Only Explanations 

Brian Lynch

To paraphrase Dan Wile:

We all feel unentitled to our feelings and we are often unable to express them, and when this happens we “generate symptoms;” we take drugs, we hurt others or ourselves or we withdraw.

We have to do these things because we are physical beings that live in the world. We are not perfect. We all need all the support and empathy we can get. We all are learning about how to go about this all the time. We know much less about it than anyone realizes.

So there are “no excuses” there is only understanding. If we understand, if we take to heart that age-old wisdom that we have had for so long, “to walk in another’s shoes” then there is no need for the word “excuse.” What then does the word add to our understanding? The word carries with it an inherent, implicit accusatory implication albeit this is not what you find in the dictionary. That is many when they hear “excuse” under their breath say, “There is no excuse you could have done something different.”

But I say, as somewhere in France someone once said “To understand is to forgive.” “Tout comprendre est tout pardoner.” If you connect all the dots you know exactly how the person got there.

This never means that people are not severely ill, or disturbed or that they may need to be removed from society but it means we as humans have reached “The Age Of Reason” where we can explain our actions.

There are several words I would like to do away with and “excuse” is one of them.

There are no excuses. But not at all in the way you might just have thought I meant it. I mean there are only explanations.

This is a very hard pill to swallow for many people.

It is because we are bound up in several thousand years of believing that we can outrun our emotions and “choose” what to do. Well, we cannot. We cannot until we can and that takes a long time to learn and if we have not learned it we have not learned it. You cannot put the cart before the horse.

When is the last time you “lost your temper?” When is the last time you smoked when you didn’t want to? Or drank one too many? When did you “slip” and use that old “recreational drug” or are you still using it?

What are our “choices” to solve the problem? I think until now it has been pretty much to scold ourselves. To feel guilty and say we won’t do it again. But this is now putting on the breaks at eighty. Why did the foot get placed on the gas pedal in the first place and how do we not do it again?

I like to say now that, say for addictions, alcohol abuse has nothing to do with alcohol, cocaine abuse has nothing to do with cocaine, opiate abuse, and addiction has nothing to do with the drug. So too yelling at your spouse has nothing to do with yelling. The Ponzi racket, big or small, has nothing to do with money. It all has to do with how we are feeling and how we were feeling way back when we first fell into the behavior.

You use the fight with your girlfriend as an “excuse” to get drunk. Don’t tell me about your hard life “It’s just an excuse” for getting high. To the more complex feelings of entitlement that are triggered by a series of events that end in all manner of actions such as theft and demands. So you are to be “excused” as you are “entitled” to what should be yours.

But doesn’t it sound hollow when stated? Isn’t it obvious that the “excuse” is not primary? The statements are “throwaways” and meaningless. Everything goes back to real feelings about something, to some real feelings about the relationship with the girlfriend or relationships in general. Everything else is secondary and a way to deal with the pain.

That does not mean that if I am being hurt by someone that I don’t get out of the way or that I do not stop them from hurting others or that they might even have to be isolated. What it doesn’t mean is that we understand very well why they are doing what they are doing until we ask them. Usually, they know, and if they feel very safe they will tell us. Often they don’t know without some good help but it is not because they “wanted” to grow up and become what they became. No, they were running from something. 

Brian Lynch

"Why are we violent?"

Why are we violent? Because
 we have to be!

Brian Lynch

Surprised by the question? I am a bit. But also hopeful as only by facing this fact will we be less violent.

This is to articulate what I have come to see as an elegant way of viewing all violence, yet the concepts need to be repeated many times to reduce what has been made too complex into its more simple elements. Society eschews the basics for more complex, often erroneous solutions.

The basics are: we desire pleasure and avoid pain. We accept that we are flesh and blood creatures that cannot vanish into thin air when times get rough. We accept, for the moment, that we all get “hurt”, and damaged. If we are hurt. If we are emotionally hurt, say humiliated, shamed, or in a state of shock or grief what can we do? We cannot be perfect.

We are not Gods, all-knowing and powerful, able to solve all problems at the moment. This being the case we have to do something. If we cannot in our humanness solve the problem in a positive way then we will have to do something. That will be some way of processing the pain with the means at hand. 

We do not have a hundred, a thousand, or even ten choices. We only have, in a generic sense, five choices. They are: we can 1) try to run away from the problem 2) blame ourselves for the problem 3) blame someone else for the problem or attack, or finally 4) drown our sorrows in some activity. Finally, we can try and face the problem and come to some resolution. Any of the first four will in some way do at least some damage to ourselves or others. 

If you look at the first four choices we can contemplate how all four are types of violence in our daily lives. To “withdraw” from the world is a violent act. It denies the world of our skills and services. The parent who abandons the child is said to be more violent than the one that actively abuses. That is if the parent is present at least the child feels they exist. To abuse ourselves is violent and affects all those around us just as withdrawing or drowning our sorrows does.

There is a famous saying “He who does nothing can do everything!” Many talented people will spend a lifetime skirting the edge of success and look like they have a career when all along they have been living off on the edge of that career. Avoidance and shame keep them away from full participation in the world meanwhile often forcing them into a web of lies and thus doing violence to themselves and others.

I guess you are waiting for me to speak about war, murder, and domestic violence. These all come under blaming or attacking someone. These modes of violence can be addressed later. I address violence here in this way to emphasize that the larger manifestations of violence are often consequence of the the more hidden forms of violence.

 But I started by saying we are violent because we have to be. Yes because we have to engage in all four of the activities of withdrawal, avoiding or attacking the self or other, because we are not perfect. As a friend said in a beautiful essay if we start to “lower our standards” we just might get somewhere. We just might be less violent to ourselves and others if we don’t expect perfection from ourselves or others.

Brian Lynch

"People do what they do for very, very good reasons."

"People do what they do for good reasons."

By the above, we came to accept ourselves as we are and to understand that we have done what we have done due to unmanageable feelings of hurt and thus it is counterproductive and damaging to blame ourselves and others.  Twelve Steps to Emotional Health

Someone once told me that no matter how we are reacting for the “good” or the “bad” we react to stimuli exactly as our organism “should” be reacting at that moment. We are “nothing more” than our memory banks. We can only react based on what we know how to do in a given situation. We can not do what we don’t know how to do.

Either we are hopeless without redemption, or we are, that is, so biologically damaged that we have to be removed from society, that to the best of our present knowledge, we have no capacity for empathy ( I am not punished but removed from society.) or we have the capacity for empathy but have been traumatized to the point that our negative emotions continually overwhelm us in the present so we are thrown into turmoil. To the observer, the two situations will appear the same. They both appear to be unable to empathize. It is important to sort them out because the latter person can be and needs to be helped. 

So one point is you cannot be “crazy” and responsible at the same time. In both cases, the emotive side has taken over, in one case permanently and in the other momentarily. For those caught in the moment, it is a “shame” bind. It can be a setup for eternal failure. “Oh my God I did such a terrible thing and I am responsible for it!” The shame one feels at that moment now is as overwhelming as the original shame and rage or terror and it freezes one into inaction. That is the original shame and terror let us say that lead them to do the “antisocial” act in the first place. One now is incapable, even now in what seems to be a calmer state, a more rational state to have the wherewithal to apologize, pay for damages, or repair harm done in other ways.  

Why is this? One reason is that deep inside one feels the truth with which this essay started that their organism could not have done anything different than it did at the time it did it and so in the most strict cosmic sense there is never any guilt or responsibility. There is at least a kind of emotional determinism. Why should I apologize for the emotional demons that control me and for whom I cannot control? I did not traumatize myself! Still worse there are those who barely even recognize the trauma they underwent. They cannot betray their caretakers! (See: Protecting our parents.)

But the world attempts to work in the here and now; this organism does harm to that organism now and the one that has harm done to it is not expected to understand anything other than that they are hurt. They want and need reparation. How to do due justice to both. There is a way and it is Restorative Justice.

 Restorative Justice is an approach that addresses this by bringing all parties together to express their narratives and work toward understanding and healing. It focuses on repairing the harm caused by crimes through an inclusive and participatory process. This approach has been shown to have a positive psychological impact on victims, who are often overlooked in conventional justice systems[1]. Through Restorative Justice, we can strive for a more compassionate and understanding society

"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.