Analyzing Thoughts

I'm having such wonderful insights into the nature of my morbid thoughts.

The morbid thought I refer to is the thought that obsesses over the sound of my voice.

What I find fascinating is how there appears to be two different parts to this puzzle: there's the bodily, affective arousal; and then there's this cognitive recognition. The recognition is a type of perception that senses into the bodily arousal; knowing it, and sensing that it represents something painful.

I am surviving, or allowing myself to function in the world, because I have been able to get rid of the cognitive recognition aspect, by focusing my mind on the bodily aspect of the total experience of self.

This difference is probably best encapsulated by what the psychologist Alan Fogels terms  subjective emotional present and conceptual self awareness. When I am finding myself in a traumatic state of altered perception - that state where I find something 'wrong' in the sound of my own voice; and indeed, become hypnotically entranced by it - I can feel intense shame for sounding off; for failing to connect; and even worse, for perpetuating my experience by unwittingly enacting desperate efforts to string myself free from it. It fails; I fail, and then a 'secondary shame' follows, whereby I experience my "weirdness" in the presence of an interlocutor; amidst this is a a general intense bodily heat;a growing tension in the throat region; and strong sensations of activity within my temples. In all likelihood, the strong sensations of heavy blood flow I feel in my temples is the hypothesized "little seizure" activity that accompanies reliving traumatic experience. Makes a lot of sense to me, as when these types of experiences happen, I do indeed have trouble discriminating sounds in human conversation, as well as an overall sense of diminished ability to hear; also tending to change in proportion to the intensity of the arousal. 

Somehow, the mind is able to 'sense into' the dynamic vitality forms of actuated experience. But it is combining different strands and different pieces of knowledge. I am using insights that have come from elsewhere; a sense of strangeness in the world - my own strangeness, or estrangement from others over the years. I discovered something deep in myself, in my suffering self, that was only discovered out of necessity: to survive, my mind needed to 'find' an equilibrium within me, or at least a possibility within a general ontological space. The world felt real not merely as a fact, but as a reality juxtaposed with nothingness: and that, the fear of nothingness, trumps all fears.

 I cried and cried - but to whom? To God. To the ontological "other" that is responsible for this sorry fate of mine. To suffer because...of what? Because my mother suffered and dealt with the consequences by externalizing it against her child? But before I was wise enough to appreciate that fact, I had only the feelings of emptiness and fear, and the desperate need for an other to help and save me from the feared doom.

Doom is the overwhelming sense that played a part in building this feeling within me. I could not have come to feel such compassion, to know such awareness, without having been "stunned" into vital alertness to my environment. The evolutionarily ancient "amydgular" system raises consciousness - spurs consciousness, which for humans, supercharges this thing we call "consciousness". Fear builds it; Fear gives us access to possible ways of thinking that would otherwise be hidden in sight. It is not merely a qualitative thing, but something intimately related to a change in quantitative arousal. It is such an odd thing the way quantity and quality relate.

I had a good day; spoke to my teacher. Spoke loudly and assertively. Was relaxed, and most importantly, was relaxed to my relaxedness.

This condition I live within forces me to embed awareness within the thoughts I have. Every thought now needs a thought which can "stabilize" the former. In being with my teacher, I am clearly replaying my relationship with my sister, whom I've developed a particular 'relational function' with, or sense of my self in relation with, that gives me the confidence to proceed.

I do not know what I would do without Ashley. She is so obviously valuable, on a purely unconscious/neurological level; and this is why I need to "build some bridges" towards others, so that this way I feel most relaxed with, based on a person I will perhaps never be as close with (my sister) unless perhaps with a future spouse. In any case, there is a complexity to this situation in that I still have to keep at it, that is, building up an autoregulative faculty that can maintain itself independent of a particular outside other.

I am also clearly sensitive, as we all are, to energy changes. Late at night. Tiring day; a psychologically significant experience - conversation with my teacher, a woman in her late 30's (i'm guessing) and experiencing myself as a positive object for another. I say "object", just to convey that there is a particular pleasure in knowing that you are being experienced by another person in a positive way, and not a negative one. I thought I had this as a child, but obviously I didn't; my mothers BPD undermined my psychological growth, leaving me adapted to a strange environment (the one she created) which in turn spawned worlds of distortion that ultimately culminated in my various traumas (13, 15, 16). Now, in this wonderful conversation with another person, I find myself being a different version of me; some I actually do recognize, as "me", or at least a version of me whom others can know as "mike", when I know all too well there also exists another mike, another part of me, which I naturally fear: could you handle it? Could you still like me if you knew that that part existed?

Such thoughts jump about in my mind because they pertain to the all important issue of being liked. If humans didn't have a genetically ingrained need to be liked, developmental trauma wouldn't exist. But it does; and it does exist, because sociality evolved as a way to maintain "shared intentionality" between conspecifics. Thus, the breakdown in sociality - or the attunement of the caregiver to the infants mind - leads to a series of adaptations, by which I mean, mind-boggling biological complexity at the genetic, organelle, and cytoplasmic level, whereby the world 'out there' becomes internally mapped "in here". Every aspect of the metabolic processing of conscious experience is in the brain, in neurons, represented by something in physical form (proteins, lipids, sugars).

Because of this reality, human infants are at the whim of their caregivers; their future of being the jock everyone likes or the loner who eats lunch in the washroom is perhaps best conceived as a 'phenotype' 'built up' out of a complex medley of opposing meanings, shaping, displacing, and 'designing' the contours of personality.

So this is me? The one who suffers? The one who feels like crying when his mind is so disordered? So lost? So involved in a thought, an obsession, with a feeling of absence.

The loss of self is very much a loss of agency. When I can't hear my self in my voice, I sense that it's due to something more basic: a feeling of effectancy. I do not speak, or hear my self in my voice, because I do not want to speak. I speak, but hear in my own background, a censure, a conviction, that what is there is "wrong" or "unlikable".

At perhaps the deepest level there is something, thank lord, far more banal: inertia. I live it out by feeling so "meh". The dissociative, hypoaroused sense of relatedness to experience yields half-hearted attempts; and it is in these attempts that the 'absence' is heard, and hence, sensed as an ontological 'thing".

There is no thing. Never was. The self gets caught up in these thoughts because it 'thingifies' itself. The self-focus, the turn to conceptual-self awareness, speaks to this reality: when the self is looked at an held as an object, experience becomes performative - a thing to "do" - as opposed to the far more basic reality of "being", whereby I feel my aliveness and connectedness to the world and reality: this, the more natural and true state of human functioning.

That the mind can weave its ongoing experience into a sense of being that is more relaxed, by being more aware of the dynamics of bodily experience, while simultaneously "tuning" ones out breaths with a sense of "peacefulness" and wellbeing. This, I must say, is pretty existentially incredible.

Helping Me See

I feel afraid...again. Why? Why should the next day torment me? I'm just going downtown. Just riding the bus...sharing the bus. And the you get up, walk a bit to another point; wait, get on a bus. Wait...possibly with another person nearby. Get up, off bus, walk, in station, down station, on subway, off subway, walk. Sit.

Just doing this, this exercise, I can feel in me a torrent of feelings. Why? Why are you afraid? Because of the weakness you feel? Because of the fears that arise - fear of more pain? More shame? To feel isolated, alone, and unable to cross the divide?

Those feelings, so real, so ME. It is me. A hurt me. A suffering me. Challenged. So different from other people, so focused in different ways; existentially aware. Constantly living in this zone of empathic awareness and understanding of others. Understanding - or sensing - meanings in actions, because actions, my actions, hold so much meaning for me.

I am me. An astronaut - someone who maintains an 'etheral' sense of relatedness with others. I read this. Explore this. Find in me these stirrings of conviction - of power - and yet side by side is this timid, feckless little boy. Curled up, eyes averted. Shaking with the awareness of watching eyes.

This is me -------> This character <--------, this reality, lived, embodied, known. I feel him because I am him. And yet I am not him, because here I am, talking of myself, holding myself, watching myself, and above all, understanding myself. This blessed capacity to know and suffuse experience with a feeling of lightness, calm, or a removed, silent awareness, piercing the darkness, as it were, its knowing.

The language and evocative imagery of chaos theory has meshed with my perceptual experience of myself. I am that which I want to change: my brain, the "stock" whose inflow/outflow's I must contort.

Repeat a behavior, because behavior is the flows, and the brain, and it's molecular micro-structure, is the stock that needs to be changed. Will 'silences' arousal. Calm. Focused, related. Faces all around, faces just like me, people - knowing as a being in their world - but not knowing the strangeness of it, or more magnificently, the awesomeness.

I am saved by Awe. Awe. It's as if compassion and awe are two sides of the same metaphysical coin, each giving reference to a different vantage point: Awe, reality, knowing you are a knowing knowing; looking around, and experiencing not mere static phenomena, but the dynamic interplay of mutually supporting realities. And compassion - for oneself - for the pangs of others.

I am not as compassionate a person as I like to think. I consistently pull away in interactions; when I pass by a homeless person, I look away; do I not care? Or am I more preoccupied with the social discomfort of talking with someone? I live in myself, away, and apart, a lot of the time. It's still with me, at this point.

But it's moving eastward. It's pulling. I'm growing, My mind is becoming more tolerant of certain realities. The shocks - of awareness - pumping into my mind with incredible force - I need to stay calm and aware of these experiences; experience them, note them, and letting them go - say "bye bye" - a little, loosen your mind, and the fear that cripples a sense of openness.

My brother frequently evokes out of me feelings of insecurity. A pompousness of sorts; not conscious, but embedded, or encoded within his personality, is the types of adaptations he has had to make at his job. The persons he works with - and their arrogance - trickles through in the form of his own attempts to survive in that environment; I see this mess in his mind, but he's mostly blind to it; or even worse, indifferent to it's presence. It is far easier just to "Be in the flow", live, in being, or rather, in the stereotypical narratives he ascribes to his day to day activities.

Because of this he can be removed; blank faced. I speak, and I see not merely a lack of response, but a resistance, or hesitance, directed at me, about me. I've had this underlying feeling that there exists between us feelings of mutual loathing, contained in 'self-states' that are not always present in our relationship, but which can be called into being by either of us, and when it enters, it typically drags the other one with it.

I've resisted these patterns, or at least I am trying to. But I still have to live with this person, with his distance, his tepid sense of intimate relatedness. And a deep, dower sense that my brother is to strongly on the dissociative side to ever really command the type of attentional focus needed to relate at a more compassionate level. There's two mutually enforcing drawbacks; his pride, or the degree of pleasure he gets in eliciting positive feedback for himself, something he's always felt naturally equipped to feel power in (thanks to his timing of birth i.e 6 years after me). And then there's his intense sensitivity to negative emotions; his mind dissociates them with tremendous fidelity; he can move between states with relative 'amnesia' for what he did before. He can persist in a silence, unable to communicate, stricken by alexythemia, I can talk forever, but inside his own mind, he cannot 'get over the upset' created by a powerful emotion. Not being a very compassionate person (or tending to be cynical) he cannot inspire himself to communicate openly. And, again, regardless of whatever health effect that accompanies his behaviors, it seems far too 'immaterial' - in his "mind" - to really strike him as simultaneously exerting a dysregulating force on energetic balance between systems in the brain and body.

The past and Present

I am feeling frustrated. A part of me wants to cry out, fall down and curl up into a fetal position.

I don't want to know it or show it. Yet I just can't leave it in there unthought about. I have to go closer, know myself more deeper. Empathize with me, who am I am, and ask: do you need to suffer?

It doesn't have to be that way, at least I don't think. The science part of me, the part that is influenced by scientists and scientifically oriented philosophers, pokes in, and tries to monitor the neutrality of my position.

Yet life isn't neutral. And if it, it a paridoxical 'middle ground' that inter-includes opposing states, which together, in their wicked harmony, makes something magical happen.

Yet to be calm, relaxed, sure of myself. I can be so brittle and think and feel difficult thoughts with a force of persuasion that eats me from within my chest: there's a "knowing" there, from my past, which repeats the same refrain: be afraid, don't move, don't think, creep away and hide. Above all, hide.

It's probably not a coincidence that traumatic surrender produces gestures associated with toddler hood. Baby's are very vulnerable, and thus liable to being traumatically over-aroused. But not every baby's been traumatized, so I wonder, why do I feel this need in me, to fall down and cry, and lament my existence?

I - what is I? I should thank my lucky buttons that I read Joshua Abraham Heschl. I like his ideas about awe and doubt. Not so much the emphasis he placed on the ontological primacy of the former, but because he spoke with such enthusiasm about it. This man had awe for reality, for the fact of consciousness, his consciousness, and the apparent automaticity of all other organisms, to varying degrees. 

Jews have this feeling of awe. Their religion has cultivated it, and I think, there may have been enough generations of interbreeding to support the predicted environmental reality: Judaism. Of course, culture is the primary mediator here, and Judaism, such as in Chasidism, and even more specifically, a sect called the "breslovers", named after the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. This knowledge here is a testament to that part of my life - my religious past - where I cultivated a feeling of awe, in my prayers to God, in my abstract forms of devotion - willing, willing, and my mind grew through that, through the biological reality of a particular neuronal network being 'more used'.

I don't know if I believe in God anymore, and it pains me to say that. Even reading that, I experience a second guessing: do I? Or don't I? One part of me pulls away towards a humanistic bent; while another part, the part that sees awe, and cultivates awe, can't help but see a oneness in the world that is not at all different from the views I held before. Our brains are interpersonally created, so why should God, in the form of an imagined companion, not be experienced in a human like way? Are not my words natural properties - emergent functions - that depend on biological materials? The psychological reality - the meanings of words - are more than mirrors for others to understand, but also, and more critically, something I hear presented to myself. My consciousness bears wisdom to my cries, and hears it, responds to it, with compassion. Why do I feel this, and why am I drawn to finding healing in it? The attachment processes of early life, where the mind is forged and given its 'charge', is this the source of the feelings? And if yes, how may one think about it ontologically? That is, to think about this fact in light of the feeling of existential awe.

But I am but a single human sharing a world with 7 billion other humans. Each one of, or the healthy of us, forms a self, and a history, and a narrative. But more than that, we share this same existential vantage point upon the world we experientially encounter. Each of us, then, together, do we make up God? But what of reality and the ineffable emergence of life? The perfect cosmic conditions, arising out of certain astronomical relations, making a sun this sun and having a planet, the 3rd one out, developing this way, and oh yeah, put a moon there to get the life producing waters on the planet moving. And then the chemicals got together, merged in ways that seemed oddly predestined, and developed in ways that involved various ways of combustion and transformation.

That I am a consciousness, emergent upon the process that is this biological evolution. Can I hear my own cries? I do. And I respond.


But would I leave it at that? I'm not big enough to be God, and neither are we together. We emerge in beautiful ways out of processes that began 700 million years ago when Eukaryotic cells evolved and came together in multicellular units. The history, and the subtly of the consciousness that came about in it's various forms. I am now the most complex thing created. 40 trillion cells. Each one processing 10,000 molecules of ATP every second. Which means the body processes 1 quadrillion molecules of ATP every second.

How can one hear that and not be amazed at the dazzling complexity? How can one not then connect our emergence, and our awareness, to this tremendous scientific fact?

The philosopher Raymond Tallis seems to be the only other person I've read who is amazed with what human beings represent. From the big bang till now, evolution has followed determinable laws. When organisms acted, they acted from inbuilt principles that conformed with earlier principles. The ontology grew more complex, but the basic processes were always physical. And remain physical. And yet, simultaneously, there is this 'mental' plane which can assess the contents of it's experienced perception. If 'experienced perception' represents Damasio's idea of the body forming feeling states that bias perception, then the consciousness that looks out upon these dynamics is oddly out of place. It's as if reality, or ontology, has made a U turn, where reality itself, or a consciousness that looks upon reality, can now act directly upon it in a conscious and self-determinative fashion.

That we can be tugged between two, very different states, and, despite what are body may compel us to think, we opt for another perception, another view, strongly suggests that the mind is involved with the ethics of choice. Not merely that either, though: it can change it's own reality - it's own brain - in a manner reminiscent of spinning a merry-go-round. The mind is either going with the motion, or consciously interrupting it, putting a hand upon it as it spins, slowing it down, bringing it to a stop, and then spinning it in the other direction.

That to me is what free will amounts to. The mind immersing itself into experiences and trying to recognize how the past is influencing the present.

Some ideas on Evolution

The human brains outer strucutre - the cortex - is an expansion upon the lower-level subcortical areas. Thus, the necessity of an evolutionary stage where certain features of the environment generated certain brain functions.

Between the inner and outer brains, it is now known, is a split between 'explicit' and 'implicit' processing. Below the cortex, experiences are generated as if by automata. The phenomenology is the sensation of doing something because one always does this. Indeed, to resist the enaction of a behavior - to conceptualize it mentally as a want and then to impede the execution of an action - feels a bit like a mental '360'. Something wanted, no longer attended to in the same way.

This development must follow from earlier, simpler, ways of being. Tomasellos theory of shared intentionality is an obvious background for human development. His work parallels work from developmental psychology (Beebe, Tronick, Trevarthen, Stern, Emde, Fonagy, Schore) which sees the infants first forms of communication as gestural; but these communications are unconscious, or implicit, in that they act on and through procedural systems. The infants brain detects intentionality/affects via facial expressions, body movements and intonation of voice, and orients accordingly to threat or safety.

What does such information mean for human evolution? It tells me that our ancestors in the genus homo, as suggested by Tomasellos shared-intentionality hypothesis, first began to "share intentionality", or from the perspective if a developmental psychoanalyst, began to experience symmetrical affects that mutually generate a shared attentional focus.

The question, of course, is how these "shared-intentionality" processes evolved in the brain. Developmental psychologists have an under-appreciated term for this process, which they call "implicit relational knowing", or relational "internal working models". They're the most subtle aspects of procedural learning: how to self-organize in particular relational contexts: how to process the object, make meaning of the object, etc, all in accord with a prediction system that guides the organism to act vigilantly towards threatening objects and relaxingly with safe objects.

Early evolution therefore had to establish a sense of trust and confidence i.e. safety, in the human interaction. This could only have happened in small-band hunter-gatherer groups and those close knit connections they formed with one another. Question: what was their attentional focus like? Is it possible that early homo was drawn to perceive more and more in his neighbors intent? So over centuries, faces could become less hairy, eyes more white, as the face of the other was probed for more and more intentional meaning?

The degree of sensitivity in humans to the information held in the face of the other strongly indicates that Schores theory of intepersonal regulation to be true. It pretty much makes sense of the mind in a way that Freudian and behaviorist thinking can never do: it integrates evolutionary logic into the developmental process: the organism self-organizes in terms of a larger 'system' of psychological dyadic regulation. This requires another person, so that mind after mind is patterned and 'recreated', but of course the process is strongly cultural and psychological; genes don't matter, as they set general parameters that can be undone (barring serious neurological injury) by experiences. The evidence of therapy is the strongest demonstration of the power of human relationships. Cozolinos ideas about a 'social synapse' sound appropriate. The idea beneath it is salience: human beings stand as 'desired objects' for one another. Good emotions depend on the other; yet paradoxically, the individual acts for the pleasure of the emotion generated by the interaction: it takes the emergence of a secondary take, explicit consciousness, to notice the contextual factors that determine the feelings generated by interaction.

Perhaps emotional connection between early homos within tribes deepened their sense of one another. This may have been a period where mirror neurons multiplied as the organism mapped "more" of the others intentional state. But attentional state os . They also, of course, must have been compelled by both sides of the ledger: the carrot of love, friendship, laughter, pleasure; and the stick of fear, anger, anxiety, and shame. The organism is 'pulled' into a dynamic system that requires a dyd

The Two Sides of Consciousness

I'm now convinced that what we call our "mind" or "self" is a phylogenetic construction created between individual ape-like organisms with greater bipdeal uprightness, hands with better dexterity, etc.

The thought dawned upon me while I was playing basketball at the leisure center. I went there a little bit high (bad habit) and I mention this only to provide a physiologic frame for what my affective state was like. I began thinking about how well I was doing. Which was perhaps prompted by thoughts about the meaning and significance of playing at the gym on Tuesday when adult pickup starts. I saw the Indian kid who once took a fair bit of pleasure in blocking my shot. The message was clear: I'm tall, you're short, shown with zest with the added wiz of a ball hurling in the other direction.

 The Indian kid seems to be about 16. He's about 6'1. Maybe 6'2. He's typical for kids these days. Basketball oriented, he wears all the gear that brands him as 'this type of person'. I get the message and try to calm my impulsion to enact an irritated look. Why bother? I then become conscious of myself, of my ability, of the temerity of my affective state: how can he world feel so different now, be so different now? I got to learn that this is a stupid, pointless question. Powerful - but you need to contain it or you'll be sent into endless iterations of the same feeling: it's overwhelming.

I did however get an idea that impressed me. In the past, I existed almost entirely, about a depressing 99 out of 100 times, in a state of unresolved traumatic vigilance. The disordered stress response, now in full swing (say, in 2002) is mutating in a certain way. I become hyper-focused on the voice. The brain now links the voice - the vehicle of self-expression (and development) is broken. When I speak, I do not speak from my body, but from an overly concerned frame of reference that lies outside me altogether.

Trauma heightens the environment, and in particular, the reality of the object. I see myself, unconsciously, enacting not merely the trauma, but the actors on the other side who contributed to the creation of these states: I unconsciously experience them as the view that I ascribe to myself. Being in the presence of other people at 7 pm, perhaps not so long as 3 years ago, was compulsively experienced as tense. Even till this day, I reach a point of 'complexity' that is difficult to track and thus bring back to a stable ground. I can get lost, and the only way out is to limit information from everything except the body.

This story is all about the way the environment "hides" within the ways we act with people. The environment, of course, is the minds and intentional states of other people. When we act, and when we reflect, we do it in tacit reference to the memory of past experiences, and the 'meanings', as affects and cognitive percepts, are "ejected" at later times with only the felt affects/cognitions that come along in a conscious state to dominate awareness.

This makes more sense than you realize. Human brains today are constructions of at least 500,000 years of significant 'altruistic evolution'. I say 'altruistic', because organisms within primate lineages (there were multiple, co-evolving species of human-like creatures) became more intuitively engaged with one another's intentional states. Intentional states for knowing, but at a certain threshold, consciousness became deep enough to sense affective states in partners, and to feel the pleasure of aligning oneself, and helping out another creature.

Evolutionary psychologists give such short shrift to the reality of the existential - that is, of pain, suffering, and the way these experiences stand out in human awareness. Is pain - and the recursive, deeply aware consciousness of it - not uncomfortable, and thus, act as a "negative reenforcement"? In complexity theory language, suffering would compel some sort of creative solution. The solution, of course, is already present in lower animals as bonding and connecting; it's love. But for us higher primates, experiencing the suffering of another stimulated our brains to want to say something or, as is likely the case, make a gesture, such as a hug, to comfort, console, and change the affective state (which is what is being 'read') of the other.

Our human brains today are built out of interest and love. The so-called "machivaellian" brain merely co-opts a system that has built itself mostly from altruistic experiences: hence the reality of psychopatholgy - that every human being is psychodynamically bound to one another through affects such as shame; and through affects, we usually do the same things to get rid of them (dissociate conscious attention from them); and thus much of our societal behaviors are emergent properties of dissociation - a hyper-emphasis on ephemeral things, a short term, individualistic, competitive "game" (until, of course, the emotions of life present their experience in a negative way, forcing a reassessment on things).

The self and the object are the two poles. I am the consciousness who observes the objects: yet I am an object to myself. I've come to this state of affairs via countless iterations of an evolutionary process that has created creatures of a similar phenomenology. We each create ourselves without awareness of the ontological 'structure' of self and other.

The theory of evolution changes how we think about the psychology of the mind. The functions of adapt to survive, and the emergence of love as an antidote, as a way to 'bind' individual 'actors' one to another - is this way of speaking concealing an utter oneness between parts, whose very sense of selfhood, naively extolled in the business notion of "self-interest, is a product of the self-other process, whereby the mind monitors the other as well as the self, encouraging actions that yield positive feedback and discouraging actions that yield the opposite?

The greatest challenge for the future of homo sapiens is whether we truly develop the 'sapiens sapiens' part of our moniker. Can we have the wisdom to understand the necessity of developing children that can break the dissociative process, and do what evolution makes instinctively impossible: think about those things which make us uncomfortable, but nevertheless need to be spoken about. Climate change and the costs we must absorb; talking about mental illness, death, inequality and the discomfort it no doubt costs us to talk about it.

Part of the naivete in the human condition is the conviction that we 'know' something to be true even though our biology is built to 'scaffold' our psychology, that is, to bias our thinking so that we think mostly good 'regulating' experiences of ourselves, as opposed to those which present us to ourselves badly. It is imperative that people understand that this is the actual reality: this is not an 'opinion', but the most plausible, empirically supported description of how human consciousness functions and under what circumstances it evolved to become as it has.

The only rational conclusion about our condition is a paradoxical one: we are individuals yet we are psychically bound to one another. Anything I do influences your response. So long as dissociation - the process which 'deemphasizes' certain past experiences by generating desires that bring our mind some place else can ping and pong people back and forth while each party secretly (to themselves) confabulates another reason (one that doesn't bespeak shame) for why they believe what they do.

Human minds and all that they create are dynamic processes bounded by the inherent limits in a physical system. We have only so many neurons mediating our phenomenology. The meaning one situation has for us interacts with those before and the context that come next. The utter immaturity of dorso-cortical networks makes metacognitive self-control an impossibility for very young children (2 years to 6 years) and even when kids seem to have more self-awareness, or 'moral awareness', in their teens, they are still surprisingly inhibited by the force of cultural standards in self-representation. Not just dress, but being able to talk openly about emotions and feelings is largely experienced with discomfort, which then elicits a dissociation - the unconscious searching for "cognitive coherency", by locating a more palatable frame of reference, and so teens, undergoing neurological 'remodeling' themselves, naturally enact the "low road" behaviors to manage the affective challenges created by highschool.

Psychological Trauma and Shame in the Evolutionary Process

I'm very interested in the process behind the evolution of human minds. How did it happen? How did this incredible creature - us - who see the world as they do, come to experience themselves as they do?

My studies have brought me to this conclusion. The self, or the thing we think about, as us, is a construction built out of a recursive, positive feedback between individual primate minds taking a bigger and deeper interest in one another. What is this 'bigger and deeper interest'? Michael Tomasellos ideas about shared intentionality, and in particular, his analysis of chimp and human communication in his book 'the origins of human communication' settles the body as the primary locus of cognitive development: chimp and bonobo (our closest genetic relatives) minds are 'built' up from the bottom - from the body; it is not their vocal attempts, but their gestural actions, that indicate the presence of a cognitive creature.

Tomasello and the other evolutionary psychologists (scientists and philosophers) I've read are more cognitively oriented, which for me misses a big piece of the puzzle. Tomasello is right about the primacy of the body - and thus in human speech - as the research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson has shown, large chunks of our language are unconscious metaphorical constructions of a metaphorically biased mind. The world makes sense this way because the brain is always organizing and cross-referencing different types of information. The types of creatures that we are - visually dominant with tool like hands - has to integrate different modalities to form a coherent reality. Sounds and vocalizations, pitches, timbers and other acoustic elements, present themselves 'this way or that way'. Take the devils note, the 'tritone' in music. When people hear that we all naturally react in a similar way. High tones are soft, sensuous, and safe. Words like nipple and tip and blip and sip - it isn't a coincide that these sounds share the same theme: smallness. They sound 'small' because it is high and pitchy. In fact, smaller creatures tend to produce a more high pitch sound while large creatures produce lower pitch sounds.

Integration, consolidation, and increased complexity, all have to operate in the service of coherency - homeostasis for the body - but psychologically speaking, a sense of stability for the mind. Evolution maintains a marvelous balance of forces within the body, so it should not be surprising that the mind is similarly organized.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me lay out three principles that I think operate in the evolution of human consciousness. They are aspects of one process, but because of it's nature, it's difficult, not to mention uncommon, for the human mind to be presented this way:

i) Adaptation
ii) Affect Regulation
iii) Coherency

The first idea is basically the working process of biological evolution. The organism at the cellular level is amazingly complexly organized; in multicellular creatures, each cell is exquisitely intertwined with the activity and function of other cells. But it can be hard, and even tempting, to exclude the very consciousness we use from this similar process.

Thankfully, us humans are hardy - and heartful - creatures equipped with tremendous plasticity. The second idea, affect regulation, is basically what the human mind is designed to do. The way we think, we're unconsciously brought to assume that we are the true deciders of our actions; and even worse, we develop philosophies and ideologies that reify certain ideas about the world (and ourselves) that fly in the face of a much sounder reflection.

Affect regulation is the way an organism self organizes in response to environmental threats and attractions. It is basically automatic (Ledoux, Anxious) but also has a basic consciousness component (what it is like to be aroused or distressed) for every creature with a complex nervous system. Negative experiences that hyper-arouse the organism destabilizes neuroendocrinological systems like the HPA axis. An organism needs to return to a normal equilibrium - or psychological 'homeostasis' - after hypo-arousal, and it appears there is a mechanism that follows severe arousal that allows a 'discharge' from an overly aroused procedural motor circuitry. Peter Levine sees this discharge as the "shake" an animal makes after an affectively traumatic experience.

Coherency is a distinctly human concept that is fundamentally related both to the nature of human consciousness, and the process of affect regulation itself.

Imagine Australopithecus, a creature that seems to be man 4 million years ago. Australopithecus already shows a departure from the great ape morphology, but is still very ape like. It's brain is small - chimp like - and so likely was its behavior. However, it was largely arboreal - living on the ground and so needing to become more aware of the threats below it.

Homo Habilis comes along 2.5 million years later and the head is bigger. What happened during this transition, phenomenologically? What engendered this shift?

Theories abound, but I want to consider one related to the communicative process itself. Working from Michael Tomasellos obvious theory (in light of modern traumatology) the shared-intentionality hypothesis, I am interested in the very nature and structure of modern human conscious itself. That is, the two poles which makes up our mind and even gives us the sense of a "self": Self and Object.

Shuffling back to Tomasellos theory about chimp communication, I am intrigued by the way he describes great ape minds as "cognition for competition". Tomasello presents chimps as acting imperatively - that is, for themselves - and when relating with humans, although they begin to learn that humans are benevolently disposed towards them, they nevertheless struggle with interpreting human action as concerned about them. When chimps see you pointing for something, after a while of learning that paying attention to the pointing gesture yields nice rewards (a treat), they begin to respond to a human pointing. But lets say one human drop a treat under a bucket, leaves, and another human comes in and points at the treat. The chimp won't get - doesn't have a working model to support - that the other human is similarly disposed. The chimp doesn't know that the pointing gesture is borne of a a concern that is shared between humans. 

It seems the way to get to a steady state of Self-Object consciousness is to build into creatures a disposition towards inquiring about the intentional state of other actors, for their benefit (and also your own!). Tomasello does this by tracing human linguistic communication to gestural communication executed through the body. This is all very cognitive. Interesting, no doubt, but missing out on another sphere of communication - the right brain kind - that 'carries' the narrative-structure of a human life.


Intentional state is the end goal, perhaps, but what is that like on the inside? A gestural action, such as those seen in apes, is very affectively alive. The whole body is in it. In the pointing gesture - something chimps can do - the motion from the body to the object parallels the embodied experience of being a self that wants some thing. The pointing action represents that want, and hence, processes like these, inasmuch as they occur in actors biologically the same, will generate perceptual states that 'converge' on similar phenomenological experiences.

In discussion about human evolution, you seldom here mention of shame. And if it's mentioned, it often seems superficial in its descriptiveness. This is odd, because shame may in fact be - and to me, actually is - the phenomenological condition required to maintain states of "shared-intentionality" between human agents.

From the perspective of the human nervous system, the body can be either aroused via sympathetic, HPA networks mediated by ventral tegmental area, or hypoaroused by parasympathetic networks like the lateral tegmental area (PAG) and the dorsal portion of the vagus nerve. These two, oscillating systems keep the organism affectively alert to threats in the environment. This process is being called 'neuroception', and serves as an unconscious system that organizes object-relations with bodily processes like metabolic homeostasis.

But how does this system operate, phenomenologically? The phenomenology, it must be stated, is at first very passive vis-a-vis environmental input. The brain is very small and very unmyelinated at birth to pass through the cervix. Experiences to come will shape the brain and at the same time will shape subsequent experiences. Good experiences will stand out with particular objects, and likewise negative experiences. Those that occur most commonly will fill-out hyper myelinated circuitry with dense synaptic connectivity. Those that occur less will be 'crowded out' by those that occur most.

What really cements the brain-mind dualism is the process of meaning. Self-Object is the mind of a human being. The human being instinctively builds self with reference to the object. Since the object is essentially other human beings (the source of the self to begin with) the brain is constantly cataloging meanings as it works out a state of coherency. To put this differently, the closed system of the brain needs to 'make psychologically coherent' the various meanings the human organism encounters. This, of course, is a bizarre paradox: the closedness of the brain is BUILT by the openness of the mind; furthermore, the input is the activity of other minds, which our brains, instinctively, self-monitor and imitate as we struggle to make sense of the world around us.

Coherency is the phenomenological process of struggling with the affects that social interaction creates in individual actors. Shame occurs because that's what shared-intentionality required to create minds that cared about one another. Joy, laughter, pleasure - these too are dependent on dyadic interactions: they are emergent properties that follow from the complexities of human meanings.

So back to those old species, those homo's who biased our present brain structure. It bears to point out that not only our cortex, but our amygdala and our upper brain stem are disproportionately large in modern human beings. The biological sociologist Jonathan Turner sees this as a co-evolution between emotional and cognitive processes. So what sort of experiences made this possible?

What about the expanding phenomenology that came with a deeper, more recursive awareness of self and other? Self and other co-evolved, as access to the former follows from access to the latter. When ancient ape-lineages became more interested in one another's knowledge, at some point, the affective program (probably mediated by mirror neurons) referenced the other in constructing a present affect state. How does this happen?

Psychoanalytical and developmental research makes it perfectly clear that right-brain processes 'scaffold' attentional states (contents) that align with the past history and the general needs of an individual human organism. But this is something that is occurring from moment to moment; usually quieted and relaxed in moments of solitude, it becomes "conjoined" to the presence of others by simply being around them. Affective information (which would give the organism knowledge of a conspecifics intentional state) is picked up unconsciously in facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures and other types of movements. These types of information impel feeling states, especially those that occur most often and most often dissociated from: shame, or 'awardness', 'insecurity'; affects that are ubiquitous in relations, yet not spoken of, perhaps, not surprisingly, due to a secondary shame about their constant presence. What else is narcissism but an overcompensation against the self destroying affects of shame?

Shame is often regarded by emotion theorists and psychoanalysts as "destroying' the self and as well it should be. If the self is a construction made by a brain BUILT UP from an evolutionary process of deeper phenomenological awareness of the other - or object - than when the primary object, or the activity of another self, expresses disapproval, naturally, the self as "self-object" falls apart because the object is looking upon the self with disapproval. This could hardly be harder evidence that the self was made in the furnace of interaction - communication - and that the affects we feel from moment to moment are the 'carrots' and 'sticks' that promote Tomasello's shared intentionality in the evolutionary process.

Human minds are also dissociative, which gives us a microscope into the nature and purpose of moment-to-moment phenomenology.

Trauma breaks a part the mind simply because cortisol has neurotoxic effects on neurons. In a state of trauma, the neurons involved with working memory (hippocampus and surrounding structures) are damaged, which phenemonologically is experienced as not being able to think clearly or recall aspects of the traumatic event. To offset this neurotoxic effect, the brains periaquaductal grey region releases copious amounts of endogenous opiates, apparently for the purpose of blunting awareness of the 'object' out there in the environment that is causing such stress. The autonomic response to stress of this sort is to decouple the two systems - cognitive and affective - which may be useful in the short term, but long term creates havoc for the personality.

The cerebellum and brain stem seem to play a big part in keeping the affective elements alive in the procedural outputs of nervous system. The body doesn't feel right, which means affects don't feel right, which, if something is known to have gone wrong (the trauma) fills the mind with an endless focus on the negative experience.

Humans have no doubt responded to trauma in different and myriad ways, but I imagine that huddling closer together, and coming "closer to the object" played a significant role in the development and evolution of compassion and love. Pain served love by making awareness of self - and ones own vulnerability - vitally apparent to the organism. The organism then reached out to the other - other humans - as a way to soothe the self and its fears.

Trauma de-couples neurologically because neurons have been damaged and working memory has been deeply dysregulated, paradoxically, because of the continuity of affects that consciousness cannot give meaning to. A normal memory when made works its way from short term areas in the hippocampus, to more widely distributed areas throughout the temporal lobes. Traumatic memory seems not to have made that journey; furthermore, it is lodged in the mind still as affective inputs into ones normal stream of awareness.

I mentioned earlier the "discharge" that animals execute after a traumatic experience. Humans have something similar to this, but, being highly cognitive creatures, our affective systems and homeostatic systems "organize" trauma top-down, by instinct, with reference to the meanings and events we ascribe to it.

When people die, we grieve and mourn them. This process occurs because of a powerful buildup of affects. We cry. We share meaning. We make coherent. The brain, to it's credit, seems more able to 'open up' working memory and store the loss in long term memory following a grieving process of existential reflection.

BIID:Body Integrity Identity Disorder

As recently presented in the book "The Man Who Wasn't There" by Anil Ananthaswamy, is not real.

First, let me explain by "not real". We got to go down a philosophical pathway first and note a distinction between two types of pathology. There are pathology's (or diseases) that are genetic and exhibit irreversibility. And then there are diseases that exist because of some underlying condition that the person isn't aware of (i.e blood pressure, diet, stress) that can otherwise be changed.

Anil Anathaswamy and others who claim that BIID is a "neurological disorder" and thus requires a medical treatment (removal of the body part the person wants to remove) are advocating what seems to me to be an insanely extreme position - and ironically enough (from an Indian writer) Anathaswamy doesn't seem to recognize the influence MIND - that is, how the experiences human beings have in their everyday interactions with other human beings can influence the neurobiology of the brain and the homeostatic balance between "self in relation" (the states we enact when we communicate with others) which is situated in the frontal and dorsal temporal areas, and the areas of the brain stem which regulate homeostatic processes (i.e the various factors influencing blood flow, breathing, etc) - can have on the body; and, I might add, ones sense of relation towards a body part is not at all different from the other ways the mind can go wrong.

Lets explore some of these other ways: anorexia nervosa, spasmodic dysphonia and gender dysmorphia

The first one is a disorder of how someone experiences their own body. The cause, of course, is the overwhelming influence (as experienced by the anorexic) of the significance society ascribes to body image. Causally speaking, some aspect in the anorexic's early relational environment (as between mother and her, father and her, individual siblings and her, and the emergent properties at higher levels) makes her vulnerable to succumbing to the influence society places on body image. I want to make clear that I am speaking probabilistically: when certain combinations of relational circumstances come together (say a gene for being high reactive and a mother who yells and screams) the likelihood of a certain phenotype (or consequence in behavior) is made either high or low.

Anytime anorexia appears, it can be said to have these certain relational conditions "scaffolding" the appearance of the phenomena in question. The end phenomenological (or the psychologically experienced) state is the sensation that ones body looks fat. I don't know what that's like and neither do you: it requires the presence of certain preconditions to 'make apparent' the "reality" that one is overweight, even though one may in fact be desperately underweight.

The second condition is one I myself once dealt with. I suffered a severe relational trauma at 13 which occurred again at 15 and 16. The result was post-traumatic stress disorder which, since it was caused by bullying, is better described as "developmental trauma", also known by other theorists as "complex trauma".

The issue of psychological or emotional trauma is perhaps best understood in terms of energy flow through the nervous system. Our nervous system is built to process a certain rate of information. When were relaxed and yet focused - a necessary mental state for effective socializing - information passes between humans with very high fidelity. On the other hand, when we feel threatened, our brain switches from what the neurophysiologist Stephen Porges calls the "social engagement system" to the "fight-flight" system. In neuroendrincology, this system is better known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

Whenever were shocked into defensive reaction, our brain releases a chemical from the hypothalamus (CRH) which causes the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropin into the blood stream; this then causes the adrenal glands (which sit atop the kidneys) to release adrenaline and cortisol. Cortisol, in turn, breaks down glucose which is then used to power mitochondria in cells; cell activity for the energy required to mount an effective defense response. This is basically what's happening when were "stressed" by the world.

When being bullied, I realized early on that I couldn't speak. What I heard whenever I attempted to speak was the presence of anxiety; an unconscious effort, compulsively enacted, to 'fix', or control, or do something that would make the bullying end. Repetition. The longer the threat lasts, the more consequential the effects on brain cells and the architecture of inter-cellular activity. Eventually, you brought to a state of mind of compulsive alertness to the now generalized relational threat: alert to the cues of others, in face, voice, of movement, that indicates disapproval. I found myself operating as if 'from without', seeing myself as a "shameful object", deserving disdain; the external viewpoint is what happens under relational trauma; the other party, the other perspective, begins to dominate your attention. In evolutionary logic, this is precisely what we should expect from examples in lower phyla: organisms adapt by modifying their internal organization. In complex multicellular organisms, these changes are coordinated to correspond to the information coming in from the visual system. Such as running away, fighting, or freezing when the two other responses aren't available or aren't possible. This, also, is basically what the simplest cells do: they pull away from noxious chemicals; likewise, they draw closer to useful chemicals.

Spasmodic Dyphonia is the belief that the raspy, stressful effort to speak is caused by an unrecognized neurological disorder; I, as well as many other psychologists and neuroscientists (such as Robert Scaer) believe a "disease" such as this is a consequence of relational trauma that occurred in the early years of development. I see early years because the belief that spasmodic dysphonia is a real thing (brain, or even larynx related) gains its force from a lack of episodic memory to make sense of it's presence. Because I suffered bullying, I know the contexts that brought this state out of me. Neurologically, the voice - the organ that felt the stress when one felt the need to protest the abuse - remains tentative and withdrawn.

Should we infer from a brain scan that the brain is causing a voice issue? Or should we instead trace the dots backwards and recognize the obvious contingency between social reality and the effect it can cause in neurobiology.

Finally, lets get back to body integrity identity disorder, with reference, this time, to what I've explained about the way emotional trauma builds anxiety and over-reactivity into brain processes. This occurs because, again, in a normal evolutionary context, the body is meant to 'burn' off the energy being provided by the stress response system (which, it bears mentioning, is inherited from evolutionary older species); but in our very unusual evolutionary environment, we often find ourselves stuck, in a job, without a context that can help us process our emotions without feeding them through, again and again, as rumination and paranoia about the self and it's world.


Here's an example. Imagine being 3 years old and witnessing a car accident. All around you people are screaming;loud noises all around you activate the stress response system. A women cries for help. Scared, you instinctively turn to where you last saw your mother, but she isn't there. You can't see here. You look and look. You breathe heavy, you start crying, wailing, mommmmmmmmy, wherrreeeee arrrrrrrreeeeee yooooouuuuuu. You quickly turn around and trip on the curb in front of you, you fall down and bang your knee on the cement. Your legs bleeding and you begin to cry harder.

In the brain at these same exact moments, the stress elicited by the context at hand spurred the HPA Axis into activity. It's revolution in the brain, each moment of fear and anxiety, is fed through and magnified from moment to moment. The brain is on maximal "high alert", feeling threatened and enacting a defense behavior that may elicit help attention from helpful adults. In particular, I want to highlight the 'social' parts of the brain as well as the parts that deal with meaning and narrative. "Mommy" is missing, and the loss is felt by the child as terrible: felt with such totality because psychological individuation has yet to happen.

The hitting the knee at the same sequence of time brought into the chorus of activity the area of the sensory cortex that processes knee sensations. The knee - in pain - is being 'incorporated' into a sequence of neurological events that's presently processing an existential sensation of emptiness of self; the mother - the source of identity for a child this age - is missing, and so in a sense, is the child. Hitting the knee brings the 'knee' into the experience of existential absence.

The read psychosomatic disorders exists is perhaps ultimately a manifestation of homeostatic balance. The brain may seek to "unload" certain experiences in different and sometimes anomalous ways. Normally, psychological trauma is processed and the person is able to return to balance without much residue on present functioning. But very often, when the intensity crosses a certain threshold, psychological trauma exerts disastrous effects on consciousness via the deleterious influence of cortisol on neurons. The self is instantly made disordered in some way. For some, it can be the voice (as it was for me); for others, their body (gender dysmorphia). But trauma is apparently very diffusive. A trauma can be 'linked' and contained, as it were, by the fact that a simple thing like a knee bang occurred at the same time one experienced trauma. Just as in other traumatic experiences (this is a science, called 'traumatology') episodic memory is 'deleted' by the power of cortisol, but procedural, or implicit memory, often stays. This is the core feature of post-traumatic stress disorder and there is very good reason to believe that a body part mapped by the brain which was experiencing trauma may 'retain' the existential, embodied sensation of being 'alien' from the body.

This is hard to understand for us because the idea of someone not 'owning' a body part seems strange, so it must, of course, be real, in this day and age of brain science. But we shouldn't rush to such a conclusion when a relational event (trauma) can provide a core 'basis' for the evolution - key word here, the perceptual state of the adult is the not same as the 4 year old, 5 year old, etc; perceptions change as our brain evolves more complex ways of analyzing an experience: for the adults Anathaswamy describes, they spent many years deluding themselves about an experience, which, understandably, they couldn't give narrative sense to (and thus resolve the anxiety: traumatic stress follows because of a lack of episodic clarity,) and thus grew more and more estranged from.

Now, of course, there is the question: so if not amputation, psychotherapy?

Yes psychotherapy. But also, not just any psychotherapy. You need a therapist who can pay attention to the global and systematic effects of interpersonal communicative displays in interaction, and also gain a sense of the individuals history to 'flesh out' out a narrative structure that can go along with this procedural symptom

This, I hope, will one day become a rule in a neurobiologically based psychotherapy: when a person is relating to some aspect of their experience in a dissociated way, assume trauma. As mentioned above, traumatic experiences are recorded differently than normal experiences. Because of the large amounts of circulating cortisol (possibly other stress chemicals as well may have toxic effects on cellular structures) and the particular role the hippocampus and adjacent structures play in 'working memory', what is felt phenomenologically by the traumatized person as 'dissociation', may well be the mental manifestation of neurons being destroyed by too much of a certain chemical.

What does this mean? It means the entire experience as neurologically coded is imperfectly processed. The physiological and affective feelings seem to persist, but without much memory of an event. In particular, I'm thinking of those children who are abused or neglected who fail to develop coherent self-schemas, and thus fail to experience themselves in any normal or healthy way.

Therapy would seek to locate some plausible "building" block from the persons past, and from that past, construct a coherent self narrative that can "take in" and absorb the meanings associated with the body part.

On another note, in this day and age of brain 'mapping', I find it unbelievable that brain scientists don't pay attention to the psychodynamic processes psychoanalysts pay attention to. It's ridiculous. The thoughts and feelings we ascribe to events and the meanings they hold about our past relationships, these are brain events; not only that, as many neuroscientists already acknowledge, a coherent sense of self, a sense of "I know where I am" in one's conceptual self-space, is very important to the whole idea of the self narrative.

Anxiety is tamed when we are able to contextualize or given meanings to our experiences. But when an experience seems nebulous (without an episodic memory) the procedural experience (a sense of numbness, or distance) can generate thoughts that canvass every aspect of the experience, until, over time, a relationship with the body-part has been formed - and also very much 'enbrained' - by countless instances of brooding, ruminating, and suffering from the thoughts and feelings you're having.

I must also stress how unethical it was for Anil Anathaswamy not to pay attention to the difference between psychotherapy's; even more so, to not know about all the progress being made in the field of psychotraumatology, which for example, allows us to study the symptoms of the present (a feeling towards a limb) with reference to catayzing events in the persons relational past.

Lastly, since the self is made in relation, it can only be remade, or remolded, by relationships. Intensive psychotherapy would be the only means to "create" new relational self states as, in terms of systems theory, existing 'ways of being' practiced thousands of times form deeper "troughs" than activities only performed a few times. So, psychotherapy, weekly, can help CREATE A NEW RELATIONSHIP (does the foundationless nature of the mind bother you?) between a person and his affectively infused body part.

But why don't we know this? Enter insurance companies, who want "quick and effective" solutions that work more on 6 week schedules, rather than the more necessary "as long as possible" schedule. This is what skews results.

And on an even more final note, claiming tihs to be a real condition that warrants surgery is a dangerous idea to throw out there, as people, especially anxious people, are liable to be suckered in by the gravity of the statement, and brood upon it, until they too develop the conviction that they have "always felt this way".

The mind is inherently dissociative. Each new revolution of consciousness codes differently, but often follows predictable pathways. At our core is a defensiveness, because dissociation is all about paying attention to things that are relevant to survival; in our abstract minds, this also means ignoring feelings that generate shame or anxiety: homeostasis works 'throughout', physically and psychodynamically.