Evolution, Shame, Dissociation, and Education

It's amazing how she lights up the room. Why? Why should that be? Why should a "mongrel" to an earlier generation be seen as the symbolic center of family vitality to me?

If you watch this little thing in action you can't help but be mesmerized by the wonders of life. Humans. Such cognitive and conceptual capacity! The difference between us and the animals is huge; of mammoth proportions; rightly engendering perceptions of us as somehow "godly" and them as "earthly". Our minds are extended; we know that we know. We know that we know that we know. Through neural recursions we "see things", in the language of neuroscience. However you want to cut it, being human feels like being a god, compared to the experiences of an animal.

Yet, despite this facticity of our experience, we are bogged moment to moment with the difficulties of being human. Knowing that we know can help us in designing and mapping our environments. But our perceptions can scare us; we can be disturbed by thoughts on death; we shudder and become possessed when we experience shame in front of other people; in fact, many personality and emotional disorders are the result of this 'meta-cognitive' awareness' of a self experiencing shame: stable human consciousness depends on affective stability; the experience of shame is always contextually based: we feel shame BECAUSE of the conditions and context were in; shame is an inevitable result of intersubjective failure; the person who feels it feels it in it's totality; not only the feeling, but the context; the people; their faces. Together this generates "shame". Our minds and our brains takes this perception in not as separated pieces, but all together, as one, a "gestalt" perception. As a memory, this feeling of shame is affectively charged, and thus, formulates consciousness to pay attention to certain ways of being. In the language of unconscious dynamics, the 'perception of the self in this context' acts as a little "trauma" that, if not observed and processed cognitively, will ineluctably determine the direction of personality development.

Keep in mind that this is all happening to a mind that knows it knows: it is the higher recursive levels of human self-awareness which "manages" what to do with these social perceptions it has. To many, myself included, the self is a creation of society. In social mirror theory, the self is generated and structured by its social interactions with other selves. This means that when the experience of shame occurs, its as if the super-ordinate field of the "social mind" retracts and it's emptiness - a 'something' that is created as absence - permeates bodily and mental experience. Shame is noxious to the developing mind; it feels like "self annihilation".

This being the case, the same evolutionary forces which regulate phenotype and genotype - the environment - are active in the mind as "competition between self-states"; those which provide affective durability are "selected" by a coupling between the mind and the environment (such as the experience of yourself as being shamed by a friend at school for being dorky and silly; the result being an unconscious selection of a self-state/behavior that is more constrained/less spontaneous but also allows you to feel better in that previous situation; and this is usually a simple imitation of another behavior that was observed as being successful)

In this view of things, the personality is somewhat "blank" at birth. Sure, there is likely some genetic variability; but one wonders if what is thought of as genetic variability is simply a 'selection' that occurs in intrauterine development; the first "home" of a growing human is its mothers womb. The mothers body is therefore its "environment". Feelings and psychological states of the mother produce specific neuro-hormonal chemicals, a portion of which invades the placenta and acts as a "directive" for biological development.

Since entering the world is first a phenomonologically affective experience, it is feelings:and sensitivity to feelings, which first 'bias" psychological personality development.

Yet, none of us can outrun the affects of our social reality. Probably the majority of us have been 'determined' in our personality structure by the micro-experiences of shame in our interactions with others. Some states were unconsciously 'selected' whilst others remain in dissociation; maybe until this day. And for generations we thought of this - and some still do - as an inevitable condition of being human. As if, perhaps, the possibility of actually intervening and creating a more affectively safe environment couldn't create a different human personality.

What kind of world we want depends on what kind of minds we want to create. In my own experience, self knowledge has depended on an "external" guide - relational psychoanalysis, traumatology, interpersonal neurobiology, systems theory - that have midwifed my own exploration of how flexible and pliable self experience can be.

I mention my example because I am amazed by how rigid and conservative minded the majority of people are. They are like this - not because of some 'genetic' difference; that is utter nonsense. They are like this, simply put, because of generational factors; one generation sharing a way of being and experience of self with the next; certain self states are 'selected' and others are dissociated. And they remain in that state till today. Why? Because of a ridiculous commitment to self with a view of the world that embeds within itself the conditions for aggressive tendencies. It's own "inner split", between a self state that feels itself as vulnerable and shamed in relation to a prominent self state with a rigid place in the persons narrative structure which is repetitively confirmed and "validated" by other selves with a similarly rigid structure.

Any fundamentalist view would fall into this category; and in todays world, that would be many (Christian fundamentalism; Islamic fundamentalism; gun-rights fundamentalists etc)

One of my passions is mindfulness in education. Another passion of mine is emphasizing the role of dissociation in keeping us from experiencing "bad states". We run away and it happens unconsciously. In development, it seems important, perhaps essential, that every child learn to understand the nature of his or her bad experiences; and no bad experience equals the experience of shame. It is in shame, which occurs in the dynamic relations of social connection, that personality is most forcefully shaped. If children do know the importance of shame, for example, that every mind experiences it; that is not something to be afraid of or to worry over; and mostly, that what we see in others when they experience shame (implicitly signaled by the body, voice and face) need not be worried over; need not be run away from. In fact, the experience of shame in self and other should spur a compassionate response; because even though at this moment you feel shame, or the person in front of you feels shame, the next moment you can both feel better; can both release yourself from the feeling by accepting it; and by accepting it, the now can shift to a different now, and mind can be more attuned to the embodies connection within the social field.

I started this off with a story of my dog. When I come home feeling crummy, there she is. She comes up to me with her wagging tail and I feel her vitality; I am in awe of her affective versatlity: she is glued to the now. One second shes chasing one signal (a smell), the next another signal (a different smell). I can get her excited by saying an appropriate cue (Want food?) or simply rub her and have her lounging in canine bliss. She is completely attuned to me and what I think. She is watching and waiting; cued; and when I acknowledge her wondrous sensitivity to the now, she shares it back. She gives me the recognition I need to feel affectively alive. At any moment (or most moments) she is response and ready for play.

I think I mention this because being happy is not something we find by "seeking it". Instead, were happy when we accept what is and just go with the flow. It is an effect; not a cause. It comes by being engaged with "an other"; human, animal, nature. Animals, especially dogs, teach us and can even help us get back into that flow state. Their complete simplicity and ignorance of past selves and future selves protects them from the social shame we feel. It can be exhilarating to just imagine what they subjectively experience. So innocent. So trusting. The trust makes me want to make good on it.

We should all try to trust one another more.