Into the Fold

The more I read, and the more I see, the more I realize the need to continue articulating a vision for the future - at least for myself - if I'm not going to go insane or throw in the towel on this life. This comes through not just accepting things as they are but developing a more powerful language that resonates with and motivates me, and keeps my heart oriented. Yes, it's time to start that cult I've been talking about, but maybe a little more mundane than that.

I'm often hastily labelled a narcissist, a liar, or a self-serving fratty white boy by people who don't take the time to get to know me or who have their own issues to project onto me. I hold very few if any conservative views, I consider myself an advocate, I am highly sensitive to other people's feelings, I'm a depressive introvert who struggles to form words sometimes, I am trying to learn the world in earnest, and I know I'm none of those nasty things. I'm like a blank canvas that the world paints onto, and my own perceived identity and personality doesn't really seem to factor in anywhere except in my own actions (or merely my beliefs about my actions). Sure, I do things to my advantage sometimes, I do tell lies occasionally, but never at the cost of someone else or to artificially inflate my image. No, we do this life thing on hard mode - honest and fully engaged. I've noticed that the more I begin to see things in a different light and can't keep my mouth shut on some issues, the more I run into anti-intellectualism, into duals with others' ego constructs, and even into the potential threat of death. The more I learn and make myself known, the more my weaknesses haunt me and even get preyed upon. This has caused a sort of dual consciousness in myself, where I'm simultaneously aware of and worried how many people I put off or what their true intentions or bullshit beliefs might be, and also how I don't really give a damn because nothing important to me would get done otherwise and I'd rather try to make at least a couple friends along the way. This conversation with myself got me curious about dissociation more, along with some other recent events in my life.

I've been reading this book lately called The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization by several fantastic clinical psychologists (free link) who were extending the Interpersonal Neurobiology field. While this book is meant to inform clinicians (which I am not), it holds so many incredible insights and builds a beautifully focused view of developmental psychology and evolutionary biology as it pertains to the careful process of creating a whole person - and how trauma can fuck that up entirely.

The gist of the theory of Structural Dissociation is that your consciousness is made up of many physical subsystems as defined by yet-to-be-measured, tightly interwoven neural interfaces across your brain and particularly in our huge frontal lobes. These help you meet all of your daily bodily needs, and importantly also contain attachment and fear systems. All together they make you, and the unified experience you have of yourself looking out from your beady eyeholes.

From the book: "Attachment is central to the context in which all other action systems mature" (p.48). They use this as a launching point to talk about what happens to young children exposed to chronic abuse by their caregivers. These kids can often undergo a hard split in their psyche. On one hand, caregivers are kids' only source of survival and love. On the other hand, if the caregivers are repeatedly abusive in any way, the children may learn to simultaneously fear and love their caregivers. Over time, these hard splits may never be resolved, and will actually develop their own semi-independent consciousness' that are not integrated with the other parts of the brain and never fully develop. PTSD by this model is then considered to be characterized by exactly one split in the psyche, corresponding to a severely traumatic event like from war or being personally violated in some way - especially when you are too young or inexperienced to understand it. Complex trauma (C-PTSD) corresponds to multiple, systematic traumatic events and conditioning. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a step further, where repeated trauma, neglect, and often sinister forms of conditioning were present from a young age. While this was once thought of in terms of multiple personalities (thus the old MPD label), it's a bit more subtle than that. DID is then split into primary, secondary, and tertiary dissociations, where the person may have elaborate coping schemes and avoidance mechanisms that you have to unravel and reintegrate in layers in order to get to the next - and the former layers may just be a complete show yet even prevent the suffering individual from awareness of their other parts of themselves. It can take years to crack a person like this, and this is one of the hardest to diagnose yet most real and severe psychological illnesses we know of according to the books. These splits don't just come with different "normals" or different triggers for different responses. These decision and emotional networks in your brain are actually functionally separated, in a system that is meant to be as densely networked as possible. This comes with severe cognitive impairments especially for higher level tasks like long term planning and long term or working memory. It can also result in, say, blindness or paralysis. Depending on which subsystem is dominant, those memories and modes of behaving may only be accessible at different times, and it seems that often only the "real" memories are agreed upon between subsystems ("personalities"), while the traumatized subsystems are known to lie about anything else when dominant (with transference being a common occurrence here as an avoidance mechanism).

So, when a therapist hits on a traumatic memory or a mere associated emotion with these individuals, they may find it causes a massive cascade of behavioral problems as the individual's brain begins to fight itself for homeostasis (in this case avoiding the pain of the memory and associated experiences to prevent instability) while being unable to agree on what to do - and one underdeveloped brain subsystem may come to overtly dominate another underdeveloped subsystem at times - rather than the person being truly adaptive and fully integrated in heart and mind.

The task of the therapist in these instances then is to help the person slowly hone in on these split systems and integrate them - as painful as that will be. I've heard this characterized as "reclaiming power," where you enter the memories from a more stable place - which would be you literally making connections in your brain - then essentially forgiving the experience - which would be part of you retraining those traumatized networks to serve more harmoniously. Therapists may engage in all kinds of odd rituals to play out this process of tapping these functional splits due to trauma and reintegrating them systematically. This can lead to a measurable recovery of higher functioning in the individual along with the emotional and behavioral stability that comes with resolving trauma. What is so brilliant about this theory is how it doesn't beat around the bush on the overlap between behavioral patterns and neural systems. These semi-spiritual yet all too real disorders like PTSD, C-PTSD, and DID literally cause our brains not to talk to themselves correctly, because the pain is too much to bear and our dominant selves will secede from those areas containing those memories. This means those physical cellular networks will be left underdeveloped for the whole brain while continuing to develop in themselves as they are still cells trying to survive. They can be so complex as to have their whole own egos, aesthetic preferences, emotions, and so on - while that will be met with a seemingly proportional loss in higher functioning. So where am I going with this? Well I'm not quite sure, but if you were to dare to generalize this idea outside of the realm of severe psychiatric disorders and into everyday growing and living, we can see how obvious it is that healthy families and social relationships, as well as access to unbiased education (the kind that doesn't condition you for a cult) are utterly necessary for anyone to become a whole person. We can see that in the world that these basic needs are certainly not being met in so many instances. A quick trip to the CDC website finds that childhood trauma cost the US nearly half a trillion dollars in 2015 going by ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scores as correlated with chronic psychiatric and physical illnesses, and rates anywhere from 20% to 50% for people with significant childhood trauma. This is a good place to drop this fantastic Nadine Burke Harris talk, who is helping lead efforts addressing childhood trauma in California right now as their current Surgeon General.

It's obvious that simple nurturance and care are so basic to everyone's existence as a rapidly growing child and even adult, but what's not obvious is the amount and quality of nurturance, and what the ceiling is for creating not just well-adjusted people (which really just means "I can work a job" in this culture) but even more high functioning and ethical individuals than we would consider the standard or even the ideal, especially by our education standards.

In the US, we're still emerging from a pitch black history of genocide, slavery, fascism, oligarchic debt peonage, marginalizing women (and everyone else not fat and white and male or if they're queer/Irish/Jewish/etc.), and so on. We only seem to just barely respect our own autonomy and grace and real (as in not in service to ideology) capacity for brilliance and ethics as people, and that's if you're lucky enough to have the education to know these things. The difference in standards of health and nurturance today are far and away better than the standards a century ago or even 40 years ago. What I ask then is where to from here? There are clearly massive cultural changes that we still need to undergo just to quash the disturbing rates of traumatization and subsequent lifelong issues they more than often cause, including real and debilitating splits in the brain's sensitive networks as it develops. The amount of energy the brain needs (especially as a child) just to function, as I've talked about in other posts, helps indicate just how sensitive it is to environmental changes, as it must operate at much higher demand. That means negative changes can be that much more detrimental to brain and personality development than any other part of the body, while the later health issues come through things like self neglect or bad obsessive/addicted habits (eating disorders for example). This isn't just a matter of coming up with some utopian vision and patting ourselves on the back about it. I made somebody a promise I would get to the bottom of all this, so let's keep digging. What I think needs to happen to education and social support in this country would be considered radical and offensive to tens of millions at this time, but it would restore the compassion, resiliency, civics, and self-motivated talent that this country is really hurting for. We're in a bit of a pickle here to say the least.

Many if not most of us are likely structurally dissociated in a real way as described by the neuroscience theory. We all bear splits in our minds between our daily functioning and what we know to be true of our world and the powers that be that abuse us so, and I believe it's making us weaker and dumber just like the victims of these awful disorders begat by conditions they couldn't control. I'd go so far as to say it's nigh indistinguishable and would probably even show similar brain issues to people diagnosed with these real disorders. In adults, however, they may make the choice to undergo such a division of conscience. An image that comes to mind is of the Nazis partying at their cabins at Auschwitz as if they were at summer camp. It's such a strange and horrifying example of this amoral dissociative groupthink, and a lot of conditioning was involved to make it possible.

What I am seeing for the first time is a way to weaponize modern neuroscience and psychology in favor of humanity's liberation, as it definitely paints a "radical" vision for widespread ethics, care, social support, and education. This isn't just about making health care and education free (and up to date) in the US, which badly needs to happen, but essentially sending everyone back to school on developmental and evolutionary psych and forging a new outlook that respects how delicately our brains reach their fullest potential - and let us experience life as fully as we have every right to. This would send a massive shock through the standing systems of power, which are in fact control schemes that motivate and condition individual actions even if those individuals don't really know what's going on. Can you see yet how there's such a clear connection between corrupt political systems to this phenomena of trauma and dissociation? No? Then check this documentary Hypernormalization out (and all of his other ones, including his new and fantastic 2021 series "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" all free and full on the "Adam Curtis Documentary" Youtube channel):

Let's keep this ball rolling. Knowledge implies intellectual responsibility. Responsibility implies action. Truly healthy development is clearly only provided through nurturance and unbiased education, these are basic rights. We are making our environment inhospitable all over the world, from pollution to wars to poverty, and this is suffocating countless people from ever being able to see the world as you or I may be able to see it.

Those invested in socially and informationally stratified control schemes would see to it that it continued that way, because that's easier for them and their own dissociated homeostasis, and prevents them from ever facing justice and being properly phased out. This "they" I'm talking about of course is the large multinational financialist and power brokering core of our global economy, and we can't forget your local religious and political extremists (who can often be the same people). Before the societies of recent millennia, people did not have mega-systems of social control to contend with. We also didn't necessarily have the understanding that our minds are as much products of our environment as anything else. If we really met people's needs the world over, the first thing they'd be able to do is dismantle all of this crap in their locales and help grow our planet into something approaching utopia. They'd have the systemic knowledge, the fitness, and the sense of responsibility to others that motivate these kinds of humanitarian revolutions. It would not need to be so gradual and risking more war and deadly fascism and just plain pathetic economic squalor like we are seeing right now.

Getting down off my soapbox now, theories like Structural Dissociation are so fascinating yet so tragic, and if looked at through a different lens than intensive psychiatry, it provides a greater social commentary that is so spot on to the human condition it is rocking me to my core. It's so effective at characterizing the issue of brain development diverging due to conditioning and trauma, and is growing out of decades of work from some of the most compassionate and talented mental health workers in the biz. It's an openly incomplete yet well substantiated theory and invites questions on just how do we best help victims of these disorders recover, as it currently requires some serious creativity, intuition, and education to even begin to recognize let alone treat these kinds of issues. It effects far more women than men, too, in my opinion due to widespread sexual and domestic abuse (as well as bodily commodification/obsession) perpetuated against women and girls and not due to some inherently different coping mechanisms between the sexes.

I am not sure if neurotech has a place in this conversation, but as a tool for communication with oneself, I kind of think it does - if we can learn how to use it in instances like trauma-based dissociation, which may be a far more widespread and chronic issue than we ever imagined. That's especially if we take an honest look at how the world is run right now and reframe our idea of trauma as not just an event related condition but one born from our networks and environmental & educational shortcomings as they condition us (which is more like complex trauma). This is also just one way to frame a large body of social problems and as a potential misappropriation/trivialization of a unique and powerful psych theory.

We're looking for solutions here and this seems to be pointing toward a fairly comprehensive one, beginning with obvious answers like universal and free health care & education along with a clear multigenerational effort to reverse the psychological damage the past centuries have done to we the people (the actual we, not the white and wealthy "we" that the founding fathers had in mind). Bringing back that quote about attachment being foundational for all integration and thereby self-actualization; without ever-stronger, more diverse, and healthier human and resource networks to be a part of, there is no context to hold any of my words true, or to see any greater succession of human agency and quality of life on Earth. In other news, I am getting back into the swing of things after a short hiatus while waiting on the rest of my V2 parts to show up finally and dealing with life problems. I'll make sure to respond to all of the people I have neglected on my forum/email and get some more coding done finally.

And just because the new Adam Curtis doc turned me on to this song:

Okay one more..