DARK EMPATHY

"I would never kill myself"-- but he did.

It’s remarkable how much of our media is based on empathy for pain caused to the brave and innocent -- and then violence on their behalf in retribution.  When I began thinking about this post I was just pondering how much we love catastrophe and suffering, so long it’s second hand.  Then I watched two films and the whole idea of empathy began to shatter.  No longer was it the English teacher’s simple distinction between sympathy, feeling bad for someone, and empathy, feeling what they are feeling.

“Bridgend” is a documentary about a “suicide cluster” of teenagers in a shrinking Welsh town.  An inquiring camera interviews the grieving family and friends, by accident registering a vital, handsome, much-admired young man who declares he would NEVER commit suicide because it would hurt his mum too much.  But then he does it.  Did the pressure of being filmed, of thinking what it would be like to commit suicide, of realizing how much the world was interested in young people who kill themselves, of hearing the expressions of love and yearning for the dead person, actually push him over the edge?  Was it death by media-supported empathy?

There were rational puzzles: the adolescent kids knew each other, more or less.  They were hanged by rolling up their own clothing, not with rope.  They were found hanged kneeling from trees and playground equipment.  The police would say nothing about the cases at all -- total wall.  Sex was never mentioned: not who was sexually active nor the possibility of sexual abuse as little children.  When I looked into the story behind the film, Alex Shoumatoff’s  2009 article was rational and research based.  It looked at the nature of sucide clusters around the world.  http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/02/wales-suicides200902   

But the film mostly showed weeping people and a walk through the landscape.  John Michael Williams, the director, is revealed at the end, a handsome singer who specializes in sad songs about loneliness and being a misfit.  This is the original puzzle about empathy -- why we are so attracted to tragedy and why for some it kindles sexual interest that's never really acknowledged.

Wu Dunn and Nicholas Kristof

“A Path Appears” is a Nick Kristoff documentary about human trafficking, mostly of American women, and though there are the obligatory emotional testimonies, mostly the approach is rational -- sympathetic, focused on what can be done.   The Chicago police provide an example:  arresting the johns but offering help to the prostitutes.  A group home, that runs a business, explains how the women got their feet under them and take us on a tour of the streets, where both pimps and drug-hooked prostitutes declare they want to stay where they are.  There’s a demonstration for a mom to show her how easy it is to find her trafficked daughter on the Internet and get her back.  (The girl curls up like a puppy against her mom.)  All constantly worry about violent retribution from traffickers and pimps, but it never happens. 

Kristof, composed and cool, makes notes and often refers to his wife, Wu Dunn.  Nevertheless, the tweets that appear after the movie (It's streaming on PBS right now.) talk about love, being totally open, wanting to help.  Kristof uses beautiful young female movie stars as partners, some -- like Ashley Judd -- who are abuse survivors.  The comment responders seem to empathize with the movie stars or WANT to.  They are mostly female.  They want to be “Pretty Woman” and jump over the patterns presented so clearly.  They have no grasp of the economic trafficking of movie stars.  Nor can they see the damage inside the elegant facade.

But then I ran across an even darker aspect of empathy.  I began to see it less as the straightforward “co-consciousness”* in the word of one of my acting resources, and a much deeper mammalian response, not the rat in the tube but the papa prairie vole in the grass who loves his wife and children.

http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/dark-side-empathy-91399

“A paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that feelings of empathy toward a distressed person can inspire aggressive behavior. For some people, at least, feeling another’s pain is insufficient: they also experience the urge to harm the person they are in conflict or competition with.  This linkage was particularly strong for participants with a particular gene variant linked to the neurohormone vasopressin, which has previously been associated with aggressive behavior to defend one’s child or mate.  This is the prairie vole male reaction to threat.”  You can see it on Saturday night in most small town bars.

The experiment in this case was performed on humans using hot sauce as the source of revenge pay-back pain instead of “Fight Church” extreme fighting.  But it is still "unjust" pain triggering such a need to punish that it becomes a new source of pain -- in the process arousing a strong “taste” for violence, mixed with sexual passion.  No one asked about the impact on the belligerent’s love life that night.  

Years ago I heard about a local sports coach who tuned up his high school players by telling them to imagine that the opponent team members had raped their mother and killed their little brother.  They were a winning team, called a “red meat” team because of injuries to themselves and opponents.  This was not empathy.  It was endo-drugs, causing the imagination to release effective drugs within the athlete’s system.  It was teaching them to do that at home as well as on the field.  

Sansa of Game of Thrones is an abuse magnet.

Watching “Game of Thrones” can do the same thing without even moving off the sofa.  We’re so easily hooked.  In real life people might well reject an effort to empathize with them, even if their state is not suffering or anger.  Even if they have nothing to hide from the law or their family.  We’ve all questioned people about why they did something and gotten the frustrating answer,  “I don’t know.”  Which makes us want to know even more.  

Empathy can make a person vulnerable because then others will know what will hurt, what will stir up old emotions, what will release vasopressin.  But dark empathy is a great money-raiser, a path to admiration.  An author, among others, can get trapped between the desire to be rich and famous by revealing sensational subjects -- how we love misery porn!  But on the other hand writing that stuff might mean being attacked by those who have that gene mutation the male prairie voles have.

Queen Elizabeth II has a look at the Throne of Swords.

Does she empathize with the Starks or the Lannisters?

Journalists, esp. the television version, shove the microphone into the faces of those subjected to catastrophe, loss, and trauma, demanding to know “How do you feel?  How do you feel?”  Some families go indoors and refuse to talk.  Others stand and deliver.  Do the journalists go home and weep or do they become callous because it is their job and their bosses will fire them if they don’t do the expected thing.

Even doing this research and thinking has shown a searchlight on my own past.  Suddenly I realize what was going on sometimes under the surface of other people’s lives and that not-knowing meant that I didn’t have to do anything about it.  Didn’t know I COULD do anything about it.  I did act sometimes -- lost jobs because of it.  Didn’t trust the law even when I was working as an officer.  Didn't trust my denominational leaders when I was a minister.

Clearly “empathy” or “co-consciousness”* is an evolved and climax sort of capacity, but the social understanding of how to manage it -- both for individuals and between large categories of people -- has not caught up.  We can't do mind-melds yet.

*  It turns out that "co-consciousness" is a psych technical term referring to split personality.

MOLECULES MAKING TROUBLE (sex)

Clint Walker as Cheyenne was always getting stuck with babies.

And losing his shirt.

This post is an attempt to follow up the idea that the part of the human brain concerned with sexual mating is physiologically between the neural part concerned with the nurturing of children and the neural part concerned with competition, jealousy and domination of rivals.  When the three parts are cross-wired, maybe due to genetics or trauma or experiences, sex becomes compelling, sex becomes tenderly parental, or sex becomes “rough” or SM.  The three versions are mix-and-match in our culture and sometimes even in individuals.

The brain operates by creating connectome patterns among different parts in two ways:  by neuron filaments that reach out through the body between neurons to organs and muscles.  The second is that organs, which include structures in the brain like the pituitary, send out molecular signals that circulate via body fluids to all cells.  

A happy vole family.

Prairie voles have been a molecular revelation when compared to their cousins, the montane voles.  http://knowingneurons.com/2013/02/13/why-prairie-voles-fall-in-love-a-chemical-romance/    Prairie voles will pair-bond, as is the human ideal in some circles.  This turns out to be due to vasopressin, a molecule (actually a neuro-peptide) produced by genes, which in the male causes him to aggressively defend his female and then stay with her faithfully to help raise the pups (made tender by oxytocin).  Montane voles are cruisers, but if prairie voles have the genes that control vasopressin knocked out, they become just as promiscuous as their cousins.

Though it is interesting to know that genes/hormones can be so controlling, as far as I know there is no parallel gene/hormone link that explains a desire preference that’s not for the opposite sex, or for that matter a certain age group or personality type.  But it is clear that there are brain differences between men who prefer for sex either men or children and men who prefer women.  This has nothing straightforward to do with the three-mode styles of voles.  A gay man may also be either tender or aggressively violent or in the middle -- just turned on.

Tough, athletic guys can be nurturers.

There is correspondence between characteristics but no proof of causation.  Some thinkers see correspondence with left-handedness which develops in-utero (the proof is that the fetus has a hand-preference when it sucks its thumb), short size and a few other characteristics that suggest a glitch in gestation.  It does appear that desire preference develops in the womb.  No one knows that what cause there might be and, in fact, it could be any of a number of things including molecules, blood oxygen, temperature, the mother’s emotions, and other environmental factors.  

Anyway, it seems clear that one can not sort homo-from-hetero or adult-from-child preferences in a clearly dyadic way: people are on sliding scales of qualities which combined are what add up to their identities.  These distinctions on the basis of gender or age are “electric” because they are culturally-based legal categories meant to help protect families and children -- as well as the usually smaller and more vulnerable women -- from being attacked by aggressive bigger persons.   Keeping social order means providing stability in living arrangements so as to support economics and to prevent violence of any kind, which pulls drugs and alcohol into the laws, mixing them with sexual violence and with neglect of parental nurturing.

Things can go too far.

But stability or “home” have diminished meanings for people who have experienced in early life both dramatic disruptions (not necessarily war -- family violence will do) and terrifying abuse.  Though I’ve never experienced either of these, I still somehow developed the idea that children are a burden that would prevent achievement (I think my parents came to this conclusion, partly because of expectations of success that were not fulfilled, easy to blame on having children.  Mine was not a fighting family.  In fact, it was a suppressed family that I tried (am still trying) to provoke into coming out in the open to resolve some issues.  But this is countered by my total rejection of any violence or substance abuse.  I am a teetotaler, as was my grandmother. 

Another personal development was that my strong drive to nest, to stay put, is countered almost exactly by a dread of being trapped into relationships where I am used instead of helped in my own achievement.   It suits me to be celibate and with cats.  All this other stuff is not necessarily determining -- just a part.

These kinds of patterns are often expressed in “games” or just “repetition compulsion” which means that a person sets up the same situation over and over in hopes of figuring it out, making it work.  When it doesn’t, this is one definition of madness or at least neurosis.  Something has to change in the identity convictions to make the next version of the pattern end differently.  

When you're really in sync, it's so great.

If attempts to solve the problem end up with bait-and-switch, like men who seem to be madly in love but then fear entrapment so become punishing, or men who seem to be strongly attracted to another man but then are equally strongly attracted to a third man but then inconvenient aggressive competitive hormones kick in  -- there can be trouble.  Gay men who are on the nurturing side may want to settle down and raise children.  Gay men who are on the aggressively seeking side would endorse being the bee rather than the flower.  If the two gay men are mismatched, that has little to do with being gay.  The same mismatch could have happened in the heterosexual context -- and does.  Might even happen between prairie voles and wandering montane voles.  In theory, some of them should be "gay." A small percentage of every species appears to desire the same sex.

Know thy desire and manage it well.  I’m a high androgen woman.  I love high oxytocin men who also have strong male characteristics.  It’s the sort of thing that drives the plots of novels.  Not least because it doesn’t fit into social expectations.  Novels are about survival strategies.

Some guys don't know a cat when they see one.

_________________

This article notes some facts and theories about the mechanics of a crucial brain part, the hypothalamus which links the floating molecule cues to nerve cells.  It’s at the top of the brain stem, which means it is an “old” part that relates to early brain functions.  Sex has got to be one of the oldest, most primal.  So far our problem is TMI (too much information) as is often the problem with sex.

Hypothalamus Males and Females

By Dr Ananya Mandal, MD

The hypothalamus controls some of the basic functions of life including hormonal activity via the pituitary gland. There are several gender differences in the gland present between males and females.

Some prefer maturity anyway.

Some of the differences between male and female hypothalamus can be listed as:

• The volume of a specific nucleus in the hypothalamus (third cell group of the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus) is twice as large in heterosexual men as in women and homosexual men.
• In addition, the preoptic area that regulates mating behavior, is about 2.2 times larger in men than in women and contains 2 times more cells. This large size depends on the amount of male sex hormones or androgens. The difference in this area is only apparent after a child is 4 years old. In girls at 4 years of age there is a decrease in the number of cells in this nucleus.
• The shape of the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, involved with circadian rhythms and reproduction cycles is different in men and women. In males, this nucleus is shaped like a sphere whereas in females it is more elongated. The volume is similar. The difference in shape may be due to different connections.
• In men, the hypothalamus has a higher number of androgen receptors (AR) and young adult women. There are differences in ARs in horizontal diagonal band of Broca, the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area, the medial preoptic area, the dorsal and ventral zone of the periventricular nucleus, the paraventricular nucleus, the supraoptic nucleus, the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus and the infundibular nucleus
• Males and females respond differently to ovarian steroids due to differences in estrogen receptor status.
• The mamillary body complex is known to receive input from the hippocampus by the fornix. It is involved in cognitive skills. This is different in the two sexes.
• The differences bring about several functional differences between males and females. For instance, males in most of the species of animals prefer the odor and appearance of females over males. If the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the hypothalamus is damaged, this preference for females by males diminishes.

Love is always a leap of faith.