Recognizing....

I almost think there's a psychic quality to the way two people affect one another. There are moments when minds become "mutually aware" of something that is happening between them, but they remain "isolated percepts"; known individually within each person, but without the "cultural scaffolding" of a shared conventionality. To conventionalize something is to sanction it as a way to perceive something. Percepts that do not fall within a cultural "basin of attraction", enter and fall out of consciousness, while their dynamic effects persist in subsequent states of consciousness in a misplaced manner or whats called "emotion displacement".

Conventionalization is mankinds highest form of evolution, as what is "conventionalized' itself becomes a rule-based system that gains its authority by acting upon innate pride-shame sensitivities that organize the "self-world" of every human mind.  When things have been catalogued or come to be known in some implicit way as "undesirable", the brain-mind 'screens' it out, a priori, as an acceptable phenomenological item. Re-opening the mind up to an item that has proscribed is subject to the pride--shame continuum that operates subliminally in every human-human interaction; if the person being communicated with is known in some important way (holding alpha status in your eyes) then anything this person says acts upon the pride-shame continuum, thus opening up certain pathways or closing others.

Because pride and shame is the carrot and stick in human functionality, "what" can be known, or the metaphysical nature of reality, is dependent on how aware a person is of the way others affect them, and how they in turn "orient" to this knowledge. The self can "rise above" it's own orientations, itself a well-woven fabric by the time the mind is functionally complex enough to "stay aware" of it, so that minute instances of shame and pride no longer tug the organism-self in arbitrary, self-serving ways - itself a relic of the normal "tightness" between the working memory systems of the brain and 'exigencies' of the moment - and so allow a true reflectivity on the actual causal processes that influence normal propositional thinking.

Because the "what" is so directed by the "how", truth is something subject to the normal social processes that underlie human needs. But what is human need? A biologist would say "food" "sex" "sleep" and other basic, obvious needs. But this is not the functionally highest type of human need. The genuinely unique human need is itself conceptual, or mental, and is scaffolded by incredible neurological and sociolinguistic complexities. In one word, human needs can be reduced to "recognition". In two words, we can say 'being recognized'. In three: "being recognized [by] others". But what in itself does this even mean? In today's highly industrialized and commoditized culture, it can actually be hard to recognize, indeed, you are rewarded to ignore it, how utterly connected we all are to one another's communicative signals. In fact, it can be argued that the "signal" in the communicative act, itself a container for the felt intentionality of the communicator, is the fundamental source of human consciousness, in that it acts as an accelerator in phenomenology; excitement looms on the other end of an alert or excited facial expression; voices which react excitedly to our presence "charge" our minds with an energy; but it also 'charges' neurons, in that it facilitates neurogenesis. The higher level process of one human mind acknowledging or affirming the selfhood of another mind, somehow, someway, seems to be the key process in all that makes human consciousness what it is.

The Shame Game

Shame is one of those emotions that nobody ever likes to talk about, acknowledge or [u]even notice.[/u] The most amazing thing to me as a psychologist who studies human evolution and the development of the human mind is how unaware humans have historically been vis-a-vis this emotion. Sure, the ancients had a word for shame, but there was really no significant [i]study[/i] into it. Somehow, the etiological relationship between one affect and another was never explored, perhaps because the world was too "full" of positive meaning, or too in need of a negative meaning, to recognize the messy complexity of emotions which act most strongly on our personality development, which create needs, sensations, thoughts and ideals. Shame, in its true importance, only makes sense in psychodynamic terms, and so perhaps humans had to await the "mechanization" of the mind, in Darwin, Freud, Cognitive Science, and latter day theorizing in various areas of the social sciences.

Perhaps the most astonishing hypothesis of all, in terms of how it changes our thinking about ourselves, is that we aren't "individuals" at all, but expressions of a group phenomena which finds its "homeostasis" in the coordinated functioning of relating minds. When the individual is seen in this respect, at various levels, we can make out the "logic" of organism-environment coregulation. There is "one" thing happening, but it is split up between individual organisms. My mind is built to "care" about your facial responses, vocal tones and body language. I want, in a very general way, positive feedback from my environment.

Of course, one could also argue that all animals are "fitted" to their environments; indeed, they are. But it is purely physical. The mind of one animal does not "sense into" the mind of the other the way our minds manage to attend in very specific ways to complicated mental assumptions implicit in our every moment of thought and perception. We think, in short, as "humans". The "human", it seems, or is often thought, is simply me. But this is wrong. Much research in developmental psychology has shown that the human mind does not become "human" in the absence of the presence of another face. Somehow, the brain wont grow without the 'spark' of moving faces, gesticulating body's and effervescent voices. When that happens, the eyes follow, the mind is 'activated' and brought into being - a being that will become so habitual as to almost seem "my own", and not social, communal, and relational at its very core. Consciousness - or human consciousness - exists as it does because of the other. The "other", is simply what is not you, but what is always present. It may be interpreted generally as "everything" one can think or sense i.e. as an object. But this wouldn't be entirely correct, as the "other" in human beings is most essentially the other person, the other face, whose activity we probe and whose expressions communicate meanings that far transcend the processes of ordinary matter.

In any case, why would shame hurt? Or rather, why is it the most painful emotion, feeling, or affect, known to the human heart? Some psychologists have defined shame as "interrupting interest", which is to say, it brings to an end any will or thought in the mind of the individual currently experiencing it. This is an important point to always keep in the front of your mind: shames power is its ability to literally "shut off" your self. So, if the self is important and meaningful - as of course we know it is - naturally, we will be most phobic and fearful of those emotional states which bring us to a state of weakness and infirmity. But what makes shame so special is that it touches at our very highest level of concern: our interests as social beings, to be liked, to be enjoyed by others, and to have fun. Shame turns that off. It momentarily says to "nope, sorry, you're out. Get the fuck out of here!" and there you go, find something else, like objects, to pass your time. The pleasures of engagement - at least right now - is not going to happen!

Horrible. No? It is, and this is why evolution, as it does, needed to adapt. And it did. We evolved psychodynamic techniques to 'get away' from the perception of shame in ourselves. Yes - this is an interesting irony in the history of thought. The perception of emotion - shame - is reacting the same way as an antelope responds to a lion: with fear. But this is all in our head! How interesting it is, metaphysically speaking, that the mind has become the new environment in human beings! In any case, the perception of shame induced dissociative processes that inclined the mind to focus upon meanings amenable to the needs of the self in the present moment. Every interaction, every cue and every context, has a preexisting network of connections in the brain that it acts upon, so that our way of responding really are whats called "limited cycle attractors" in dynamic systems theory. These are 'basins of attraction' that the meaning-hungry mind is activated when it senses the cues from the world around it. And shame is it's main foe: it knows it. Your brain too knows it. And you, like me and most everyone else (sparing only those who've spent the time to know themselves more deeply) use things like this:

All of these techniques are dissociative in nature in that they defocus you from the unwanted perception.

Laughter. Laughter is great, its awesome, but its also recognized as an effective dissociative mechanism to get the self from feeling shame in a personal and internal way, onto an external and objectified take on the action-itself which has prompted the laughter. The psychologist Michael Lewis says this about laughter:

[i]"laughter, especially laughter around ones transgression as it occurs in a social context, provides the opportunity for the transgressing person to join others in viewing the self. In this way, the self metaphorically moves from the site of the shame to the site of observing the shame with the other."[/i]

There is also anger. Anger is a response of the self to its own experience of shame, but at the same time directed towards the cause of the shame response, that is, another person. Anger is way of moving from the "frozen mobility"of a shame state into the "firery assertiveness" of an anger state. It's simply an unconsciously made effort of the brain-mind to bring the self-affect complex to a state of coherency and stability (i.e. familiarity), however unstable it really is.

People also just flat out deny the presence of shame in them. They refuse to acknowledge what they themselves habitually experience, again, and again, simply because they wont give a perception "license" in their epistemological universe. If they admit the perception, and say to themselves, "yes, I notice that", such as for instance, saying "yes, I notice those bodily feelings; in the gut, dropping heart, a desire to want to hide, my face in particular", they open themselves up, as it were, to the "lion" who wants to eat the antelope. People maintain denial because the thing feared possesses a known ontological propensity; the antelope fears the lion because lion, its form, movements and action, have long indicated "threat" to the cells which make up the body of the antelope. Similarly, the [i]feeling[/i] of shame has long held the relevant neurons in the amygdala to notice its destabilizing capacity to the self-system, and so become especially 'charged' in matters

pertinent to the individuals social life - and all the thoughts, feelings and relevant behaviors that coordinate its social life.

The person who doubts the presence of shame, therefore, has [u]good reason[/u] to doubt, as his life provides plenty of examples of where he needs to defocus from the perception of shame in order to "make coherent" the way social life normally flows in his mind. Indeed, environments usually spontaneously construct ways of being, so that many people occupying the same social environment tend to evolve similar ways of processing the complexities of social life, which often means, the complexities of shame-inducement.

Thinking, paranoia, misattribution ("I'm just tired, not shamed", even if the previous circumstance was a social situation that typically results in shame) are also ways to get the mind away from thinking about itself in a way that implies being "defective" as a social person.

All of this is, and exists as it does, because of the counter pole of pride. Pride is what we think we need to have, to maintain, in order to survive. But what is pride? It's a state, for sure, but it is a very general one, one that seems more pervasive than shame, in that it is implicit in so much of what we do. Pride is embodied, its in how we hold ourselves, use ourselves, in our motion in the world. Its also present all the time when we speak, as for instance, right now I can't help but know that as I write, I am being motivated at a self-conscious level, and so reflexively experience myself as intelligent, wise, articulate, and all those great things which we usually wish that others will see in us.

Pride is a powerful force that compels assertiveness. It asserts in human beings as statements, of the propositional kind, where we say "so is so". In shames pervasiveness, and prides opportunism, human beings have evolved grandiose ways of regulating one another's self-states as they talk about truly useless, meaningless, and often-times factually incorrect things. These states can even be conceived as being distributed between the relevant parties, so that they 'act this way' ONLY in these contexts. It is the specific nature of a feedback with a particular person that leads to these ways of speaking, thinking and acting. These states can sometimes seem like a type of 'being' that takes over the humans involved when they fall under its force.

Reality becomes contorted because of pride and the inclinations of the self to assert itself in matters relating to the 'real world'. Everyones imagining an wishes fall through in their actions, so its not surprising, for instance, that an insane person like Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Donald Trump, would find supporters, as it is pretty common for people to "mass aggregate" their individual megalomania onto a 'figure head' that embodies all their own delusions about what constitutes "good" and "value".

Pride and shame can be seen as two forces which 'battle' in the process of human relating. Shame happens when another self does not recognize "me", which is to say, my needs. When emotions 'sympathize' with one another, states are shared, and in sharing states, the brain grows and the mind exults. When one mind reflexively orients to another mind, and expresses through its outer image - the face - what is felt on the inside, it is a "shock" to the other minds homeostasis. Something 'wrong' has happened. If the world were simple, the state would freeze forever and we could know exactly how we feel. However, evolution is resourceful, so what were left to see is what can appear to be a confusing morass of emotions. But on closer look, it is obvious that the mind is noticing a feeling - the shock - when shame happens, but then reflexively enacts a LEARNED adaptive behavior - laughter, talking, denial, anger  - about which the know much more about, and our liable to think is "all that is there".

I believe the next stage of our social evolution has everything to do with recognizing the social-dynamic that created our distinctly unique human consciousness, and the emotion which creates so much confusion, pain, and over-determined compensation:shame

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

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.