A social environment can feel dangerous too, can’t it? We get triggered by fear all the time when facing new people or hostile people, don’t we, most of us?
THE AMYGDALA IS SOCIAL. That just hit me.
Now, I’m a dabbler in all this, in many ways. I’ve read a couple books, which I’m not even sure makes me a credible Ama-teur, lover of something. I would like over time to do much better.
But ALIENATION EQUALS CLINICAL TRAUMA. I personally was physically abused (hit) and emotionally neglected (by and large not on purpose, but through lack of capacity on the part of both parents). Those are traumatic, and happening before age 4 or so, also things which constitute Developmental Trauma.
But if you are an average American from an average family, where everyone had a computer and TV in their room, and where your parents were working most of the time, and where your friends grew up likewise mistaking social media for emotional connection, then you are chronically traumatized by every day and every contact even with your “friends”. They don’t know what they are missing, and neither do you. But you are unhappy and anxious.
No wonder rates of depression are through the roof, despite this being the easiest and most decadent way of living ever seen on Earth.
Specifically, I was thinking about how easy hate is. Hate, as I see it, is a mixture of anger and shame. It is the flip side of a felt need for hyperconformity. One sees both, of course, in totalitarian regimes. Nazis hated the Jews (and gays and Gypsies, and by and large Slav, etc.). Communists hate the rich, “class traitors”, the middle class, and all genuine Republicans in the old sense of the word of anyone valuing freedom and a government confined by effective law. They USE both the words Republic and Democratic, but they are lies. Obviously.
Slavish conformity is an internal turning of distress. Hate is an externalization and projection of it. And this, really, has to be the sociological roots of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It would be one thing to roll your eyes at him, or to disagree with his policies. But they take it so much farther than it is really not unreasonable to see it as a sort of publicly (and no doubt privately) expressed mental illness.
Literally, at this moment, large segments of the people triggered by Trump would support the institution of a national Fascist government, to “stop” him from, I don’t really know what. The whole thing makes zero sense rationally. It is pure emotion, and to the point, pure trauma driven by emotional superficiality and the extent to which people have forgotten how to connect honestly at a deep emotional level. It’s a lost skill, among so many. We–and I’m guilty of this too–grow up playing roles, wearing masks, becoming who we think we need to be in a given social context. If everyone else does that, it is lies top to bottom.
A comment on Wim Hof. I really like the breathing (which basically consists in multiple rounds of hyperventilation alternated with breath holding). It gets me high. Interesting insights will often pop in my head, and it is very relaxing. Functionally, hyperventilation is the primary tool of Holotropic Breathwork, as combined with vivid and excitatory and then calming music (and occasionally some human touch, framed as bodywork).
The cold, though, I have mixed feelings about. Now, I grew up in a physically cold place. I have body memories of standing at a bus stop when it was still dark and ten degrees below zero. When it is that cold the air has a feel. Sounds carry more easily, but it feels like there is a steam of silence flowing up from the ground. I remember it well.
When you face that sort of cold daily for long periods of time, you pull inside a bit. You become more emotionally reserved. You have to. It’s a truism that people up North are less warm than people down South, the world over. They are less expressive, more intellectual. This varies widely by person, obviously, but by and large the dominant climate does affect peoples emotional tone and sensibility in what seem to me clear ways.
I don’t have any doubt that cold exposure is good for most people. I think it constitutes a de facto assault on the vagus nerve, which wants things neat and orderly and regular. When you first do cold exposure, you lose the ability to breath for a moment. But over time your body learns this is not the danger it thought it was, and reacts less. This is the calming effect of cold exposure.
But it feels to me there is something cold about this emotionally. We all want to feel warm, wanted, no matter where we are from. Russians want to feel warm and wanted, but they often settle for the warmth of drunkenness.
Cold exposure is a way of muting your natural need for emotional warmth. I read somewhere (here is one link) that people who feel lonely take more warm showers, since physical warmth seems to serve, emotionally, as a poor substitute for human warmth, of which the most obvious example is physically being in someone else’s arms, as in hugs, sex, and sleep.
Now, I did Wim Hof’s latest course. He is a goof. He is not someone whose social presence and emotional skill are conspicuous, to say the least. Having said that, I think there is ZERO doubt, none, that he has saved a lot of lives. His methods have prevented we will never know how many people from killing themselves.
But what he helps people do is reach an accommodation, a healthy addiction, something to get them through. They mute their loneliness through cold exposure, which is a sort of insulating tonic. But it is not a cure. And of course the Wim Hof Community, seen broadly, IS a help. It DOES breed human contact, which is good.
But I continue to believe we can do much better. We are social animals. Cave men and women lived in caves with each other. Now we live in caves alone, with the flickering fires of TV’s and computers which lend precious little warmth.
I still have my plans, but the more I grow, the more mistakes I see, the more wounds I see, the more blind I realize I have been. I don’t want to do anything until I have crossed the river myself. And to be clear, that means figuring out how to calm myself without vampirically sucking someone else dry through my sheer need.
I have the tools. I am perceptive–God has given me a good mind, and I’ve done what I could to develop it. And I am making progress. And part of my progress, I think, it realizing that not only can’t I save everyone, I can’t even save one person, if they are not willing and active participants. It is not really my fault if I see countless people making, daily, what I see as stupid decisions. The creation and maintenance of boundaries is a big part of my task. Compassion must have limits defined by wisdom.