And for those of us with issues of trauma–and I suspect trauma exists in at least a muted, low grade form in nearly everyone, perfect childhoods being nearly impossible, with precisely the right ratio of stress and adaptation–we have the Unholy Triumvirate.
And with regard to that specifically, when you feel excessive anger, comment to yourself “I also feel excessive fear, and I also feel excessive shame. Those are all within me.” I haven’t decided yet if that helps–I just came up with it yesterday–but it is in any event the truth, and I suspect that toggling like that between three related but distinguishable emotions reduces the intensity of all of them.
And it just occurred to me that self defeating behaviors stem from an organismic effort at emotionally logical correlation. What I mean by this is that if you have a chronic sense of shame, some part of your psyche has an overwhelming need to justify it, to make it logical, rather than simply an unanchored feeling floating out there. As I’ve said before, if you feel like an asshole–to be clear, because of chronic amygdala overactivation, and other related brainwave dysregulation, all resulting from adverse and unprocessed experiences–the temptation to act like one is strong.
And it occurred to me as well that evil is really simply the ultimate in self defeating behavior. It is taking the logic of the amygdala disregulation and building a life on it. We all want to feel safe, to feel connected to other humans and our world and lives generally, and we want stimulating challenges. These are the basic requirements of a happy life. We want to exist calmly, to exist in a network of connections, and to have something interesting to do.
Evil is giving up on all that. The hunger for power, for example, could and probably should be seen as a misguided quest for safety. Acts of cruelty should be seen as misguided efforts at connection. And dissipated hedonism should be seen as a misguided effort at the feeling of satisfaction which can only come from work well done.
I’m not an ascetic. I’m not a Puritan, but I do think we are all built to want and need certain things, and so many of us cannot remember or figure out what those things are. This is the source of so much confusion in this world.