Emotional inflammation is a new term that may be more helpful than PTSD, which refers to major traumas like war or auto crashes. If you read my post about close calls and narrow escapes, or even about falling in the snow, that’s more the level I’m considering. I would add the term “stoic scabbing” as opposed to overuse of the term “healing.” If you knock the scab off, you get pus and a bit of blood.
Continuing the metaphor:
background inflammation
social
cultural
cytokines and possible fatal storms
self-obsession
Here’s a link to the original idea. I like the term, but not their socially conventional idea of what to do about it or even what it really is. I’m relating it to my project of understanding something deeper and more pervasive, hidden in the structure of being that is built in infancy.
Here is how these authors identify “emotional inflamation.” They are undeniably real and present:
“New forms of distress and depletion – scandal fatigue, racial battle fatigue, compassion fatigue, ecoanxiety, news fatigue, apocalypse fatigue, solastalgia (distress caused by environmental change), and so on – that our culture has been experiencing at astonishing rates. . . . .”
Here’s their vaguely New Age prescription, all good advice:
“Prioritise taking care of your body’s needs – by getting enough good-quality sleep, steadying your body’s circadian rhythms (by dimming artificial lights and setting curfews on digital devices), taking care of your gut microbiome (with foods containing probiotics and prebiotics), exercising regularly, and taking time to regularly decompress from stress (with meditation or even deep breathing exercises).
They add writing.
This definition and approach to “emotional inflammation” is about daily anxiety which is stressful, but not what I describe as facing the terrible life-threats met with stoicism that have shaped my life. These are much more hidden in unexamined assumptions that make a person vulnerable to events but also keep that person functioning and persisting, even in damaging pursuits. It’s more systemic, like inherited tendencies or accumulated experience.
Not that it’s always trivial. The result may be fatal or may even make a person long for death. It may be agonizingly painful, or just an itch. A family tree might be helpful, but they are notoriously vulnerable to social change, for instance the disenfranchisement of teenage boys due to changed marriage patterns, diminution of war and its new emphasis on education, mechanization of boy-labor, new sex rules, and the idea that boys are somehow naturally resilient and brave.
The assumptions of my family have “inflamed” my thinking in subtle ways that have been denied and resisted by my extended family, though they didn’t “catch” all of the microbes and suffered from others. A list of mine follows.
Having a Scots heritage because my paternal grandfather grew up in Scotland along with his birth family and emigrated as a unit to South Dakota, then with his own children at about the same age to Manitoba, and finally to Oregon — always keeping the idea of being Scots which my father accepted. The Strachan crest was on the wall; my parents and cousins visited Strachan, the town in Scotland (our ancestors didn't live there); Scots stories like the persistent spider who inspired Robert the Bruce (my father’s name was Bruce); the idea of Scots-style rigorous education combined with a progressive outlook; and an a-theological take on life that preferred government “socialism” defined as patriotism.
On the one hand the family assumptions (coming from my father) were that Scots heritage made us better than anyone else; education came from the accumulation of books; photography and classical music indicated high intelligence; jobs should be idealistic; going up the ladder of promotions in a job was beneath us. My cousins on that side would agree that this was valid. Also, they believe that my father was jolly because he was fat, joked, and did parlor tricks with paper wads. They never saw him in a rage storm, which was an outbreak of his “emotional infection” reacting to reality like the fact that the family never really had enough money, partly because he didn’t make much or try to and partly because he spent so much on photography and records. Also, I don't think anyone in their families spanked children.
On my mother’s side (Irish American since the settlement of Kentucky) the beliefs included making the husband primary; acting on British primogeniture so that the oldest boy was the responsible one who dealt with legal matters; and believing education was the key to success. She compensated for everyone else because she thought that’s what a woman was meant for and she was enraged with me for not thinking that. I tried for a decade.
These are not just preconceptions that therapy might uncover, but pervasive cultural assumptions that were reinforced many ways and controlled our lives. I came to consciousness as much through theatre as through therapy. Also comparative religion, which is about culture.
Background inflammation as explored above, entwined social and cultural disfunction and reaction. The essential arrogance in being Scots was a defense against the inequitable pressure from the English with their greater wealth, stronger Roman infusion, and landed gentry. It was a sustaining conviction of my paternal family against the hardship of potato farming in far north Manitoba. So it was “cytokine” which is the body’s innate force for countering disfunction and disease (violence or crime).
The problem is that it leads to selective remembering. None in the family remember or admit that the historic Strachans who succeeded had sugar plantations in Jamaica where they kept black slaves. Even when my father went downtown to investigate a band named Strachan and met them so there was no doubt they were black and named Strachan because slaves took the names of their owners, he refused to see it as anything more than an anomaly. There was nothing in Scots wisdom about race.
My sort-of Irish mother who was raised with Native Americans on the scene in Washington and Oregon, was a champion of equality but clung to the idea that the goal of good humans was to be sort of Masterpiece Theatre people anchored in the big house. When black people went past the house, shouting obscenities raucously and possibly hurting each other as part of teasing, she felt they were not worthy. But when they were composed, proper, and responsible, she admired them. One of her black former elementary school students became a shopping mall cop in uniform. One of her best tricks was walking up to him and hugging him. A cytokine strategy.
I’ll come back to this.
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