The Texture Of Defense

Here we are. Again. As people. In a new moment, acting in new way; but not really new. The "external part" is my action, the new context, a different point in time. But the underlying tone, the way were doing it, hiding the evasive "why" of a meaningful dynamic. This doesn't show up so easily. At least not in it's full evolutionary contours.

I have experienced so many different states that comes with being human. I know shame like few people know it. I feel the feelings, and feel the "eyes", inverted inwards, as my own gaze, doing the work of the shaming other.

And what is shame? Few people have defined it in the way that it deserves to be defined. It's as if, the human beings who spend the most time around it, intelligent people, studied minds; its as if these people, known technically as "psychotherapists", or "clinicians", have the minds most suited to probing life in the "mid-range", as Merlin Donald describes it.

But in any case, eyes inward, but the body is bristling with an energy. Just before shame strikes me, there's this budding anticipation of a negative experience. I know that what is happening, here, in these sorts of experiences, is a process in me, my own thoughts, reflexively "looking", not at the present, but at some virtual mental place, performing some mental observer status, watching, until the feeling grows and reaches its apogee, in thought, in thinking, the specific fear thought that may give it away - my weakness, my fearfulness, my doubt in my abilities.

I know shame very well. These sorts of experiences, usually happen weekly, which, btw, is quite wonderful, as it used to be every other moment. Silence alone was enough to keep me from "engaging" me, from extending myself, and hearing myself, and suffering the look of my own gaze. Back then I did not see what I know now: the gaze is not my own, but that of another. Others, plenty of others. Inherently replaceable, changeable, offering the same potential circumstance, if I just happen to give it away. If I let them see that "weakness". Little tolerance, humans beings. We can't even keep our gaze very long in watching the suffering of another. Their "suffering" - the phenomenological quality of their perceptual experience of self in a state of shame - can actually, in fact, provoke a most horrendous mischievousness in particular others. Certain people can't tolerate, in the least bit, the sight of shame in other people. Shyness is basically shame, hidden behind a different word. The experiential beginnings of shyness intimate "I am afraid of you"; but it can also give away an even more intolerable dysfunction: a nervousness in the body, tension in the voice, and the most bizarre inflections in facial and eye changes. The very act of "diverting", which happens so impulsively and reflexively when fear or shame is evoked in social circumstances, speaks to its utter evolutionary vestige.

Shame reflects something of the evil in the natural world. A state imposed on certain creatures to indicate the weakness of their status, and subordination to the group. The psychologist Louis Cozolino suggested in one of his books, quite plausibly, that an act of suicide may function in the same way as apoptosis in the body. Programmable cell death, done for the aid of the body. Programmable suicide? Sometimes, indeed, this happens.

 The human being, however, is a conscious personality, not a cell. And it does battle with its thoughts and isn't typically eager to just kill itself. The presence of good, of reflection, of kindness, received in ones life, stands as the "force" behind this eagerness to persist. To live. In this urge to survive, to remain conscious, to fight for the self. The qualities of surviving, consciousness, seems to hide the hidden force of love. Simple kindness, "imprinted" into your biology, called forth when thoughts of self destruction gain control. The only selves who "do it", were ones who had become too dissociated from the force of love to help themselves.

But yes, shame is a powerful reality. It hides behind actions, or, rather, is concealed by its opposite force, pride. Pride is also just "another word". But we understand intuitively the states which correspond with the general concept of pride. Downstairs, just a moment ago, I am communicating with my brother in a state of 'pride'. Confidence is another word, but it can almost have an obfuscating power in this particular conversation. What I mean is flowing in your experience in such a way that you look forward to your next statement, and also enjoy your own "style" of communicating. Indeed, there is even a subtle 'domination' quality, sometimes, when you communicate. You want to stifle and unhinge people, at least sometimes. Indeed, we do this mostly unconsciously, almost as if were hypnotized into acting these ways because of the pleasure that accompanies it. But make no mistake, there is a fundamental "wrongness" in these actions, because they are violent to the emotional states to the other. Not all, not always, and I'm not saying pride is bad; only a pride that turns the other into an object and 'does with him' whatever your unconscious mentation takes you. It's these sort of careless escapades into nihilism that human beings in our day and age have a difficult time resisting.

So, I've felt pride. I've felt it just as I watch others who speak and apparently appear to be experiencing it in a very similar manner to myself. And they're also likely doing it just like I do it.

Mental Mysteries

I haven't been feeling well. My body was off. Got a cold, and of course with the cold comes concomitant changes in phenomenology. A slight increase towards the negative, as if the force of feeling negative in the body infuses itself into conscious processes, dictating their direction.

But I've gotten over my cold. So what else is it? I missed school. I skipped school. I made a rather reckless and immature decision to stay home and smoke weed with my brother rather than go to school, watch a documentary, and then take notes of the class conversation. And that's it. I skipped an opportunity to take important and useful study notes. I broke a promise to myself; a meaning which I struggle to keep contact with. I'm almost afraid to go forward in describing it without losing awareness of the arbitrariness of it. I both feel intense guilt, and a desire to chide myself, to say something to myself, that will help me see what I need to see and understand. So much fear all the time. And weakness, and perception of self in terms of weakness, associated with your voice and the flow of your experience.

How do people not see how obvious it is? Because it isn't relevant to them. They do not have periodic eruptions, borne from a history of daily submersion in the dynamics of shame, anxiety and obsessiveness. I do. So I see things in me. I feel in me this utter dysfunction; a concatenation of speech, perception of speech, a deep visceral feeling of shamefulness, a stress in the voice, a void in the self, a fracture at my core, a being struggling with its beingness. How could I get out? How do I get out? A fearlessness. Like the Tao Master 100 eyes in the TV show Marco Polo says, I do not cling to life. And that's it? Isn't it? Why should that be it?Isn't that cynical?Or unappreciative sounding? 

No. Life's ways teach us how to exist. Complex dynamical systems, as we are, when dysfunctional at one level - in my case, in affect, self-perception, an audial sensation of dysfunction, must strive, and search, and find; but what do they find? That feeling. Call it grace, compassion, love, acceptance, forgiveness, openness, tolerance, forbearance. There's a Jet stream like quality to it. It is important. A stream that the mind senses exists, in the stream and flow of thought and the various moral and ethical ways of thinking, perceiving, and orienting to an object. The stream presents perceptions that build-up into complex perceptions of a self-environment coherence, but the coherence always strikes a nice balance between the equal aims of vying selves. It's in the sincerity of sensing, exerting to sense, and trying to afford to the other what you feel to be a fundamental need in yourself. But can you feel the needs? Can you say, if I asked you, what your needs are? I'm sure sure some of you would say "yes", and name their needs; some, legitimate, others ridiculous. But the problem is, the most relevant needs when it comes to human health and wellbeing is structurally built into our biology and cultural behavior. Omissions are deadly powerful. They are bad because what we don't think of, indeed, may be something that our brain is deliberately directing attention away from. If you actually watch and listen, honestly, you can hear within yourself, in your body, a certain affective reaction. Affects are complex things; not simple and certainly not isolated from one another. They ultimately cohere around a basic need, hardwired into our brain and appearing within us as a basic unconscious want. This is the bear minimum. What we need, at every moment, is a way to make sense of ourselves, to ourselves, in terms how the other responds to us. It just so happens that other people can have a powerful hypnotic effect on the human mind-brain. Humans becomes entrained and enchanted by a particularly feeling in a particular situation, because it is meaningfully familiar to them. But it is also performing a function within its mind-brain: you exist like this because you need to exist like this to get along and thrive with others. 

 Our selves are amorphous structures that change from moment to moment, from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, and a changing external context. In my room, in this quiet bed, and with the reverberating tones of the Tao Master 100 Eyes, tingling in the background, I sense in me an effort to just bring peace to myself, calm to myself. I feel a certain strength, from an unconscious identification of myself with his manners, to no shy. I do not need this background, yet its there, exerting a certain expressive force on the way my thoughts emerge, with images and sensations projected in between of it's source. 

So what now? It's late. Go to bed. Accept the feelings. You've talked about them. But you're also very stoned, and no doubt a large, if not the main-cause of this change, is due to the dissociative and affect blunting power of weed. You feel a frozeness in your chest and an obsessive fixation on "whats wrong". How do I fix this? In my interacting with my brother, I give expression to this experience. This is to say, my bodily experience is projected into my need for recognition, for re-connection with the other, with my brother, for validation, for confirmation, that I exist and that I matter and am cared for. What a strong, incredible impulse! THIS, this is the need that underlies not just me, but all humans, and it's a need that seems to underlie the processes that sustain group homeostasis, with a "shared intentionality", or the pleasure of agreeing on the same thing, magnifying one another's sense of positive influence on the other. To see yourself as a FUNCTION of this 'higher dynamic' is a profoundly sensible notion. It's phenomenologically true - at least to any psychotherapist who truly understands what their patients feel, and also what they themselves  feel. Shame, and it's discomforts, and the resonance that forms between two brains synchronizing emotional information in terms of expressive affects in face, eye, voice and body. The body communicates intent, and when we "know" it as an inchoate percept, we un-know it before we ever have a chance to recognize it's formative power. The shame 'inhabits' your system as a powerful attractor. And it's meaning structure is such that our minds incline away from it and towards a positive structure that is its polar opposite. It could be thought of as an adaption made by your brain-mind to make coherent a particular existential self-world relationship pertinent to the present context. As contexts shift, the brain-mind shifts its way of doing business, so that every thought structure has a particular homeostatic "coherency" that maintains whole organism coherency. Of course, the thought-structure, if truly coherent - complex, yet integrated - will be thoroughly social, open, and accepting of changing circumstances. 

Is this just "unconscious cerebration"? No. At least I don't think it is. I think that idea is sort of chutzpah, and frankly irrelevant to the remarkable meaning of being a conscious expression of a unity of common need. That we unconsciously seek confirmation of self from one another speaks to the intensity of our interdependence. Faces, voices, - visual input, audial input, in neuroscience talk - change the structure of our attention to attune in a new way, to bring about a particular effect in self-experience. 

Notice I always speak with an underlying dualism. Mind and it's object. Mindfully probing self, demarcating always the act of perception from the thing perceived. The former is the real thing, the thing looking for the thing. You can talk about brains all you like, and emphasize evolutionary processes: this, as can be seen, is a pride of focus for me. But in the end of the day, I see s causally active mind - morally, and empathically aware in the way we mean by "love" and "awe" and "compassion" - sometimes coming through, but more often than not being coordinated by the affective factors shared with primates and other mammals. Competition. Defensiveness. The felt need to express strength and defend against ideas that conflict with the idea of strength. Strength, power; the exisential qualia intrinsic in phenomenal states of pride conduce to feedback loops that build narratives consistent with past meaning-structures. Shame is an enemy to this mind, and yet its not acknowledged as such. Our present, modern day society talks about morality in abstract terms, but fails to generalize it to the real world. The mind is fractured. It is a dynamical system that somehow maintains a 'general identity' (in mentally normal people) yet maintains enough looseness to create internal incoherence between "self stated views", such as the self-belief that one is fair, kind, and nice, and those times when one is pressed by his social relationships to act in ways that are unfair, unkind, and mean-spirited. Each situation is unique; and in some situations, shame is the enemy - by which I mean:awkward experiences; being left out; saying something that might get a certain type of feedback. Semantics and style are serving the same goal; and the coherency operates by "keeping away" negative affective reactions.

The Neurological And Phenomenological Dynamics Of Dissociation

The basic idea behind this diagram is simple. First, the 'phyletic', or affect-regulation dynamics hardwired into our brain-mind, detect something in the face, voice, or body, that might indicate a "threat". "Threat", here, means anything that might be affectively unwanted. For example, Person A, who suffers with agoraphobia, in ruminating about how he looks as he walks in a social area, unconsciously indicates his state of mind by his eye gaze, facial expression, and body movements. Person B, in walking by person A, picks up a slight discomfort in his body before he swiftly turns his head in another direction. What happened here?

The social trauma of person A is unconsciously communicated as he struggles internally to regulate his negative affect. In his mind, his phenomenology is fear-based, as well as ridden with shame.

Person B's right amygdala notes it. That is, the phyletic, homeostatic, self regulatory processes of Person B's brain notes it, which is then instantly represented within his phenomenology as a sub-symbolic percept - that is, the "how" the person he just saw looks (anxious, uncomfortable, or threatening) as well as how it makes him feel (anxious, uncomfortable; "awkward" i.e. a dilute form of shame); however, he turns his head an instant later, and in doing so, has "regulated" his affect without actually symbolizing why he turned his head (for example, by saying, "this 'weird' person makes me want to turn away from him").

In this simplistic example, the phyletic memory, or the invariant, and unconscious mode of regulating the self, notes in person A's behavior a suite of actions that indicate threat. Threat here, to be sure, is enormously subtle: negative affect. Negative affect is interpreted as a threat by the brain because it compromises the functioning of the self, or, said differently, compromises the coherency of organism-environment relatedness. In addition, negative affect indicates low social status - or "beta status" - in that the organism who exhibits this behavior obviously has trouble making relationships with others. Since the human brain is ultimately shaped by the forces of group selection - or the "shared intentionality" that uses positive affect to bring individual human organisms into a common ground - an organism that exhibits negative affect activates threat-detection processes in the right amygdala.

The turning of the head is not-so much culturally learned as it too is phyletically instantiated. However, what IS learned is the knowledge brought to such facts: HOW the culture he developed within responds to negative affects is transferred and integrated within his mind-brain. This example is enormously simple, whereas a more complex example could work by activating certain consciousness-based, "reflexive social language" (Cozolino) processes that derive from past conditioning. The "grist" could come from past conversations with others, or what he observed in a third party or popular media, as a way to "deal" with negative affects.

An example from my own life, is how my father reacts when I decide to talk about certain "delicate" things - things which he himself has been relentlessly conditioned by past thinking/feeling and the environment he group up within, to dissociate from conscious reflection. So I'll say "how does that make you feel?" (after he describes to me a certain negative interaction he had) which causes a slew of actions; first, a slight pause - as if recognizing inside that he doesn't want to talk about this (this is the first part: threat detection); then he'll quickly say something that I know from past interactions he often says: he has preexisting "defense tactics" that become reflexively communicated when negative affects are activated. What's most interesting is the abrupt transformation of affect. What appeared to bother him a moment earlier has been replaced by an apparently (or deceptively) positive affect, oriented towards a different mental object. His "instrumental avoidance" is language-based, no doubt more related to the left side of the brain, and the left amygdala, than the right side (which detects the threat). He uses the "self-constructions", or what he says about himself and how he thinks about himself, and these are linked with positive-affects (more often than not; although dissociative processes may also activate negative affects like anger, jealousy, or resentment following a negative percept).

Point is, the psychological dissociation described above is simultaneously a neurological dissociation between the hemispheres. What the phyletic right hemisphere picks up, and seeks to notify consciousness of, is dissociated by the culturally-conditioned left hemisphere, as the 'knowledge of the right', is incompatible with the interests, goals, and sociocultural-embeddedness of the left.

This way of seeing things is perfectly consistent with existing neuropsychological research that lateralizes negative affect more to the right hemisphere (indicating a concern with threat detection) and positive affect to the left hemisphere. Again, this makes perfect sense, as threat detection is more of a holistic phenomenon, and thus unconscious,, whereas inclining the organism to some potential good recruits consciousness, which is lateralized to the left hemisphere. Thus, "instrumental avoidance", when considered in terms of neural darwinism, is happening all the time, from birth onwards, as the organism-self uses past positive images/affect associations to distance itself from negative affects.

The Two Sides Of Emotional Brain