Fable

Choose approach, be well.
(And find awe?)

I crave the chocolate cake.

House rules permit anyone to eat food left out. The cake is fair game.

The victim would hate me, no doubt. I eat one bite to mark my territory.

The cake reminds me of my project to learn to cook with chocolate. I was newly single and thought skills with chocolate would help me make friends. I wrote out this aspiration as a project, did research, bought cookbooks, new cookware and utensils for the kitchen, and more than $100 of cooking chocolate.

I baked one cake and made chocolate soufflé twice. I ate the remaining $92 of cooking chocolate over the next year.

I designed many projects to satisfy cravings, or to control uncontrollable circumstances. Some were inspired by defenses to my Furies (deeply-personal, emotionally-upsetting experiences). Worse, some projects masked and reframed plans fueled by hatred.

I pursued my cooking chocolate project to become more charming, a defense against future rejection.¹ Once I wasn’t rejected, I stopped cooking chocolate.

I did many misguided projects before I was mindful of their toxic qualities. I needed to find a guide.

I now use a system of confront/contemplate to create perspective and agency, to embody guidance not toxins. Nurturing projects require tools to overcome hardened resistance. You can’t drive a tie-spike with a tack-hammer.

I seek to confront Furies, not pursue projects inspired by the underlying pain (see Open Up, Confront The Fury: Change Trauma Into Triumph, Some Thoughts). I choose to dominate challenges to my well-being.

I enjoy the triumph of the chocolate cake and my success from so many misguided projects.

A dictionary will have many definitions of triumph, either in the form of ‘to act’ or ‘action:’

1. The act, fact, or condition of being victorious or triumphant; victory; conquest

To me, triumph is not an act. It’s a feeling:

3. Exultation resulting from victory; joy over success

For an organism, once the arousal and feeling of triumph fades, what would be its condition? In a biological sense, the organism has obtained homeostasis,² a state of regulated life.

After triumph, well-being.

For Damasio, homeostasis is a complex idea of nested responses. So he drew a tree.³

The tree shows a hierarchy of body functions. They become more sophisticated and increasingly regulated by the central nervous system and brain. Emotions are the top part of Damasio’s tree (the first version). For him:⁴

4. The immediate result of these responses [emotions] is a temporary change in the state of the body proper, and in the state of the brain structures that map the body and support thinking.

5. The ultimate result of these responses [emotions], directly or indirectly, is the placement of the organism in circumstances conductive to survival and well-being.

You walk into the kitchen and see a partially eaten piece of chocolate cake on a beautiful plate, set on a clean marble counter, soaking in warm sunlight.

1. You are startled [a basic reflex],
2. Eating the cake is a [pleasure],
3. You desire the cake [appetites, drives] but you fear being caught [motivation],
4. You approach, eat one bite, put the fork back and walk to the couch in the den [emotions proper].

The process cycles through the four different aspects of regulating homeostasis, particularly #3 and #4. You approach, check for threat, permit the desire of the cake. You pick up the fork, check for threat, permit the desire for the cake, and so on.

If you sense a threat (someone walking down the stairs), you would inhibit the approach. You want the cake (a positive valence). You fear being caught (a more intense negative valence). You choose flight (from fight, flight or freeze), and walk over to the refrigerator.

Sneaking a bite of cake is complex behavior. My dog would just eat it, without vigilance. Such is the power of chocolate cake.

Both you and my dog triumph. The cake tastes great, induces pleasure, sates desire. The fear of getting caught dissipates. The thrill of the heist fades. Your arousal extinguished, you savor a moment of well-being.

Your pleasure becomes my dog’s disgust.⁵ Chocolate is dangerous for dogs. They get nauseous and throw up. In this manner, disgust is an emotion of failed success.

Approaching chocolate cake is easy. Approaching a Fury (the thought or image of a difficult event - a trauma-object) is hard. We prefer to withdraw.

The reasons seem obvious: the fear, sadness, and disgust of the trauma-object, and work needed to integrate it. Harsh feelings, hard work and gnawing doubt exceed any anticipated gain. We avoid rather than nurture well-being.

What’s going on?

Cake is good (positive valence). Fury is bad (negative valence). Let’s change the story from positive valence to negative, from cake to spider.

A big, knarly, brown spider with inch-long legs crawls up the wall, just over the shoulder of your three-year-old daughter. The spider threatens your child. You hate the spider.

The sight of cake triggered desire. The sight of the spider triggers anger, the willingness to rush over and kill it.

You approach, inhibiting fear. You chose to dominate the object rather than withdraw (the object would then dominate you).

You squash the spider.

You might mentally reframe the act as the desire to care for your child, but the look on your face in the act of squashing would not be of kindness but rather malice. We so often deceive ourselves when we act in anger.

The anger triggered by the spider was greater than the desire for the cake. The degree of arousal was different (like valence, there is a scale of arousal from low to high). Both objects roused you to act.

You squashed the spider. You ate the cake.

You hug your daughter. You savor the chocolate. You triumph. A little while later, arousal gone, you luxuriate in the sensation of well-being.

Triumph and well-being are what we want. Trauma, the experience of past failure and pain, is a frequent adversary.

We are haunted by failures to provide for our own well-being. Our most ingrained defenses are attempts to prevent similar future failings. Can I bake you a chocolate cake?

Instead, we could heal past pain. To heal requires basic change: approach instead of withdraw.

My essay Open Up, Confront The Fury, describes a process of integrating a deeply-personal, emotionally-upsetting experience (a trauma-object). A trauma-object can be stored without significant cortical processing,⁶ frozen by emotions.

The right brain represents a trauma-object with vivid imagery; the left with limited verbal recall. Integrating a trauma-object is the process of allowing these different representations to cohere.

The first step of integration: confront. Approach the Fury with the intent to dominate.

This change in behavior is very symbolic, yes. It also moves the processing of emotions and experiences from the right-brain to the left.

When emotions trigger withdrawal, they are processed in the right-anterior brain regions (engaging the Behavior Inhibition Systems - BIS). The emotions of approach are processed in the left-anterior (engaging the Behavior Activation Systems - BAS).^{7, 8} These anatomical pathways underly the brain’s emotional/motivational systems.

The dominant emotions of trauma are sadness, fear and disgust - withdraw emotions, right-brain emotions, the emotions of BIS. We then wrap these trauma stories in guilt, shame and embarrassment. These secondary emotions reinforce inhibition.

Your emotions and experiences are trapped in the right-brain. Your Furies sink into the a-BIS of you unconscious mind.

The act of confessing a Fury is a shift from withdrawal to approach. A shift to left-brain from right changes both the representation of the experience (to language from imagery) and your state of emotion (to curiosity, joy, anger from sadness, fear, disgust).

By itself, such a shift is a significant psychological event. The change unfreezes and enables healing of trauma just as it enables action.

The act of approach reinforces the cognitive shift. The cognitive shift strengths the capacity to approach. This reinforcing system demonstrates the brain’s built in capacity to heal psychic wounds. (Pennebaker showed opening up created significant improvement in emotional and physical health.)⁹

The stories of the cake and the spider focused on approach and withdraw behaviors. They also recognized three qualities of emotion - valence, arousal and dominance:¹⁰

Dominance has been defined as “feelings of control and influence over everyday situations, events and relationships versus feelings of being controlled and influenced by circumstances and others [helplessness].”

Dominance is action taken to overcome a conflict or impediment. In a biological sense, its goal is homeostasis. In life, it’s about “control and influence of everyday situations, events and relationships (circumstances).”

The force of civilization reduced threats of direct bodily harm. Dominance, the drive to approach, is directed less toward embodied threats and more to the threat of “overwhelm,” the complexities of “situations, events, and relationships.”

We might be angry at one or two problematic circumstance. However, with the experience of a multitude of complex circumstances, anger gives way to disgust.¹¹

According to Rozin and Haidt,¹² “disgust is in many respects the emotion of civilization.” Overwhelm is our uncivilized life.

Overwhelm triggers disgust. Enter a dirty kitchen. Read down a list of 53 half-scribbled entries on a ToDo list soiled with coffee and fingerprints of pepperoni pizza grease.

What if we seek to dominate a digust-object? If we approach the elicitor of disgust, we seek to regain hygiene, to achieve a proper aesthetic, to purify.¹³

David Allen’s book Getting Things Done (GTD) articulates a system¹⁴ to approach and manage “situations, events, and relationships” - to manage overwhelm. His system of structured action:

1. recognize a desired outcome about ill-defined blob of undoability,
2. consider the next physical action,
3. organize the planned actions,
4. choose the best next action, and
5. do.

His system is instructively mindful without mentioning the quality. His first step is to “collect things that command attention.” His fifth step is “do.”¹⁵ You shift your orientation from stuck to approach, from a BIS-dominated state of inhibition to a BAS-enabled state of activation.

With GTD, each identified and completed action is success. Complete action, triumph: Fewer ToDos, more hygiene. Allen has put emotional force behind the hard work of confronting blobs of undoability.

For him, “managing action is the prime challenge:”¹⁶

..The real issue is how we manage action.

That may sound obvious. However, it might amaze you to discover how many next actions for how many projects and commitments remain undetermined by most people [un-contemplated]. It’s extremely difficult to manage actions you haven’t identified or decided on [failed to confront]. Most people have dozens of things [“situations, events, and relationships”] that they need to do to make progress on many fronts, but they don’t yet know what they are. And the common complaint that “I don’t have time to _” (fill in the blank) is understandable because many projects seem overwhelming - and are overwhelming because you can’t do a project at all! You can only do an action related to it.

The consistent practice of a system of organized action (like GTD) creates another valuable outcome - hygiene. Instead of being disgusted with the overwhelm, we feel invited into an ordered space of aspiration and achievement. We bask in purity. Jonathan Haidt explains:¹⁷

I first found divinity in disgust.. Because I had always thought morality was about how people treat each other, I dismissed all this stuff about “purity” and “pollution” (as the anthropologists call it) as extraneous to real morality..

But disgust doesn’t guard just the mouth; its elicitors expanded during biological and cultural evolution so that now it guards the body more generally.. the most fascinating thing about disgust is that it is recruited to support so many of the norms, rituals, and beliefs that culture use to define themselves.. Disgust is like Jacob’s ladder: It is rooted in the earth, in our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven - or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow, “up.”

As far as guides go, we could do worse than disgust. We could follow our Furies. How disgusting would that be?

Use of organized action systems strengthens agency, provides triumph and purifies. When the confrontation succeeded, the arousal spent, we are in a place of contentedness and well-being. It’s a sustainable state rather than ephemeral experience.

GTD does projects. At one extreme, it is practicing OCD. An overcommitment to a system of organized action would mark efforts to bolster your defenses, to compensate for Furies, to insure perhaps you’ll never fail anyone ever again. You have, you will. Heal the old pain.

Too often, bound by our Furies, we create aspirational projects to defend against future wounds. The completion of a Fury-inspired project does not slake the Fury’s pain.

We cannot out-achieve pain.

I sketched the outline of a system of confrontation/contemplation for doing Furies. Instead of acting upon external circumstances, act upon internal trauma-objects.

What if we address:

There’s but three
Furies found in spacious hell
But in a great man’s breast
Three thousand dwell

- John Webster, The White Devil

What if we confront our Furies, our collections of unintegrated trauma-objects? What if we civilize them and bring to heal notions of self-disgust? What if we achieve a sense of emotional hygiene, of proper aesthetic, of purity?

The process of healing a trauma-object is analogous to completing one GTD project. This process of confronting/contemplating scales as we develop mindfulness to our moments of emotional distress.

Organized action systems and the process of confront/contemplate both activate BAS. BAS drives us to confront with the intent to dominate. These processes engage the same essential brain systems oriented to the maintenance of homeostasis. They are deeply similar:

1. GTD: attend stuff; Furies: feel the fury,
2. GTD: process stuff; Furies: describe the felt-object,
3. GTD: organize stuff; Furies: interpret the considered-object,
4. GTD: review stuff; Furies: contemplate the interpreted-object, and
5. GTD: do; Furies: do.

We can practice emotional hygiene. No doubt it will create durable well-being. For some, such practice may be a gateway to purity, and perhaps like Haidt, a professed atheist, we might find awe of the divine:

In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear is a little studied emotion - awe.. Awe is central to the experience of religion, politics, nature and art. Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.¹⁸

CORRECTED for typos and sordid embarrassmentata.