When you see the President or other politicians use terms like “animals” or, even worse, “infestation” (a term usually reserved for insects), they are engaging in dehumanization. People use dehumanization to justify greed, violence, and abuse.  Although dehumanization is most associated with right-wing nationalism, others sometimes use dehumanizing language too. 

Dehumanization is one of eight forms of “moral disengagement” described by the psychologist Albert Bandura.  Humans are capable of terrible crimes, and civilization has developed ways to inhibit aggression.  However, we have not eliminated violence, in part because of techniques for creating (false) excuses and justifications for immoral behavior.  All moral disengagement techniques are tricks to get people to accept behaviors that they would otherwise immediately recognize as unethical and unfair.  For example, assuming most people are not big fans of child abuse, dehumanization and other moral disengagement strategies are used to trick people into accepting abuse of some children.  The manipulators do it to secure power or financial gain.

Dehumanization involves redefining the targets of prejudice and violence by making them seem less human (that is, less civilized or less sentient) than other people.  The classic strategy for this is to use terms like “animals” and “vermin.”  Referring to people as “illegals” is also dehumanizing.  You’ll see dehumanization at work in most large-scale atrocities or genocides committed by governments, armies, or terrorists.  The main purpose is to get people to accept or even engage in behaviors that they know are wrong.    

Dehumanization is not limited to political issues, however.  Any time someone reduces a human being to a single characteristic, especially a negative one, they are dehumanizing.  “Alcoholic,” “addict,” “diabetic,” and “schizophrenic” all rob people of the full complexity of their lives and reduce them to a symptom or disorder.  Even many self-professed humanitarians used dehumanizing (and inaccurate) terms like “superpredator” in the crime scare of the 1990s.  All slurs (insults based on race, gender, sexual orientation, health status or other characteristic) are also dehumanizing. 

Other Moral Disengagement Strategies

Victim-blaming (“You made me do it!”) is a favorite strategy of many perpetrators.  Like dehumanization, victim-blaming works by trying to taint and diminish the target of the violence, instead of focusing on the perpetrator as the actual source of wrong-doing. 

Some moral disengagement techniques involve pretending that immoral acts are not really bad.  Euphemistic labeling is popular with governments, such as when they refer to “collateral damage” instead of the slaughter of civilians, or “tender age shelters” for imprisoning infants and toddlers.  Moral justification tries to re-frame the action as a moral good (such as “The ends justified the means”), while advantageous comparison introduces a moral relativism where you don’t have to meet your own standards of goodness, you only have to be better than your enemy (“What they do is much worse”).  This latter one has sometimes led people to fight violence with violence, but  nonviolent resistance is not only more ethical but also more successful.   Distortion of consequences denies that the actions were harmful.  For example, when infants and children were taken from their parents, some officials pretended that this was not harmful as long as they were being fed.  Just because people survive mistreatment does not mean they were not harmed by it. 

Displacement of responsibility, such as claiming they were just following orders, and diffusion of responsibility, where people justify their actions by saying other people do it too, are forms of moral disengagement designed to minimize personal responsibility for immoral actions.  Mob behavior is partly caused by these forces, for example when normally law-abiding people loot stores after blackouts or natural disasters.  However, the most problematic versions of this are when soldiers, law enforcement officers, or other authority figures use their legal authority to abuse the public. 

Source: Pixabay

The Golden Rule:  The Opposite of Dehumanization

The opposite of dehumanization is empathy and respect, as perhaps best expressed by the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Some version of that belief is found in virtually all world religions.  The Golden Rule is as humanizing as it gets, by calling for everyone to give others the same treatment that you would like to get yourself.  The Golden Rule means that there should be no us-them thinking—that all humans, or in some philosophies all living beings, are part of “us.” 

Causes of Dehumanization and Moral Disengagement

There’s less research on the causes of moral disengagement (versus how moral disengagement is a cause of violence and prejudice), but there are some well-established pathways. 

The first is manipulation, political or otherwise.  In some circumstances, it does not take much to tip people into an us-versus-them tribalism.    

Second, dehumanization is a component of narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.  Many people with these personality disorders cannot appreciate that other people have inner lives like their own.  They are the stars in their own movie, and the rest of us are just props.  Fortunately, these cases are relatively rare, they can be dangerous if they get a platform to manipulate others. 

Dehumanization can also be part of the cycle of violence. People who were mistreated as children can wall themselves off as a defense against that pain (physical and psychological).  Sometimes, what helps abuse victims survive childhood becomes a handicap when they reach adulthood.  They may be afraid of experiencing feelings about other victims because that could open the floodgates to all of their bottled-up feelings. 

How Can Dehumanization Be Prevented or Reduced?

Another way of thinking about dehumanization is that some people have under-developed skills of empathy and perspective taking, and when you think about it that way, it suggests solutions. 

Most of us can become more empathic.  For children, many programs improve social and emotional learning (SEL).  We now recognize the value of “emotional intelligence” for adults too, and that emotional intelligence can be learned later in life.

In cases related to PTSD, interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or mindfulness can help people handle their feelings and create more space for empathy. 

Milgram’s famous study on obedience also suggests ways to weaken the diffusion of responsibility.  Although many participants could be compelled to give high electrical shocks to a “student” (actually a confederate who was not really getting shocked), it has been noted less often that it was not that easy to get them to do it.  For example, if they saw the impact on the victim, or only had indirect exposure to the authority figure (such as receiving instructions over a phone or intercom), these factors greatly reduced their obedience.  This is one reason why journalism is so important, because it helps people see what is really going on. 

Most importantly, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

You can’t fight dehumanization with dehumanization. 

For those of you who are horrified by the dehumanization that has led to children being kept in cages at the border or terrorists mowing down civil rights advocates, it is important to not let that horror slip into dehumanization.  For example, some elements of the antifa movement are also using moral disengagement to justify harassing people.  The border patrol agents who are ripping children from parents and the neo-Nazi sympathizers who are advocating for racism are human too.  We can call out their behaviors without calling them “monsters.”  Their actions might be hateful, greedy, violent, or maybe even monstrous, but they are actions that are being committed by people.  Some of them may be victims themselves, others may have grown up in families where they were taught to hate.  There are ways to make a bigot, but they are still people, and recognizing their humanity will be essential to reducing dehumanization.  If we want a more humane society, we cannot engage in violence and harassment ourselves.

What Can You Do?

There are many specific action steps that can help you become a humanizing force in your community. 

1)Do not use dehumanizing language when you criticize others, including people with loathsome political views or who perpetrate terrible crimes.  In this article, I made sure that I refer to loathsome views or hateful behaviors and do not call people “monsters” or “Neanderthals” or other terms that suggest they are not human. 

2) Use questions or statements to draw out empathic responses.  Except for a few people with extreme narcissism or sociopathy, most people are capable of empathy.  Try statements such as “I can only imagine how I’d feel if those were my children,” or “Would you be able to rip a screaming child from her mother?”  Some all-purpose statements for promoting empathy include “I try to imagine what it would be like to walk a mile in their shoes,” or “I always try to find common ground with others,” or “I think we all want the same basic things in life.”  You may get some defensive instead of empathic responses, but if you can get even one person to recognize others’ humanity, that would be an important accomplishment.

If you want to engage more deeply, I recommend the podcast episode, “The Talk” by Charles Duhigg, which covers a 3-step process.  First, validate the person (not the attitude or behavior), or, in other words, humanize them.  Second, name the issue and express some curiosity about the other person’s thinking on the issue.  Third, tell a personal story about how you developed your own (loving and respectful) position. 

3) Avoid posting unfiltered clips of people making dehumanizing claims.  Several of my friends have posted clips on social media from dehumanizing pundits with comments such as “Can you believe this???” or “This is insane!!!”  It is good to share and post analyses of events on social media, but it is problematic to re-post clips directly from racist or misogynistic sources.  You do not want to support these websites with advertising income from clicking and sharing.  

Also, not everyone views these clips through the same lens, and you may be inadvertently creating a “backlash” by showing people achieving national media coverage by espousing dehumanizing ideas.  This is the same kind of contagion that can lead to increases in school shootings and suicides after media coverage. 

The news media is still wrestling with this challenge, but in this new world where even the most despicable views are easily accessed online, we all need to learn how to cope. 

4) Remember that the only true way to raise yourself up is by lifting up others, not running them down.  Most people recognize the neediness and insecurity behind negative comments that range from petty to fully dehumanizing.  Strong people do not need to “punch down” to feel good about themselves.  Attacking infants and children is always punching down for adults, but so is attacking anyone who is less privileged than you are.  The more authority and power you have, the more care you need to exercise in criticizing others. 

5) Be aware of—and speak up about—hidden biases in your work or other settings.  Are you and your colleagues modeling inclusiveness?  For example, I recently attended a research conference on families where every single invited speaker was white.  As a result, there was little consideration of social and cultural differences in families, such as the importance of extended family and the percentage of multi-generational households.  We need to do more to be sure that the full spectrum of humanity is represented in all settings.

I mentioned this afterward to the conference organizers, and admittedly that was kind of a tense interaction, but one awkward interaction is a small price to pay for less dehumanization.  It also made me realize that I should have done more homework to learn about the program before agreeing to be a speaker. 

These are just a few ideas.  If you have others, please leave them in the comments!  Sometimes, the world can seem overwhelming, but there are ways to counteract dehumanizing forces and you can make a difference by being a force for humanism in your own community.

© 2018 Sherry Hamby.  All rights reserved.

If you want to learn more about strengths-based approaches to dealing with adversity, come to ResilienceCon. 

Please note:  Comments are moderated.  All posted comments must adhere to community standards of respectful discourse.  Responses that include obscenities, slurs, or dehumanizing comments will be deleted.

Our understanding of how the brain generates conscious recognition is growing, and a report in the May issue of Science expands it further.

The study examined neural impulse discharge responses of the monkey brain to visual stimuli. Electrodes were implanted in the four visual cortex areas that are sequentially activated by visual stimuli. The stimulus was a circular spot of varying contrast in the lower left area of the visual field. Monkeys were cued when a stimulus was delivered, though whether they saw it or not varied with the spot’s contrast against the visual background. Monkeys were trained to report when they knew they saw the spot by shifting  their gaze from a central fixation point to the spot’s prior location some 450 milliseconds earlier. Monkeys reported unrecognized spots by shifting the gaze to the right of the default fixation point. Investigators imposed the delay for reporting to eliminate the response being a simple reflex saccade. A longer delay would have been more convincing, but it might have taxed the monkey’s working memory and easy distractibility.

As expected, spots of sufficient contrast evoked impulse discharge in each of the four visual cortex regions. Whether or not the monkey reported actually seeing the spot depended on whether there was also increased impulse discharge in the region of frontal cortex that had implanted electrodes. No doubt, other non-monitored frontal areas might also have been activated under conditions where recognition was reported. The point is that conscious recognition requires activation of widely separated brain areas at the same time.

Not demonstrated here is how the frontal activity is interacting with activity in the visual cortex areas, but that certainly could be predicted from studies in my lab, reported in 2000. We showed that conscious realization of alternate perceptions of ambiguous figures in humans occurred when brain electrical activity (EEG) over the visual areas of scalp became highly synchronized, over a wide range of frequencies with multiple frontal areas, both in the same and even opposite hemisphere. Figure 1 shows the topography of coherence change at the moment of realization for the alternative perception.

Source: W. R. Klemm

Figure 1. Topographic summary of p<0.01-level coherence increases across all 10 ambiguous figures, all subjects, in the 25-50 Hz band. Each square matches a given electrode and shows how activity at that location became more coherent with activity at other locations at the instant the subject consciously realized the alternate perception in any of 10 ambiguous figures. From Klemm et al. (2000). Widespread coherence increases were also seen in the band below 25 Hz.

Thus, it seems that a meaningful detectable signal, which need not be limited to vision, not only activates its immediate neural targets, but those target cells can trigger feed-forward to trigger activity in more frontal areas. Feedback from those frontal areas can set up time-locked oscillatory coupling across wide expanses of cortex that is apparently necessary for conscious recognition. The time locking probably amplifies the signals to the threshold for conscious realization.

The distributed signal processing does not necessarily mean consciousness requires huge expanses of neural tissue. Recall from the split-brain studies in Roger Sperry’s lab that even half a brain can be fully conscious of the stimuli it can receive. The magic of consciousness seems to lie in the qualitative nature of data sharing, not in the volume of tissue involved.

Thus, the major issue is how oscillatory coupling of otherwise isolated circuitry amplifies signals to become consciously recognized. “Amplify” may be a misleading word, inasmuch as there is no compelling evidence as yet that consciousness is related to having more nerve impulses per unit of time. The impulses certainly don’t get bigger, because their voltage magnitude is constrained by concentration and electrostatic gradients. Rather, the secret may lay in the controlled timing of impulses. A likely form of amplification results from the reverberation of activity among coherent neuronal ensembles, which could have the effect of sustaining the stimulus long enough to be consciously detected, that is, for the brain to “see” what the eyes were looking at.

Consciousness may also simply be a matter of improving the signal-to-noise ratio. Time-locked, reverberating activity should be more isolated and protected from random activity which is unreliably associated with a given stimulus. Intuitively, that is what we sense in daily experiences. When we look at a tree, the cognitive noise of the multitude of tree signals may obscure our seeing the bird in the tree until, by accident or intent, we are able to see the bird.

This still leaves us with an incomplete answer. What is it about amplifying or reducing background noise that makes stimuli consciously recognizable? Where is the “who” in the brain that does the realizing? When my brain sees or hears something, it is “I” who consciously see or hear it. How does my brain create my “I” and where in my brain is my “I?” One possibility is that the unconscious brain can release a set of unique network activity that operates much like an avatar, giving brain a functionality it otherwise would not have. I elaborated this idea in my post “The Avatar Theory of Consciousness.”

How does this avatar “I” find a stimulus that it recognizes? Is it searching for it, like a searchlight scanning across the cortex for stimulus-induced activity? Or maybe it is not “looking for” sensation but rather is triggered into temporary existence when a stimulus acquires the needed threshold to launch consciousness. The monkey experiments support the latter option. However a stimulus becomes recognized, the awareness may outlast the triggering. We often consciously think about the meaning of a momentary stimulus, integrate it with memories, and develop beliefs, intentions, and responses, either cognitive or behavioral or both.

One more thing needs mention. In the monkey experiments, it was clear that the monkeys were continuously awake, even when they were not detecting presented stimuli. Thus, being awake is not the same as being conscious. We know this also from human experiments on inattentional blindness, which reveal that consciousness depends on selective attention. Wakefulness is a necessary condition for consciousness but not, by itself, sufficient.

Source: International Association for the Study of Dreams

Several hundred people from all over the world just gathered in Scottsdale, Arizona to discuss the latest findings and methods in dream research.  The 35th annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) featured five days of panels, workshops, and artistic events.  A lively mix of academic symposium, spiritual retreat, and collective self-experiment, the IASD conference offers a stimulating variety of approaches to the nature and meaning of dreams.

Here are several highlights from the sessions I attended.

Remington Mallet, a doctoral student in cognitiveneuroscience at the University of Texas, Austin, described exciting new research on “the ability to communicate in real-time between sleeping and waking.”  This theme has been explored in fictional form in various movies and television shows, from “Inception” to “Dream Corp. LLC.” Mallet analyzed the sleeping-waking communications portrayed in these popular media in relation to current scientific knowledge about what is and isn’t possible.  Mallet concluded that the media portrayals are far ahead of the actual science, but new technologies are moving quickly in the very same directions envisioned by the movies and television shows.     

Sharon Pastore and Tzivia Gover of the Institute for Dream Studies gave a moving presentation on the common themes in the dreams of those who care for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.  Building on research on dreams and bereavement, they described how simple methods of exploring dreams can be extremely helpful for the caregivers, whether professionals, friends, or family members: “Dreamwork can guide decisions in the care and communication with loved ones, as well as coping/healing.”  In additional to academic research, Pastore and Gover drew on personal experiences of caring for a parent with dementia to illuminate the value of dreams for the caregiving process.

Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, gave a fascinating keynote address on the role of sleep and dreaming in memory formation.  This has been a controversial topic in the field, with some researchers questioning the connection between sleep, dreams, and memory.  Stickgold granted that dreams rarely include episodic memories (i.e., direct, unmodified re-playings of a waking event).  But he laid out extensive evidence to support the idea that different stages of the sleep cycle are important for memory stabilization.  Sleep seems to help people better remember the emotionally relevant aspects of a waking experience.  He didn’t talk a lot about dreams, but he did note some studies “demonstrating the explicit incorporation of waking learning experiences into dream content… [S]uch incorporation is accompanied by enhanced sleep-dependent consolidation of the learning task.”  In other words, the more people dreamed about the learning task, the better they remembered it the next day.  The best part of Stickgold’s address, from my perspective, was his willingness to admit he does not have an easy answer to the “hard question” of how to relate the psychological experience of dreaming with the neurophysiological processes of sleep.  It was a refreshing statement of epistemological humility, and quite a contrast to the views of his predecessor at the Harvard lab, J. Allan Hobson, who had no doubt about the right answer to the hard question. 

Linda Mastrangelo, a psychotherapist with a private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, explored in detail a series of her own dreams in which she found unexpected connections with her family heritage, ancestral roots, and places of origin.  She combined psychology, myth, art, and sacred geography to trace out a map of her dreaming landscapes.  The frequency of certain places in her dreams inspired her to learn more about her own spiritual grounding in special features of the land, and to deepen her awareness of the wisdom traditions and ecological teachings that have grown around these places over the ages.  As Mastrangelo made clear, this is a process that anyone can pursue in exploring their own symbolic connections between dreaming and place.

Mark Blagrove, a professor of psychology and director of the sleep laboratory at Swansea University in the UK, proposed a theory of dream function that centered on the evolutionary value of empathy.  Drawing on the studies of Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley about fiction and empathy, Blagrove presented evidence in favor of a theory that telling dreams has the effect of eliciting greater empathy towards the dreamer, which strengthens interpersonal bonding and thus enhances reproductive fitness.  Blagrove made thought-provoking use of Mar and Oatley’s psychological analyses of fictional literature as a powerful means of simulating social experience and boosting our capacity to understand other people who are different from ourselves—that is, boosting our capacity for empathy.  After exploring the connections between empathy and dream-telling, Blagrove passed the microphone to Katja Valli, an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Skvode, Sweden, who agreed beforehand to offer constructive comments on the proposed theory.  This was an admirable exercise in scholarly dialogue, and a valuable opportunity for everyone in the audience to observe the kind of critical scrutiny that can help improve our ideas and sharpen our awareness. 

Next year’s IASD conference will be held June 21-25 in the Netherlands, at the Rolduc Abbey conference facility in Kerkrade, about 200 kilometers south of Amsterdam.  The Abbey is a glorious 12th century structure where the IASD has hosted two previous conferences.  I can’t wait!

Source: Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

I am an immigrant.  Married for over 10 years to an American husband, I am a therapist, teacher, trainer, and blogger.  You might think that I’d feel confident in my place in America.   Truthfully, I am deeply frightened, worried that somehow my still incomplete process of naturalization will be blocked and I’ll be deported.  

I should be silent and challenge nothing right now.  They are deporting so many.  What if they come for me? Fear often wakes me in the night and holds me sleepless for hours.   But my knowledge of human functioning and my ethics compel me to speak out when suffering is wantonly inflicted on others.

As a therapist, I spend much of my time with clients who are trauma survivors.  For the most part they are children suffering from developmental trauma early childhood abuse, or adults who were traumatized as children.  I see daily the devastating impact of early trauma on my clients and their families. Trauma reaches far into the future of its victims and it is hard to undo the damage it causes.

In early life, infants and toddlers need safe, predictable, accessible, and loving caregivers to provide a foundation for further growth.   When they are exposed to terrifying stress due to separation (even a short one when it is not followed by prompt reunification with their primary caregiver) or deprived from ongoing stability for extended periods, development of the brain, emotional functioning, and even the body are affected. The longer the exposure to separation or instability, the greater the injury. 

The brain develops from the bottom up. Lower parts of the brain are responsible for our survival and stress responses.  The upper parts are responsible for executive functioning (like making sense of what you are experiencing or exercising moral judgement). Development of the upper parts depends on prior development of lower parts.

When stress responses are repeatedly activated over an extended period of time in an infant, brain development is compromised. This can manifest later in defiant behavior and speech and auditory difficulties.  Together these are a setup for behavioral and learning difficulties (many diagnoses of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and ADHD are at root the result of developmental trauma).

Possibly even more damaging, early separation trauma damages a child’s ability to form and retain healthy attachments (emotional connection) to others.  When children fail to experience caregivers as available and compassionate in times of fear and stress, they react to the entire experience of attachment as unsafe.  The result is what therapists call reactive attachment disorder, which manifests in an out of balance nervous system (either hyper or hypo/numb).  Often it is followed in later years with other diagnoses such as personality disorder, depression, anxiety, bipolar, etc. 

Early trauma creates a chronic sense of stress and fear that accompanies survivors relentlessly across life. Children deprived of or removed from the safety of loving care are terrified.   They are wired to know that their survival hangs on others.  In their small world of total dependency, the absence or disappearance of familiar, loving caregivers is similar to what an adult might experience after being informed that the world is going to end at any minute.  

Stress accumulates in a child, as it does in adults.  The body remembers and reacts to repeated sensations of fear and stress. Over time, chronic stress often affects physical wellbeing as well in the form of disturbed metabolism, a compromised immune system, and difficulties with sleeping. 

Trauma is transgenerational
Although the devastating impact of trauma has been recognized for a long time, it is not as widely recognized that the pain it inflicts can impact generations to come.  We now know that trauma is transferred from one generation to the next through epigenetics. It seems that the genes conveyed by trauma survivors to their children carry modifications that function to make their children particularly vigilant against the possibility of recurrence of that trauma. In other words, heightened anxiety and stress are passed on to future generations so they can better cope with what their ancestors endured.

Three generations removed from Holocaust survivors on one side, and World War One era pogroms on the other, I grew up on stories of family members separated in terrifying circumstances from one another and in several cases dying.

When I studied research documenting the transgenerational impacts of trauma, I felt that I could finally understand why I have lived my whole life with a sense of pain and grief over people long gone whom I never met.

Living daily, in both my personal and professional life, with the consequences of early life trauma, it is acutely painful to witness the trauma inflicted now on young children (and their families) at America’s borders. I have often wondered if my ancestors might have survived had those around them refused to be silent bystanders and spoken out against the atrocities that took place during the Holocaust.

It is excruciating now to witness innocent human beings around me dealt with in ways that I know will resulting in debilitating, lifelong damage to many of them.  Today it is my turn to be more than a bystander.

Dr. Colleen Craft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, described her impressions from a visit to a Texas children’s shelter in an NPR report: "By separating parents and children, we are doing irreparable harm to these children. The long-term concern of what we call toxic stress is that brains are not developed efficiently or effectively”.

Craft describes a toddler "...crying and pounding and having a huge, huge temper tantrum. This child was just screaming, and nobody could help her. And we know why she was crying. She didn't have her mother. She didn't have her parent who could soothe her and take care of her."

I invite you to listen to this episode of the Circle of Willis podcast in which psychologist Jim Coan talks with five leading developmental scientists about the potential impact of this separation on children.

As I write, there are reports of a presidential executive order ending separation of children from their parents.  For this I am grateful.  But this does not mean that these vulnerable children are no longer at risk from decisions of adults who are deeply ignorant of or cruelly hardened to the damage of childhood trauma. 

There are those who say, “but it is the parent’s fault who bring these children.”   Yet those who today live in security and comfort, clamoring for walls against newcomers are themselves grandchildren of immigrants who fled terror, persecution, poverty, and despair.  I wonder how they have lost the realization that life has a way of placing us all in situations of dependency on the kindness of others or in transition across borders of one kind or another.

Walls are built from fear, and I am not immune to fear.  But more than strangers, I fear the danger of neighbors who’ve lost compassion for others. 
As a person, as a mother, as a mental health professional, and as a nervous immigrant myself, I feel I must raise my voice for the vulnerable.

Source: Pexels

Memory refers to the system, or systems, by which the mind registers, stores, and retrieves information for the purpose of optimizing future action.

Memory can be divided into short-term and long-term memory. Long-term memory can be further divided into episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory records sense experiences, while semantic memory records abstract facts and concepts. Interestingly, the distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory is already implicit in a number of languages in which the verb ‘to know’ takes on two forms, for example, in French, connaître and savoir, where connaître implies a direct, privileged kind of knowledge acquired through sense experience.

There is, naturally, a close connection between memory and knowledge. The connaître and savoir dichotomy is also pertinent to the theory of knowledge, which distinguishes between first-hand knowledge and testimonial knowledge, that is, knowledge gained through the say-so of others, often teachers, journalists, and writers. In the absence of first-hand knowledge, the accuracy of a piece of testimony can only be verified against other sources of testimony. Similarly, the accuracy of most memories can only be verified against other memories, not any independent standard.

Episodic and semantic memory are held to be explicit or ‘declarative’, but there is also a third kind of memory, procedural memory, which is implicit or unconscious, for knowing how to do things such as reading and cycling. Although held to be explicit, episodic and semantic memory can influence action without any need for conscious retrieval—which, of course, underlies practices such as advertising and brainwashing. In fact, it is probably fair to say that most of our memories lie beyond conscious retrieval, or are not consciously retrieved, and, therefore, that memory mostly operates unconsciously. ‘Education’, said BF Skinner, ‘is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.’

A mysterious type of memory is prospective memory, or ‘remembering to remember’. To send my mother a birthday card, I must not only remember her birthday, but also remember to remember it. Whenever I forget to set my alarm clock, I usually find myself waking up just in time to make my first appointment, even when I have only slept three or four hours. This suggests that, even in sleep, the mind is able to remember to remember, while also keeping track of the time.

Memory is encoded across several brain areas, meaning that brain damage or disease can affect one type of memory more than others. For example, Korsakov syndrome, which results from severe thiamine deficiency and consequent damage to the mammillary bodies and dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus, affects episodic memory more than semantic memory, and anterograde memory (ability to form new memories) more than retrograde memory (store of old memories), while sparing short-term and procedural memory. Alzheimer’s disease on the other hand affects short-term memory more than long-term memory, especially in its early stages.

As a psychiatrist, I am often asked to assess people with advanced Alzheimer’s Disease and other forms of dementia, and am all too aware of the importance of memory in our lives. Without any memory at all, it would be impossible to speak, to read, to learn, to find one’s way, to make decisions, to identify or use objects, to cook, to wash, to dress, to develop or maintain relationships, or to have any real sense of self. To live without memory is to live in a perpetual present, without past, and without future. It would be impossible to build upon anything, or even to engage in any kind of sustained, goal-directed activity. Although there is wisdom in being in the moment, one cannot always be in the moment. In Greek myth, the goddess of memory, Memosyne, slept with Zeus for nine consecutive nights, thereby begetting the nine Muses. Without memory, there would be no art or science, no craft or culture.

And no meaning either. Nostalgia is often prompted by feelings of loneliness, disconnectedness, or meaninglessness. Revisiting our past can lend us much-needed context, perspective, and direction, reminding and reassuring us that our life is not as banal as it may seem, that it is rooted in a narrative, and that there have been—and will once again be—meaningful moments and memories. And it seems, if weddings and wedding photographs are anything to go by, that we go to considerable lengths to manufacture memories for the purpose of nostalgizing. Tragically, people with severe memory loss cannot revisit the past, and, as a result, may confabulate (make up memories) to create the meaning that they yearn for. I once visited a nursing home in England to assess an 85-year-old lady with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. She maintained that we were in a hotel in Marbella, and that she was making plans for her wedding. When I asked her what she did yesterday, she replied, with a twinkle in her eye, that she hit the town for her bachelorette (hen night), and that her glamorous friends spoilt her rotten with champagne and fancy cocktails. The search for meaning is deeply ingrained in human nature, so much so that, when pressed to define man, Plato replied, ‘a being in search of meaning’. Like confabulation, it could be argued that nostalgia is a form of self-deception, in that it involves distortion and idealization of the past. The Romans had a tag for the phenomenon that psychologists have come to call ‘rosy retrospection’: memoria praeteritorum bonorum, ‘the past is always well remembered.’

And memory is unreliable in other ways as well. ‘Everyone’, said John Barth, ‘is necessarily the hero of his own life story’. We curate our memories by consolidating those that confirm or conform to our idea of ourselves, while discarding or distorting those that conflict with it. We are very likely to remember events of existential importance such as our first kiss, or our first day at school—and, of course, it helps that we often rehearse those memories. Even then, we remember just one or two scenes, and fill in the gaps with reconstructed or ‘averaged’ memories. Déjà-vu (French for ‘already seen’), the feeling that a situation that is currently being experienced has already been experienced, may arise from a very good match between the current situation and an averaged memory of that sort of situation. Our memories depend on our interests and emotions. Two people supporting opposing teams in a football match, or opposing political parties in an election, will register and recall very different things, and would likely disagree about ‘the facts’.

Generally speaking, emotionally charged events are more likely to be remembered, and it has been found that injections of cortisol or epinephrine (adrenaline) can improve retention rates. But if a situation is highly stressful, memory may be impaired as cognitive resources are diverted to dealing with the situation, for example, escaping from the gunman rather than registering his clothing or facial features. In addition, any attention paid to the gunman is likely to focus on the gun itself, leading to a kind of peripheral blindness. All this has real implications for the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, which may be further distorted by the use of leading or loaded questions. In a study, Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction, Loftus and Palmer asked people to estimate the speed of motor vehicles when they smashed/collided/bumped/hit/contacted each other, and found that the verb in the question altered perceptions of speed. What’s more, those asked the ‘smashed’ question were subsequently more likely to report having seen broken glass. After a traumatic event, to cope with unbearable stress, a person might go so far as to dissociate from the event, for example, by losing all memory for the event (dissociative amnesia) or even, as Agatha Christie once did, assuming another identity and departing on a sudden, unexpected journey (dissociative fugue).

While on the subject of memory and emotion, it is well known that, of all the senses, it is the sense of smell that triggers the most vivid memories and emotions. The olfactory bulb has direct connections to the amygdala and hippocampus, which are strongly implicated in emotion and memory. These three structures—the olfactory bulb, the amygdala, and the hippocampus—form part of the limbic system, a ring of phylogenetically primitive or ‘paleomammalian’ cortex that is heavily involved in emotion, memory, and motivation. In a famous passage, ‘the madeleine moment’, Marcel Proust describes the uncanny ability of certain odours to recapture the ‘essence of the past’:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

Killing two birds with one stone, here are 10 ways to improve your memory that also cast light on its workings:

1. Get enough sleep. If you read a book or article when very tired, you will forget most of what you have read. Sleep improves attention and concentration, and therefore the registration of information, or retention rate. Sleep is also required for memory consolidation.
2. Pay attention. You cannot take in information unless you are paying attention, and you cannot memorize information unless you are taking it in. It helps if you are actually interested in the material, so try to develop an interest in everything! As Einstein said, ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.’
3. Involve as many senses as you can. For instance, if you are sitting in a lecture, jot down a few notes. If you are reading a chapter or article, read it aloud to yourself and maybe even inject some drama.
4. Structure information. If, for example, you need to remember a list of ingredients, think of them under the subheadings of starter, main, and dessert, and visualize the number of ingredients under each subheading. If you need to remember a telephone number, think of it in terms of the first five digits, the middle three digits, and the last three digits—or whatever works best.
5. Process information. If possible, summarize the material in your own words. Or reorganize it so that it is easier to learn. With more complex material, try to understand its meaning and import.
6. Relate information to what you already know. New information is much easier to remember if it can be contextualized. In a recent study looking at the role of high-level processes, Lane and Chang found that chess knowledge predicts chess memory even after controlling for chess experience.
7. Use mnemonics. Tie information to visual images, sentences, acronyms, or rhymes. For example, you might remember that your hairdresser is called Sharon by picturing a Rose of Sharon or a sharon fruit. Or you might remember the colours of the rainbow and their order by the sentence, ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle in Vain’. Medical students remember the symptoms of varicose veins by the acronym ‘AEIOU’: Aching, Eczema, Itching, Oedema, and Ulceration.
8. Rehearse information. Sleep on the information and review it the following day. Then review it at growing intervals until you feel comfortable with it. Memories fade if not rehearsed, or are overlaid by other memories and can no longer be accessed.
9. Pay attention to context. It is easier to retrieve a memory if you find yourself in a similar situation to the one in which the memory was formed, or if you are feeling the same way. People with low mood tend to remember their losses and failures while overlooking their strengths and achievements. If one day you pass the cheesemonger in the street, you may not, without her usual apron and array of cheeses, immediately recognize her as the cheesemonger, even though she is very familiar to you. If you are preparing for an exam, try to recreate the conditions of the exam: for example, sit at a similar desk, at a similar time of day, and write with ink on paper.
10. Be creative. Bizarre or unusual experiences, facts, and associations are much easier to remember. Because unfamiliar experiences stick in the mind, trips and holidays give the impression of living, and of living longer. Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.

Source: CCO Creative Commons

Memory is fallible. Memory is fragile. Memory ends at the present moment. It is everything you have lived, experienced, seen, and felt up until this instant. Everyone holds their own set of memories. Sometimes it might feel unnecessary to stick to the exact or literal truth of what happened, as long as the message or the meaning of the experience is portrayed.

Fiction writers must master the art of creating a vivid picture, but the challenge for memoirists is to determine how and what to remember. Very often, storytelling, whether verbal or written, is a cross between fiction and nonfiction. For example, when people write memoirs, they typically convey the truth—to the best of their knowledge. However, memory plays tricks on us, and sometimes details get blurred. Typically, what we remember is based on how we felt (positive or negative) in response to an experience.

The concept of memory has been on my mind lately. It might have to do with the fact that I’m teaching a memoir-writing class, that I have an aging mother, and because many people have been complaining that they’re questioning the nature and/or clarity of their recollections. Perhaps the omnipresent social media and the necessity for daily multitasking is obscuring our sense of focus. What we forget might not always pertain to important matters—maybe it’s more about mundane subjects, such as the point that you were making in a conversation or where you left your keys.

At times, when we tell stories, we might consciously or unconsciously fill in the gaps as a way to make the narrative hang together; thus, we are merging our memories with our imagination. This can also be called embellishment. A well-known example is the drama surrounding James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Back in 2002, Smoking Gun published an article claiming that Frey had fabricated part of his book. This inspired many people to read it, and, as a result, sales skyrocketed. When he was interviewed about what happened, Frey said that all memoirists alter minor details to increase the literary effect of their stories. His comment ignited a nationwide discussion about truth in memoir, something I had been discussing in my writing workshops for years.

Years ago, I conducted a research project on the interplay between memory and imagination. I compared two memoirs: Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings(1995) and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. (1972). In her book, Welty compared her inner and outer worlds:

The outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My work, in the terms in which I see it, is as dearly matched to the world as its sharer. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning (p. 76).

What I learned is that, for the most part, when memoirists start to write their stories, they set out to be truthful; but often, as in McCarthy’s case, it does not take long before they realize the unreliability of their own memories. McCarthy got lost in a labyrinth of confusing images from her past. She was unsure about the demarcations among her memories, her imagination, and her habit of lying during childhood. She was not even sure if there was a clear boundary.

McCarthy shared her memories of the difficult times before her parents’ deaths, when she was six years old. At the time of the influenza epidemic, her family had to evacuate their home. She vividly describes the hotel in which they all spent an evening and its grim environment. She said that she remembered some of the things about her mother’s death and how all the adults looked worried and uncertain; but she was unsure if she truly remembered all the details, because at the end of her passage she wrote, “. . . as I recall it.” Her inability to check the facts gave her a strong sense of insecurity about her past.

Patricia Hampl, in her essay “Memory and Imagination” (2002), said that writers pen memoirs to find out what they don’t know, in an attempt to not only find themselves but also to find (and share) a world.

Here are some tricks to jog your memory if you’re having trouble remembering something:

·      Engage in mindfulness, and be consciously aware as you go about your day.

·      Find photos or objects relating to people or experiences you’re trying to recall.

·      Speak to others who have gone through similar experiences.

·      Reminisce regularly.

·      Listen to music that might evoke certain memories.

·      Make a memory box—include a chart for the years of your life, and try to recall what you were doing during each month of each year.

Most important, continue to engage in activities that are stimulating, inspiring, and that lead to the creation of new memories.

When I talk about control with friends, colleagues, or in teaching and training seminars, it’s often suggested that I should find another word to use. Over and over, people have told me that the word “control” has negative connotations and so we should use other words instead. Depending on the context, the alternatives that are offered are words like “regulate” or “steer” or “guide” or “shape”.

For a whole host of reasons, I think it’s a shame that control has a bad rap and I want to do what I can to change that. Perhaps the reason control is not viewed more favourably is because it is misunderstood.  

When something is misunderstood, I think we should talk about and study that something more, not less. For that reason, I want to keep talking about control. I want everyone to know just what a groovy phenomenon control is.

Control is nothing more mysterious than making things happen the way you want. Getting to church every Sunday before the first hymn finishes is control, and robbing a bank before the cops turn up is control.

Source: Labelled for reuse; Derek Keats; Red-billed Oxpecker; flickr

Brand new babies control and sweet little old grannies looking over the top of their spectacles at you control. You control. I control. Even letting go of control is control. Every living thing controls. Control is actually the thing that keeps them living. Blue whales feeding on krill at the South Pole control, and oxpecker birds eating ticks on the backs of zebras roaming across the Serengeti grasslands control.

Control is life. Walking along a busy sidewalk and texting your colleague about where to meet for lunch is control; rocking your baby to sleep is control; kicking your foot out when the doctor taps your patella tendon is control; writing to Santa is control; raising a glass in acknowledgement and admiration is control; teaching your dog to sit on command is control; squinting when you step into the sunlight is control; buying the perfect anniversary gift is control; singing in harmony is control; arranging the knives and forks around the table for dinner is control; cooking your eggs “sunny side up” is control; assuming the Bharadvaja’s Twist yoga pose is control; stopping your car at the red light is control; adjusting the volume is control; calculating the second derivative to find the stationary point on a curve is control; making it across the road before the walk signal stops flashing is control; bending down on one knee to propose is control; fighting to end inequity and discrimination is control; even thinking up examples of control is control!

Is control nature’s most stupendously magnificent achievement? It is so much more marvellous than gravity or lightning. Control could be nature’s most important but also most neglected force. I’m sure you’ve experienced the force of control many times but maybe you haven’t appreciated it for what it is.

If you’ve ever bounded out of bed in the dead of night at the sound of your infant crying, or swerved violently to dodge the deer that just bounded out of the undergrowth, or frantically flung your chair back to avoid the tumbling glass of red wine from splashing on your favourite outfit, you’ll know the force of control that compels you to do something any time there’s a large and sudden difference between the way things are, and the way you want them to be.

Thankfully, large and sudden differences aren’t usually the order of the day. For the most part, control is gloriously mundane. It’s a bit like air. Generally, we never notice the way we use the air around us, unceasingly and unobtrusively, to keep ourselves alive as we inhale and exhale throughout the day. Similarly we mostly don’t notice controlling as we, unceasingly and unobtrusively, act to keep our world the way we want it to be. Unfettered control feels like … nothing. It’s just going with the flow, or getting on with things, or being in the groove.  

When problems occur, they are problems of control. Fever is a sign that all is not right with some of the control systems that keep your blood and internal organs the way they should be. Depression is a sign that all is not right with some of the control systems that keep your psychological and social life the way it should be.

Whatever we do in life is control. Getting better at something means getting better at controlling the important parts of that something. Getting better at tennis means getting better at controlling things like the direction and speed of a tennis ball. Getting better at parenting means getting better at controlling things like: how patient you are; how caring you are; how attentive you are; how available you are; how reasonable you are; how considerate you are; and how consistent you are.

Control is not good or bad, in much the same way that rain is not good or bad. It just is. If I’m planning a barbecue on the beach, a thunderstorm will be a darn nuisance. If I’m waiting for my crops to grow, a deluge will be a godsend. And, although you can come in out of the rain, you can’t ever escape control.

Control: it’s only natural. By learning more about control and how it works we’ll have a better chance of getting more of what we want more of the time, and building healthier and happier relationships and communities. Control is as ancient as life itself, but this ancient miracle could hold the key to a new and exciting frontier of carefree, compassionate, and contented social living.

This article is part 2 of a guest post replying to a series of articles (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) I posted critiquing a paper called 'The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load', in which the authors of the paper respond to my criticisms.  As I noted previously, the contents of the following represent the authors' views, not mine, and I stand behind my original critique. 

It May Seem ‘Amazing’ (and Even ‘Egregious’) but the Mutant Really Does Say in His Heart: “There is no God”’ (Part 2)

Dr Edward Dutton and Prof Guy Madison

10. The Religion-Health Nexus doesn’t exist

Mr McGreal criticised our argument that the religion-health nexus may be partly genetic on the grounds that Koenig (2012) assumes it to be environmental in origin. However, Koenig specifically argued that religion, in general, is not associated with health, but rather that only the very specific kind of religion that involves community worship and belief in God is positively associated with health. And we make it abundantly clear that it is only this very specific kind of religiosity that is associated with elevated health.

11. Healthy Non-Religious Jews

Evidence has been presented that non-religious Jews are healthier than some religious gentiles (see McGreal, 19th March 2018). Of course there is bound to be variation within a general trend for various reasons, which obviously does not refute the general pattern observed. The relevant comparison would be observant Jews versus non-observant Jews.  

12. Healthy Atheist Ideologues

Evidence is cited indicating that atheists with a well-defined world view are healthier than the vaguely religious. This is again comparing different things. We have in no way argued that religious people are always healthier than atheists, nor is that key to the theoretical issue. What we do argue is that this is the overall trend and, more importantly, that it is the case when key variables that also impact health – such as socioeconomic status – are controlled for. In addition, we are quite clear that we are talking about a very specific kind of religiousness, of which the vaguely religious would not be a part.

This provides a route into the question of which beliefs might fulfil our definition of religiousness. Indeed, atheists with a ‘well-defined worldview,’ such as active Marxists, can be argued to be following something that is in many ways similar to a religion. Indeed, ideologies are widely argued in Religious Studies to be, in some ways, ‘replacement religions’ (see Dutton, 2014; Eliade, 1957). We would therefore certainly expect such people to be healthier than other kinds of atheist. Thus, we might question whether they are really atheists at all. Marxism seems to reify History as something that unfolds inevitably; implying some kind of belief in Fate. So, although these people do not seem to believe in gods, they seem to conceive of eternal values and principles that are absolute and unquestionable, indistinguishable from religious dogma. As Jordan Peterson (2018, p. 103) has put it:

‘You might object, “But I’m an atheist!” No you’re not . . . You’re simply not an atheist in your actions, and it is your actions that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs . . . You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.’     

Also, as we stated in our original study (Dutton et al., 2017, p. 3):

‘. . . it has been argued that atheistic ideologies, such as Marxism, have many religious dimensions (Eliade, 1957), to the extent that they are, to some extent, ‘replacement religions’ (see Dutton, 2014). However, in practice, their leaders are often accorded transcendental powers and ultimately literal god-like status, as in the Soviet Union with Lenin and Stalin (Froese, 2008).’ 

13. Religiousness not related to subjective health in parts of USA

It has been noted by Mr McGreal that in less religious areas of the USA religiousness is not related to ‘subjective health.’ It may well not be, but that is missing the point, which is that objective health is relevant to our analysis of adaptive values. Indeed, subjective health has been shown to be a poor proxy for objective health, so it is unsurprising that whereas the correlation between religious measures and health is about 0.29-0.38 (see Koenig et al., 2012), it has been shown to be much weaker – in one study 0.09 – when it comes to subjective health (see Argyle & Hallahmi, 2004, p. 187).

14. Left-handedness doesn’t predict Atheism

McGreal claims that our analysis of handedness says nothing conclusive about atheists. What it does show is that the least religious are the most left-handed. As atheists can be regarded as very irreligious indeed, it is reasonable to conclude that atheism is associated with left-handedness. Mr McGreal further attacks the fact that the study measure is religious commitment, and that this is ‘distinct’ from religious belief. It can be countered that it may well be distinct but it is clearly very far from completely distinct. 

15. Left-Handedness is not a Mutation

Mr McGreal has questioned whether left-handedness can be regarded as a marker of genetic mutation load because handedness is also influenced by environmental factors. This is a mute argument, as one would be hard pressed to identify any trait, let alone any measure of developmental instability, that is not influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.

16. Atheists are not Autistic

Concern has been raised by Mr McGreal about our argument that autism is associated with atheism. This is a version of the old logic problem that if all p are q, does it then follow that all q are p? No, and if autistics (who have a ‘pathology’) are atheists for a particular reason then everybody else who is an atheist does not have to be that for the same reason. But we are not arguing this. The evidence shows that we are all somewhere on a spectrum between autism (which predicts atheism) and schizophrenia (which predicts extreme religiosity). Autism reflects hypo-mentalism and schizophrenia reflects hyper-mentalism (Crespi & Badcock, 2008). People become more atheistic as they get closer to the autism end of this spectrum. So, Mr McGreal’s criticism involves drawing some sort of essentialist line between ‘mentals’ and ‘normals.’ There is no such line.

17. Confusion over maladaptive intelligence

Mr McGreal accused us of being confused in how we dealt with an anomaly in our study. We argued that mutational load would be associated with atheism. Yet this does not fit with evidence that intelligence – which is a marker of low mutational load – is weakly negatively associated with religiosity. We respond to this anomaly with two key points. Firstly, intelligence is a very weak marker of mutational load and, secondly, the criticism confuses different time perspectives. Let us elaborate. Yes, intelligence has historically been adaptive, probably up until at least the 18th century (Woodley & Figueredo, 2013). Nevertheless, from a Darwinian perspective, intelligence is non-adaptive in the present-day modern context, because it is negatively associated with fertility, meaning that we would actually expect it to be associated with mutation load. Mr McGreal claims that we try to ‘have our cake and eat it’ and that our idea is ‘confused’ (McGreal, 21st March 2018). It is indeed a confusing issue, and we should have put more effort into clarifying it. With regards to the present-day situation, however, the issue is crystal-clear: You are adapted to your environment to the extent that you pass on your genes. The intelligent pass on fewer of their genes than do the less intelligent in developed countries. Therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, intelligence is presently maladaptive in this ecology as it does not promote the passing on of its underlying genes.

18. Lack of direct measures

We do of course agree that more direct measures of mutational load are required to more conclusively test our hypothesis. This reflects that classical problem of where to draw the line between what is a legitimate scientific endeavour and what is not, reflected in the aphorism that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Should we refrain from communicating what we believe might become a fruitful and important area of study, because the data are not good enough, or restrict ourselves to non-scholarly outlets? On the other side of the balance, it might be better to communicate ideas with the rigour and empirical evaluation that can nevertheless be mustered in a specialist journal, rather than in the shallow and abridged form available to a magazine author. That might furthermore provoke the unearthing or gathering of relevant data. Thus, employing the best data one can find is, however unsatisfying, still better than not testing the hypothesis at all.

19. Religiousness, symmetry and the paranormal

Mr McGreal criticises our argument that paranormal belief is a marker of mutational load on the grounds that religious people are also more likely to believe in the paranormal. He notes that the evidence we cite – of schizophrenics and those with mildly asymmetrical physical traits (both signs of mutational load) being more prone to paranormal belief - does not allow a distinction to be made between religious and non-religious paranormal believers. Again, however, we do highlight the relative weakness of some of our measures, and that we employ them because they are the best available. Mr McGreal concludes that, in essence, if you’re more inclined to believe in one form of non-material existence then you’re more inclined to believe in another. However, there is evidence that schizophrenia predicts not only belief in the paranormal but also belief in conspiracy theories. These have nothing to do with a non-material existence (Barron et al., 2018). Schizophrenic characteristics are also associated with belief in aliens (see Clancy et al., 2002). This would imply that schizophrenia, as a marker of high mutational load, is associated with both material and non-material worldviews which deviate from the specific one to which we are long evolved. This is the model which explains all these data, whereas Mr McGreal’s ‘one non-material belief, many non-material beliefs’ explains only part of these data.

20. There is no evidence for an atheism asymmetry nexus

Finally, Mr McGreal observes that we have found no relationship between atheism and asymmetry, which he takes as an argument against our propositions. That does not quite follow, however, because it remains to be tested. Some data to that effect that we had not room to cover in the article are that, as noted in Dutton’s (2018) How to Judge People by What They Look Like, Republican voters are more physically attractive than are Democrat voters (Peterson & Palmer, 2017), with low physical attraction being a sign of developmental instability. As further indications of a relationship between atheism and mutational load it has been it has been found that in Europe, the USA and Australia, people rate ‘right wing’ politicians as more physically attractive than ‘left wing’ politicians (Berggren et al., 2017). The authors provide an economic explanation: ‘Politicians on the right look more beautiful in Europe, the United States and Australia. Our explanation is that beautiful people earn more, which makes them less inclined to support redistribution.’ However, the problem with this argument is that there is far more to being a ‘right-wing’ politician than not supporting economic socialism. The current consensus in psychology is that two broad dimensions are necessary to describe sociopolitical attitudes (Duckitt et al. 2002). One of these is ‘resistance to change’ or ‘traditionalism’ and the other is ‘anti-egalitarianism’ or justification of inequality. Berggren et al.’s interpretation does not explain why good-looking politicians are more likely to be traditionalist.

An alternative explanation to Berggren et al.’s, which is far less question-begging, is that egalitarianism, the questioning of religious tradition and the promotion of Multiculturalism were extremely rare between the Dark Ages and the Industrial Revolution; the period of intense Darwinian selection. Populations that were so low in ethnocentrism as to espouse Multiculturalism and reject religion would have been selected against, and would probably have been extinguished across the 50 generations or so in this interval. The evidence for this consists of the robust association between religiousness and ethnocentrism and the fact that ethnocentric groups ultimately win the battle of group selection in computer models, as we noted in our article. It therefore follows that the espousal of these dogmas would partly reflect mutant genes, just as the espousal of atheism does. This elevated mutational load would be reflected in the bodies as well as the brains of its protagonists. Accordingly, we would expect them to have higher fluctuating asymmetry in the face – reflecting mutation – and this is indeed the case. There is a substantial degree to which ‘religiousness’ crosses over with being ‘right-wing’ in industrial societies. Indeed, the Right Wing Authoritarian Scale (RWA) and the Fundamentalism Scale have been shown to significantly correlate at 0.75 (Laythe et al., 2001), meaning they are strongly the same. So, these studies provided indirect evidence for an atheism-fluctuating asymmetry nexus.

The (Mutant) Heart of the Matter

As stated, we agree with Mr McGreal that more research is needed in this area, and it would be informative if more direct measures of mutational load could be unearthed. We do insist, however, that it is not a valid argument against our study that these kinds of data do not exist or that we have been unable to find them. Having now responded to all points, we feel that the heart of the matter might be an overestimation of what it means to propose something in a scientific journal. It does of course not mean that we insist that this is the absolute truth or that we demand that the reader agrees, and it does neither necessarily mean that we believe it ourselves. What it does mean is that we find it sufficiently worthwhile to use as a lever to gain new knowledge, as supported by its tendency to arouse interest amongst other intellectuals and academics - to which Mr McGreal’s thoughtful responses amply testify. In this light, many of the points could be seen as somewhat nit-picking or unpersuasive upon close inspection. We are nevertheless very grateful for Mr McGreal’s interest in our work, engaging in which has forced us to think carefully about our study and to some extent develop our reasoning, and for his courtesy in publishing our response on his blog.

It has thus been a fruitful exchange for us, as well as hopefully to some extent for the development of knowledge in general. We conclude that we were quite correct in saying that ‘The mutant says in his heart, “There is no God”’. The study has stood up to the many criticisms levelled against it, notwithstanding its ‘controversial’ findings.

References

Argyle, M. & Hallahmi, B. (2004). The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience. London: Routledge.

Barron, D., Furnham, A., Weis, L., Morgan, K., Towell, T. & Swami, V. (2018). The Relationship Between Schizotypal Facets and Conspiracist Beliefs via Cognitive Processes. Psychiatry Research, 259: 15-20.

Berggren, N., Jordahl, H. & Poutvaara, P. (2017). The Right Look: Conservative Politicians Look Better and Voters Reward It. Journal of Public Economics, 146: 79-86.

Blume, M. (2009). The reproductive benefits of religious affiliation. In Voland, E. & Schiefenhövel, W. (Eds.). The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior. New York: Springer.

Clancy, S., McNally, R., Schacter, D. (2002). Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol 111: 455-461.

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Crespi, B. & Badcock, C. (2008). Psychosis and autism as diametrical disorders of the social brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31: 284-320.

Dickens, W. & Flynn, J. (2001). Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved. Psychological Review, 108: 346-369.

Duckitt, J., Wagner, C., Du Plessis, I. & Birum, I. (2002). The psychological bases of ideology and prejudice: Testing a dual process model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83: 75-93.

Dutton, E. (2018). How to Judge People By What They Look Like. Thomas Edward Press

Dutton, E. (2014). Religion and Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. London: Ulster Institute for Social Research.

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Dutton, E., Madison, G. & Dunkel, C. (2017). The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: The Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods is Associated with High Mutational Load. Evolutionary Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0133-5

Dutton, E., Madison, G. & Lynn, R. (2016). Demographic, economic, and genetic factors related to national differences in ethnocentric attitudes. Personality and Individual Differences, 101: 137-143.

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Ellis, L., Hoskin, A., Dutton, E. & Nyborg, H. (2017). The Future of Secularism: A Biologically Informed Theory Supplemented with Cross-Cultural Evidence. Evolutionary Psychological Science, doi 10.1007/s40806-017-0090-z

Froese, P. (2008). The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Tiffany looked great and was obviously thrilled with the results of her weight control and stressmanagement program, so Nadia decided to give it a try. “I don’t understand it, ” she said, dismayed, “I’ve been following the same program religiously, but I’m just not getting anywhere. What’s wrong with me?”

Virtually all introductory psychology courses teach that everyone is unique, but this important fact is often forgotten. As a result, we find all sorts of general facts, figures, and average statistics that often have no personal validity.

For example, almost everyone has seen the typical charts that list ideal weights according to body mass index or BMI. And while a generally valid guideline, BMI is not the ultimate metric for a healthy body weight that many people think it is.  This is because it fails to take body composition into account. Therefore, very athletic and muscular people can register as overweight, or even obese, based on a simple BMI.  For example, in his prime, Michael Jordan was “overweight” with a BMI 28 yet his waist was less than 30 inches.  And, believe it of not, with a BMI over 30, Arnold Schwarzenegger was “obese” during his reign as Mr. Olympia!  Consequently, the recommended number on the BMI chart may be too low or too high for certain individuals.

This is because people are complex and multidimensional beings who cannot easily be reduced to simple, one dimensional numbers, labels or terms. (This includes psychiatric diagnoses, too.)

Or, take those numbers that have appeared in numerous publications and purport to measure degrees of stress. “Death of a spouse” heads the list The implication is that all marriages are the same, that everyone loves and cares for his or her spouse equally, and that, therefore, everyone will be equally devastated by the demise of a marriage partner. Unfortunately, we have probably all met couples where such an event would be as much of a relief as a source of extreme stress!

And how about those diet books that provide sample menus? After studying a recommended diet plan, one of my patients remarked that if she followed such a program she would gain, not lose, a pound a week. She was correct. When she followed that plan she gained weight. Her metabolic rate called for far fewer calories than most people require.

Similarly, in the mental health field, too many therapists have a standard regimen that they use on everyone. Frequently, a form of treatment that might be helpful for someone else might be unhelpful or even harmful for you.  What’s worse, some therapists have only a single tool in their therapeutic toolbox.  Obviously, if all one has is a hammer one will be tempted to treat everything (or everyone) like a nail.

These one dimensional and single focused clinicians use a “Procrustean bed” approach when providing therapy.

In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon.  He had a bed in which he insisted that every passer-by spend the night.  If a guest was shorter than the bed, Procrustes would set to work on them with his smith's hammer to stretch them to fit.  If the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length because Procrustes demanded an exact fit.

Hence, a Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.  Therapists who employ Procrustean bed approaches to psychological  treatment basically have a single method or intervention that they use on everyone.  Rather than modifying their therapeutic approach to fit the needs of unique individuals, they insist their clients conform to their preferred method.  Thus everyone they see in therapy will get whatever they like to dispense, whether or not it’s what the client really needs.  So, regardless of one’s presenting complaint (i.e., anxiety, depression, panic, OCD, trauma, stress, etc.), a Procrustean bed practitioner will provide only DBT, or ACT, or standard CBT, or psychoanalysis, or mindfulness, or hypnosis, or EMDR, or medication…     

Unlike Procrustes, a really good therapist will tailor the treatment to suit your specific needs, rather than attempting to fit you to his or her preferred method.  This, of course, requires that therapists are flexible and adaptable, and have an eclectic therapeutic toolbox containing a variety techniques, strategies, and procedures; ideally ones that have scientific backing and empirical support.  And they need to know when and how to use them because people have to be ready to change before they are able to consistently apply and practice the therapeutic methods they’re taught during therapy. Indeed, determining where a given client is on the readiness for change spectrum is a crucial part of the therapeutic process. So, even if a one-size-fits-all clinician is treating a person for whom their singular method is appropriate, unless the client is ready to meaningfully participate in the process little will be gained.

My advice is as follows: Nobody is average; everyone is unique.

• Make sure that your personal and individual needs are carefully considered, including the foods you eat, the medication (if any) you take, the amount of sleep and rest you need, the type and extent of exercise that suits you best, and so forth.

• If something seems to be disagreeing with you, try to consult an authority who will tailor the treatment plan to suit your individual needs.

Don’t assume that a specific medication, a course of action, or a particular treatment will be good for you because everyone you know thinks it’s great.  Also, don't hesitate to ask your therapist why he or she believes a recommended treatment will be helpful for you and what other methods can also be of benefit.

• Remember the old cliché, “different strokes for different folks.”

Also remember:  Think well, Act well, Feel well, Be well!

Dear Reader: The advertisements contained in this post do not necessarily reflect my opinions nor are they endorsed by me. — Clifford

Copyright Clifford N. Lazarus, Ph.D. This post is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional assistance or personal mental health treatment by a qualified clinician.

Leadership scholar, George Graen, shared some of his research with me and is my guest co-blogger on this post.

According to Graen’s research, examining workers’ careers from college graduation to near retirement, there is a definite path to early promotions. It’s not the brightest or most committed who get ahead, but does involve following a particular path to success. This research demonstrates that workers with average intelligence and reasonable levels of commitment gain early promotion more frequently at each stage of their careers by following this path.

The path calls for developing allies within the team, particularly with the leader, by becoming the “go-to helper.” This path rewards those who demonstrate their helpfulness to all. Part of this successful role calls for developing alliances with the team. Alliances involve understanding of mutual investments of time and energy in a project or enterprise so that all invest in and benefit from the success of the project. In these instances, no one is the boss of the project. The team leader simply becomes one of the partners who helps coordinate the mutual investments of the members.

The necessary conditions that need to be developed among team members are as follows:

Mutual Respect for Competence

This is derived from giving and receiving help on important issues, sharing knowledge in stories, and listening to stories while collaborating with each other’s work. The most competent and helpful colleagues, who share information, tend to be the most valuable.

Mutual Keeping of Promises

This is learning to make and keep promises to the team. Those who make no promises, or fail to keep their promises, tend to be poor allies. When an ally makes and keeps promises to you, and you do the same, a condition of mutual dependability is developed.

Mutual Generosity

This can be developed by offering help without strings attached, without expecting anything in return. This lets potential allies understand that you are okay with giving a bit more in the relationship of give and take between allies.

By following this 3-step path, you show and tell your potential allies your passion for cooperating on the efforts to work together for the mutual success of the project. These are the folks who win early promotions!

Follow me on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/#!/ronriggio

Source: CC0 Public Domain

Stories about Elon Musk are everywhere. No wonder. This is a man who had the idea that we should colonize Mars as a backup for humanity in case of global catastrophe, and so he built SpaceX, a profitable space exploration company that sent more rockets into space in 2017 than the rest of America and Europe combined. He built Tesla, a car and now also a solar power storage company, “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” That company, which had never built a car before, has shown that electric cars can be among the most beautiful and highest performing cars on the road. The valuation of Tesla now rivals GM. And he keeps dreaming and then making extraordinary dreams seem attainable. He started a tunneling company, the Boring Company, to turn traveling between cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco into a local commute. He recently started a company, Neuralink, with the goal of developing brain computer interfaces that can treat major brain diseases in the short term and contribute to the artificial enhancement of human intelligence in the long term.

Is he the most visionary leader of his generation or Daedalus flying too close to the Sun? A lot of people revere him. Some revile him as a crackpot whipping up hysteria in a world too frenzied over the “Next Big Thing.” Most of us, though, recognize him as an innovator on a scale no one else is currently matching. We love to watch him -- his successes and his failures. We want to know what he will try next and whether he can pull it off. He absorbs and excites us. Inside and outside of his companies, there are many who are deeply inspired by his vision. But how often do we look at him and think, “If he can do that, what can I do?”

We could. I have quoted Steve Jobs on this point before:

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use…. Once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.

It’s a crazy idea: Maybe you could use your mind and your life with the same creativity as one of the people with the craziest ideas in the world. There is no shortage of opportunities to innovate in every aspect of society. Maybe if you did your life would be better, and maybe if a lot of us did the world would be better too. Play along with me and see if it really seems like such a crazy idea after all.

We can frame what is unique about Musk in terms of a few simple questions that any of us can ask every day of our lives:

How Are Things Now? How Could They Be Better?

These questions do not on their face seem to have a lot of bite, but everything follows from them. They drive Musk’s life and work. The analysis of Musk’s career in the February 10, 2018, issue of The Economist, from which all of the subsequent quotes in this post come, makes the point:                        

Mr Musk does not simply want to have fun building rockets and fast cars. Nor is he running two multi-billion-dollar companies just to become rich, or to beat rivals. He wants to open up fundamental opportunities with which he thinks the market would not trouble itself [italics added]…. The fact that the firms’ goals go beyond products and profit sets the two companies apart from, say, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon or Larry Page’s Alphabet. In “The Complacent Class”, which laments lost entrepreneurial vigour, Tyler Cowen, an economist, cites Mr Musk as a counter-example, today’s “most visible and obvious representative of the idea of major progress in the physical world.”

Musk is doing something different than the tide that carries with it the general flow of even the most influential and creative in business, like Bezos and Page. The possibilities that the market already has a handle on are going to happen anyway -- for better or worse. Maybe they will not happen as well without certain people that lead the field, but they will move in roughly the same direction. But Musk starts by looking for what could be that is not happening already. He tries to see what the fundamental possibilities are that would improve the direction the world is taking, and he pursues them.

Thinking this way is exceptional. Cognitive science has taught us how conservative our brains really are. All of us tend to start by absorbing what is already happening, and then we continue in that vein. We miss the alternatives in the shadows on the periphery as if it did not exist, even though that is where all of the interesting, novel possibilities are.

Almost every aspect of social experience could be better. Any area that you care a lot about has obvious problems. But they do not necessarily have creative, effective minds applying deliberate effort to discovering how to change them. Simply asking the question of what could be better that is not being addressed and considering seriously whether there is any way you can explore the answers can almost immediately open you up to goals you never would have considered otherwise. Few of us consider them seriously. If you pursue them, those goals will take you out of your comfort zone and beyond your current capacities. You will grow, if you can learn how to explore new possibilities effectively. Doing so starts with asking the question:

How does it work?

Everything that humans create -- great chess playing, art of arresting beauty, speeches that move the hearts and minds of crowds, our jokes, our stories, the buildings we live in, the products we use -- is complex. We can appreciate these things, but we will not become creators ourselves without knowing how the pieces work together to create the effects we appreciate. No matter how many symphonies you listen to and no matter how deeply you are moved by them, you will never be able to compose one until you study how every note works together to create the overall effect. Innovators are not just dreamers. They are discoverers who find what is possible through explorations of minute detail. They have great ideas because they have mapped out the connections that make things work so many times that they can navigate possibilities better than the rest of us. Most of us take a great deal about how things are done for granted. Innovators do not. They know that the details of how things work is where the potential for discovery lies. They study like a child taking the back off of a radio to understand how it works.

This process of learning is at the heart of what makes Musk so extraordinary. Impatient with formal education, he dropped out of a PhD program in applied physics and material science at Stanford. But he did not stop studying the world with the attention to detail of a physicist and an engineer. As Chris Anderson of TED has said, he is “uniquely good at system-design thinking.” The Economist observes, “He reduces thorny problems to what he sees as their essence—typically expressed in terms of physics—and then extends his analysis to technologies, business systems, human psychology and design in an attempt to solve the issue.” Most of his great ideas have come from this detailed examination. The ideas at the heart of SpaceX and The Boring Company came from his realization that rocket launches and tunneling were both more expensive than physics required they should be. From there, he figured out what changes could be made in machines, in supply chains, and in pricing schemes that could support the improvements that were possible. Musk describes himself as a “nano-manager.” Antonio Gracias, a board member at SpaceX and Tesla, said, “Elon can be at the macro, see everything that’s highly disruptive, and then can zoom all the way down to the micro, down to the door handle.” He absorbs enough of the complexity of every project he takes on that he can look relentlessly for possibilities for improvement in achieving his goals. Tunneling and rocket launching have been going on for decades, but it is because people tend to stop looking past the established way of doing things that the whole profession missed opportunities.

Following this path can be thrilling, because it changes our experience of the world. The person who is so intimate with music that she can understand how every tone plays into the overall effect appreciates what is possible with music on a whole different level than someone who sits back and lets it sweep over her. We start to see the world not as a fixed set of assumptions but as full of potential. The fact that we are learning in the service of bold goals we care about makes it all the sweeter.

But it is also a lot of work. The established path involves much more predictable rewards. It satisfies most of us most of the time. So the big question I need to ask if I want to work hard for uncertain rewards is:

Why?

Everyone will have to find their own answers, but Musk suggests a couple of reasons to me that at least help me answer this question for myself. The first is that he is a reminder that some very bold goals we thought were unrealistic are worth pursuing. The business world is a source of enormous creativity and innovation, but we do not expect large, successful businesses to be defined from inception by their leaders’ attempts to improve the world. Musk’s career is a reminder that our expectations often gloss over what is possible. The business world is full of people who would love to improve the world. Many start non-profits with their business profits in order to do it. But none of them saw the possibility that that mission could be built directly into the world’s capitalist DNA at such a scale. To me, it is a reminder that there are almost certainly areas in yours and my corner of the world where we have dismissed as unrealistic ways that the world actually could be improved. Not exploring them means that we are part of the mass of people who perpetuate the false belief that realism and routine are synonymous, rather than the ones who open the creative possibilities that all too often go unexplored.

The second reason that Musk suggests to me that pursuing bold goals off of the beaten path is worth the work is that he brings home the fact that we do not have to reach our goal to have lived a very successful work life. One reason most of us stay on the beaten path is that we can contribute something there. We do not want our life’s work to be irrelevant, and pursuing goals no one else cares about or believes in yet can feel like it runs that risk. The Economist notes that every one of his current companies may fail to achieve its stated objective. In the end, though, he may not have to achieve his objectives to succeed. As The Economist writes:

It may also be that, even in failure, he achieves his goals. Now there is one gigafactory, others may see its merits and build more. Now there is a market for high-quality electric cars, others will expand it….

Asked about a new space race after the [SpaceX] Falcon Heavy launch, Mr Musk was enthusiastic: “Races are exciting.” They also let pacesetters guide the field. If you start a race in the direction you think people should be going, it may not, in the end, matter if you win.

Musk sets the goals for what he believes is a better world. If he sparks others to realize those possibilities, he wins. Of course, nowhere near as many people may ever know about our successes or our failures. But some people will. If they see us standing against the grain and making progress, it may leave them thinking twice before they assume making bold changes is a fool’s errand. If that happens, our life’s work becomes a surprising and inspiring reminder that humanity can do better.

Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection

In May 2018, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, under the direction of the Trump Administration, implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that directed judges to prosecute people who enter the United States illegally and place their children in separate custody. This policy has caused extreme public backlash from almost everyone: Parents, teachers, business leaders, world leaders, Democrats and Republicans, including all former First Ladies Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Hilary Clinton and Rosalynn Carter. First Lady Melania Trump also spoke out publicly against the policy and visited the Upbringing New Hope Children Center in South Texas that is housing some of these children.

There is extensive research that demonstrates separating children from their families and holding them in “congregate care” facilities is associated with increased risk for harm including an increased risk of child sexual and physical abuse. Horrifying accounts of boys being stripped naked, handcuffed and strapped to chairs are beginning to emerge from the facilities in which immigrant children are being held.

According to research on the harms of placing children in congregate care published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “placing already traumatized children in group settings can put them at greater risk of further physical abuse, when compared with children placed in families.” Because it has proven impossible to keep children safe within congregate care facilities, there is a national movement to close youth prisons and new federal guidance that limits the use of group homes with older children in foster care eliminates this practice with children younger than 12 years old.

The long-term consequences of trauma are extensive. This trauma is caused by unplanned and unpredictable separation of children from their parents and subsequent child sexual abuse, child physical abuse and child neglect that we know will happen at increased rates to children separated from their families and even to vulnerable immigrant children who remain with their parents. These consequences include increase risk for a host of mental health problems, like depression and PTSD and physical problems, including increased risk for cardiovascular disease.  Our recent research demonstrates that child sexual abuse is costly. The national economic burden exceeds 9 billion dollars. 

President Trump appears to be reversing course by doing away with the mandatory separation of children of newly prosecuted parents, but there has been no plan from the White House or the Department of Homeland Security or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency of what to do with the children who have already been separated. Moreover, a plan that includes keeping children sequestered and imprisoned, even with their parents, for any length of time is destined to cause harm. There is simply too much data to ignore. All children require and deserve safe, stable and nurturing relationships and environments. Every effort should be made to ensure that immigrant children remain with their parents in the least restrictive settings possible to facilitate their wellbeing and to protect them from the entirely preventable harm associated with congregate care facilities.

People often foreclose on their romantic happiness simply out of a fear of the dating world and the uncertainty that it entails. Adopt a different kind of approach to dating so as to give yourself ample opportunity to meet the right match while at the same time being at ease in your own skin. Here are 4 ways to date with more ease.

1. Treat Everyone as a Friend:

Perhaps the most burdensome aspect of dating is being rejected and also having to reject. Many work overtime to not lead on potential partners because of the fear of having to turn them down. And, experiencing a string of rejections can feel like a very black mark against your name. Taking on the mindset that you are getting to know each new person/date you meet as a friend can circumvent a good deal of this angst. Even if you don’t announce this is your mindset, know in your own mind this is where you stand in these interactions. You don’t have to know right away how you feel about your new dates. You are free to take the time to get to know them in the same way you would a new friend. Work to have no expectations for yourself of knowing with certainty how you feel about someone or how they feel about you. 

2. Multitask:

Singling in on one match too soon makes you vulnerable to putting that person on a pedestal while ignoring all other potential suitors. And too, it means if things don’t work out the way you wish, you will feel completely bereft. Remember the dating world is not the commitment world. At this stage you should date multiple people from various sources-—dating apps, meeting through friends, through common activities or hobbies, playing co-ed sports, work. You will catch a wider variety of fish if you vary where you fish.  And that means, you will be less likely to overly invest in one particular type.

3. Get A Life:

If your entire life outside of work or school is checking your dating apps, then we have a problem. Work to build a rich life—close friendships, activities you enjoy, plans for travel and achievement goals. Build these activities and interactions into your week on a regular basis. Even when a potential date would like to meet up, honor your commitments to your life outside of your dating world. And remind yourself when you are lonely or wishing a date would contact you that there are other ways you can gain pleasure and connect with the world.

4. Self-Care:

Taking good care of yourself is attractive. Healthy others will sense that something is amiss if you are neglecting yourself and not attending to your needs. Failure to take good care of yourself can lead you into dysfunctional unions with unhealthy partners. Make your self-care a priority. Getting enough sleep, eating healthfully, attending to your emotional and physical health on a routine basis will help you to feel strong and confident as you go through the dating process. 

In my book, Getting Close to Others, I offer specific strategies around growing your intimacy skills for dating and partnering.

Source: JohnMoore/GerryImages

When a government acts capriciously, especially against a powerless and much-reviled group, it is hard to describe the terror and anxiety. There is nowhere to turn, because the only people with the power to help have trained their guns and dogs upon you. You are without rights, held without charge or trial. The world is upside down, information-less, and indifferent or even hostile to your plight. At least during the internment, we remained a family, and I credit that alone for keeping the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul. I cannot for a moment imagine what my childhood would have been like had I been thrown into a camp without my parents.

George Takai, in a column for Foreign Policy, writes about how he was able to get through his years living in a Japanese internment camp in the 1940s. Given the reports flooding our recent newsfeed, Takai’s description of his experience during World War II is frighteningly applicable to the humanitarian crisis we are facing today in 2018.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, over 2,300 migrant children have been separated from their families since May. As of this writing, there is no concrete plan for how, when or if these families will be reunited.

The current administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border is what Colleen Kraft, MD, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), is calling a form of child abuse.

“We know that family separation causes irreparable harm to children,” says Kraft. “This type of highly stressful experience can disrupt the building of children’s brain architecture. Prolonged exposure to serious stress—known as toxic stress—can lead to lifelong health consequences.”  

Damage already done

Every second away from a parent is one second too long—Dr. Dawn McCarty.

In response to President Donald Trump’s recently signed Executive Order ending the separation of children and families, the American Psychological Association (APA) released a statement urging lawmakers to adopt policies that are “humane” and that “take into account the harmful, long-term psychological effects of separation on children and their families.” APA president Jessica Henderson Daniel, PhD, states:

While we are gratified that President Trump has ended this troubling policy of wresting immigrant children from their parents, we remain gravely concerned about the fate of the more than 2,300 children who have already been separated and are in shelters. These children have been needlessly traumatized and must be reunited with their parents or other family members as quickly as possible to minimize any long-term harm to their mental and physical health. This is not an acceptable policy to counter unlawful immigration.

Dr. Dawn McCarty, director of University of Houston-Downtown’s Social Work Program, works with immigrants and asylum seekers who have been faced with separation from their families. Until this recent situation, she says, children weren’t typically taken away from both caregivers.

“These children have no idea what’s going on. They’ve already undergone a traumatic process of leaving their country and arriving here. Now, they are separated from their caregivers.” When a child has been traumatized, McCarty says, they should be surrounded by support and resources, including counseling and restored security. Unfortunately, many will not have these support resources. “They will not be in conditions that will immediately help them move forward. They may be reunited with their families or sent elsewhere. Either way, they will be released into family systems that are already distressed.”

Impact on health

Children who experience trauma are at a much greater risk of developing mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, addiction, ADHD and PTSD. Their physical health is also negatively affected.

“Young children tend to internalize trauma and negative experiences,” says Lauren Aycock Anderson, a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in Baltimore, MD. “This can have devastating long-term effects on the psyche and can lead to self-destructive behaviors as an adult.” Children also don’t have the language to express what has happened to them, so temporarily you’re likely to see a lot of somatic symptoms such as loss of appetite, stomach aches and headaches. Trauma tends to live in the body, so these types of symptoms could even become chronic if left untreated.

According to one study, the effects of mother-child separation on children’s aggressive behavior are early and persistent. Separation for as short as a week within the first two years of life was related to higher levels of child negativity and aggression

Attachment

According to attachment theory, secure attachment comes from the child’s perceptions of his or her caregiver’s availability (physical accessibility). In their research, attachment theorists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth demonstrated that separations as brief as one week in duration could negatively impact the quality of attachments. “In contrast to children who develop secure attachments, children who experience separations develop insecure/disorganized attachment and persisting high levels of stress,” says Dr. Katie Davis. “When children believe their parents are unavailable, they become traumatized because they do not understand the reason for the absence and the timing of return.”

“Aside from the basic needs that parents provide to their kids, they also provide the stable and secure bond that children need in order to support healthy attachments,” says Christanne Kernes, a licensed marriage and family therapist and cofounder of mental health app LARKR. “When children are exposed to traumatic events and stressors, such as forceful separation from their parents/caregivers, their sense of safety and security is disrupted.”

PTSD

Kernes points out that most of these migrant children have already experienced trauma in their native lands from exposure to danger, violence and other stressors significant enough for these children to develop PTSD. These issues, she says, are then exacerbated by the forceful separation from their parents.

As a member of Physicians for Human Rights’ Asylum Network, psychotherapist Silvia M. Dutchevici, MA, LCSW, conducts psychological evaluations documenting evidence of torture and persecution for survivors fleeing danger in their home countries. She has counseled and interviewed many refugees who either were separated from their parents at a young age or are the parents of those children. Dutchevici equates the separation of children from families with torture. “Most [of the children],” she says, “will develop PTSD. Displaced children learn that the world is unsafe, that people cannot be trusted, and that attachment and love causes deep pain. The child’s sense of safety and security is broken at the moment when their parent disappears. 

Disruptions in brain development

According to The National Center for PTSD, traumatic stress has been associated with lasting changes in key areas of the brain and with increased cortisol and norepinephrine responses to subsequent stressors.

“There are so many things that can go wrong developmentally for the child,” says trauma specialist Ginger Poag, MSW, LCSW, CEMDR. “The brain is impacted severely; the body is being continuously flooded with stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. When stress hormones are released on a continual basis, we can see brain development disrupted and neurological damage.”

“The saddest part about this type of traumatic event and its negative impact on children is that it’s completely avoidable.” says Kernes. “And if they do not get the help that they need while their brains are still developing, this will have a lasting impact on their well-being as adults.”

A dangerous slippery slope

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. —George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Rachelle Goldstein is the co-director of the Hidden Child Foundation, which represents Holocaust survivors like herself who were hidden during the war when they were young.  “The separation of family was probably the worst thing that ever happened to us,” Goldstein said. “You take a child away from the parents, from the home, from everything they know—they are never the same.” She says that many children separated from their parents during the Holocaust have still not overcome the trauma.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Council for Public Affairs refers to the “zero-tolerance” policy as “unconscionable”:

This policy undermines the values of our nation and jeopardizes the safety and well-being of thousands of people.

As Jews, we understand the plight of being an immigrant fleeing violence and oppression. We believe that the United States is a nation of immigrants and how we treat the stranger reflects on the moral values and ideals of this nation.

Many of these migrant families are seeking asylum in the United States to escape violence in Central America. Taking children away from their families is unconscionable. Such practices inflict unnecessary trauma on parents and children, many of whom have already suffered traumatic experiences.

Separating families is a cruel punishment for children and families simply seeking a better life and exacerbates existing challenges in our immigration system. It adds to the backlog of deportation cases and legal challenges in federal courts, places thousands more immigrants in detention facilities and shelters, endangers the lives of more children.

The letter, published on June 12, urges leaders to immediately rescind the policy and “uphold the values of family unity and justice on which our nation was built.”

Implications for society

Ironically, the traumatic events that are taking place today may actually end up producing the very outcomes its enforcers are purporting to prevent.

“What these children are experiencing when being separated from their parents in a foreign country, with a different culture and a new language, would be considered a traumatic event, even if temporary.” says licensed mental health counselor Maryellen Newman. “My clinical opinion,” she says, “is that we are creating a subset of immigrant children with trauma histories that will likely go untreated and may develop into lifelong deficits and struggles.”

“Early childhood trauma places a heavy burden on society,” according to the National Center for Children in Poverty, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “It can lead to dependence on a wide range of systems, such as child welfare, juvenile and criminal justice, and physical and behavioral health [and] can manifest in later behaviors that disrupt school and work environments.” Then there are the financial consequences. “In the United States alone, the estimated total lifetime cost to society associated with one year of confirmed cases of child maltreatment is $124 billion.”

Judge Anthony Capizzi of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFC),  in a statement, calls for children to be reunited with their families and not subject to further trauma. “Not only are these children immediately traumatized,” he says, “but also their chance for a productive and happy life is significantly reduced by their experience.” According to Capizzi, in cases of similarly situated children in juvenile and family courts, the council works with all parties involved to give those children an opportunity to see their parents regularly and to gain a safe, permanent, and stable home.

What will be the effects of creating a generation of traumatized children … children who will grow up to be adults with a strong distrust of authority and a lack of a sense of safety in the world? The forcible removal of children from their families, without cause, not only affects the individuals involved, but has much broader implications and ultimately affects us all.    

Source: JanMcCarthy / Pixabay

The evolutionary approach to human behavior largely seeks to understand how psychological and behavioral processes would have provided our ancestors with survival and/or reproductive benefits under ancestral human conditions.

A common criticism of this approach to psychology focuses on the fact that since we do not have time machines, we cannot know what ancestral conditions were like — suggesting that a foundational feature of the field of evolutionary psychology is flawed.

Actually, based on various kinds of scholarship, including work by biological anthropologists, geologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and cognitive scientists, there are several important features of the ancestral human environment that we can be certain about. Importantly, in fact, there are several specific features of ancestral environments that were certainly different from modern environments. An understanding of these environmental conditions, along with how they differ from our modern worlds, is key to understanding what it means to be human today.

Below are three substantial ways in which our modern environments differ from the ancestral conditions that surrounded human evolution.

1. All humans were hunters and gatherers.

Biological anthropologists have examined questions regarding the origins of agriculture in detail. According to all kinds of evidence, the agricultural revolution did not begin until about 9,000 BC - or about 11,000 years ago (see Bellwood, 2004). The advent of agriculture was a game changer, leading to what is often referred to as the Neolithic revolution. In short, once people figured out how to grow and domesticate their own food sources, they could stay put. And just like that, humans no longer had to be nomads who spent all day hunting and gathering and moving from place to place. Our diets changed dramatically. Our amount of average exercise changed dramatically. Our group sizes changed dramatically. Cities formed. These are things we know.

2. Ancestral humans did not have McDonald’s, Fortnite, or pornography.

Supernormal stimuli (see Tinbergen, 1953) are stimuli that represent extreme versions of stimuli that animals show evolved responses to. In studying a broad array of animal behaviors, renowned ethologist, Niko Tinbergen, discovered that many animals that are attracted to certain cues will respond more strongly to human-made, exaggerated versions of these cues. A herring gull chick that will peck at a mother’s beak that has a small red mark will peck even more strenuously at a human-made larger red patch — with even larger human-made red patches being even more likely to lead to pecking behaviors. The more the better!

Without exactly realizing it, humans in all kinds of industries have used technologies to create all kinds of supernormal stimuli. The reason is that supernormal stimuli sell. And such stimuli sell because our minds, which evolved under ancestral conditions in which the supernormal versions of these stimuli were absent, are like the minds of herring gull chicks — we evolved simple “more is better” algorithms when it comes to so many kinds of stimuli in our worlds.

We evolved a taste for foods that are high in sugars and fats because drought and famine common under ancestral conditions. So now McDonald’s is very popular around the world. You may have never thought about it before, but a Big Mac is a supernormal stimulus. And so are all highly addictive video games (such as Fortnite). And so is pornography. McDonald’s, Fortnite, and Playboy did not exist under the conditions of human evolution. This point is not equivocal.

3. Ancestral humans did not have cell phones.

When someone says to me that “evolutionary psychology is wrong because there is no way of really knowing what the ancient world was like for humans,” I will usually say, “Oh yeah — do you think that our ancestors had smart phones on the African savanna 200,000 years ago?!”

The fact is that people across the world are addicted to our cell phones and other devices — which are all based on extremely modern technology from an evolutionary perspective. A recent CNN poll found that 50 percent of teens in the U.S. report being addicted to their cell phones. And we all know that the other 50 percent are lying!

I was surprised during a recent visit to China, where I taught about 90 undergraduate students in the city of Chongqing, that the students there seemed to be just as addicted to their cell phones as the students here in New York are. And it’s not just young people these days. A few years ago I was proud to be one of the few adults I knew to not own a cell phone. I now own one and I probably check it at least 100 times a day, to be honest. (There, I said it!)

Cell phones are completely evolutionarily mismatched from communication mechanisms found in ancestral human conditions. They allow us to obtain social information in an immediate and large-scale manner. This fact is reinforcing, but it is also not exactly how social interactions worked under the conditions that surrounded human evolution.

And research on the psychological outcomes of being tied to your cell phone has a very clear result: It is not healthy for us (see Twenge, 2017).

Bottom Line

Look, I know that we don’t have time machines — and I know that, to some extent, our understanding of ancestral human environments is guess work. But let’s be clear: There are definitely many specific things that we know about ancestral human environments. Further, we can be quite confident that there are many specific ways that our modern environments differ from those ancestral conditions. Ancestral humans did not live in cities, they did not eat Big Macs, they did not play Fortnite, and they did not have Snapchat. And all of these facts have substantial implications for human psychology. Next time someone tries to tell you that the evolutionary approach to psychology is off because we can’t really know what ancestral conditions were like, ask them if they think ancient people had iPhones and ate Chicken McNuggets.

Today, I begin a weekly serialization of chapters from Salvation, a section of my book describing the hope that effective treatment brings. For the first time in over five and a half years and after standard rehab had made little change to my injury, I received a "yes" to my goal of healing my brain. I began to experience permanent restoration of parts of my injured brain. Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me begins at the start of my brain injury journey; the Salvation section begins the journey of restoring my neurons.

Salvation

Chapter 8: Brainwave

Source: Shireen Jeejeebhoy

I launched Firefox and stared at the Google search box. Maybe instead of typing “brain injury treatment,” I should search for ADD, a condition I’d studied and researched back in university. I didn’t have ADD back then, but it sure felt like I had it now. Maybe I had googled ADD treatments before. I couldn’t remember. I would try again. I found my answer! The ADD Centre.

But it was too far away.

I’d call anyway.

First thing the morning of Thursday, July 14, 2005, I phoned Lily to pray for courage. I hung up. Prepared to ask if they knew anyone in Toronto, I dialled the number from memory, fearful I’d gotten it wrong like I usually do. To my utter shock, the medical doctor, the husband of the Clinic Director, answered, not voice mail. I learnt later that him answering was rare.

He told me that their primary clients were those with ADD and they had not treated many with closed head injuries. But they could assess me in Mississauga and treat me in Toronto. I could do that. He was very interested in seeing what they could do for me. It took all my effort to focus on his neuroscience talk. He told me they had a cancellation; I could be assessed in only three weeks. God heard me! Would this be my salvation? Maybe I could problem solve again. Read again. God had finally made an opening for me to get help. About damn time too.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

A yellow Lab wandered past me in the coolness of the ADD Centre on Thursday, August 4, 2005, and I smiled inwardly, amazed I had found my way despite being confused over the streets.

“Hello!” a high, chirpy voice greeted me. “I’m Dr. Lynda Thompson,” said a slim woman with shiny black hair in a classic bob.

This was the clinic’s Executive Director, I remembered. I stood up, spoke my name, and followed her into her office. My senses reeled. So much to see from her large dark wood desk to prints to carpets to books to prints to the windows to papers to her to books.

Two wooden chairs with country-style pillows on them waited for me. Choices, choices. I focused effortfully, finally choosing.

She was speaking.

This was my chance, my last chance to get help. I had searched for so long, and this was it. What if they found I was normal? The neuropsychological tests I’d taken had always shown me as normal. I shook my head internally. Focus on the now. In her neutral, quiet tones, she was asking me the same questions the IMEs and nice doctors had. When were you born? What happened in the crash? How long ago was it?

I handed over the sheaf of information I’d brought with me. I was well versed in seeing new practitioners who wanted to help me, and I knew to bring test results and reports.

She got up and walked around her desk to another one behind me. I struggled upright and followed her. An IBM computer!

Something familiar.

I’d started my work life using computers like this one. I hadn’t seen one in years! I sat down in another wooden chair in front of the computer as she instructed me. She said that I was to do a boring test. I nodded, trying to keep up. She handed me earphones, their small, foamy pieces rough against my ears. The computer would instruct me. She pointed the mouse out to me. I was to use it.

I felt comfortable with mouse and computer. I felt connected to a time when I was competent. I felt I understood the simple instructions: click the mouse if I hear or see the number one; do not click if I hear or see the number two.

As the program began, I became unsure of what I was supposed to do. But I had faith in computers. Computers were my friend. The male voice precisely spoke the instructions to me through the old earphones and led me through a practice. I felt I knew it.

Left alone to do the test, door shut, I stared at the screen. A number one flashed on in the old 1980s’ green pixels. I clicked the mouse. I heard intoned in my ear: one. I clicked the mouse. A two flashed. No, I told myself. Don’t click. Don’t click. I thought I heard one but wasn’t sure. And now there was a one on the screen. Click. It felt easy. Click. Don’t click. This isn’t hard.

The minutes ticked by.

They slowed into hours.

I had to talk to myself more and more to keep going. Boredom dragged my neurons. When would it stop? Wait, did I miss one? No, I didn’t think so. I was acing this. I was sure of it. Suddenly, it was over.

I sat back, exhausted. I slowly removed the earphones. Again, I was going to be told: nothing wrong here. Try harder. Be grateful. Get on with your life.

I wondered what I was supposed to do now.

- To be continued next week.

Source: Manzanar Relocation Center by Dorothea Lange/Wikimedia Commons

Former First Lady Laura Bush has compared the government policy of separating migrant children from their parents to the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. She called the internment camps “one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.” There are similarities. In both cases, there was racial profiling. And some Japanese American parents were separated from their children. My Japanese American mother was in college in 1942. She and her family were incarcerated at the Poston, Arizona internment camps. She was placed in a different camp than her family to work as a nurse.

There are also important differences between the present and World War II. The internment was much larger than the current detention of migrants. At least 117,000 were incarcerated in World War II. About 2000 children currently have been separated from their parents. Two-thirds of those incarcerated in World War II were citizens of the United States. The current migrants are not citizens. Public opposition to the internment camps was limited and did not overturn them. Current public pressure has caused President Trump to overturn his policy of separating parents and children.

So, perhaps there has been some progress since 1942. We tolerate mass incarceration of our citizens less. And we are more opposed to inhumane treatment.

Why is our nation prone to incarcerating minority groups? Psychological science can offer an explanation. In a summary of 31 studies, it was found that Whites were less likely to help Blacks than they were to help other Whites. And helping Blacks was particularly less likely when there were higher levels of emergency. This is probably because Blacks are viewed as an outgroup who are less deserving of help. People tend not to help people who are unlike themselves.

So, why is the 2018 public reaction different than the 1942 public reaction? In 1942, many Americans knew little about Japanese Americans and had no contact with them. Some Americans in California who had contact with them saw them as competitors in farming. And they resembled the enemy. So, many Americans did not see Japanese Americans as deserving of help.

In contrast, compassion for Latinx migrants in 2018 may result from a superordinate identity. We see these migrants as like us because they are fellow humans. Most people have compassion for children separated from their parents. Even religious conservatives who have overlooked President Trump’s other shortcomings have opposed this policy of separating families. This superordinate identity as humans caused many people to see separating migrant children from their parents as wrong.

But not all have compassion for the migrants and their children. Although most Americans oppose separating children and parents, the policy was supported by some groups. And vigorously defended by some lawmakers. President Trump’s new policy mandates that migrant families be detained together. But there is no limit to how long they can be detained, as there was in the policy that existed pre-Trump. And there is not a plan to reunite children and parents separated at the border.

Because of our inherent group biases, we need to actively resist our tendencies to mistreat outgroups. In a study of Los Angeles high school students, contact with ethnic groups unlike themselves increased a superordinate identity and decreased prejudice. But intergroup contact does not happen without effort. It can be facilitated by:

·      Early education and experiences with people from diverse backgrounds.

·      Ensuring shared power among people from diverse backgrounds in schools and organizations.

·      Creating projects in which cooperation among different groups is necessary for success.

Opportunities to mistreat outgroups will occur in the future. Perhaps seeing diverse others as fellow humans will prevent us from taking these opportunities.

Source: Danielle Blunt, used with permission

Danielle Blunt is the creator of Dasya Yoga and an NYC-based Dominatrix, full-spectrum doula, yoga teacher and sex worker activist. She studies power dynamics through kinesthetic modalities and her work and play explore the intersections of tenderness and pain.   

Q: You have created a new form of yoga called Dasya Yoga, in which you combine elements of traditional yoga with BDSM. I imagine most people would be puzzled about what this combo may look like. Can you describe a typical session?

A: Every Dasya Yoga session looks different. Each session is tailored to an individual's’ particular interests, desires, and fetishes. A session can take the form of a more asana-based practice in a traditional yoga studio, or the form of a more meditative session in my private dungeon space. The purpose isn’t that the practice looks any particular way but rather that it addresses an individual's wants and needs while expanding their understanding of kink, yoga, meditation and one’s relationship with their body and with other. I use the asanas (postures), mudras (hand gestures) and mantras to cultivate openness, vulnerability, and devotion within a unique framework of power, surrender, pleasure and pain -- this is the core focus of the Dasya Yoga practice.

Source: Danielle Blunt, used with permission

Q: In your bio, you state that you work as a dominatrix and utilized BDSM as a healing modality. How did you find BDSM to be healing?

A: Many activities within a BDSM experience are heavily reliant upon negotiation, intention, and consent -- all of which provide an ideal environment and ample opportunity for healing. In many ways I think of BDSM as a form of ritual work. Learning to ask for what you want, articulating desire and putting pre-established rules of limits and consent into practice are all integral to the operation of a good BDSM experience. Such protocols can create a deep sense of security not often found in most interpersonal interactions. This can be healing in and of itself. In a society where so many people feel powerless and stressed, consensually giving up control to a trusted and experienced individual often gives people permission to surrender, relax, submit and access a different part of their brain that they don’t get to in other aspects of their life.

While I believe BDSM to be therapeutic and healing, I want to make it clear that I am not a therapist. I encourage everyone that is working through something intense to see a kink-affirming mental health professional in conjunction to their work with me. Manhattan Alternative is an amazing example of an NYC-based resource for people looking for kink-affirming therapists. There is a definitely a need for more kink-affirming, knowledgeable and non-judgmental health care professionals.

Q: A great deal of your work is focused on pain. Specifically, pain as a form of salvation. It's a very different approach than our natural instincts of seeking to avoid pain. In your view, what role does pain play in psychological development?

A: A lot of what we are taught in the west is that pain is something to be avoided, but many religions and practices across the world utilize elements of pain, devotion, and suffering as a way to reach the divine and tap into altered states of consciousness. Rituals involving pain emphasize the importance of intention and creating space to process an experience, to move on and grow into a new way of being. They also provide a first-hand experience of exploring pain in a confined and intentional capacity; helping to teach an individual on a moral, as well as chemical level, that ‘this too shall pass’, while simultaneously fostering a sense of resilience and pride in individuals and communities. I believe that the physical exercises with movement, breath and rhythmic movements in both yoga and BDSM teach the process of how breathing steadily through pain and creating the space to process an experience can help foster elasticity within the brain and alter an individual's response to chronic pain and earlier trauma. Introducing the chemicals and hormones involved in pain perception to an individual in a controlled and intentional manner allows the autonomic nervous system to regulate the parasympathetic nervous system and return to a 'rest and digest' mentality. Research suggests that creating a space for the autonomic nervous system to return to its resting state helps to create new neural pathways in the brain. I often think of BDSM ritual work as a hacking of the autonomic nervous system, working to create neurologic resilience and control.

As a chronically ill woman, I am intimately acquainted with pain. I found BDSM at 18, the same time I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. My illness has continued to shape and affect my relationship with my body. BDSM gave me an outlet to be an active participant in choosing when and how I received or dealt out pain and also gave me the platform to learn about my boundaries, limits, and how to create relationships that worked for me, including a relationship with my body. BDSM has also given me a way to take control over my mental health and consciously work through my relationship with pain and power dynamics.

Source: Submission beauty gor second life, labeled for reuse, Pixabay

​​​​​​​Q: Let's talk specifically about submission, as 'dasya' is the Sanskrit word for servitude. You state that Dasya Yoga "offers care to masochists and submissives by creating space to explore submission as a path to self-care and personal growth." What does submission specifically have to do with personal growth?

A: The core tenants of many religions are focused around the idea that true enlightenment and faith can only be achieved through an acceptance and submission to the divine. I incorporate this idea in my practice, as well as archetypes of the divine in Dasya Yoga. I believe that devotion through submission has abundant potential and creates a fertile field for personal growth and I have a very broad interpretation of divinity. Through creating space to confront, engage intentionally with, and accept pain and suffering many are able to find purpose and find renewed meaning in life.

The term ‘Yoga’ literally means ‘to yoke’. The Dasya Yoga practice helps to yoke the wandering mind to the oftentimes numb body. This allows for the potential for a transformative experience to occur. Through physical touch, devotional asanas, and mudras, the Dasya practice works to yoke the slave's actions to the Mistress’ pleasure. Each breath in reverence to Mistress. Each breath in gratitude to Mistress. It is through this sacred act of devotion that a submissives purpose can be found. It is the universal process of the breaking down of boundaries of self and not self and learning to identify with something greater than the self that many religious traditions, as well as the BDSM community, utilize to encourage feelings of peace, transcendence, growth and acceptance for participants. That is what submission is to me, this process.

Research suggests that an individual's intentional suffering and relinquishing of power may actually provide them with a greater internal locus of control. For many masochists, self care can be a difficult concept to implement in their lives. I often refer to what I do as ‘forced self care’. Externalizing the command to care for the self can in some circumstances help an individual to over time learn to reestablish a relationship with their body and their mind where self care doesn’t seem like such a foreign idea.  

Source: Thwack, labeled for reuse, Wikimedia Commons

​​​​​​​Q: In your blog, you challenge the idea of safe spaces. You state “Creating a safe space is a beautiful ideology, but impossible to promise another when it comes to practice." Further, you believe that those who preach "Safe, Sane and Consensual" are potentially "providing false assurances." I imagine these are very challenging concepts for people to wrap their mind around, especially at these times. Can you explain further?

A: First of all, I think that as a society we need to rethink how we teach and understand consent and power dynamics. I do not believe consent to be a simple matter of “yes” and “no”-- this can reinforce the pre-existing power structures that are in place and who feels they have the power to give an affirmative yes or a firm no. These binary ways of thinking do not take into account the complexities of choice, circumstance and coercion that take active roles in the processes of giving consent. We need to complicate the conversations that we are having around consent and power dynamics. I encourage the folks that I work with to take a critical lens to the power dynamics that affect their lives, identities and experiences and utilize this awareness to build power in themselves as they move through the world.

I challenge the idea of safe spaces, because I think that it can be incredibly presumptuous to assume that you have the ability to provide someone with a safe space. Everyone’s triggers differ and no matter how much negotiation goes on before a scene you never know what will come up for someone. I’ve seen people triggered by a glance, a word, physical distance, by being asked to articulate their needs out loud. They had no idea that this would come up, so how could I be expected to? The process of exploring self and how we relate to one another is never a completely safe space and I think that being willing to confront the things that come up is an important part of the process. I come from a background in public health and harm reduction and would like to see more of this language in how we talk about sex and consent. While I don’t think that BDSM or sex are agents of harm, I think the way that we talk about them (or don’t) can be.

I can do my best to hold space for someone and create an open line of communication and accountability if something does come up. But safety is not a guarantee, not just in BDSM play but in most aspects of life. I think that the offering of a safe space to someone is at times an overstep that can lead to further harm if something does come up and I wouldn’t want the pretense of offering a ‘safe space’ to make someone feel silenced.

I also think that it is important to note that these aren’t only challenging concepts to wrap your head around, but challenging conversations to have in general. As a society, I don’t think we deal well with conflict and often times we are encouraged to stifle our conflicted feelings about our experiences in service of not giving ammo to people who criminalize and stigmatize marginalized communities.  

Q: You believe that repressing desire can cause one to lose control of their actions. In your view, shame is a social construct. What is your view of shame and what role does it play in your work with clients?

A: I don’t believe in the effectiveness of pushing abstinence based models of care, and I believe the repression and pathologization of desires to be incredibly harmful to an individual. Why should someone feel shame at expressing a part of themselves with consenting adults? Getting to play around with humiliation and shame in a confined space and time allows someone the opportunity to find relief from their insecurities without letting them consume them. Playing with shame gives someone an opportunity for catharsis through confronting their fears and beginning to understand them better.

When someone comes to me with an interest in humiliation play I really enjoy unpacking their shame with them. They want to suck a cock? Why is that shameful? They want to dress as a woman? I don’t think it is shameful to dress as a woman, why do they? One thing that I really enjoy when working with cis men who are interested in crossdressing or ‘forced-femme’ sessions is to ask them to perform masculinity for me before we begin the transformation. For many being asked to perform masculinity is much more humiliating than when I teach them the magic of femme. I take a very ritualistic approach when asking people to confront their relationship with shame.

I don’t like contributing to reinforcing violent and oppressive power structures in my work; I’d rather the people that I work with question these structures. That’s not to say that I don’t think reenacting can be powerful, just that it needs to be done with a critical and grounded eye and self-reflection. Through the inversion of shame and stigma, the sacred can become profane and vice versa; there is no differentiation. Becoming aware of the internal and external process that are constructing your desires gives you the opportunity to grow beyond socially enforced norms.

New York police thought it would be just another routine raid of a gay bar. But tonight, Friday night, June 27, 1969, was different. The young black and Latino kids and drag queens who frequented the Stonewall Inn were in no mood for it.

“I was in the back of the bar near the dance floor, where the younger people usually hung out,” recalls Philadelphia native Mark Segal, 18 years old at the time, newly arrived in Manhattan, and a Stonewall regular. As usual, he said, the cops “walked in like they owned the place, cocky, assured that they could do and say whatever they wanted and push people around with impunity. We had no idea why they came in, whether or not they’d been paid, wanted more payoffs, or simply wanted to harass the fags that night.”

As the cops emptied the bar, a crowd gathered outside in Sheridan Square. Onlookers jeered and catcalled as a paddywagon hauled away the bartender, the bouncer, and three drag queens. After a lesbian put up a struggle as the officers steered her through the crowd to a patrol car, all hell broke loose.

“Limp wrists were forgotten,” the Village Voice reported a few days later. “Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows and a rain of coins descended on the cops . . . Almost by signal the crowd erupted into cobblestone and bottle heaving . . . From nowhere came an uprooted parking meter—used as a battering ram on the Stonewall door. I heard several cries of ‘let’s get some gas,’ but the blaze of flame which soon appeared in the window of the Stonewall was still a shock.” Backups rescued the cops from the flames.

“It was not the biggest riot ever,” says Segal, founder and publisher of Philadelphia Gay News. “There were probably only a couple hundred participants; anyone with a decent job or family ran away from that bar as fast as they could to avoid being arrested. Those who remained were the drag queens, hustlers, and runaways.”

Young Puerto Rican transvestites and homeless youths from the ghetto of runaways in the East Village charged against rows of uniformed police officers. “Whoever assumes a swishy queen can’t fight should have seen them,” says Segal, “makeup dripping and gowns askew, fighting for their home and fiercely proving that no one could take it away from them.”

By the next night “Gay Power” was graffitied along Christopher Street. Young gay men, mostly femme according to reports, hung about the streets. Anger and tension hung in the air. Someone threw a bag of wet garbage into the open window of a police car. A concrete block landed on the hood of another patrol car on Waverly Place. Dozens of men immediately surrounded the car, pounding its doors and dancing on its hood. Cops in riot gear swinging their nightsticks broke up a chorus line of gay men. Several dozen queens screamed “Save Our Sister!” as they rushed a group of officers who were clubbing a young man, dragging him to safety.

Trash fires burned, stones and bottles were tossed, and shouts of “Gay Power!” echoed through the Village.

When gay countercultural poet-guru Allen Ginsberg arrived on the scene Sunday evening, he commented on the noticeable change along Christopher Street already evident after the Stonewall riots. “You know,” Ginsberg said to the Village Voice, “the guys there were so beautiful. They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.”

The author outside The Stonewall Inn on March 25, 2018.

Source: Michael F. Felcone/photo

One year later the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade kicked off from Waverly Place on Sunday morning, June 28, 1970.

Arnie Kantrowitz was one of the marshals. He’d come a long way from turning up his jacket collar so work colleagues wouldn’t recognize him as one of “them.” He was very much one of us, and proudly proclaiming it on this first-ever LGBT pride day.

“Out of the closets and into the streets!” he shouted with the other marchers as they made their way up Sixth Avenue toward Central Park for their planned “Gay-In.”

“Curious crowds began to string along the sidewalks,” Kantrowitz writes in his 1977 memoir Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay, “as we passed up the avenue, flaunting our hearts on our sleeves. There were smatters of giggling, but they were quickly stifled. We were a few too many to offend. The spectators’ faces showed amazement, confusion, shock, resignation, unconcern, affirmation. Ours showed two emotions: pride and determination. We were coming out of our closets, however many of us could, but we were coming out together.”

As the marchers made their way north, no one had dared to look back lest their number prove to be as few as they feared it would be.

“At last we came to the Sheep Meadow,” writes Kantrowitz, “our feet hot and tired. I got to the crest of a small knoll before I turned around. There behind us, in a river that seemed endless, poured wave after wave of happy faces. The Gay Nation was coming out into the light! There was hardly a dry eye on that hill. What had begun as a few hardy hundred had swollen all along its route, until we filled half the huge meadow with what the networks and newspapers estimated as 5,000 to 15,000 people, all gay and proud of it!”

Mark Segal was there that day, too, marching under the Gay Liberation Front’s white banner emblazoned with large, entwined same-sexgender symbols. GLF emerged from the rebellious ferment that followed the Stonewall uprising as LGBT subcommunities were coming together for the first time to organize, strategize, and fight back. “Up until that moment,” Segal writes in his own 2015 memoir And Then I Danced: Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality, “LGBT people had simply accepted oppression and inequality as their lot in life. That all changed.”

Wistful longing for a place “somewhere over the rainbow” was giving way to a new insistence on equality here and now. “We were going to smash that rainbow,” says Segal. “We didn’t have to go over anything or travel anywhere to get what we wanted.”

We simply had to claim it, insist on it—and resist the condemning voice of the harshest critic of all, the one in our heads telling us we are unequal, less than, sick, sinful, and wrong. Stonewall became the symbol of our liberation, the touchstone of a people's proud history of resisting and subverting those who oppress us.

Let us not be our own oppressors. Happy Pride!