"Attack Self"

Raising children is difficult on average, and always has been. Little more than a hundred years ago if that, childhood in fact barely existed. The common man’s life expectancy, once one made it past the early years was still short, and was often not past the mid-thirties and women often died in childbirth.

This is to set a stage for some “reality” that life has, yes, been for the most part nasty brutal, and short. Simply a fact that it does not take much to realize that in a world without heat and in the cold it was not too easy to feed a baby, carry it around or clean it. It might be easy to see how babies were seen as the devil incarnate. Evil made flesh now in “our hands” to be made “good.” Ergo the finger pointed at me the evil one that “I” the child am bad.

This has the most profound implications as the child often becomes the bearer of the family’s emotional burdens.

Following logic, I believe what I have stated so far. I also believe that we have a biological glue that holds us together as a family unit and that is “interest” and “joy.” – My goal in these words is to limit myself to the “here and now”, to the tangible, to what we can glean from everyday life. - We need companionship. But the journey to where we are has been rough. We are beginning to recognize in all of the modern psychology the dominance of our “negative” feelings or what Silvan Tomkins preferred to call our punishing feelings. These keep us alive in a punishing environment that, by the way, is still punishing just made more pretty by suspended ceilings and bridges that are just as easily swept away by tsunamis and earthquakes. That is, our punishing feelings tell us what is “wrong” at the moment and that we should take care of. 

As babies, these are what keep us alive. They are the only way we have of communicating with our caregivers that something is wrong but boy can we get on their nerves. We become the “bad” ones.

 We have evolved ever so slightly from this idea that children are bad. The idea persists because it has always been a difficult balancing act to raise children; to make a go of it. 

Lloyd DeMause, a founder of what is called “Psychohistory,”’ delineated six stages of child rearing all of which persist today. They are infanticide, abandonment, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping mode and he feels the last mode which takes into consideration what the child wants for his life only to have arisen around 1950 and he claims that it is only practiced by a minority of parents.

The mother “has” to emotionally abandon her children or worse for fear of her own life as the father demands that the mother follow his orders or she is beaten or worse. One outcome: “Look what happened to your mother because of you!” The adult result of this is overwhelming guilt and shame.

My point is to concentrate on this legacy of us as children bearing the burden of the family’s emotional pain. The theory goes that it has just been inevitable as the world is not perfect. Things only will get better slowly. Parents “have to” dissipate negative feelings somewhere. Yes, terrible thoughts, and yes not “excuses” just facts. Can we do better tomorrow?

Then what are the consequences of this legacy for all of us? It is that we grow up with many ideas that we are to blame for much of our problems and everyone else’s. Simply “I am a bad person.” Why would I not think so? Since I am been told so all along?

I cannot give many examples here but they come in all varieties. Just recently someone was enthusiastic about getting a job after a long hiatus and focusing on all their attributes and the positive aspects of the job, the good hours and low stress that the job was presented as offering. Unfortunately, the job did not work out, and when they came in the next time some of the very first phrases were self-accusatory phrases such as “I was not ready for that job.” “I was not right for it.” I stopped the person and made them realize this was not at all the case that it was, according to what they had said to me, simply not true.

Or the seventy-year-old who calls me late at night devastated and “ready to die” as she still hears her father’s voice every time she tries to fix something. “You’ll never be able to do anything.” “You’ll never amount to anything.”

This self-blame becomes a way of “fixing” all kinds of problems it “avoids” all kinds of problems and “stuffs” severe emotional pain. It helps us “affiliate” with others so we “at least have someone.” We end up buying too many of the rounds. We are the “sucker” or “mark in the room.” It is a deep belief that I believe I deserve to get “screwed.”  

I once read a small study done on the general population in a Family Practice waiting room and it asked if patients in any way had done something to hinder their care. My analysis of the data was that a good 2/3 had; they had missed an appointment, not changed a bandage, skipped a medication dose, or something, all of these things with some conscious element. We somehow are punishing ourselves.

All of this is to say is what I believe to be the case as a medical doctor is a majority of what I see as “physical” illness is greatly influenced, if not caused at some level, by our “subconscious” affect system diverting “negative” affect/feelings/emotion to places where it cause hare. We end up in doctors’ offices.

Brian Lynch

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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