On The Nature Of Hatred And The Art Of Braking

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Julia Lapina Source:

Freud was undoubtedly a genius. In his time, to talk about the fact that childhood affects the whole future life, and the unconscious affects our daily routine, is like talking then about the luminous boxes that every inhabitant of the earth will carry with him, and if he wants to talk from Vienna with whom in New York, just put the box to your ear.

Today, in addition to the reality of "communication boxes", the reality of the influence of the history of growing up on the development of the brain is obvious. Children's experience falls on the most plastic times for the brain and literally molds a person.

The personality grows through copying the environment, through how the surrounding world reflects a person, including through "what an idiot you are, hands are not from that place", "what a lazy insignificance you are, get ready faster" like your daddy."

The brain learns automatically, the matrices of critical thinking will grow later when the frontal lobes mature, but for now everything is perceived without a filter - both Santa Claus, and "you are nothing", and "look at what you brought your mother to." It is so arranged that the knowledge about the world and about himself the child receives without judgment from the person with whom he has formed a connection.

And yet another most famous prediction of Freud - about the unconscious - has been confirmed. In the 1970s, American psychologist Benjamin Libet conducted his famous experiments, which excited the scientific community, but somehow passed by the general public.

The experiments that gave rise to new heated discussions about free will, a mass of books by neuropsychologists from Dick Saab to Susan Blackmore, in which the question is not even raised whether there is an unconscious, but the fear sounds - is there consciousness?

Science only describes phenomena, a specific philosophical culture interprets the results - and there was something to think about. The experiment tells us that the readiness for action does not occur as a consequence of our decision, but on the contrary - our consciousness only observes and all that it can, it seems, is to veto. Slow down. And he doesn't have much time for that, to put it mildly. 200 milliseconds. 200 milliseconds of freedom.

Who, then, makes the decisions? Brain? And what is the algorithm by which it does it? They activate the most commonly used behavioral pattern - including the one that was formed by our environment in childhood.

This is how, over time, character traits turn into pathology - the path along which they often drive becomes a rut, from which you cannot get out and a slightly suspicious woman can turn into clinical paranoia by old age (I simplify a little, genetics also builds its own neural connections that form a matrix of reactions and is responsible for how quickly the soil subsides and whether a small depression turns into a rut).

In general, human culture arose with the appearance of the first taboos - consciousness began to fulfill its super-difficult task - to slow down. Evolution has been tormented for a long time to free up a resource for the brain (automating everything that can be automated as much as possible and solving the tricky problem of energy supply) for that part of it that can say "stop" to the subcortical monkey.

By the way, the Christian idea of posts is also about training inhibition, the most important skill, a skill that pulls a person out of the biological automatic causal chain of reactions.

Why is it so hard to slow down? Imagine a stone rolling down a mountain: at the beginning of the slope it can still be stopped, at the end it is almost unrealistic. Any reaction is a force; to stop it, even greater force is needed. Moreover, the energy from braking needs to be put somewhere.

That is, here you are on the bus home, the end of the working day, the crowd, fatigue, clients tortured, the boss is in another inadequate, and then someone next to you pushed you and commented, “Cho, she’s upset, there’s not enough space”? The automatic reaction is anger, the stone has ALREADY started rolling down the mountain. You didn't start it, but then you have very little time to brake.

“Sorry” is an almost incredible feat that leaves your lips. To answer is to multiply evil by wounding the offender, because he will have to contain it somewhere, and judging by his behavior, he has nowhere. When no one is able to stop the squabble develops into a fight and the body takes a hit, the matter collapses in order to stop the evil.

From the very first second of our appearance in this world, we must do something with the energy that is released when our desires (or unwillingness) collide with reality. A newborn hungry baby screams, as he grows up, he may already postpone the cry.

And over time, he will learn a lot of things to endure and postpone until the right moment - hunger, trips to the toilet, sexual impulses. Actually, this is what Freud wrote about, talking about the stages of development: oral, anal, genital - where desires are located in the body, which a person learns to inhibit.

Where does the energy go when braking?

And again let us recall Freud and his concept of the id - the image of a certain unconscious "container", one of the functions of which is to store energy from the inhibition of unfulfilled desires. Everything is bad for a newborn with containment (but it should be - this skill grows "outside the mother", in contact with the environment) - all impulses are immediately expressed in behavior, and then the whole life is training. But the training conditions are different for everyone.

A significant adult near a child is his container - “putting troubles in his mother” means letting his still small container develop normally, without hammering it to the eyeballs. A child can burst into tears from a nonsense scratch and run to his mother on her knees - in order to put his important experiences for him in her container, he himself still cannot stand as an adult, cannot help but react "well, why are you crying like a little one."

That is why an adult often thinks children's experiences are nonsense, although it does not seem strange that a child cannot pick up something that an adult can easily pick up.

The child adds complexity to the adult. If, of course, an adult has something to add … "It's his own fault, where he climbed", "that's what you need, you will think better" or mom is simply not around. No one is around.

And then the pain freezes. And she will, like a partisan in a trench, wait in the wings - the war is over, and she suddenly appears out of nowhere with a grenade and shouting “all die”. Often this happens unexpectedly for the person himself. A lot of research shows a high correlation between bouts of anger and difficult childhood.

Is the container filled with injuries like a freezer? Then the daily frustrations simply have nowhere to fit and in their behavior we observe a person who is ready to burn to ashes with the staff of a cafe alive, where the waiter was not polite enough - not only does he have nowhere to put the offense, so a pebble still activates everything accumulated during his life and REAL subjective the experience of pain from a harsh word is as if something very terrible was done to a person. Hence the asymmetry of the reaction.

Translating into the language of neurobiology, this is how neural circuits have grown together. A person can then regret and repent, but this in no way prevents such reactions in the future.

In totalitarian states, early separation from parents seems to be part of the upbringing policy (look at how the child-rearing system is arranged in North Korea). In the USSR, at three months, a woman had to go to work, sending her child to a nursery.

In hospitals (read - with a weakened own resource) from a very early age - without a mother. Such a system cripples not only the child, but also the parent, killing at least even biological attachment to the offspring.

The parent is physically and / or emotionally (the container is closed for the child) is not around, and the child has to put all the burdens of reality somewhere. Or somatize (everything in the body's illness), or freeze until other times.

Freezing uncontained child injuries is the basis of any bullying and bullying. Deviant childish behavior. Problems with adopted children, about which foster parents are warned at school.

High school students scoff at the younger ones, as they once scoffed at them. Pedophiles most often themselves became victims of violence. The most evil boss at work is usually the one who crawled up the career ladder from the very bottom and “remembers everything”.

Army. Jail. It would seem, why are you doing what you did to you, if you know HOW IT HURTS? Because it seems to you (your neural circuits) that there is a chance to finally take out the frozen pain. On the one who is weaker, and therefore will be FORCED to accept it - children, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, animals …

This is the temptation of an unprotected supermarket - now everything is possible and nothing will come to you for it. But this is just an illusion. The illusion of temporary relief. Pseudo-orgasm.

And traumatized children do the same when they themselves become parents - the emerging dependent creature opens a portal to hell: it seems that the words themselves come to mind "and I said don't go, but as you wanted", "I'll hand you over to an orphanage, you bastard "," Not a dumb triangle, but you are dumb. " The child, by the fact of his existence, makes a request for a resource, but there is none. There are only injuries and grievances.

Just as the first Christians went to the slaughter to the blood-thirsty crowd (they became containers for hatred), so a child born (albeit without his own consent) becomes a lamb on the altar of parental trauma. With its appearance, it breaks through the already flimsy dam, which holds back the turbulent river of the accumulated.

In a society where a toxic attitude towards children is legalized, such communication with a child does not raise questions from others - everyone lived and live like that. This gives a final indulgence to violence in his family, in relation to his children.

And then there is almost no chance for these 200 milliseconds of braking freedom to appear to stop the hand from being slapped on the head, and the tongue from “why did I just give birth to you, creature”. There is no resource, no time, no incentive to stop pathological, but already too traditional, methods of communication with a child.

A person is rolling on his own rut of neural circuits, losing what can be called free will.

Indeed, often in culture, turning the other cheek, that is, containing someone else's rage in oneself, is considered a weakness. The one who forgives is a goof. Whoever does not play the game “they are to blame” is a coward and a slob. You can't whine (that is, express pain outside), people in besieged Leningrad were dying of hunger, and you whine that there are problems at work, as if if this person now stops sharing pain, those victims will resurrect and heal happily.

All these "and the children in Africa are starving" - this is a refusal to contain, because there is nowhere to put your own, where else someone else's. However, forgiveness is not weakness, it is the most powerful force of all that is stronger than the force of automatic hatred.

Forgiveness is when all your neurons are ready to be destroyed, and in 200 milliseconds you take your hand away and shoot into the air. To be able to forgive is a skill, which means that he trains, with increasing loads he can move to new levels. First you learned to forgive friends, then enemies. 200 milliseconds for each set in your workout.

A full container of injuries is also always a predictable thing to manipulate. For example, a manipulating parent can easily infuriate an adult child, causing rage, resentment, irritation with just one phrase like “And what, when the grandchildren will be, the mother will die soon, you will not wait for you, everything is only about yourself. Why are you freaking out as always, what did I say. Oh, you have been psycho since childhood."

It will take a lot of time to practice braking, which will look like a calm phrase "Mom, you are still a young beauty, give me a little sister or brother, I want to babysit!" or the more daring "Mom, I understand your concerns, but now I have other plans for my body and my time."

And if, for some reason, a large number of people are concentrated in society who want to react to their trauma, then it’s a matter of technology to show them who they can attack. Moreover, they will adore the person who gave them this permission, he seems to them to be a liberator from personal hell.

And this, maybe, both at the family level (what disappointment does a brother feel from forgiving his father in the story of the prodigal son - and who is now bad so that I could be better?), At the level of a separate group (oh, a wonderful movie "Scarecrow"), and in the world (a dirty nation, a backward population, etc. "they are not people, let's beat them painfully" - a vivid example of the global epidemic of fat phobia with the wishes to die all "overweight" from heart attack / cancer / stomach rupture).

It is important to understand that the ideological shell for hatred is always secondary, it is a derivative, along which the initial function is not always immediately noticeable. The nucleus is a broken personal container (and their sum among the population), which is also filled with unprocessed waste - non-empathic parents, violence in kindergarten, bullying at school - and…. the temptation cannot be resisted, the temptation to lay the pain in another, appointed by the guilty, especially when the lid of his container is cracked by the situation - now he will receive from me …

The question is - what to do with the energy of daily frustrations? Situationally - it can be anything from sarcasm while watching stand-up comedian jokes on forbidden topics (which, of course, is socially legalized aggression) to an evening boxing training (legalized physical aggression).

The freer the public morals, the more safe methods of dumping energy from inhibition - because numerous unnecessary senseless "no's" are forced to slow down again (it is wrong to get a divorce even if the husband beats, you can only look in a certain way, no matter what the cost, you cannot talk about these topics and etc.).

But this is if your own container is large enough, functions in a more or less healthy way and the environment does not overwhelm it with horrors such as wars, deaths of loved ones, violence, and so on.

And if there are global problems with the container, then this is already a matter of therapy (and the therapist is essentially a reserve container, functioning according to certain rules and, within the framework of a therapeutic relationship, accepts things that people are not obliged to accept within the framework of friendship or even close relationships), and for believers it is a matter of religion, for in the words "Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." [Matt. 11:18] is the image of God as an infinite container.

All of the above is not resolved here and now. It is a matter of time, but seeing how there are more adequate parents, how it is not necessary to send a child to state institutions almost from birth, how you can stay with a child in a hospital and the traditions of punitive medicine are hotly discussed and condemned, how it becomes acceptable to talk about parenting problems out loud without the stigma “do not squeeze noah” - all this gives hope that there will be other times, woven from people with a stronger psyche.

By publishing this post between Catholic and Orthodox Christmas, I would like to remind you that Christ calls to the cross - calls everyone to bore out evil. This is against logic, against customs and people's opinions, often against what we have been taught. "We preach Christ crucified - to the Jews a temptation, to the Greeks madness" [1 Cor. 1:22]

It is to love your children, in spite of the chorus of evil voices from your traumatic childhood and external comments “don't take it in your arms, you spoil it,” “what you grow up with a sissy,” “crack him well, let him know”, “tell him, let him always give back.” This is not revenge on someone who, by all human standards, deserves this revenge.

They say that there is no justice in the world. Yes, but there is Love in the world, and Love is the greatest injustice. It's not fair to help someone who should kind of be your enemy. It's not fair to love someone who hurts you. It is not fair to do good and not receive recognition, but to continue to do it. It's not fair to give strangers their hard-earned money to solve their problems. It's not fair to risk your life for other people by getting them out of the fire.

And I would very much like people to always find strength and resources for such injustice, both in themselves and in those close to them.