"Judging by Feeling"

Brian Lynch

We came to an understanding that only by taking a detailed emotional inventory, - an inventory of our anger, fear, distress, disgust, and shame and by assessing what we are really interested in and what really makes us happy- will we truly be able to change our actions.     Twelve Steps to Emotional Health, Brian Lynch, M.D

We call the above-named feelings “negative” feelings but it is important to see them as useful feelings. The psychologist Silvan Tomkins claims that we are born with innate feelings. The reason we are born with them is so that we can survive an environment that is at once dangerous but at the same time affords multiple opportunities to achieve moments of joy and long periods of interest. The “negative” feelings are, at the core, “positive” if they can be appreciated quickly and assessed as quickly as possible. Martha Nussbaum talks of our emotions as having a judgmental quality. 

We do have our interests. Tomkins was the first to point out that interest was a primary emotion and probably the most primary emotion for indeed what would we did not have our interests? 

One of the immediate dynamics of note is what happens when our interest is interfered with. I will not speak about the most common instance of that but what happens when we are involved in very common “medium” levels of interest. For example when we are interested in our work but become angry at our landlord and distressed at the state of the stock market.

A simple thought is that at once the distress and anger are in direct opposition to getting my work done but on the other hand they are in their interest. I have an interest in the stock market and in my issue with the landlord. So my anger is a type of “interest.” It augments the interest I have in my landlord, to a point. It can on the other hand also hinder it depending, of course, on the intensity of the anger. We all know if the anger becomes a wild rage it will probably only cause me more problems. Low-level anger just might, however, get someone’s attention where I was previously ignored. It, therefore, augments my interest. Here we get the “judgmental” quality that Nussbaum talks about.

Where this judgmental quality comes from is how each emotion has been associated with our life history. How we have recorded in memory each important time we were angry, or distressed, or terrified. We then now “judge” the present situation based on a synthesis of the past. This is not presented as an explanation of what Nussbaum thinks “judgment” means.

 "More 'testing'"

"Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then, gradually without noticing it,

Live along some distant day into the answer. "

   Rainer Maria Rilke

I would suspect that most people would not know that most of what is practiced in what is called clinical psychology or psychotherapy has not been proven. That is when doctors and therapists treat patients the methods they use have not been “tested” in any rigorous way. Are you surprised?

Well, this whole business of trying to help people in this way is barely a hundred years old and the idea of having organized systems of doing and paying for research on a large scale is much less than that. Then realize that we are dealing with face-to-face one-on-one encounters, conversations between two people. How do you compare one conversation with another and decide if one is better than another? It is difficult. But we have made some progress.

I have spoken a great deal about two positive emotions joy and interest, mainly interest and about “testing.”

The exciting news is that it seems that there is some “proof” that they are indeed valid. Through a therapy called “Control Mastery Theory” (don’t bother about the strange name) they have been able to do studies through which they conclude that people in therapy are indeed trying their best despite many, many things they might do to demonstrate the opposite. Like, do what! Like calling the therapist names, leaving therapy, and not paying the bill. The conclusion in all of these cases is that the person is “testing” the therapist. They are testing whether or not it is “safe” to move forward in life. Now I just say we all do these things with everyone, we all “test”, in our lives if we are not acting in a healthy way toward them.

We start with a good deal of “interest” and “joy.” These feelings are not attached to much “thinking” or reasoning for a very long time. They are attached to “doing” things. To “playing”, to enjoyment in the world. But through much of our own lives, there has been much interruption of this “interest” and “joy” that from an early age has taught us that the world can hurt and can “hurt” a lot.

I can only suggest that what the theory suggests is that we have a deep subconscious master plan to get “back to the good times.” We will charge forward wanting and hoping for love and connection but will then “test” the environment, the desired object” to see if they or the environment is safe. I also it is “just” that what happens is that old memory of the bad times, of the old hurt of pain and abandonment come back. The feelings of fear of more loss, the feelings of shame and distress return and they are too much and we either runway into a pit of self-hate and blame and often addiction or we strike back.

Each human is innately “healthy” due to innate “interest.” That is we are born with the absolute biological need to connect with other people through “interest.” This is not the Freudian sex drive. This is “I am interested in you.” This is our healthy state. We can never lose this except in extreme cases ( this is what I call the most damaged of us such as a Sadam Hussien). So we subconsciously are trying to recover it even though in any given family we might have learned many rules that teach us that connection is not healthy or is dangerous. We learn the dysfunctional rules (don’t cry, don’t display affect; no hugging or kissing, never being told you're loved) that to connect is not healthy and is dangerous. This causes great internal conflict as these thoughts and feelings are always fighting our biological nature to connect.

 “Hey, It Works For Me.”

Brian Lynch

After speaking with a number of people in our lives there comes a time when we note that if people talk about themselves in any kind of insightful way they will say some remarkably insightful and accurate things about their personality but then seemingly not be able to use the information they just brought into consciousness.

Someone might say “I tend to see things in ‘black and white’ and that is the way it is.” Their voice will trail off and then go on to something else. Or maybe they will note that they see others in a similar situation that they have been in recently, but they just don’t have the patience to tolerate it in others. That is, they cannot help others, as they would like to have been helped.

As terrible as it sounds it seems that many people, in a manner of speaking, give up on life rather early. They give up in the sense of having a life of affluence, rather life is seen as “life is hard and you better get used to it.” The sense of this is magnificently expressed by psychologist Silvan Tomkins in speaking of grander defenses against life’s hardships when he says we enter a “..lifelong war that need never have been waged, against enemies (including the bad self) who were not as dangerous or villainous as they have become, for heavens that never were as good as imagined.”

There is evidence, that I would think is counterintuitive, that people become more sociable as they age and that in their twenties they are actually less sociable and more work-oriented. 

Implicit in the psychology of the late teens to the early twenties is “deciding how things are” and going with it. That is solidifying your ideals. The danger is, that while by necessity, one will have to close off certain options as life goes on to get anything done, one may also take on thoughts that are more rigid than necessary and that we may start to project onto others. That is, we may start to say others should be like we are. 

Of course, with not much reflection these thoughts are not surprising. For the vast majority of humanity, it is a matter of facing some kind of economic reality fairly early in life. A tiny minority of people have any advanced education at all. We are put out in the world with frighteningly little information and especially frighteningly little in the way of how to find alternative solutions to life’s problems. It is not surprising that we will then fixate on “what works” for us. “Hey, that seemed to work last time, why not this time?”   

We can fall into all manner of “bad” habits. It “seems” to work if I yell at people. I get my way I seduce people. This can go on for years and years before anything serious happens or before I realize how much better things could have been doing it another way. Or I more or less “decided” to hide from life and this went on for years and years and maybe I did or did not find out the damage I did to myself and others. But hey, “it worked” I was “alive” wasn’t I? The “Dapper Don” “Mafia King-Pin” John Gotti, lived with the belief and reality/acceptance that he would either be assassinated, “whacked” or die in prison. It “worked” for him.

Now is this anyone’s fault? No, it isn’t. It is the state of society. It only says we now know what the situation is. If we know the situation maybe we can change the larger conditions that trap so many people. It means making education ever so much richer at an earlier age. 

"Getting well is tough. Getting well emotionally is tough. It can take years. II"I

 Getting well is tough. 

Getting well emotionally is tough. 

It can take years. III

We came to realize that we are profoundly emotional beings and that unless we understand our emotions we are very often powerless over our own actions and are powerless over the world.

For some time now I have been bothered by the phase you “have to do it for yourself.” As you have to stop using drugs for yourself you can’t do it for your wife or kids et.

It is not so simple. What motivates one person is different than the next.

We are social beings.  It would seem that we are trying to get well under any circumstance in order to better fully enjoy the company of others.  “I don’t want to lose my children.”  “I want my family back.”  “My wife left me.” 

True enough we have to somehow come to understand how we got to where we are. How we came to this point of “losing everything.”  Everyone has their own baggage and it is our baggage and we bring it into relationships and those around us do not need our baggage because they have their own.  So we do ourselves and everyone a big favor if we work  hard on understanding what hurt us in the past and how we have come to habitually respond now in our adult life to hurt by taking drugs or by whatever we are doing be it gambling or sex or beating our spouses or running up credit card bills.

So yes work on “the self” but it seems to me it all has to be done at once.  Why on earth are we working on ourselves if it is not to connect with others?

There is a study about alcoholics and suicide that seemed to document that those that committed suicide were those that ended up with no connection at all. It was when the wife followed through on all the threats. That is the man would come home and the house would be empty, the car was gone. No note, no forwarding address. All efforts at contact would fail and he would have no one left in his life. Yes, there are, at times, seemingly no solutions but, obviously, inherent in that is the thought that there are no easy solutions. There is a tragedy. Not that people do not have to leave sometimes but it is also true that he cannot just “up and stop drinking.” He needs a community. How he or anyone does it is an ongoing project.

Brian Lynch

Shame and Humiliation

Tomkins, Silvan S.: Affect Imagery Consciousness NY: Springer Publishing Company, 1963.

Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self by Donald L. Nathanson Paperback (March 1994)

W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393311090

How To Get Where You Want To Go Brian Lynch

"Humiliation"

Brian Lynch

Labor and management: What are the problems and what are the solutions? Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to solve everything in a few words? Well, most everything, believe it or not,, does revolve somehow around shame and humiliation. Yes, it is unfortunate, in some aspects, equivalent to saying that everything revolves around E=mc2, and then saying that is nice but what can I do about it? It is not quite that bad. We might go with an example.

The world of work is complex and varied but we have to start somewhere. There is an organization of labor that often consists of people who manage and others that do the actual labor of the enterprise. Of course, in many enterprises, the two roles are mixed. Nevertheless, the division has been applied In the arts to making cars.

What is for sure these worlds often do not overlap they are parallel universes and this can be a problem and set up for shame and humiliation between the worlds and cultures.

An example is that management has to promote within its ranks executive talent. These people by necessity will often have little experience, often no more than a year or so, but they are seen as “rising” stars. They are then put in charge of the “talent.” Who are the “talent” anywhere from famous Rock Stars to, a clinic full of experienced physicians or a chef with fifteen years of experience at the top of her game? The problem with the manager is that they have to, as they see it, gain “respect.”

Anyone who has been in the workplace probably anticipates what I am going to say. The age-old way of gaining “respect” is to “put people in their place” and “show who’s boss.” This is done in any number of ways. Whether the new manager has the back of their superiors will be played out, but that is neither here nor there for my point the point is people use, so often, shame and humiliation as the tool. Not out of “choice” but as the default mechanism as there is no recognized other standard of “respect” of a tried and true way of “the right way to do things,” a set of a minimal set of standards of human rights. There is a basic stupidity of not knowing any better. Why is it that we do not know that such actions only serve to alienate, drive performance down and drive talent away?

Ad nauseam I hear the stories such as when the boss continually comes by a unit of a highly talented team at near closing time with an entourage and keeps everyone for two or three hours. Or the middle manager that has increased profits by 80 percent over last year and takes no time off coming in some hours every day and saying “Now we want to make sure you're putting in your hours.” And the big boss making clear that “Profits were still not good enough, you know.” So, how many a reader recognizes the parent who would never praise an “A” but asked, “Well child I am disappointed that you didn’t get an A+.”