Fisbe, responses and inner work

I have come across an interesting model of how we relate to life, which is denoted by Fisbe (see video here), which can be stylized as FIsBe too: Focus, INner state and REsponse.
From this model, we could say that our loop of personal experience can be broken down as such: External world -> Focus -> Inner state -> Response. We focus on certain parts of the external world, not all of them, and that is where troubles can already start in our lives. Then that focus of attention leads to a certain inner state, which can be far more subtle than a like/don’t-like but often boils down to that crude binary. And finally, that inner state prompts a response from us.
The key insight is that we tend to react to our internal states, not so much a reality outside of our self. This post gives a great example of the distinction. The situation goes like this: someone's wife brings him his favorite meal as a surprise during lunch break, and she does so in front of his colleagues. Then his colleagues make fun of him for that, because it looks like mommy bringing lunch to one of her kids. Then when he gets home, the guy gets mad at his wife because he felt humiliated by the situation.
Here, what actually made the guy angry wasn't his wife bringing him lunch, nor even his colleagues making fun of him—these are two distinct external world events. It is ultimately the internal state of feeling humiliated, which we could say is “caused” by the last event, but only for him because many other people would have had a very different internal reaction in the same situation, and I'm sure some would be able to brush the taunting off because they care about their wife's affection more than what colleagues think of them.
So Fisbe is not some deterministic behaviorist model of how we interact with reality. It is fairly reductive because our internal world isn't so sequential, but it is useful to remember that how we react and respond isn't directly caused by the external events. There is a lot of past baggage that influences our internal states, which we could call trauma ⁵, or in general it could simply be an overwhelm response that hasn't finished.
And finally, we could roughly map each of the 3 transitions in the Fisbe sequence I describe, and assign to each one a type of inner work/introspection:

1. Inner state -> Response is the Stoic attitude: we do not control the world, but we have control over our actions and how we respond to things
2. Focus -> Inner state is the area of trauma work or shadow work. Seeing the ways in which our inner states can be wildly out of sync from our actual experience of events, because of emotional baggage or limiting beliefs or stored tension in our body, amongst other things
3. External world -> Focus is something more subtle than the previous one, so I'm not sure what to call it. It has to do with perception itself, and how it can get fixed on certain things in favor of others, how it is tainted by our worldview, and also our fears. Perhaps we could also assign this to trauma work and shadow work, but I would say it is even more existential than that, so something like “perception shift”, the kind that you engage in with meditation and the likes, when your typical sense of ‘I’ changes.

Footnotes

³ Related to this discussion about quality of life being bottlenecked by a single factor, see this post by Yudkowsky discussing UBI and why it wouldn’t magically improve it.

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2024-08-05