Practical Interaction

A simpler way of viewing all this for putting it into practice is:

Core Conditions + Interaction = Behavior that leads towards things beneficial for life & intelligence and away from things harmful to them.

Wronguse or Nonuse = Behavior that leads towards things harmful to life & intelligence and away from things beneficial.

Using Interaction in Real Life Situations

If you use the core conditions for interaction it becomes possible to both predict and beneficially modulate outcomes via your own behavior.

For example, if you come home and your house is on fire, standing around watching it burn or crying or saying, "Ah, well, there was nothing I could have done, "are options for "nonuse". This is taking a 'helpless victim' stance and is a reaction of 'nonaction'.

Options for "interaction" are to move to a safe distance and phone the fire brigade, to attack the fire yourself if you have equipment , to warn the neighbors and rustle up any help you can. These are all sensible, justified behaviors.

Options for "wronguse" are to panic and start screaming, kick the door in and try to attack the fire without equipment, or go charging in to rescue your photos. You are taking a proactive stance but these are bloody stupid actions.

Going in to get your kids out is however an interaction option because although you might die, you might save others with the greatest ability/potential. Interaction always favors the agents of greatest ability or potential in any situation. That's what evolution by adaptation is all about; developing the greatest ability in as many situations as possible.

Since humans are supposed to be the organisms with the greatest ability/potential for survival and adaptation on this planet, it's worthwhile looking at how many levels this applies to us on.

Even a simple thing like eating a nutritious meal is an interaction. Interaction tends to develop things from simple to complex, from concrete to abstract, and during eating molecules move from a simple to a complex system, more options open up to them and to the diner, as nutrients are transformed into fuel and building blocks and used for energy, growth and repair. The result is certainly beneficial to survival and thriving, and the energy spent is less than that acquired.

...You might think, "But if I ate a chicken, it certainly wasn't beneficial to the survival of the chicken!" –and you would be correct...Interaction always benefits the agents with the greatest ability/potential for survival and adaptation, and in this case that happens to be you. That's why it's in your interest to fulfil your potential! The more you improve, the more you are able to improve.

From a physics point of view, the meal provides optimum nutrients for running the body closer to optimal health, (and running on optimal saves energy too.) As a nice side effect the body, knowing it is getting what it needs, releases hormones to make you feel good, satisfied, and occasionally really stuffed. These hormones themselves are good for your health, moving you closer to optimal physical and mental performance. (An interaction often starts a chain reaction or 'cascade' of interactions .)

Practicing Interaction in Communication

What we are feeling changes how the world appears. When practising the core conditions, our mood improves and we inspire better and friendlier responses in our social intercourse. This feedback in its turn boosts our self esteem, anxiety reduces, we are able to think more clearly and confidently, we pay attention where it matters, and do not get distracted by things that don't really matter. We perform competently and with minimal error. We can understand things more easily and learn things faster. This makes every task easier and saves energy too. The more we practise interaction, the faster and more accurate we become, because we are working with biology and not against it. We have "congruence".

Incongruence is the term in personality theory for a mental state in which a person is unable to interact in enlightened self interest due to anxiety. Their behavior is out of alignment with their biology. There will be a fundamental discrepancy between reality and their perceived reality; for example, having a morbid fear of something when there is no actual danger and no real evidence of danger, is incongruence. Hallucination due to illness is incongruence. A conflict between your biological instincts and society's rules is incongruence. Incongruence simply means that what is going on in the real world and what the person (or the society) thinks is going on do not align. (Yes, many of us live in an incongruent society).

If someone recognizes a cat as a chicken, that's obviously incongruence, but it's also incongruence if someone interprets concern as jealousy, or closeness as a threat, or possessiveness for love and so on. Incongruence is about misinterpretation based on warped perception, and most people live in a state of incongruence most of the time, because of anxiety.

Achieving Genuineness

You need to have a genuine desire to interact, and to start with a genuine desire to learn. If you find it hard to achieve this or feel short of motivation, you probably need to understand more about why it's in your best interests to do so –remember this is about improving your intelligence. The more you interact, the smarter you will get. Nothing builds up brains like it. If you don't know how much anxiety affects your intelligence and health, read Anxiety & Input Control: The Basics in the library.

Achieving Unconditional Positive Regard

It may seem difficult to imagine feeling respect for people who are arrogant or rude. Some behavior is downright unpleasant and disgusting! Well here's the secret: you do not have to have unconditional positive regard for anything except for intelligence. Your attempt is not to communicate with any anxiety-based personality façade on the outside, but to speak directly to the intelligence program you know is in there somewhere and communicate with it; to build a bridge of common ground between yourself and the other and let intelligence flow along it. Interaction is capable of overrunning anxiety programs, as long as we can maintain a state of mind based on the core conditions. Again, you must remember that it is ourselves we are improving here; we are not here to change others or their behavior –that's up to them. What you are learning is how to adapt to stress and respond to it in ways that prevent anxiety and promote conflict resolution.

Organisms who adapt will survive and thrive. Those who cannot adapt to avoid anxiety will (and do) suffer its ills. We are using interaction as an adaptation strategy, because that's what biology does. Creatures whose biology doesn't interface healthily with their environment die out, because incongruence buggers up the immune system (again dependent on that all-important brain chemistry).

Achieving Empathy

You will speed practice by learning to recognize initially which of the three basic positions yourself and others are operating from in real life situations; nonuse, wronguse or interactive. It's easiest to start by categorizing behavior like this so that you can discern the underlying attitudes, and it works very well. You must understand how anxiety works to see where each of these attitudes is coming from, understand what the related needs and problems might be and how you would respond to these problems with a healthy attitude. As you reduce anxiety, you will be able to empathize much more easily (because anxiety hormones restrict the growth of mirror neurons, the type of brain cells you need for empathy). Once you are no longer anxious, all your brain networks will increase in density by themselves. When we have the ability to understand others' actions or reactions from the inside, we gain a more sensitive awareness of the way the process of change and learning seems to them, and then again the likelihood of significant improvement is increased. People feel deeply appreciative when they are simply understood – not evaluated, not judged, simply understood from their own point of view, not yours.