PAIN AND SUFFERING

Hieronymus Bosch

Suffering is everywhere and yet it is so hard to understand even though the motivation is very high.  Pain seems to signal something urgently, and yet it often makes the sufferer close down and pull away from everyone.  Holding still, being quiet, trying not to feel, are not good strategies for finding the cause, but that’s what our instinct tells us.  Clench, clamp, chill.

Plain ordinary pain is one thing: step on a nail, slice your finger while meaning to cut something else, strike something hard -- these traumas are clearly what pain is for, to draw your attention and motivate an effort to clean, to bandage, to protect.  Yet the mechanisms that take the information to the brain and interpret trauma there can get “stuck”:  person whose damaged part has been removed (an amputated leg) so that it theoretically CAN’T hurt, goes right on hurting.

But pain is only one kind of suffering.  A few kinds of emotional anguish can be resolved by a second person who is willing to pay close attention and offer reassurance, interpretation, hope for a better future.  An impulse to help a suffering person is present in small children or in animals.  Loneliness, guilt, an inability to see a way out of a trap, a loss of hope for an end to troubles, an inability to imagine and therefore move towards something better --

these are the anguish that religious institutions promise to ease but sometimes only make worse.

Being virtuous doesn’t seem to have much to do with avoiding suffering, it seems to me.  Entirely innocent people suffer terrible trauma and disease and some of the treatments that can save lives also impose ghastly agony.  Consider burns where the treatment is excruciating, so much so that the nurses come to hate the patient because they hate hurting a person so much.

There’s no equivalence.  In the Eastern contexts, like Buddhism, the emphasis is not on escaping but on enduring, partly by withdrawing desire which can lead into the floating detachment of opium.

For some people suffering is handled with anger, rage rage against the injustice and sometimes that will kindle fires of adrenaline and other warrior molecules that have evolved to handle attacks, hunter’s focused obsession, the molecules that paralyze the mouse in the claws of the cat by putting it into a kind of victim’s euphoria.

A while back the media and script writers discovered displaced suffering and especially torture that does not hurt you but the person you care about,  because that’s also torture, courtesy of empathy.  For a while there were crime plots about girls kidnapped in pairs so that one could be tortured to make the other obey without scarring her with lesions.  So much about suffering is suggested to us by script writers rather than shrinks or docs or priests.

Do you remember Peter Pain?

Advertising puts in its two cents worth, suggesting pains of various kinds and then offering relief through meds or some other handy product.  

There is a kind of pain that is not pain, at least not in the way we understand it as physical discomfort, but rather a psychological state like depression or even just floating nothingness.  The body wants to be busy and the brain will begin to go haywire or lose function unless there’s a steady flow.  That’s the insane punishment of solitary confinement, which doesn’t have to be physical confinement.  Just solitary.

Understanding suffering need not be a matter of book learning, but of experience.  When I was working in a nursing home there were patients who were legitimately (with medical cause) suffering who begged for relief.  The nursing staff would begin to be annoyed with them and to talk about addiction, even withholding the drugs to punish the patient for not being cooperative.  

Addiction is the big Scare Threat, and yet these were sometimes dying people.  Addiction over-rides pain, but I’ve known people who WERE truly addicted in the worse kind of dependence on that escape, but who were still able to “kick” drugs.  It wasn’t easy and the kind of pain was the kind I dread most: nausea, the invasion within.  It was a decision of some kind on their part, maybe a desire for clarity.  A goal beyond suffering.

Another kind of suffering is invasion of space, maybe as simple as coming inside that invisible circle around a person or animal or even insect close enough to be a threat.  Do not walk up behind a person who has been in prison -- the circle around that person is BIG.  There are some people who either can’t perceive the line or have somehow learned to stand very close.  In some cultures people will stand close enough to feel and smell your breath.  Personally, I have to clench my teeth to be on a crowded bus.  Why do you think I’m in Montana!

But to have one’s body invaded through orifices or with a needle or blade through skin, even with a careful and well-lubricated instrument, can add insult and outrage to real pain.  If you’re an old woman having a pelvic, prepare for pain and then the comment “Oh, these elderly vaginas are like that.”  With no easing off.  

In France the insertion of urinary catheters into a male is done with anesthesia.  You can watch this procedure on YouTube.  I’ve watched on video a careful soothing nurse do this for a boy who couldn’t even hear her through his suffering.  The passing of body-generated “stones” -- kidney stones -- is screamingly painful.

There is fMRI study of pain:  http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/01/breakthrough-on-chronic-pain/  

Here’s a little jargon sample.  “Finding increased levels of the translocator protein in regions like the thalamus — the brain’s sensory gateway for pain and other stimuli — is important, since we know that this protein is highly expressed in microglia and astrocytes, the immune cells of the central nervous system, when they are activated in response to some pathologic event.”  The translation is that one can see pain on a computer screen.  It turned out to be quite consistent.

But it’s not possible to see suffering.  Suffering can be moral, which is to say invisible and relative.  I found a Swedish study that looked at women with borderline personality disorder.

“The main findings were that BPD patients suffer to an extent that is often unendurable, leading to deliberate self-harm (DSH) and suicide attempts to relieve suffering or just try to get away from it all (paper II). In study III the BPD patients showed significantly poorer quality-of-life (even physical) than normal population controls of comparable age. The suffering, suicide attempts, DSH and poor quality-of-life . . . put the patients in a position of voluntarily or involuntarily getting involved with psychiatric care. . . . On one hand, psychiatric professionals can add to the suffering by not being understanding and being disrespectful, on the other hand they can be helpful and relieve suffering by being respectful, understanding and validating. There was a clear relationship between the patients ́ experience of validation and the experience of being helped.” 

The third explicit goal of the study was to relieve the suffering of the counselor burdened with the task of helping!  I’ve heard more than one shrink complain about having to counsel women, interpreting them as shirking, childish, and boring.  The woman feels this, of course, and so do boys who go for help but instead get sighs over their intractability.  Myself, I find that a bad counselor is like a clumsy catheter inserter, an unjustifiable invader who only adds to the suffering.  I run.  I shirk.  I'm childish.

There are a few who enjoy authorized hurting of others.  At this point my psychiatric nurse friend will mention Dr. Mengele.  If you’re too young to remember him, use Google.  But brace yourself.

(to be continued)

BEE DEATH

The theory now -- after years of research -- is that the honeybees are dying because of killer chemicals used to control damage to plants.  The main killer is nicotine, the same as a person killer.  It was not present in natural environments so that honeybees never learned to avoid it or even to detect it.  But the effect on them is invisibly deadly.  And addictive.

Addiction is not conscious.  Addiction might not be detected.  The phenomenon of being addicted is very old and in the most basic functions of the brain as well as embedded in the molecular reactions of the cells and muscles, the autonomic nerve system.

Some human body systems are far more susceptible to addiction.  First the cell level ability to respond at least at the epigenomic level -- the more intense, the more addictive.  Then the inter-person forces of society and relationships.  Availability, intense links to the effects related to trauma, terror, and low-level anxiety barely conscious, if that. The corporate mind-fucking advertising, the commercial substrate dependent on the substance’s production and marketing.  (Tobacco farming is deep into the identity of some places.)  It hardly matters whether the substance is nicotine or heroin.  In fact, honeybees, or whatever it is that pollenates opium poppies, have probably evolved ways to handle opiods.  

Honeybees, which are mostly European like our earthworms, are susceptible to nicotine poisoning in part because they go from one flower to another, accumulating, while American ground bees (like bumblebees) don’t do that.  They are not hive bees.

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on sex.  You already knew that.  (So does smoking -- sooo sexy!)  The virus is not perceptible.  Sometimes sex is not perceptible.  I just watched “Black Narcissus,” the 1947 film -- ironically listed by Amazon as “Christian” though it is about lust, both spiritual and physical.  The idea is that a fabulous retreat in the Himalayas used to be sequestered as a harem.  (Don’t go looking for it -- it’s a scale model with a painted background.)  Its walls are painted with seductive sexy dancing girls, but outside from the incredibly gorgeous and rarified perch, the view is “heavenly.”  At age 8 I only knew I was disturbed and imprinted with these subconscious metaphors.  My girl friend and I danced for hours in her backyard while her mother vigilantly watched the fascinated old man in the house behind, who was watching us.  The mom knew and had sense enough to protect us without forbidding us to dance or alarming us about a social dimension we were not ready for.  

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on IV drugs. Syringes are the enablers.  There are no condoms for syringes. (They'd have to have a hole in the end, wouldn't they?)  But it is conscious -- the addict knows what’s happening and even the thought of the act: the spoon, the candle, the rubber tubing is enough to stop the vehicle so the addict can climb in. 

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on pain addiction.  Not much research has been done on the addictiveness of pain, I think.  Is there a difference between self-inflicted pain (cutting) and group imposed pain (boot camp)?  What about four-inch heels, so like needles?  As painful as the spiritual and sexy toe-dancing shoes for ballet.  (The directors of “Black Narcissus” also did “The Red Shoes.”)  Why are nuns and priests often into self-torture through restrictions or active flagellation or hair shirts?  Why is secrecy or limited collaboration (the confessional) a part of the addiction?  Can one be as addicted to the secrecy as to the punishable behavior and then flirt with disclosure in order to imagine fear, pain, and sex?   

 Kerr, Kathleen Byron asthe nun who goes mad, and Farrer

Aren’t the entirely bundled-up nuns as sexy as the David Farrer character, about as bare as the Fifties would allow?   And isn’t Gauguin Syndrome in part about “going native” but not “really” being native (Jean Simmons as a Tibetan -- please!  Like Natalie Wood in “The Searchers” ?  What about that famous National Geographic image of the green-eyed Afghani woman) -- flirting with the edge of autochthony, all about the earth/body and the escape from over-structured societies.

The flower, the pollen, the invisible poison, the devastation of missing populations and the loss of profit.  Bees communicate by dancing in a correlating way: using the direction, the distance and the promise as translated into a little compass metaphor on the porch of the hive.  One can get hooked on the bee dance of pornography, online flirting, depictions of all sorts, without even knowing it.  Easier for women to deny arousal than men, sometimes it takes equipment to reveal what the body knows.  And can demonstrate in males unless you’re sitting close enough to the poker table to hide an erection.

Jean Simmons -- an unlikely Tibetan

“Send me a picture -- a RECENT picture.”  “Put your picture by your post.”  “Try to look attractive. “Like” people -- give us their names.   And kids have to be told to NOT sext, because they think it’s innocent.  It’s so possible to double-speak in the sleepy dark of an adolescent bedroom with walls full of sexy posters.  Or in the addiction parlor of the Oval Office of the President, as full of power as one of those carefully fenced and warning transformer sites we see so often that they become invisible.

Bottom line: addiction is not always perceptible and often is detected only through consequences.  Attempts to break addictions often become addictions in themselves: “group”, intimacy, self-affliction and denial.  

This is because so much of the addiction is in the animal substrate of humanness; unconscious, automatic, and meant to expand in the face of danger, discouragement or paralysis.  Craving cannot be cured by intelligence.  Nevertheless, to some extent both are in some exquisitely subtle way calibrated to be triggered by thinking.  As our technology becomes ever more delicate, we begin to think of addressing the penetrations of sex and drugs with changes to our very cells.  Now there’s a scary enough idea to give you a squirt of adrenaline!

Joe LeDoux is on the edge of this research.  His books are like the early Kinsey investigations of sex -- so scholarly, so dependent on footnotes and sources to be mastered that I have to read them at a table with a high-lighter and legal pad, now and then traveling to the computer for definitions.  The words aren’t in my medical dictionary which is a little dated.

I do better than most stuffy people with obscene materials because there is so much overlap with literature.  Well-written descriptions of every kind of transgression (sex or abuse or sickness and death or raw violence or HIV-AIDS) are as addictive as their subject matter, without the earth/body consequences.  I do not know whether censoring these real forces is helpful or whether their vivid depiction is damaging.  I’m pretty far over on the open depiction side.

As an eight-year-old, “Black Narcissus” -- which is masterfully done -- hooked me right there in the plush theatre seat, surrounded by family and society.  The title comes from a mythical perfume, which is a drug, right?  The East Slope of the Rockies can as spiritually exalting as the Himalyas, Blackfeet can serve pretty well as Tibetans, and if you don’t think Bob Scriver is as sexy as David Farrer, it’s because you didn’t know Bob.  He didn’t own any shorts because he never wore them.  If it seemed safe, he took everything off.  If it wasn’t safe, he only removed his shirt.  

I do not demonize drug use because “drugs” are a part of the operational system of the earth/body -- for better or for worse.  Maybe we would do better to address the human interactions that produce deceptive information in our bee-dances and lace our flowers with poison.  

Lilas et Narcissus Soivohle for women and men

Here’s something for Facebook users to consider.  I dumped Facebook quickly, partly because most of my family is clearly hooked.  It’s part of their reassurance that they are normal, safe, and attractive, though it is anything but.  https://blog.bufferapp.com/psychology-of-facebook  It’s what I got my education in order to escape.  My relatives think it is all about family.  It’s not.  It’s “hive mind.”  All about swarms and queens, so terribly sweet.

HUNGRY GHOSTS EAT RELIGION

“In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts” makes it plain that addiction is a wretched fate with no “up side.”  But Maté also says that two things are worse than drug addiction itself and its capacity to destroy people.  One is that the official blunt-object reaction that demonizes pain-killers denies their legitimate relief for suffering people.  The other is that the exaggerated value and the power of covert distribution creates an underground economy of more power than any government.

Enough time has passed since the discovery of effective anesthesias that we’ve forgotten what a great contribution they were.  I wonder whether the media fascination with enacting childbirth agony as a source of drama isn’t a faint memory of a time when a woman going into labor never knew whether she and/or her child would survive.  In many parts of the world that’s still the case and in some parts of the world, it may even be hoped for. Life-saving surgeries like transplants would simply not be possible without deep anesthesia and even ordinary trauma like broken bones and abscessed teeth would be much harder to handle.

A hip replacement

My stepdaughter, a year older than me, died of cancer at age thirty.  There was very little chance of her being cured but she was in agony through the last months because the doctors didn’t want her to be addicted.  She was on a very strict schedule that nurses had to obey though it meant she begged and gripped her bed rails with white knuckles towards the end of the interval.  The doctor knew this, though he didn’t witness it much, and talked about severing her spine to relieve the pain, though it meant that if she did recover by some miracle, she would not be able to walk and would be incontinent.  Her priest said she was in hell on earth.  Today she would have a morphine pump and fentanyl patches.

We are only beginning to apply neuroresearch to pain though it is clear that pain is “in the brain,” that it doesn’t register as pain until it is recorded there in consciousness.  The rest of it forms in the other ninety-plus-percent of what the body does.  It is not necessarily related to tissue damage; even missing limbs can be a major source of pain.  It is a “symptom” that can be a disease in itself, limiting life.

The famous pounding donut

When volunteers were slid into fMRI machines, the experimenters were shocked to see that what lit up when their subjects were made to feel social “pain” (exclusion, rejection, disapproval, desertion) was the same brain network that lit up for “physical” pain.  We know that hypnotism, without any touching, can make people NOT feel pain, though no one has admitted using hypnotism to make people hurt.  

A notorious work of fiction appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine many years ago.  It used physical pain as a metaphor, proposing that young women were being given a drug that made all physical pain feel like pleasure, a bliss that they begged for, and their bodies were found on improvised operating tables where their spines had been opened to impose damage for the sake of the pain.  Of course, the author was talking about heroin, but also the kind of drama-trauma that some young women seem to crave as demonstrating true love: all that operatic jealousy, sacrifice, and renewed passion.  In certain circumstances, the outcome may be murder.

A mouse pup

Other experiments with animals show that the whimpering and calling that distressed baby mammals use to call their mothers can be suppressed with heroin, which means that the mothers never come and the pups never develop the parts of their brain that deal with interaction with others of their species, because brains learn by experience.  A rat pup that goes unlicked by its mother will be sociopathic.  Dysfunctional.  RAD.

We are deeply confused about pain and what it means and who “deserves” relief, as well as what to do about addiction.  We seem to be as stubbornly addicted to the neglect and abuse of children as we are to short-circuiting our brain systems.  According to Maté there are four main systems involved, each of them independent but interacting, far more unconscious than we admit.  1) opioid attachment-reward system, 2) dopamine-based incentive-motivation apparatus, 3) self-regulation areas of the prefrontal cortex and the 4) stress-response mechanism.

Maté flatly states that babies damaged by lack of care will be susceptible to drug addiction and conversely all addicts were neglected as infants.  This goes to the survival of the individual.  But there is also great threat to the survival of the society, because the legitimate government is soon accompanied by an underworld system of commerce based on huge profits capable of exceeding any income from taxes -- without paying any taxes and with private armies of enforcers.  So rich nations become a place where desperate people live under bridges, but even the bridges themselves are so unmaintained that they fall down.  Both are failures of infrastructure, neither supports survival of the human species nor any country.

So here comes my curve ball.  Religions are institutionalized belief systems that are meant to recommend behavior, create communities, and identify meaning for human lives that balances individuals and groups.  Forget about all the pre-existing religions because they evolved in a world that no longer exists.  By now they are so preoccupied with guaranteeing their own survival that they are willing to destroy any competition.  The main guides for their behavior are acquisition and status.

Let’s look at “zero-based” thought structures, based on what we know from research and personal experience will promote well-being.  First, I would want to separate sin (specific acts that are damaging and can be controlled in part, as well as identified with legislation) from evil (the human impulse to destroy and control, perhaps not even consciously).  If we look for the equivalents in terms of “good,” what might they be?  First, funding for the public welfare (the obverse of sin-based criminal systems).  Then against human “evil” we could endorse empathy, participation in the emotional lives of all others.  If evil is not caring about the suffering and destruction we impose on others, then good must be not just shared understanding but “feeling with” them -- not just their suffering but also their joy.

It’s a challenge, esp. when dealing with people whose joy appears to come from imposing suffering on others.  What do we do or think about general deprivation that obviously makes people evil in their effort to survive:  the people of Russia have lived for centuries in misery.  Can they ever be happy without being drunk?  It’s not that they have no natural resources, but that too many people don’t have a big enough share.  And the rest of the world seems to be imitating them.  

In the meantime the planet keeps throwing its own version of curveballs, or maybe more accurately boomerangs, in which our own excesses come back to us in melting icecaps and moving climate windows for crops and ecologies.  Poppies must now be grown north of the previous fields.  The topsoil that has supported the world’s wheat is washing out to sea, which comes a little more inland every year, creeping up over the curbs of the megacities where people have migrated by the millions in search of a livelihood.  What is the religious meaning of the Bangladeshis walking waist-deep in water across what used to be their land?  There isn’t any meaning.  No sin; no evil.  It just is.  The distinction is in the response by us.  That's where the felt meaning is -- in our own hands.

ALL THIS FITS TOGETHER SOMEHOW

One research revelation is coming after another -- or maybe they are realizations since the knowledge was always there and, once thought of, is perfectly clear and real.  It’s strange that we always think we’re coming to an ending of history, the line has been drawn, the sum has been added, and it’s all over.  Except it never is. You don’t even have to make an effort because it all shifts, except that it’s not the world shifts so much as we’re seeing it differently.

Being able to see into neuron cells and their hookup relationships has revealed:

1.  “Thinking” is something the whole body does all the time: it is taking in a representation of the world and reacting to it in every second.  More than that, the body and brain is changing and rearranging itself between representation and reaction in every second.  The brain connectome is like a piano concerto that chords out changing patterns as it plays.  It’s not a bump for this and a wire for that, it’s 100 synapses at once, all over the brain and back into the brain stem.

2.  The body’s 3-R process is a dance, a shifting process.  We are not aware of this most of the time.  We think we are “me,” a unified identity, with trustworthy memories of an actual past.  (Except where did I put the car keys?)

3.  Self-awareness, consciousness, is a small percentage of the body’s commotion.

4.  Words are only an even smaller percentage of consciousness/concepts and they are at the mercy of the culture that supplies the categories and some of the grammar.

5.  Writing is only a small percentage of what spoken words can express, passed through another set of filters that are about keyboards or gripping an instrument while staying in control of font size, sequences, clarity.

6.  Somehow our Western culture has come to believe that writing is a mark of superiority and that writing really well is not only the most distinctive of human characteristics but also true communication and an indication of genius.

This last assertion is hooey.  I’ll just leave it there.  For now.

Something similar is true of addiction.  The knowledge we have now is challenging our assumptions.  (I’m reading Gabor Maté’s book, In the Land of the Hungry Ghosts, about a program to help the most seriously suffering addicts in Vancouver, BC.)

1.  Not everyone gets addicted easily.  In ninety percent, or two-thirds, or some comparable majority fraction of people, depending on the drug and the circumstances, their molecular responses are not permanently changed.  For an addict, the cell membrane is changed in a way that prevents it operating as it should.  Instead of allowing the proper molecules access and producing the proper molecules in the first place, it closes the  cell entry points for the reciprocal endo-transactions that must take place.  Instead the cell membrane and cell synapses shape themselves around the exogenous, outsider, molecules.  Then they quite literally MUST have them to work.  This is not conscious.  It cannot be felt by introspection of the cells, just general malaise.  It can only be observed in behavior.  But the early results are highly rewarding: blissful.  Later this high can only be felt by increasing intake of the drug.
  

Maté on the left

2.  Addiction is sometimes seen as an emotional reaction to a miserable life or a need for emotional comforting, a compensation for deprivation.  That can be the original motivation for taking drugs, but soon -- in those susceptible -- the cells have changed enough that it is now a mechanical problem, just as much as if bones were broken.  The things that are supposed to make a teeny mobile ecology of membranes and molecules shift back and forth to produce thought and life are disrupted.  No amount of will power can restore them.  Proper protection of the person (shelter, food, sleep), compensating meds, support from people who understand, and the stamina to withstand withdrawal can sometimes allow people to find a new balance.  Incarceration will not work.  Methadone works if the person can stay on it.

Addiction is a physiological condition dependent on the cell's own actions that (like HIV) makes a person vulnerable to desire, meant to keep a person alive but driven to a kind of desire that will kill them, if not directly then by the neglect of other self-protections.  Maté believes that the fraction who have susceptibility were made that way just before or after birth.  Environment is crucial.

Somewhere I read a quote (I wish I’d written it down with the attribution) that suggested  the brain machinery for nurturing and the brain machinery for rage are like parenthesis, two “hands” that hold between them what we call love or attachment.  I read today that the hormone called “oxytocin” -- which we all learned from reading Herriott's “All Creatures Great and Small,” would make a resentful cow turn and care for her calf or a sow begin to make milk for her piglets -- is not ever present in reptiles.  Instead there is a precursor chemical that prompts crocodiles, for instance, to go to the birthing place, dig the hole, produce the eggs.  Then they leave.  It's humans who go "aaaww" over the babies and want to cuddle them.

http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/dr-love.html

"Oxytocin is a sort of moral governor, and that sense of morality comes from this ancient mechanism that modulated approach and withdrawal behavior. The precursor molecule for oxytocin, which was found in fish at least 400 million years ago, modulated approach and withdrawal behavior between males and females to facilitate sexual reproduction. So the value of sex is that you get greater genetic diversity faster. But the curse of sex, if you’re a fish, is that if this other fish gets close enough to you to fertilize you, you might instead become its lunch. What the precursor oxytocin did in the female was allow the approach of a male fish, but only when the female was ovulating.

"Oxytocin does the same thing in humans. It modulates approach and withdrawal behavior, and it does so by modulating fear responses."

One of the most moving stories in “Hungry Ghosts” is that of a pair of addicts who were educated, gifted people but hooked and therefore thrown on badd times.  He was more alcoholic.  She was into cocaine.  She became pregnant.  Somehow the baby was okay, but the mother rose and left as soon as the infant was born.  The father, who had been in and out of the relationship, then stepped in and for the first few weeks of the little girl’s life, as she was weaned carefully from her intrauterine addiction, he was the nurturer.  Something in the woman’s addiction evidently blocked the production of oxytocin, but alcoholism did not, even in this male.  At least for those several weeks -- then he went off on an alcohol binge and the baby was fostered.

So the function of oxytocin is to trigger nurturing or what I might even call cradling and in its most basic function -- before mammals -- was to allow two creatures who might otherwise compete, fight or eat each other to declare enough of a truce to unite semen with ovum.  Even in mammals there are no guarantees of protection.  In some animals, sex is agonistic enough to seem almost like fighting.  (Insert cat joke here.)  Tom cats will eat kittens.  Threatened mother mink will kill all the babies.

Sing it!

If everything in a body works as a reciprocity, then human love might be seen as occupying a place on a continuum between nurturing/cradling and raging/attacking.  So would the molecular trigger for violence be testosterone or adrenaline?  Or both?  Fear?  If in Ray Rappaport’s terms, all the reciprocities amount to the banks of the stream that is homeostasis (too much hot or cold and you die; too much food or not enough food and you die) so that likewise too much nurturing is suffocation and too much violence is traumatic wounds.  But the momentum goes forward towards survival, moving a little from one side or the other, so long as the bounds of endurance are not exceeded.  This metaphor is an account of the survival of individuals.  We tell many versions in what we call “novels,” and illuminate points on the continuum with “poems” or “songs.”

The survival of groups requires a different sort of homeostasis -- between war and peace.  Or more temperately, between economic competition and protection.  These are related to population density, slipping over to murder when there are too many people or suicide when life is too limited.

http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park

Rats in a box get addicted to pushing a lever for drugs.  Rats in a rat-friendly environment, a Rat Park, big as a human house with lots of things to do and play with, simply don’t get addicted. All mammals are pretty much like that.  Like, boys need Skate Parks; dogs need Dog Parks.  

CAN SCIENCE CHANGE RELIGION?

On Sunday I sorta try to post something “religious” -- whatever that is.  It’s just a conceit, esp. when you think that EVERYTHING is actually religious.  But we’ve got a three-way problem in almost everything that we’re struggling with these days.  In the past the best thinking about how one ought to live life has been based on observation, both watching society to see what works for the greater good and watching one’s own internal being to understand behavior.  We split out into two ends of the spectrum: one punishing and the other redeeming. 

The problem is not figuring out what people ought to do -- that’s pretty obvious.  The problem is that we don’t do it and we don’t know why or we just can’t help it.  We WANT to do what we shouldn’t. Some think it’s hereditary, some think it’s the result of psychological weakness, some think it’s a moral failing -- that takes it onto religious moral grounds.

Often the larger culture is crowding people into doing bad stuff, but building consensus about how that ought to be addressed is nearly impossible because of this three-way problem.  Left-right-scientific.   Pointing out that a few people are profiting from many people’s suffering is countered by the idea that their suffering is their own shortfalls, weakness, deficiency, and origins.  They are “different” lesser beings.  The liberal/conservative religious spectrum is now challenged by physical research, embodiment.

Most prescriptions and laws are simply a matter of advice and punishment.  Thinking and compassionate people are understanding and willing to do what works, if they can figure out what it is.  They are pressed by “morality” that demands response and obedience.  At last what we have figured out in the past and even used for centuries, is now challenged by new technology that clearly shows all theories so far were at best incomplete.  Everything is changed by our technical ability to perceive what wasn’t even known to exist until now.  But it’s hard to wrap one’s head around it.

Norm Holland

For instance, I subscribe to Discussion about the Arts PSYART@LISTS.UFL.EDU; a website owned by Norman Holland, who is the reason I signed up, since I admire his writing.  http://www.normholland.com  The list is centered on psychoanalysis and literature and therefore on older urban people, highly educated, sophisticated, strongly anchored, and mostly male.  They are also very busy and have had little reason or opportunity to keep up with things like brain research.  For the most part, they do not psychoanalyze young boys though they have a lot of theories about them.

Yesterday in other places I was reading about the effect of porn on the brain and also the investigation of trauma damage by looking directly at the brain.  Even drug use can be actually seen as structural damage. The problem for the Psyart folks is reconciling Freudian principles with the new understanding that comes out of direct (if via instruments) observation and physical interventions like removing tumors or implanting electrical stimulators.  It’s not just a question of accepting this new information, but it also means giving up a kind of theory poetry, as beautiful and beloved as lyric poetry or French Impressionist painting.  Even as they are pressed by their own desire to know and to help others, they are limited by their formal lives. 

A mask made by a veteran with PTSD to show what it feels like.

Today a high-level Manhattan prof asked the list if everyone traumatized will inevitably develop PTSD.  This is a question plentifully addressed with deprived kids, some of whom are considered “resilient.”  Not all soldiers in heavy combat will develop long term PTSD, though physical damage, esp. to certain structures, will change them.  In addition, people who “candle heads” -- as one shrink inelegantly put it to me -- do studies suggesting the possibility of redeeming even damaged brains.  I have time to look for this stuff and read it.  A big time Manhattan analyst does not.  Maybe they ought to engage readers the way lawyers have legal aides.

The porn study was molecular rather than from scanning, and the theory is that the molecule in question is a protein keystone of all addictions.  It’s called “Delta FosB.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU&feature=share   Gary Wilson and his team were studying porn, specifically men who watch a lot of it, and the effect on them over a long period of time.  They claim that boys as young as ten are looking for porn and will easily get hooked because the Internet keeps up a steady stream of hot images, always new, maybe a little edgier all the time, or surprising, maybe spiced with a bit of violence or transgression.  

Gone are the days of studying the Sears catalog underwear pages.  Nor do many people bother to hide Playboy these days.  Instead, an adult who knows a kid is reading the mag might slip some condom packets among the pages.  But the appetite developed by escalating intense porn is not going to be sated by any mag at all.  http://yourbrainonporn.com/garys-research-neuroplasticity-addiction-deltafosb-lay

James Bond -- shaken.

Viewing porn that is highly stimulating over a long period of time leads finally to erectile disfunction.  Common sense would say,  “Well, heck, a person can have too much of anything!”  Indeed, there’s a close parallel to eating sweet, salty, spiced foods.  Overusing it leads to craving and then indiscriminate response.  So. . . lectures, attempts to impose control, blah blah blah.  That handsome guy in "Fifty Shades of Gray" will soon be impotent.  Just like a real life James Bond who drank as much as the movie version would by now be dead from alcoholism.

When the blood assayers got into studies of porn users, they found a molecule:  DeltaFosB.  High stimulus, repeated, increased in intensity and so on -- to the level of addiction -- will make the level of this stuff go up to the point where it is blocking normal function.  It takes a couple of months of abstinence for it to fall back down.  Those of us who work on our eating or exercise levels will recognize that span -- 6 to 8 weeks before the “habit” has formed or unformed.  The habit is molecular.

We come to the study of brain trauma through violent sports like football.  The molecular addiction is in the fans, the traumatic damage is in the players.  What was often thought to be merely macho brutish behavior natural to the kinds of people who would play such a game, has turned out since to be due to chasms in the brain tissue.  The good news is that the Jello-like tissue with its responsiveness is capable of regenerating in large part.  Without emotional analysis -- just starving out DeltaFosB.  Going cold turkey.

This study was about men, esp. boys, because their brains are just forming and could possibly build DeltaFosB into the underlying scaffolding of their brains, where it can’t be removed.  I’m thinking about what the results might be with women, who have their own porn addictions, esp. to the drama of it all, the rejection and reclaiming, the abuse.  In “Fifty Shades of Gray”  the female effect of the porn (and most readers of this book are female) is NOT pretending to be the dominating, all-knowing, wealthy man, but identifying with the innocent, submissive woman.  That’s also addictive, kicking up the endogenous drugs like adrenaline or serotonin. Soon, hooked people cannot leave men who beat them up.  In fact, that may be MORE powerful than the male idea of dominating women, even when transgressive violence is added.

So is addiction just a scientific medical problem?  Can we give up all the moral commandments about not taking drugs, not abusing people, not rejecting anyone who is struggling on the wrong side of society?  Just take a pill?  Even if we accept the science-based principles that everything is connected and everything is always changing, including one’s endogenous chemicals, the new information does not change conservative ministers who send women back into addiction to abusive husbands because of the “morality” of ownership notions of "divinely ordained" marriage.  That's gotta go.

A sense of justice would also help.

This is where we need the help of the heavyweight bigshot male urban authorities in their Manhattan offices.   They must help us embrace the addicted, not punish them.  Demonizing abusers and angelizing those abused is only Manicheism: outdated.  BOTH are addictive.  Addiction is NOT a moral issue.  Behavior towards people who are addicted IS a moral issue.  To get change, add science.

PS:  I'm told that Daniel Amen is not what he purports to be.  Part of science is checking out the experts carefully, which I didn't do.  Therefore, this is not a scientific blog.  More speculative.

RELIGIOUS ATTACHMENT IS EROTIC

Bernini  St. Therese

Much of human meaning comes from the psychological/physiological phenomenon of attachment, the first manifestation of which is literal and maternal -- the umbilical cord.  Throughout life one yearns for attachment, usually to another human being but sometimes to a surrogate (dog? institution?  art?), and -- in religious terms -- to God.  One of the main functions of portraying God as a person (regardless of factuality) is that it demonstrates attachment.  Call it love if you like.  

A specialized kind of love/attachment, physically erotic, is often expressed in words and music, love songs.  I’m appending a quiz that compares the attachment rhetoric of eroticism to the attachment rhetoric of spirituality when God is seen as a Person.  It was composed by a Christian homeschooler R.L. Stollar, and comes to me courtesy of http://whiskyprajer.blogspot.com.  Don’t assume that everyone in the believing Christian community is stuffy and blind.  These people are not.  The category of the bands, I'm told, is "Christian Rock."  I’ll put the answers on the next post.

The co-opting of religious rhetoric in the service of S/M sex is a demonstration of how thin the wall between the two can be.  But also there’s something about defining a privileged meaning-community.  I think of the feminists in the Seventies busily “correcting” the UU hymnal lyrics which were Humanist but white male.  The claim was that male pronouns included people of every gender but that was demonstrably (if not very consciously) not true.  Of course, only a few decades earlier the Humanists had been scratching their heads to find words for the hymnal replacing Godtalk, even though the claim was that God could be considered an abstract principle, like “love” or “creativity” or “the Force.”  What is an one-syllable synonym for “man” that IS inclusive?  “Folk?”  (“Human” has man in it.)

The next twist on attachment is that if there is a God, then there is a Devil.  Isn’t the S/M lover in Shades of Gray just Lucifer with a bankroll?  The opposite of good is evil because they are both addictive, which is an extreme paradoxical attachment.  Ecstasy is almost painful.  Pain is almost ecstatic.  If there is addiction, the addiction is demonstrated by the withdrawal.  If the addiction is simultaneously to the “good” of bliss and the “bad” of suffering, then the addiction is twice as powerful -- maybe more, a synergy. (Like an abusive marriage.)  The other extreme of the detach/attach spectrum is fusion.  But then the relationship collapses: the two entities are the same.  

Indifference is the real opposite of attachment.  (I admit that I am addicted to the study of meanings, including that of attachment.  I am not indifferent.  But perhaps this is a protective addiction, a kind of methodone or antidote.)  Indifference/attachment is a spectrum, but a basic level of attachment is necessary for survival.  Doesn’t matter whether it’s good or evil.  Total meaninglessness is not evil but catatonia: numbness.

The ultimate meaning of meaning is survival and therefore attachment is a means of survival.  I ask all the time, what is the addiction UNDER addictions?  ALL addictions.  Of course, in the physical sense it is molecular responses in the brain, the triggers and plug-ins of various kinds.  But what connectome, what consciousness pattern?  

No one shoots up with “street serotonin.”  That can’t be the only key.  Meaning is historical.  Heroin has more of a history than serotonin.  It has glamour, wickedness.  (The root meaning of glamour is witchcraft, right?)  Every flame needs a chalice, every act of sex, religion or drug use needs its ceremony.  I’m sure folks out there can offer the rhetoric of drugs in songs, which will be close to those of God-worship and sex.  Every meaning needs its rhetoric and if the meaning is near to the core, that rhetoric will dwell in the lyrics of the songs.  

So here’s the quiz and I’ll put the answers in the next post.

*****

1. Which of the following is a lyric from a Newsboys song?

a. Giving it over, I was flat on my back.

b. I come instantly. 

2. Which use of “hand” is from 50 Shades of Grey and not a CCM song?

a. You gentle your hand…

b. Gushing with surrender in your hands…

c. My hands are open, so take what you see…

3. Three of the following four lines are from Skillet songs. Which one is from 50 Shades of Grey?

a. Stretch me bigger….

b. An empty vessel to be filled at your whim…

c. I’m exploding like chemicals. I’m going crazy — can’t get enough!

d. It’s so urgent. It’s so desperate I can feel it in my bones.

4. One of these four is dirty talk. The other three are DC Talk. Which one is dirty?

a. You consume me like a burning flame.

b. Anytime, anyplace.

c. I am calling out your name.

d. Oh, you know that I surrender.

5. Which “you” is from a Sonicflood praise song? (The other two are about sex.)

a. God, I want you

b. I want to touch you.

c. I am in awe of you.

6. Can you figure out which is neither Rebecca St. James nor Audio Adrenaline?

a. Here I am. I will do as you say.

b. You’re pinning me to the wall.

c. I’m enslaved to what you say.

7. Different people handle pain differently. Which one is the 50 Shades of Grey way?

a. How can I scream when the pain is such a release?

b. The pain is such that I refuse to acknowledge it.

c. I do not deserve to be set free.

8. Once you experience something you really like, you usually want more. Which wanting more is not about God?

a. We’re going all the way.

b. I’ve never wanted more, until I met you.

c. I’ll be chasing you.

d. I wanna do it soon.

9. Which romantic exclamation is not about Jesus?

a. When I’m in your arms is when I feel the best.

b. My heart beats for you.

c. I want my world to start and end with you.

d. I can feel your power surging through the whole of me.

10. One of these is about a BDSM master/slave relationship. The other three are from Christian music.

a. Capture me, make me a slave.

b. I’m struggling to resist, but I’m drawn.

c. If I could only be your master.

d. You can have everything I am.