Analyzing Behavior

So my mom is sitting down across from me, and were eating, and talking. I ask her if vovo (portuguese for grandmother) is coming over on New Years. She says no. She says tia (my aunt) is coming over, but not my grandmother. Originally, I am thinking about my grandmothers situation: if she isn't going to my aunts - the same tia - this year, than where is she going? But eventually, along my arguing, I switch over, unconsciously, into the wish for her to come so I can collect my christmas money....to buy more books. In any case, I press the point and ask my mom where Vovo is going. She says she's not coming. I ask her again, but with greater force, bass and pitch "How is Vovo not coming!??" And now, my mother is acting out. "Why does it matter to you? Tia doesn't want to sleep with her; she snores. And besides she doesn't want to come". She makes passing comments about me to my brother. There's an obvious rancor in it. A way to "get back at me" for irritating her.

She's irritated because she feels guilty. Her mother wont have anyone to be with on New Years - and knowing that her daughters are celebrating New Years together, with her not merely "not there", but deliberately uninvited - and it seems designed to hurt her. Yet, there's truth to my mothers resentment. She is the child of a woman who manipulated her, lied to her, enslaved (taking her wages to pay off the house, from 12 years on) her, and turned her head to the physical abuse and sexual abuse inflicted on her by her father and cousins.

That's a lot of stuff. That my mother has been so committed to her mother for this length of time is important. One wonders how she can "grow", as a person, when her mind is periodically subjected to the relational field that makes up her and her mom - as well as the emotions that underlie her borderline personality disorder.

Nevertheless, it was amusing to me how she had unconsciously 'transferred' her emotion and feeling from the interaction dealing with her decision not to invite vovo to new years, to the subsequent conversations we had about other subjects. The hostility was prodigious. She was speaking in a manner and pace that indicated profound autonomic arousal; her thoughts were darting in particularly spiteful directions, aiming for the 'weak spot' in the detested object (me).

Playing with this state - or at least attempting to - I come towards my mother and discuss what I'm perceiving. The process that we've been involved in, and which me and my sister have both contributed to creating, has led to a point where she can at least sit, and somewhat listen to me, while maintaining a bantering persona. I say to her "you're angry because I made you feel guilty about not inviting Vovo". And she listens, and begins to talk about her reasons for not inviting her. However much I disagree with this approach, for her, in her situation, it is probably necessary, albeit, it pains me knowing that my grandmother will experience this; however, the woman continues to manipulate and engage in spiteful behaviors. So what else can be expected of people like my mother, uncle or aunt?

I am not like this, because fortunately I have enough conceptual knowledge and an existential, or philosophical depth to my experience, that I can deal with the abuse/stupidity of my mother by "transforming" it into an opportunity for compassion - that is, understanding that her brain-mind has been conditioned by countless rounds of perception-action cycles. Since my mom has nothing comparable to my self-awareness and ability to sense the minutiae of experience, my relationship with her can be one of two things: constructive or destructive. I decided long ago that I had it within me to feel compassion for my mother, and to learn to tolerate and process my feelings when she falls into a negative self-state. Thankfully, for whatever good there exists in the world, I have indeed become proficient at regulating my emotions when my mother says stupid things, simply because I know that I am working with a very subtle glitch in the human condition: dissociation and idealization. Because I know how these processes work - and which I watch unfolding countless times in my self and others - how can I honestly hold a grudge against a person who has mindlessly - quite literally - done something that has caused me or others harm? To reprove of course is a necessity. To do what needs to be done, to help build up their capacity for correct awareness, should also be sought. But a punishing attitude, it seems to me, is fundamentally destructive and is done more because we are social primates who love the thought of revenge - and the restoration of social status that it implies - than for the reasons of righteousness that we tell ourselves.

Thougthts on Defensive processes

We can exist in multiple ways vis a vis a particular piece of information, but ultimately we can speak of two ways of organizing the self.

These two ways are (an idea borrowed from the psychologist Alan Fogel) the "subjective emotional present" and the "conceptual self-awareness". These two represent two ways that are way-of-being-in-the-world can be. They are different because they feel different, and indeed, cognitive neuroscience has described these two states as "reflective" and "reflexive", and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called it 'system 1' and 'system 2'.

Fogels description is closer to phenomenology. By emphasizing "subjective", he points out that the phenomenology itself is highly tied to personal feelings, needs, and motivations. In this state, we automatically give expression to our unconscious meanings - or relational histories - and what we are doing in this instant to achieve this need.

Subjective emotional present is feeling-neutral; it is a concept about a class of experiences as they unfold temporally, and psychologically. Negative feelings like shame, fear, depression, anxiety, hatred or jealousy can fall into this class as fluidly as positive feelings like joy, compassion, play, excitement, curiosity, and awe.

Conceptual self-awareness on the other hand is a function of the evolution of the dorsolateral sections of the brain. Extending from the hippocampus, conceptual self-awareness is largely a memory and consciousness process. It is what gives consciousness its power to select and inhibit. Selection and inhibition seem like simplistic things, and indeed, somehow the complexity of our feeling of 'free will' is ultimately reducible to our ability to choose and focus our awareness, or inhibit - at an embodied level (which means the brain stem/vagus nerve) - a particular physiological reaction to a mental percept that aroused a fear. Emotion that spills into the body as a result of a particularly negative percept happens because the mind has not noticed itself engaging in an unconscious, compulsive reflexive process. Self-criticism often happens in these moments; and its our habit of existing with and in these processes, and not extracting ourselves to allow ourselves to perceive ourselves as we act, that creates so much suffering in life.

But it isn't easy to know - and it's a colossal error to think that everyone is equally good at moral psychology. To know the processes and habits of your own mind requires an actual conscious effort, carried continuously, sincerely, and earnestly, over many years. This process is to be understood in the context of neural darwinism, which means that the more frequent the connections between neurons, the more established, efficient, and complex their interactions become. Information flow in the brain is ultimately reducible to synaptogenesis, neurogenesis and myleingenesis: processes that are subject to the selective pressures of a self-aware mind. Because of this, those who have spent their lives, or spend most of their time, reflecting on moral issues with reference to psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology, and who have also spent much time examining their own experience, have a certain clarity and sophistication in their moral analysis that isn't naturally mirrored by those who spend their time doing other things. To sum this idea up: we are what we do. Our minds mold towards how we relate to the world, which means, our subjective emotional reflexive actions have an automaticity that derives from what we do, whom we do it with, and the moral meaning of what we do. In keeping with a focus on morality - because humans are embodied, reflexive social animals, the needs of our personal self - which is registered at the level of affect - enter our attention as we think about things that serve what we "need", that is, with what we feel. The ultimate result of this principle is that the self, or conscious mind - called the ego, or 'working memory', or the "theater of the mind" - unconsciously "confabulates" a justification for a feeling, as the feeling, being a 'somatic marker' of bodily homeostatic processes, impels consciousness into 'interpreting' what it experiences, and to align cognitions with feelings.

There are certain truths about human nature that aren't readily accepted by academics today, but which I and many others see as fundamental to the human species. These principles are dissociation and idealization. If the mind always inclines to "justify" its experiences, this means that the natural bias of the mind is to 'see the beat', or 'feel the best', that is, to idealize by favoring a positive interpretation on things. A natural corollary of this reality is that consciousness ignores certain things. Indeed, the word "ignore" is problematic as it implies that the content - or perception - has somehow "dropped outside the mind". That if we simply say something about our experience, that means that what we say is true. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Consciousness is not the gatekeeper to perception. Things get in and imply themselves simply by having been noted by unconscious cognitive processes in our brain. The amygdala, on the other hand, is a good candidate for sentinel and gatekeeper of the human mind. As an all around "relevance detector", it takes stock of "threats" - that is, meanings with the environment - as well as noting "opportunities" for positive feedback. The amygdala is there to navigate the complexities of living in a highly nuanced social-environment, but to still carry out its evolutionary function of "guiding the organism with reference to threat and wellbeing"

The amygdala therefore is the cause of dissociation, as well as the 'avoidance' strategy of idealization. The amygdala, in coding the affective valence of each interaction, eventually carves out a personality with a particular propensity for certain reactions - or expectations and anticipations - as a way to predict the world around it. Thus, negative affective responses to a particular facial cue, vocal tone, or gesture, will become associated with a compensatory behavior that was itself 'found', or 'picked up' during some other previous interaction. Positive and negative become 'polarized' in the brain, with the negative 'cues' linked with 'instrumental avoidant' strategies of getting away from the negative affect. Idealization and dissociation are psychological terms for what the amygdala is doing as it 'marks' the external world - and subjective perception - with the affects that are genetically programmed into the typical behavior of the organism.

At which point this begins is arguable, to say the least. Many evolutionary biologists believe that an organism is 'imprinted' in embryo and as a fetus by the level of circulating cortisol in the blood stream, a certain percentage of which passes into the placenta and plays an 'informing' role in the development of the brain. So, even from the get-go, genes are being "acted upon' by the environment of the mothers body, which in turn is 'acted upon' by the mothers own reflexive mental behaviors, as well as the way others in her immediate social world relate with her (which activates her reflexive defensive processes).

A Definition Of Projection

So I'm sitting in the shower, and to stave off paranoia (smoking a juju - my bad habit) I start thinking about what I was reading earlier in Christopher Bollas' new book "When The Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia"; the cover alone attracted my attention; then I read the name (popular psychoanalyst), the topic, and thought "oooooh, interesting". But the honest truth is, any human being who has a history of traumatic affect dyrsegulation - and the concomitant perceptual disturbances in consciousness, are likely going to be afraid of the most dreaded of cultural images: psychosis, hearing voices, hallucinations, being restrained in a straight jacket. The images alone scream 'horror'.

The paranoia probably began at 17 when I watched A beautiful Mind in m English class. Some context will add to the scenario: I had for the 3rd time experienced a nervous breakdown, defined as a complete retreat from social relations, a persistent negative affective state, chronic paranoia, and the cyclical emergence of panic and anxiety. However, my anxieties were largely "contained" by the social context. Everything about the social world was my area of concern; my inability to function normally within it, an experience of continuous "toxic shame".

Toxic shame is the only appropriate word for the person who has suffered severe relational trauma, such as happens to people who are chronically bullied by a parent, sibling, or peers. The experience is itself a testament to what the "negative" of a human experience can be like. Take away the social relationships, habits, and ways of being that social relations entails - such as embodied response, high affect, and a sense of deep subjectivty - and you are left with a vacuum. In the negative, the presence of other people evoke a state in you that basically corresponds to a past experience. The shame of a past shaming, and the contextual factors that incited it. Contextual factor: other people; activation of shame, fear and anxiety.

Years later, I've learned hat the shame was not so much the problem as the human habit to defend against emotions as if they were external objects. Thoughts, perceptions, on the inside, or facial expressions, body movements, prosody, a word, a topic, a sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, is
neurologically linked to a vagal-brain stem-amygdala "gate". Everyone has a 'cue' outside their core awareness that activates them because it activated them in the past. The traumatized person has a whole network of such cues, some of which are linked to the originating trauma-memory (or cognit), and others are iterations that emerge in being a being immersed in a culture that possesses plenty of commercial material that can activate a hyper-aroused autonomic nervous system. These secondary 'traumas', inasmuch as they create new experiences within the individual, makes every human story completely unique. The feelings people have about their perceptions is fundamentally a function of the state that the autonomic nervous system is in.

So, on to projection - the title of this post, and a subject I have temporally forgotten about. In the shower, I was replaying some of the ideas Bollas was presenting about the schizophrenics way of affect-regulation (what it may be ultimately reduced to). He gave some interesting examples of the contents, or aspects of a persons being, being 'projected' outside the organization of the self, into the world it interacts with. What interests me, is how this could happen? Why is there this assumption that projection exists? Certainly, it does exist, but we do not explore the concept further when we think about evolutionary anthropological implications. The mind evolved in an external social context. Projection exists, which means, essentially, that the human mind can 'trick itself' into believing that a that a thing felt in them (defended against out of hate/fear, oftentimes referring back to an experience of shame) is actually in the other. How can such confusion arise? Or is it not confusion, but an evolutionary adaptation? Obviously, its an adaptation, but psychologically, it speaks to an underlying dynamic 'tension' between the identity of the self and the identity of the other. Self and other are simultaneously in consonance and dissonance with each other, in empathic attunement, and sharing of positive affective states; and conflict, competition, a position of threat-defense, and an attitude of domination towards the other.

The schizophrenic, desperate to get away from the experience of his own self, that is, from the process of reflecting and 'owning' the experience one is having, discovers odd ways of creating separation from the observer self and the percepts, thoughts, feelings and ways of being of the suffering, traumatized self. The effort, of course, is made under dire conditions. Already having suffered a psycho-perceptual breach, that is, the eruption of right-hemispheric dissociated affect (with their own emotional meaning) into the left hemispheric brocas area, creating both auditory hallucinations and a breakdown in perceptual awareness, particularly in the self's ability to keep track of a developing context, as is necessary in writing or observing a developing scene, situation, or phenomena.

This horrific breakdown in perception will typically generate a profound fear and anxiety response. The intiial experience of fear feels like a lightning bolt within the mind; imaginatively, even, one could locate it at the temporal lobes, right at the amygdala. Then, an instant later (though felt as simultaneous, due to the time difference between perceptual consciousness and  biological events) the heart drops, indicating that the HPA axis has taken control and the vagus nerve hyper-stimulated the viscera - with stomach anxiety, chest anxiety - affects which drive consciousness into agony.

Consciousness flees from this - from these horrifyingly debilitating feelings and the perceptions, beliefs, and fears they produce in the mind. But when time passes, and affective states soften, and the individual is woken up by genetic social urges to engage and connect, if not with the "human world", than at least the object-world (a more primitive way of organizing) the self, or the brain, finds a way of dealing with the world "out there", by making corresponding shifts "in here". When connection is forged - interest activated - a polarity seems to ensue. The processes of the self and the meanings conveyed by the interacted-with world, organize a way of relating that builds itself from recent "relational" models. The recent past builds from past avoidance strategies, but now with a schizophrenic makeup, processes more easily ignored or dissociated before, are "projected" involuntarily - it seems - into the conscious mind. I think Bollas would agree that this as a breakdown in the selfs ability to experience effectance - or the capacity to effect something. The 'eruption' of an unconscious thought, fully verbalized, into conscious experience, speaks to a breach between the usual ways of processing unconscious thoughts. In a 'normal' unconscious thought (which I can only speak from my own experience) the self perceives something that is not-verbalized, but nevertheless contains meaning. Because we are such a verbally-focused, and superficially motivated society, people usually treat these experiences as "not anything". That they occur, only a self-aware person can aver. But without being able to talk about it and locate it to a particular context and set of conditions, the mind is likely to overlook it and 'return' to whatever their brain usually does.

Projection, then, speaks to a way of dealing with feelings by 'placing' the meaning of something outside the self; in the other, as is common in all humans, or, in the case of the psychotic person, into objects that have somehow become 'linked'. Bollas argues (and I think he is largely right about) that this projective process has different stages to it, with metaphorical projections being "earlier", and more linear (able to be understood and picked up on by a therapist) followed by projections that are tacitly connected, perhaps metonymically, and finally to connections that have become almost random in their nature,

Presumably, because everything which happens has an efficient cause, and is contingently related to events and things around it, these transformations have a "logical" history, no doubt. But it is very interesting to me the way the schizophrenic uses the world around it to order it own self processes. Things which are usually 'organized within', in processes that are basic to organism functioning, are offloaded, as Bollas even writes, in an almost artful manner.

Ultimately, it gets you thinking about how interesting the connections between the organism and the world can be.

The Fun of Photoshop

So how did the human mind become as we know it today? This diagram explains the main processes.

 

The Paradox At The heart Of Healing

In reading "Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma" by Daniel Sief, I was led to an interesting thought, provoked by the clinician J Bruce Lloyd. Lloyd says we need to "go into our pain", which, of course, is a common theme in psychodynamic theories of psychological healing. But Daniela Sief then mentions the viewpoint of the anthropologist Ralph Neese, who points out that evolution 'created' pain to signal to the central consciousness that something is wrong with the organism i.e. as a means to provoke the organism to do something to get away from the pain. 

INDEED! A paradox at the heart of our condition indeed. What is psychopathology other than the failed effort to get away from ones psychological pain? Instrumental avoidance, earlier a motor strategy enacted by an organism to get away from a noxious influence, has somehow got 'inside us', with the external environment, earlier monitored by the amygdala, becoming mirrored by an internal environment of known properties. 

Because we've evolved this thing called consciousness, the world, is no longer simply external. Now, the contents that arise within our perception and which we consciously reflect upon become an aspect of our "environment". The amygdala monitors and responds to percepts as if they were things "out there", in the external environment. Thoughts and feelings (what I've called "percepts") are now things to be avoided in an instrumental way. Echoing Bromberg, the functioning of the mind parallels the immune system of the body: whereas bodily integrity is the primary concern of the immune system, psychological health, or, in short, affect stability, or sanity, is the prerogative of the unconscious self-system of the mind-brain.

Neese, and perhaps Lloyd as well, see a contradiction here. But I see the evidence of a profound evolutionary process, hidden within ourselves. Lloyd says that we "go against our biology" when we go into our pain. However, I do not think this is the right way to understand the facts.

Since the human mind is itself a relic of our having evolved around one another, and thus evolving faces and nerve connections (such as the ventral nerve complex) that mediate a conscious connection of the body, it should be understood (but is hardly ever mentioned!) that the human "subject-object"  polarity within our consciousness is a stand-in for our experience of relatedness to other humans. Thus, when a person 'goes into their experience', they aren't contradicting any biological rules or laws, but in fact are leveraging the very same processes that gave rise to our unique form of consciousness!

When I create distance between my subjective awareness and my immediate experience, I am embodying within myself the dichotomy of "self" and "other". I turn my experience into an "object" of thought. I, then, embody a perspective to my experience that is 'detached', insomuch as it utilizes compassion, and the power that this feeling and experience can unleash, to 'calm' the dysregulated affective state in question.

To recognize and appreciate this process first requires that one recognize that the self is not any sense singular or essential. What is singular is awareness. What is experienced is multiple, dimensional, and perspectival. We thus have within ourselves "selves" that become activated within different contexts. Contexts can be external or internal. Conditions such as how much sleep we got, the food we eat, caffeine intake (a problem for me!) are factors that affect our biology. External environments associated with a particular trauma (large social environments, for me) stimulate and prompt certain memory-affective processes in the brain.

An additional way to think of this, to add a greater layer of complexity, is in terms of homeostasis. When we do not take care of our bodies (sleep, eating healthy, going to the washroom when the body tells you!) we compromise our capacity to respond in sensitive environments. This is because, as the work of Antonio Damasio has made very clear, the body has a 'hierarchy' of priorities. The body, insomuch as it is as "other" to our perceiving consciousness, demands respect and care from us. When we do not get the rest or  nourishment we need, the higher levels of the brain (dorsolateral complexes) receive less blood flow. Subjectively, we experience this as a reduced capacity to regulate our affective states - as well as a "drowsiness", or dissociation, from the world around us.

Since evolution has progressed, the higher levels accreted upon lower levels do not themselves arrogate any primacy in our functioning.The brainstem determines where blood-flow goes when energy resources our low. And the body, as a rule, is given number one priority. What else does the work of Stephen Porges - and the sheer existence of PTSD - suggest, other than that when affect rises too high, the lower brain 'shuts' down the higher brain. It even releases endogenous opiods to keep the worry-mongering mind 'stunned', so that the business of keeping the body alive can be carried forward.

Finally, that we can even exist within ourselves this way - be the compassionate eye, or gaze, towards our own experience, is truly a metaphysical wonder! (at least to me!). We embody within ourselves the context of our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The cynics who decry "humans are selfish", fail to appreciate the relational neediness at the core of our selfishness! Were selfish for recognition, for being needed. We need to be recognized, because it was through such recognition, that these amazing brains, these knowing and self-knowing vehicles of consciousness, even emerged!