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

                      It is not about you.

Time and again, I go over a simple thought for myself and others: Do not take things so personally, and do not think you are special in a relationship, especially in terms of negative attributes.

If you see someone that is your friend, or you think is your friend, doing things to people that you do not like, do not make the mistake and say to yourself, “Oh, I am special; Tom won’t do that to me.”

We all have been, and are, abused. We all make the above mistake. We all “disavow” the truth. The truth is right under our noses, but we would rather not see it.

The more we take off the blinders, the more we might be able to keep those friends as much as possible and help them and ourselves. We will reduce our trauma as we will less and less be blindsided and stop saying why, why me?

We will be able to stop saying it because we will have the great insight that it is so much not about me. It is about them. You see, if you observe their behavior, they are doing these things that bother you to everyone in the same fashion. This is what we call a script. It is like a computer program. Yes, sorry to say, humans in many ways are like this. If we were not, we could get nothing done. Scripts are “good” and “bad.” I get up and start brushing my teeth, and don’t even realize it, and while brushing, I am in the process of composing this essay. That is the usefulness of a script. It “frees up thinking.”

Unfortunately, humans can get “scripted” in all kinds of ways. Due to early experiences, we generalize certain dislikes, subtlety unconscious or even conscious we have about people. These are the root of great pain and fear that people harbor their entire lives unless they get help. A very common fear is one of abandonment because the person was abandoned at a vulnerable time, and they now project that on every relationship. They might have some sort of “disgust” for people in general that they really have no understanding of, but it is there, always interfering with things. They need to get to the root of it. So, we think it is about us. Why don’t they like me? What is wrong with me?

Often, people with severe problems have overcompensated in other parts of their personality. They are, that is, for example, very seductive. They conquer us. They have the same need for attachment as all of us, but let’s say they have this lingering disgust. They would be at war with themselves, would they not? So they seduce, and even fall into a kind of love, but then it has to end. So, it is that we often blame ourselves.

What I have noticed in my own life, and what has been so convincing and so remarkable to me with several people in several types of relationships, be it family, dating, or friendships, the person has been greatly abused, but now, when the person is in a safer saner environment, not only due to me but to various other factors, it seems to make such little difference. Again, the point is, it is not about you or even the environment but about them, at least at first, and often for a very long time. Unfortunately, this can be a setup to blame and shame the person for not “taking advantage” of a good situation, or “not wanting” to, or being “lazy,” or “wanting everything handed to them on a platter.” It can all be frustrating.

Nothing that is Human is foreign.

This is an old therapist saying.

 Terence was on the money.

The therapeutic community is on the money for claiming it.

Now several years ago it came up in a discussion with a colleague and he pointed out how unfortunate it was that so many in the community only give it lip service.

I can certainly say that is so often true in my experience in medicine.

I often say that I am quite sure that I would not be alive today without the understanding of the material I came across 13 years ago which gives me a clear understanding of why even healers give only lip service to Terence's saying. To go to the extreme why one of Osama Bin Laden’s lieutenants can be a physician? Or why even a colleague of mine, that supposedly understands seemingly the same material, can refer to young girls that are caught humiliating a classmate on video as less than human? 

To be clear about what Terence is saying it is this, the therapist should not be surprised by any human act, and I take it to mean that we should treat all comers. Jeffery Dahmer was a human being, he is not, not human, no matter how greatly he “disgusts” us. He is not “foreign.” Of course, Terence knew nothing of “therapists” having lived c. 3 BC to 65 AD and it is therefore all the more remarkable the statement.

The answer as to why we give lip service to his statement is simple, human beings know squat about their emotions and thus often mostly miss the mark about what is causing behavior no matter how bizarre. 

We are humans living in what Western humans call the twentieth century at the end of only a few hundred years of using what we call a scientific method that has been looking at our species. Then add to that the man that saw us as we are only lived 150 years ago. That man was Charles Darwin. Darwin knew a lot and knew a lot about emotion but not many others did then or now.

We had to wait a while to advance. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that Silvan Tomkins picked up where Darwin left off and started to tell us about ourselves. It was then people could start to understand why humans talked so clearly out of both sides of their mouths; could talk of accepting all comers but in practice always discriminate.

Tomkins taught us about how our emotions were seated in our bodies and biology. How we felt things. How we tingled with excitement, shuddered with shame, and were seized with fear. Stuff we all knew anyway but seemingly needed to be told.

But we did not know about shame being so ever-present in our lives and how it could be commingled with fear to terrorize us into being seized with guilt. Nor did we have, nor do we have, much understanding of how our sense of taste and smell can be bastardized as children, to again, enslave us socially and sexually so that we are forever handicapped to exclude people, places, or things from our lives for no articulate reason other than “I don’t like that?” “That disgusts me.” “That is contemptible.” “I never liked that.” “I feel uncomfortable around those types of people.” “I wouldn't see those people in my practice.” “I'm not one of your junkie patients.” 

Our emotions are not much talked about. We grow up knowing something about Joy(happiness), anger, fear (being scared and a sissy), being sad, and that is about it. Somewhere along the line, we learn to say oh that is “disgusting.”

We are just all ignorant of where it all starts. Where the cultural norms came from? Why do they eat dogs in the Orient and nowhere else? So it is with thousands of likes and dislikes and the basis for cultural norms and laws and canons all coming from the deep human recesses of stored memories linked with unpleasant feelings. If you will “affect”(the bodily potential to feel, just like we have the apparatus to have the potential to feel our heart race or have “goose bumps.”) We have never had the occasion of being introduced to recognizing precise emotions such as disgust, distress, and shame. 

We can chant Terence's wonderful ode to humanity until hell freezes over but unless we have had a pretty special and liberal childhood. An upbringing that has taught us to be open to the world and its people we are going to have a hard time making it through without developing strong dislikes, even hatreds of others through no fault of our own. 

This is going to cause much confusion in our lives especially as professionals as we are going to find ourselves rejecting people and feeling terrible about it, disavowing it, and “acting out” about it. This even despite strong liberalizing experiences in later years that might end in many torturing private moments that end reinforcing our ‘beliefs.” We may be tortured as we simply feel we are “all wrong” but as we still do not understand the confusion we feel we must persist as we always have. We may become even more salt-wort in our actions. 

The most persistent place I see this is in the treatment of the “drug” addict Across medical specialties where there persists great personal dissmell and disgust for the “drug addict.” Now despite emergency medicine being a “specialty” for more than twenty years, they are poorly trained to deal with the phenomena. Or let us say individual doctors are poorly trained and this is the point of the essay in part, individual emotion is brought to the table, is not brought to consciousness, and is carried through and into practice despite exposure to dramatic experience and training. They are our own dissmell and disgust and shame that sabotage our reason. It is as if an invisible hand is pushing against what our better angels know to do. It is still not uncommon to hear reported: “Get out of my fucking ER, you fucking drug addict.” Yes, that is a direct quote of course, by a physician. 

Of course, number one, addiction is a medical problem with treatment options and the patient has many reasons to be there. They are all legitimate despite their drug-seeking lying and manipulation. They are all legitimate as they are all part and parcel of being human and therefore are not foreign to the experience. Everyone that walks into the emergency room, pretty much short of firing a nine millimeter at you, which happens, is your patient. 

It is our job to develop the interest you can in them. It is the doctor's dissmell and disgust and shame that she or he does not know of. Nor do we, in our daily lives, when we reject another human out of hand. So if we are lucky we might stumble across some knowledge of what deeply motivates us. But we should go easy on ourselves, always, as we could not have known about these deep complex emotions and their intertwining until now.

And unfortunately learning about precise emotions and becoming aware does not suddenly make things easy. It seems not to be the whole picture or answer. It can, at times, take years of digging to unravel the tapestry life has woven. Many hours of thinking and practice to undo the program; is very much like rewriting the code to the software. “At the time ‘x’ conditions occur ‘y’ will take place and not ‘z.’” 

We have to truly “get ahead of the curve.” That means understanding that I Brian Lynch truly think and believe that it is worthwhile and beneficial for me to understand what I call my “disgust” in and my “hatred” of all members of the religion of Ordeu and what I find dissmelling in their practice of sucking each other's little fingers is precisely because I feel something based in unpleasant feelings that are based in my past that I am projecting forward on them and not in some “pure” preordained “logic.”

So, we begin to understand that, for the most part, there is a “logic”. A logic of deep seeded culture and individual and group likes and dislikes. 

Brian Lynch

June 23,2010 A Day In The City

Why do we watch violence?

Why do we watch violence?

Brian Lynch

Revised

"The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Chris Hedges

Why do we watch, read and engage in violence? It was an unsettling question when I was first asked and one I still feel uncomfortable with. It is one I feel less uncomfortable about bringing up in conversation although it tends to be a conversation-stopper.

Our first reaction might be that it is a “silly” question as that “of course” we watch it because it is “exciting” or simply entertaining. I realize too that many are very careful and do not watch violence. They have either seen enough of it, it triggers memories or they just understand that participating in violence vicariously might be unhealthy.

I should also be specific in that I am referring to movies, television, games, and violent sports. From the start, we should not be simplistic and forget that from time immemorial literature has dealt often, almost exclusively, with violence but I am asking and going back to the beginning and even asking why we even bother with the Iliad and the Odyssey or the tragedies’ of Shakespeare?

The answer is not obvious. The world has always been a dangerous place and this question is only even at all sensible in that the world is relatively much more safe compared to only one hundred years ago. That is it would have been laughable as to walk out in the street would to be to see what was on stage. 

I believe it was the humorist Dave Barry who invented the hotel game of “100 Channels.” The idea is to flip through 100 cable channels without seeing a gun. You “win” if you do not see a gun; pretty impossible to do. On the one hand, there is still much violence but otherwise, when is the last time you saw a gun in real life? I live and work in a pretty tough neighborhood and have not seen a gun except in the holster of an armed guard or policeman in about five years, and when I did it was in a lock box in a friend’s home.

This was not the case only a short time ago and throughout, at least recorded history, crime, famine, disease, and war were common. We recognize that often this resulted in times when the general mental status of the common man was quite unstable only adding to the turmoil. That is despite the common notion of “how bad things are now,” things have greatly improved at least as argued by Steven Piker (see an excellent summary of the decline of crime and violence by Steven Pinker). But there is a huge legacy and history of violence and of course still, too often our ways of solving problems involve violence; war to capital punishment and of course crime. 

 This present essay is a version of what I originally wrote and I interject here that I am now not so convinced of Pinker's findings. Since the original writing I have been aware of the criticism of Pinker and on my own have wondered about all the ways humans participate in violence and now at least am a bit dubious of his overall view. I would ask what do you think? I also warn that I do not get my own specific synthesis until the end of this piece.

We need not forget about such violence as domestic violence. Has it altered by much, stayed the same, or is it worse due to modern stressors? 

Until the advent of movies, now only a little over 100 years old, If we were to have live entertainment we only had the theater which was only accessible to the tiniest part of the population. And then reading which has been available to such a small part of the population despite the printing press, until recently. It seems to me that the electronic representation of violence has much to do with interest, interest in being able to so readily see a reflection of the violence in our own lives. 

Being so very ignorant of the causes of the chaos in our own lives we are subconsciously desperately looking and hoping for answers. Unfortunately, so many people grow up with such seemingly mindless violence ( I say seemingly because, in the end, it all has a logic) that much is watched as a means of medication, and retraumatizing or reliving trauma. Do others live the hell that I do? Why do they? How can I survive it? At its worst media is also, unfortunately often and frequently a classroom of “Oh that is how you defend yourself in this or that situation.”

A coherent view of how emotion drives history can be seen through the study of Psychohistory. From the start, I say I have a problem with its foundations in that it uses Freudian ideas where I argue for the more direct approach of motivation to action through our innate feelings. I think little if anything is lost in Lloyd DeMause’s work and thinking, for example, if you substitute one for the other when he talks of infant and childhood terror states being the cause of domestic and international terror. His “Foundations of Psychohistory” is a classic. It is not for everyone. If anything is violent this book is. It is the true history of violence against children. It puts into a historical context why our interest and excitement are focused on what he calls “sacrificial themes,” and why we search them out.

So, we watch to learn and to relive and then there is the pure emotion of it all. Chris Hedges teaches us about the addiction to battle. A former war correspondent he finally realized that he and many of his colleagues were “chasing the battle” and that in fact, he had become addicted to battle. He sobered up. His quote that is used to open this essay is used to open the movie “The “Hurt Locker” the “Best Picture” of 2010 explores one man's addiction to the thrill of disarming military ordnances and IED’s to the point that it is the only “real” thing in his life. He reenlists leaving his mate and young son.

I try to be conscious of when and how much violence I expose myself to. I will often wait a long time before I see a movie that I think is violent. Often I will never see it. But then why do I eventually see some? There are some distinctions to be made the most obvious are gratuitous and non gratuitous violence. Of late I have been surprised at how I have been disavowing much of the violence around me. This is not good and dangerous. Sticking your head in the sand is not good. 

Watching works that present themselves as honest, and I have found to be honest, has helped me evaluate the real world around me. The ends of “Macbeth” or “Hamlet” are not displays of gratuitous violence. And as much as the end of “Reservoir Dogs” might look like “Hamlet” it is not “Hamlet.” There is a movie I waited years to see. I was seduced simply by the name and it's staying power in my memory. 

I forgot it was by Quentin Tarantino. I for example will not see “Inglorious Bustards.” He is who he is and for me, he feeds the addiction of and for violence. I hear him say he has no obligation whatsoever to have a moral stance. His stance is free-floating excitement and whatever serves that end is fine with him. To me, his violence is by definition gratuitous because it is only there to entertain and to satiate. After all, there is no further end, no moral, no real plot. What is the point of most marital art movies except excitement? Or the discharge of anger, rage, disgust, and revenge and not to forget honor?

Why do you enjoy violence?

Although the answer to my question is complex there is one central idea that I find powerful.

Yes, there are various reasons we have mentioned such as curiosity and learning and I will return to them. 

At the core what are we doing? For the most part, we are experiencing a core human mode of existence. Who after all engages in violence? The world is full of violence and all manner of animals and even a few plants can be said to engage in violence. Most violence in the world is for survival in the form of getting food. Next, it is to maintain the existence of self through self-defense. 

In humans, we have the same motivations but the most common cause of violence is from responding to emotional damage. We reach a breaking point when we feel overwhelming shame or humiliation. The majority of the time we avoid violence by removing ourselves from the situation, submitting to the situation, or engaging in some form of distraction. Often it is only when we have exhausted these three options do we attack. These are all solutions to a problem. Many if not most animals have a similar system of survival.

Humans have an added ability and that is to have a high awareness of what is going on. We, as many other animals that have demonstrated even a low level of cognition, can mentally abstract ourselves from the situation. The aforementioned four ways of dealing with a situation tend to be on an automatic or institutional level. In society, they often do not solve anything but make matters worse. Of course, attacking usually causes more problems. 

I am working with the idea then that we watch violence because, on the most basic level, it is a reflection of our lives. A reflection that keeps us in a mental state of the basic four options of removing ourselves, accepting or distracting from the situation until it is too much and we attack. We search out this material because we do not understand, and who does, that this is the way we have developed. 

We are not educated to the point of understanding that behavior can be broken down as I have described and therefore we are in somewhat of a constant state of confusion being pulled in all directions wondering what is necessary and whether we need to or not engage in violence. We are not at a state where we see that we do have higher mental capacities that many times could avoid all the mess. Of course, we try and we muddle our way to peace much of the time but we still need much more clarity. I will leave it at this for now. It is an important topic to come to grips with and others certainly might be better able to articulate it.