The Harvest Counterfire

This essay was written with heavy use of AI. Exactly how is disclosed at the end.

This essay contains a clinical discussion of self-harm. If you are struggling, help is available: in the US, call or text 988; elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists services by country.

Originally published on my essays site. 한국어판 is also available.

An Old Strategy

Some people fight stress with stress. Pressure from one front gets covered by absorption, or conflict, on another. In fact, nearly everyone does some version of this. Craving punishingly spicy food after a hard day, rage-cleaning the apartment, taking up running after a breakup, burying a bad week under alcohol or an all-night gaming session. It is all the same circuit. When two fires are burning, neither can fully consume you. The strategy genuinely works, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. This essay is about why it works, where it breaks down, and how to run the same circuit without getting burned.

Half of the conclusion up front: the wiring that covers pain with pain is not a personal quirk. It is factory-spec equipment in the nervous system. The problem is never the circuit. The problem is the fuel people feed it. The other half of the conclusion arrives midway through: a fire cannot be put out. It can only be starved.

Counter-irritation: Pain Inhibits Pain

The term comes from pain research, and it is old. Apply a painful stimulus to one part of the body, and the perception of pain elsewhere measurably decreases. Modern neuroscience has drawn the wiring diagram for this. In animal studies it is called DNIC; in humans, conditioned pain modulation (CPM): a descending inhibitory pathway running down from the brainstem. "Pain inhibits pain" is not a metaphor. It is a line item on the nervous system's standard equipment list.

One fact matters here more than any other. This circuit is not a pathology; it is a marker of health. CPM efficiency varies between individuals, and the circuit is demonstrably impaired in chronic pain patients. Weak CPM predicts the chronification of pain. Having the circuit is normal. A broken circuit is what correlates with disease.

Recent work has widened the circuit's jurisdiction. Pain does not merely inhibit pain; it inhibits the processing of aversive stimuli in general. Apply physical pain, and even the response to unpleasantly loud noise diminishes. This is where the body's circuitry builds a bridge into psychological territory, and it is the empirical basis for why covering psychological stress with another stimulus actually works.

A Lesson from Medical History: Analgesia Is Not a Cure

Humanity has already learned the trap in this principle once, at considerable expense.

Counter-irritation was not originally a psychology term. It was a dominant therapeutic principle of nineteenth-century medicine: create artificial inflammation or pain at one site, and deep disease elsewhere will heal. Mustard plasters, cupping, moxibustion, and blistering, the deliberate raising of blisters on the skin. At its peak it was called the most universal of all therapeutic measures.

By the end of the nineteenth century, blistering had been pushed out of mainstream medicine. The reason is instructive. It relieved pain but cured nothing. A blister does not heal pneumonia, and a second fire never touches the cause of the first.

But the story does not end there. The principle refused to die; it survived by changing fuel. Once the mechanism was understood, electricity (TENS), capsaicin patches, and needles took the blister's place. Keep the principle, replace the fuel spec. That evolutionary arc is the skeleton of this essay. The psychological counterfire can follow the same path.

The Mechanism: You Cannot Put the Fire Out, Only Starve It

Before we get to fuel, we need to be precise about what a counterfire actually does. Two common misconceptions have to be cleared away first.

Misconception one: you can extinguish it by willpower. The strategy of "just stop thinking about it" fails structurally. This is the lesson of the white bear experiments, the classic of thought-suppression research: people instructed not to think of a white bear thought about it more. Any attempt to not-think a thought requires a monitoring process that watches for the thought, and the monitoring itself keeps the target active. It is the pink elephant paradox: the instruction summons the elephant. "Stop dwelling on it" is an order that assigns your misery a permanent seat.

Misconception two: you can burn it off. The catharsis hypothesis, that "venting" anger drains it, has been thoroughly falsified. A 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies (184 independent samples, 10,189 participants) found that venting did not reduce anger and sometimes amplified it. Pounding a punching bag while rehearsing the face of the person who wronged you is not release; it is rumination practice, and rumination is anger's firewood. Arousal-raising activities like jogging sometimes even increased anger, because residual arousal from exercise gets re-attributed as anger intensity the moment you meet the trigger again (excitation transfer). The body does not itemize arousal by source.

So how does negative emotion actually go away? The deflating answer: mostly on its own. The physiological component of arousal decays within tens of minutes, provided nothing reignites it. When an emotion persists for hours or days, it is not because the arousal will not drain; it is because the rumination loop keeps striking the match. There are ways to cool arousal directly — slow breathing, medication — but they only hasten a decay that was coming anyway; they do not touch the hand that keeps striking the match. And this is the counterfire's real point of intervention. A task demanding full absorption seizes the working memory that rumination runs on. No spare capacity, no loop; no loop, no reignition; and meanwhile the arousal decays quietly in the background. A counterfire does not consume the emotion. It cuts off the emotion's fuel supply. The familiar experience of surfacing from hours of deep work to find the anger gone is not the anger having been burned as fuel. It starved, and went out by itself. Of course, as long as the situation remains unresolved, the embers remain. New provocation, new flare-up. You can ride out each round this way, but removing the embers is the job of a settlement we will get to later.

Here is the satisfying part: this mechanism matches the metaphor's place of origin exactly. In wildfire suppression, a backfire is not a technique for beating fire with fire. It is a fuel-preemption technique: burn the fuel in the main fire's path in advance, so that when the fire arrives, there is nothing left to eat. That is literally what the psychological counterfire does: the absorbing task burns up the cognitive resources rumination would have used. A term borrowed for its imagery turns out, on inspection, to be mechanically isomorphic.

A Concept Map: One Circuit, Three Fuels

Strategies for covering pain with pain are scattered throughout the psychology literature. Sort them by two axes, what the fuel is and what remains after burning, and they fall into three cells.

Cell one: self-harming analgesia. Pain offset relief research shows that the moment pain ends, negative affect drops and positive affect rises; this is a leading candidate mechanism for the emotion-regulating function of self-injury. The cell is not limited to its clinical extreme; it has a gentler everyday end. Body-focused repetitive behaviors like nail biting and skin picking are triggered by tension, boredom, and restlessness and deliver documented relief. The mechanism there may not be pain itself, but the accounting is identical: the fuel is your own body, and the residue is damage. The relief is real, but the fuel is you, and ash remains. Burning a relationship or another domain of life instead of your body is structurally the same cell: you raise total suffering to mask the original suffering, and while the new pain covers the old, the balance sheet keeps deteriorating. One thing to leave on the record: if the fire in this first cell is actually burning in your life right now, what you need is not this essay but human help.

Cell two: benign masochism. Spicy food, horror films, roller coasters, sad songs. The safe consumption of aversive stimuli, which Paul Rozin named benign masochism. The instant the body confirms the threat is fake, the very fact of having been fooled becomes the pleasure (mind over body). No ash, but no harvest either. Pure consumption.

Cell three. The cell with no ash and a harvest is empty. Filling it is this essay's proposal.

The Harvest Counterfire

The proposal in one sentence:

Set a counterfire, but set it with something that yields when it burns and costs nothing when it's gone.

The wiring that covers pain with pain is hardware; you cannot swap it out. But the fuel spec of the second fire is fully under your control. Not engine replacement, fuel replacement. Call this third-cell strategy the harvest counterfire.

The spec for a good counterfire runs three lines.

Condition 1: clean combustion. No ash afterward. Not on your relationships, not on your body, not on tomorrow. Alcohol, dark rumination, and relationship arson all fail this condition outright. Vigorous exercise passes only conditionally: excellent for the body, but it raises arousal, and if you are provoked again right after, excitation transfer makes the blowup bigger.

Condition 2: yield. Something must remain after burning. A skill, an artifact, a record, a laugh. Learning and making satisfy this condition almost by definition.

Condition 3: firepower. The counterfire must be absorbing enough to actually seize attention from the original fire. Weak counterfires do not catch. Novel and slightly difficult tasks catch best. Fine motor work with your non-dominant hand, for instance, occupies attention so completely that rumination has no bandwidth left to interrupt.

Each condition is backed by an independent line of research.

Firepower and difficulty: the anger studies. Heather Lench's team ran seven studies — experiments plus survey analyses, some 2,400 participants in all — testing anger's effect on goal attainment. Anger consistently improved performance on difficult tasks and did nothing on easy ones. Anger, as arousal, becomes work only where there is difficulty. Do something trivial while angry and you are left with the anger; do something demanding and you are left with the work. Note that this does not contradict the catharsis findings above. The meta-analysis asked "how do you reduce anger"; Lench asked "what can you do while angry." The harvest counterfire is a strategy for the second question. Arousal does not need to be discharged. It needs to be re-aimed. If fire is not your metaphor, try water. Suppression is a dam: the higher it stacks, the greater the pressure for a breach. Venting is a drain: the water simply leaves. What remains is to channel it, and if the channel points at a field, discharge becomes irrigation. One footnote: in the same studies, anger also increased cheating. Anger raises goal orientation without auditing the means. One more reason the fuel spec needs managing.

Firepower and channels: the working memory studies. Emily Holmes's team ran the famous Tetris studies. Playing a visuospatial game like Tetris shortly after viewing traumatic footage reduces later intrusive memories. The mechanism is working memory competition: when a task occupies visuospatial resources, sensory memories lack the resources to consolidate. The interesting part is that not just any task works. Verbal tasks like a quiz game were ineffective or even increased intrusions. This is not generic distraction; which channel you occupy is what matters. Rumination runs mainly on the loop of inner speech and imagery, so counterfires catch best when a hands-on, visuospatial task competes for exactly that channel.

Individual differences in required firepower. The firepower threshold varies from person to person. Some people can switch tracks on the low load of watching videos; others need a task that seizes working memory whole. Start with what is solid: that mind wandering increases as cognitive load decreases is among the most stable findings in that literature. Watching a screen is low-load work; it leaves rumination room to idle in the background, and it never touches the inner-speech loop or the hands. Some studies layer an individual difference on top: when task demands are especially low, people with greater cognitive capacity reportedly mind-wander more, the interpretation being that they can run the task and still have capacity left over for rumination. A preregistered replication failed to reproduce the effect — and suggested that any relationship may run in the opposite direction — so treat that reversal as unsettled at best. The sturdier basis for individual differences is the rebound effect: the more your stress hangs on an unresolved goal, the more a weak distraction offers only brief cover — the intrusions return, because the goal discrepancy is still open. So "other people unwind with a few videos, why can't I" is not a defect report. It is a function of what fire is burning and how much occupancy it demands. The higher the required firepower, the more a novel, slightly difficult task stops being a preference and becomes a spec requirement.

Yield: the sublimation studies. Among Freud's defense mechanisms, sublimation went a century without experimental evidence. Arguably the first came in 2013, from Kim and Cohen, and the results are more interesting for being conditional. Inducing forbidden desire or suppressed anger produced more creative work, but only in participants from a particular cultural background. It was not the emotion itself but the fact of its prohibition that generated creative drive, and the conversion circuit turned out to be culturally installed. Sublimation is real, but it does not come pre-installed. Which means the harvest counterfire can be described as installing that circuit by hand. And the frame is a gift to sublimation in return. Freud's original account rests on a hydraulic model, energy accumulating and discharging, and the discharge hypothesis, as we saw, has been falsified. If what actually happens when sublimation works is not release but occupation and reallocation, that is, a counterfire, then a real phenomenon finally gets a mechanism that can survive. None of which makes this essay a new name for sublimation. Sublimation covers only the case where the emotion itself is the fuel; half of counterfire practice is occupying the channel with a task unrelated to the original emotion, where nothing is transformed at all. And sublimation is a name for something that happened, not a method for making it happen: it says nothing about when to deploy, when to withdraw, or what must be settled afterward. That remainder is this essay's job.

Extension: Counterfires Between People

Everything so far has been internal, a technology of self-regulation. But the fuel-cutting mechanism has one more increment of range. Consider two people in conflict.

A conflict is a coupled combustion system sustained by mutual refueling. The leakage of my tension becomes your firewood; your reaction becomes mine. Each monitors the other, and sensitivity amplifies in round trips. Now, some conflicts need to be worked through. Others are best handled by simply getting on with your own work. The problem with the second kind is that it requires visibly not caring, and that cannot be manufactured. Consciously deciding not to care fails on the pink elephant problem. Pretending not to care while caring fails twice over: expressive suppression, the strategy of clamping the surface while the inside churns, raises the suppressor's own physiological arousal, and, crucially, it leaks. Experiments confirm that people conversing with a suppressor show elevated blood pressure and reduced rapport without being able to say why. Tension is detected by bodies, not parsed from sentences.

Counterfire absorption is a different kind of solution here because it does not manipulate the display; it changes the state. A mind genuinely occupied elsewhere does not hold the conflict in an active state, and what is not there cannot leak. No acting is required because there is no gap to act across. And the state change propagates across the coupled system: when my fire starves, my leakage drops; when my leakage drops, the firewood crossing over to your fire drops with it. It is a unilateral de-escalation path that requires no negotiation and no cooperation from the other side. What cannot be performed must be installed.

The boundary condition deserves emphasis. This technique's jurisdiction ends at conflicts that do not require settlement, or do not require it yet. In a relationship that is asking for settlement, sustained absorbed-indifference registers not as calm but as a wall. Couples research identifies stonewalling as one of the strongest predictors of relational decay for exactly this reason. Between people, too, the counterfire is analgesia, not digestion.

Operating Rules: The Anesthesiologist's Ethics

The operation matters as much as the spec. Four rules.

First: a counterfire is analgesia, not digestion. It cuts firewood to get you through the round; the embers, the unresolved situation, remain. Settlement of the original fire must be scheduled separately. Good counterfires have a paradoxical side effect: work too well, and you never look at the original fire again. Hence the rule: counterfire during the acute phase, settlement once the acute phase passes.

This sequence maps precisely onto the standard model in emotion regulation research. Sheppes and Gross's work on emotion-regulation choice shows that people prefer distraction, blocking the emotion before it gathers force, in high-intensity situations, and prefer reappraisal, which processes the emotion and reworks its meaning, when intensity is low. The preference is rational: at high intensity, distraction wins on short-term relief, and — the same team's follow-up finding — when long-term goals are on the line, people switch back to reappraisal. Counterfire in the acute phase, settlement after, is not a taste. It is the textbook.

Second: judge the next morning. If something remains after the burn, it was sublimation; if only ash remains and the next day you are hungrier, it was depletion. The trap is that the two are subjectively indistinguishable during absorption. Both feel good. So the judgment has to be forcibly relocated: not the fullness of the moment, but the residue the next morning. Media-recovery research backs this rule. In a diary study tracking employed gamers, evening play delivered both psychological detachment (forgetting work) and mastery (learning, being challenged), but the active ingredient explaining next-morning recovery and vigor was mastery. Controlling for mastery, detachment alone no longer explained morning recovery. Passive consumption and absorbed making diverge not in the moment, but in the next day's balance.

Third: harvested arousal is still arousal. The body does not itemize by source. Burn with anger or burn with absorption, the sympathetic budget drains identically. The sense of gain from having produced something masks the expenditure, so a dosage cap is required. However harvest-grade the counterfire, once the burning starts eating your nights, it is no longer a managed flame. It is system erosion.

Fourth: choose the fuel before the fire starts. There is a mechanical reason the switch is so hard in the acute phase. Strong negative emotion carries an action pressure, do something, now, and the fastest quenchers of that pressure are usually the maladaptive routes. Fast relief is instant reward, so those routes are paved into habit highways. Meanwhile acute stress temporarily degrades prefrontal executive function and hands control to the habit system. Manual steering is weakest at exactly the moment it is most needed. The feeling that turning toward good fuel takes a strain of will, like forcing a muscle, is not melodrama; it is the actual mechanics of that moment. The prescription is to move the wiring work to peacetime. Implementation intention research shows that pre-installing condition-action pairs, "when X happens, I open Y", lets the switch fire semi-automatically at trigger time, without routing through executive function. Friction design works on the same principle: half-started projects within arm's reach, bad fuel far away. Fire drills are not held on the day of the fire.

Closing: The Engine Is Factory-Spec; the Fuel Is Yours to Design

To assemble the pieces. The circuit that covers pain with pain is factory-spec in the nervous system (CPM). The fire can be neither willed out nor drained (thought suppression; the catharsis refutation). What a counterfire does is preempt the firewood and starve the reignition (working memory competition). Using the circuit in the acute phase is the rational choice the standard model predicts (emotion-regulation choice). And what remains afterward is decided entirely by the fuel (from pain offset relief through benign masochism to sublimation).

There is one thing the research does not tell you: what to put in the circuit. Your body, a relationship, alcohol, or learning and making; the spec sheet is silent. The engine ships from the factory. The fuel is your own design.

And the fuel choice carries more information than it seems. People who have lost a sense of control gravitate toward building small worlds where control is guaranteed by law; the counterfires of people who have lost connection carry traces of connection in them. What you want to burn often points at what you have lost. A good counterfire is analgesia and diagnosis at once. The limit lives in the same place: fuels differ in what emotions they suit. High-arousal emotions like anger make good fuel for hard tasks. Deficit signals like loneliness can be ridden out, but they cannot be repaid in artifacts. That settlement runs, in the end, through connection.

If you take one sentence from this essay, take this one.

Do not try to uninstall the circuit that covers pain with pain. Rewrite its fuel spec. The fire cannot be put out. It can only be starved, and while it starves, what you harvest is up to you.

P.S. Misread "counter-irritation" as "counter-iterating" and the meaning still roughly holds: this has been a story about taking a loop that iterates on pain and running it backward, into a loop that ships.

This essay was written out of the records of conversations with an AI, through dialectical engagement between me and the machine, typed with the AI's borrowed hands.

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