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This is the introduction to my pamphlet entitled Doing -Thinking -Feeling- In the World and serves as an introduction to this blog. You migh...

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Friday, July 30, 2010

DISSMELL

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Something you never knew about your Emotions.



Brian Lynch

If we go through life not thinking much about our emotions, which is the ax I am continuously grinding, then it is for certain we do not think about our five senses much.

Our senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

These are the portals by which we experience everything. Each is a type of feeling we are not meant to notice so much as they are to integrate us into our every moment seamlessly.

Stimuli enter through these portals. We know of famous people who lack in significant ways some of their senses but have succeeded. One of the most famous is Helen Keller. Born a normal infant, she lost both sight and hearing at the age of 19 months, and so from that age; she could only know the world through touch, taste, and smell.

The Psychologist Silvan Tomkins teaches us that we become conscious of something only when we feel something about it. And by feel, he means something emotional. But in a more direct way, we feel through our senses. All senses share a type of feeling in that they are based on nerve endings reaching out and interpreting the world. So taste is a feeling, as is smell, but then we must "feel" something about those feelings. We can be interested in touch, fearful of it, or disgusted by it, and so too a smell. All this is by way of introducing you to or as a review of a specific feeling discovered by Silvan Tomkins. That feeling is part of an innate or "born with" emotional network.

He first hit upon these ideas with his newborn son and then confirmed them by studying the anatomy of the human face in detail and taking thousands of pictures, and videotaping thousands of hours of the face. In this process, he observed what no one else seemed to have observed, and that was a new expression. That was the head drawn back, and the upper lip drawn upper ward symmetrically curled up as we see here, which he called "dissmell:."

But let's back up a moment. Initially, along with Paul Ekman, Tomkins thought "contempt" was a separate emotion, but further research found it was not. If it was, it should be symmetrical on the face like other emotions, but contempt is asymmetrical, with one side of the mouth curled up. He decided contempt was a combination of disgust and his newfound emotion of dissmell. Disgust and dissmell then go hand in hand and would seem to have their origins deep in the reptilian brain. It is well known that we are naturally protected from most poisonous food due to our sense of smell(dissmell or bad smell), and of course, taste and smell do a great job of saving us not only from other poisonous food but from rotten and spoiled food. Disgust is protective in that if we ingest something harmful, it is the way we can eject it from our body. Dissmell is a pre-emptive warning to not even consider ingesting it.

This all sounds good as disgust and dissmell can save us and, in fact, they are efficient, useful, and beneficial. There is, however, a big downside. As time went along in our evolution, we started to generalize, abstract, and project into the future and anticipate what would be dissmelling and disgusting to us and thus began to make errors. This is the case with all of our emotions. It is the case, say, with anger; we can start to get angry at all kinds of things that, in the end, make no sense.

With dissmell and disgust, they are a bit more complicated and interwoven with our senses. Focusing on the sense of smell and the emotion of "dissmell" we are reminded that we have, then, the sense of smell and that to experience that, we have to "feel" some emotion about it, and one of our emotions is directly related to the sense of smell, and that is dissmell, "to get away from a smell." We don't have an emotion related to "to get away from" touch or to get away from seeing something. Of course, all of these "to get away from feelings" would come under "disgust" or "fear" such as "what I see is disgusting." But "dissmell" is directly related to smell, and disgust is directly related to taste when we are talking about food. To be clear, I am simply saying "dissmell" and "disgust" would seem to have a special place in our emotional network as they are specially anchored, having roots not only in our senses but also in our hunger drive, and yet have their unique facial expression.

All emotion in humans has been generalized in "thought" We can apply all emotions to anything or anyone. The emotion becomes abstract. We can, that is, treat another person "as if they smell bad'" or "taste bad." We can also have come to have thought of ourselves as smelling bad. This is a quite common problem in general medicine. People become convinced that they smell bad. There are, of course, real physical problems that cause body odor, but there are situations where there is no problem other than the patient convincing themselves that they have an odor.

Disgust and dissmell are important to recognize in relationships. It is recognized by many, for example, that once disgust enters a relationship, it is usually impossible to repair, and there is a separation. All of this becomes much more complicated as we are so unaware of the concept of "shame." It is this vague and poorly understood concept that we are just now becoming articulate about. But until we are better at recognizing shame, and even when we do, it will just be the beginning of untangling the linkage that builds up between shame, dissmell, and disgust.

Brian Lynch

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