The psychopathic personality and human evolution

Polly, there was a lot in your post. There’s so much to say about fear. And it’s meaning depends on where you are in the process.

But I suspect that the letting-go stage is fear is likely to become a conscious, almost tangible feeling. If you’ve done the work of the angry part — building better boundaries, developing some skill at recognizing threats and dealing with them — and then you get to the point where you realize that nothing you can do is going to protect you from everything. And you’re not going to get back what you’ve already lost.

At that point, the fear of what all this really means about you and the world, which has been really driving the process up to this point but from a less conscious awareness, starts to surface.

Looking at it from my own experience, I think that unresolved traumas — particularly these old ones that come from our childhood — leave us with fear that’s never been dealt with. Because we can’t resolve it as children, and we have to defer it just to stay sane and keep performing in ways that will allow us to survive.

I think that, not having resolved it, we live with anxiety and inclinations to organize our lives to avoid more fear. Or on the flip side (and often simultaneously) to lose contact with our fear and become high-risk people, especially when something appears to be a “big solution” to the anxiety issues So, when the situations with sociopaths come up, they are like a return to that big unresolved trauma, and now we, as adults, have to finally work through the meaning of the trauma.

Ultimately, the meaning of any trauma is not really about whether we can trust other people. But whether we can trust the world. Or whether our destiny is to just be a kind of victim of fate. No matter what we want to be, what we want to build for ourselves, what we imagine to be sane or safe, some nasty surprise is going to come along and take it from us. And this is not just about the world. But about us, what the meaning of our lives is.

This may seem like a long way away from what you talked about, feeling a kind of fear that seemed to accrue after one bad thing after another happened. But I tend to think that the meaning of our now-minutes, no matter how challenging they are, is really shaped by who we think we are in relationship to the world. And if we feel unprotected and devalued in the larger scheme, then feeling fear as a constant state would be pretty understandable.

To change the subject slightly, I know that my best technique for working through some of this stuff is getting inside the feeling. Whatever it is, no matter how complex. And the thing I’m personally working on right now is pretty complex. It’s not just a clear feeling like fear or anger, but more like a scene from a play that seems to recur over and over in my life. It has feelings associated with it, but they’re complex too. So I’m just trying to get it to gel enough to get inside of it. I’m stimulating it with memories of things that were that scene, trying to get all the details that are relevant, so I can get a good feel for it, and get inside of it. And listen to myself. Feel what’s going on. And try to understand what it’s really about.

In my experience, eventually, everything comes down to fear. And eventually all those fears come down to fear about my place in the world. Trauma is an unexpected shock that rattles our ideas of what we can take for granted. But it also relates to a loss, as though our status has suddenly diminished. If we could count on love or support or understanding or acceptance, then how could this have happened?

Unfinished processing tends to leave us in anger or resentment or chronic distrust. Or feelings of dislocation or attempts to manage it or claims that it wasn’t that bad. And these are also the attitudes that tend to lead us into situations that reproduce the trauma, because we’re still actually walking around with it, and it shapes our view of the world.

But getting in touch with fear, especially after we’ve done some work in the angry phase and we’ve recovered some confidence in our ability to handle ourselves, can help us to clarify a lot of things. Probably the most important is that we lived through it. This awareness does not deny that we suffered or lost something. But even so, we are here now, able to look at it, talk about it, judge what happened, do all kinds of things with it. Whatever it was, it didn’t change something fundamental in us.

The other thing we can learn from inside fear is something like a reprise of what we learned inside anger. But a little more fundamental and yet more advanced. We did lose something, or we were seriously threatened, but unlike anger which is really about dealing with the outside stuff, fear brings us back to what we need to survive and be okay. It clarifies the losses or threats as something that is keeping us from being whole and well. And we can flip over all those bad things to look at the wisdom on the other side of them, which is about knowing more about what we need. With this wisdom, all the learning of the angry phase which was primarily defensive, now becomes more clearly about removing obstacles to our positive needs and objectives. It becomes about us and what we want.

I think that fear, like the other emotional stages of healing, is something you have to go through. You can’t get around it, or you land back in denial, that uncomfortable place where we don’t like what we feel and therefore don’t like ourselves. Even anger, while a crucial stage in building survival skills, isn’t going to heal us of fear. Courage without consideration of the real risks of failure is just bravado and often self-destructive.

True courage isn’t the opposite of fear; it is fear. But it’s fear working through all the layers of consciousness — our will to survive, our needs, our choices of what we want for ourselves, our sense of how we want the world to be and all the knowledge we have of the circumstance we’re facing. Sometimes it’s a choice to risk the consequences, because the potential trophy is worth it, or because not taking the risk will have worse consequence. Sometimes it’s a choice to walk away, because the trophy isn’t worth the risk.

You would think than anger comes after fear in the scheme of things. But I think the truth is that fear drives all the stages in order to help us deal with trauma, but it doesn’t show itself clearly until we’re ready to do some thinking about what it all means — not just about them and our losses, but about us and our needs and desires.

And I guess the open question here is whether we are the playthings of fate. My own answer is that it’s the wrong question, but we have to ask it, before we get to better question. I think the better question is the one I always think God is asking me, “So, Kathy, what are you going to do with this interesting situation?” Because no matter how random fate may be and how out of our control, there is a important part of it that is under our control. And that’s us.

Which is not to say that we always know immediately what to do, or that we’re not going to make mistakes. But so far, we survived. I think that part of the letting-go phase is figuring out what we have left. This is a question that we play with throughout the healing up to that point. But as survivors, we get to the point of realizing that we didn’t lose anything we couldn’t live without.

Not that we didn’t once love what we lost. And that brings us to grief, nice healthy grief. But not endless, because the irreducible truth is that we survived. And at some point, we just voluntarily finish with grieving, because the prospect of living just becomes more interesting than mourning something that’s gone.

Finally, you mentioned that you don’t like pain. I wondered if you meant that you don’t like your pain, or you don’t like being around someone else’s. (We children of traumatic backgrounds usually have good reason to fear other people’s pain, and to grow up into people who want to fix other people just as quickly as possible.) I think that, in terms of what we discuss here, pain is just the resistance to change. Once we move into the change, digest it, expand into the new understanding, learn to work with it, the pain goes away. I realize that’s a very abstract concept and there could be a lot of arguments about it. But I think, generally, if we’re in emotional pain, we’re growing. It just doesn’t seem like it until we get to the other side.

So the meaning of pain really does change as we heal. And especially as we get more aligned with who we really are. Because we feel it faster and look for its meaning without so much fear. But some circumstances are big changes. If I eliminate my ex as a symptom of old unresolved trauma, I still had to go through menopause in the last decade, and that was challenging in forcing me to change some assumptions about my life. But I think it would have been a lot easier and smoother, if I had been as okay with myself as I am today.

I hope all this makes sense. And apologies again for another long post.

Kathy

pathwhisperer, that’s a really interesting post.

I wonder if that “blindness” might not be some genetic “wiring” that may have been designed for a different cultural environment. Our forbears were originally more nomadic, I believe, and also organized into something like packs or tribes.

The female attraction toward strong, competent, dominant men makes a lot of sense, given women’s need for assistance in supporting offspring in a world where endurance, practical life skills (like hunting), and social precedence (in dividing the spoils) would have determined how well she and her offspring survived during growing up years. Likewise the hormonal aspects of sexual and maternal bonding would make it more likely that the females would mate exclusively, and would naturally take on the role of caretaker to keep the group together and healthy.

But in these environments, it might have been very different in terms of mutual community support among women, as the acceptance that men had more mobility and freedom, as well as strength, especially during women’s childbearing years (which would have been most of their lives). So the family-related expectations of men, beyond being providers, might have been minimal, and their “success” in these communities might have been largely determined by their status among other men. This pursuit of status also seemed to be genetically programmed.

This scenario is not necessarily the case. There have been a lot of studies on actual or imagined communities that are more women-centric, though they tend to be vulnerable to conquest and assimilation by more men-centric groups. And I suspect, that the transition from wandering to permanent settlements (due to the rise in agriculture) made the polarization of gender roles more dramatic. I think that some of the things we see in Islam communities are a hangover from times when the protection of women in the close quarters of village became an issue, because of the assumption of male strength and dominance.

We live in a very strange time, from an historical perspective. It’s a transition time, still, but for the first time perhaps in all of human history women can bear offspring independently without requiring male support. It is not only economically feasible, but socially accepted in cultures where it was previously a kind of social suicide for both the mother and children.

But it doesn’t mean our genetic programming has caught up with our career options.

I’ve joked about men having testosterone poisoning. But I something think that estrogen can be just a s big a problem for women. In my adult life, I know that I literally could not help bonding in a “mate” way, if I became sexually involved with someone. Although oxytocin is the hormone that does that, estrogen enhances the effect of oxytocin. And testosterone counteracts it. It’s a simple reason why men, as a gender, are better able to manage casual or recreational sex than women. One of the most dramatic examples of that is the difference between the social cultures of gay men and lesbian women.

I’m not sure, but I think I read something recently about woman’s sense of attractiveness being more inclusive of character issues than men. But I can’t remember. It would be nice if it were true.