in noticing and addressing instances in which I caught myself exhibiting this pattern, which has translated truly massive improvements in my subjective experience. I also have pointed others in similar directions and have received quite positive feedback.

While writing this essay, I googled things like “emotional manipulation” to see if anything like what I am pointing at had been written about previously. I found that for the most part people are often pointing at a different thing when speaking about emotional manipulation (i.e., trying to induce shame/insecurity/etc. in others in order to create a more desirable position for themselves), or they (more predictably) weren’t approaching it from an angle that allowed the reader to reflect via adopting a “how to spot and get rid of toxic people” frame.

I really hope that this helps people both notice when their behaviors exist to control, and help people notice when others are doing this to them and exert care through reversing incentives rather than through reinforcement (or punishment).