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To the extent that we cling to genetic fundamentalism to avoid the discomforts of personal responsibility or societal reckoning, we radically—and unnecessarily—disempower ourselves from dealing either actively or proactively with suffering of all kinds.
Even more regrettably, we miss the excellent news that if our mental health is not dictated by our genes, then we are not their victims.
Perhaps the line between sanity and madness must be drawn relative to the place where we stand. Perhaps it is possible to be, at the same time, mad when viewed from one perspective and sane when viewed from another. —Richard Bentall, Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature
What is pushed down when a person is depressed is easily identified by its absence: emotion, the continual flow of feelings that remind us we’re alive. Unlike the wrangler of the beach ball, a depressed person doesn’t choose this submersion of life energy—it imposes itself, turning a once-vibrant emotional landscape into arid desert. The only “feeling” that remains, typically, is more sensation than emotion, a thrumming, indistinct pain that threatens to consume everything, and sometimes does.
Thus the repression of emotion, while adaptive in one circumstance, can become a state of chronic disconnect, a withdrawal from life. It becomes programmed into the brain, embedded in the personality.
In other words, far from expressing inherited pathology, depression appears as a coping mechanism to alleviate grief and rage and to inhibit behaviors that would invite danger. It is not that neurotransmitters are not involved in depression—only that their abnormalities reflect experiences, rather than being the primary cause of them.
A suffering child, as Leslie was—again, the details matter less than the contours—has two possible options when it comes to processing her experience. She can conclude either that the people she relies on for love are incompetent, malicious, or otherwise ill-suited to the task, and she is all alone in this scary world; or that she herself is to blame for, well, everything. As painful as the latter explanation is, it is far preferable to the other one, which paints a life-threatening picture for a young being with zero power or recourse. The first option is not an option at all. Better to
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Self-fragmentation is one of the defenses evoked when the experience of how things are cannot be endured.
Tuning out is dissociation’s less extreme cousin, part of the same family of escapist adaptations. It is invoked by the organism when the circumstances are stressful and there is no other recourse for relief, when one can neither change the situation nor escape it.
It’s true that we are seeing more troubled children these days, but blaming a child’s behavior on her brain makes no sense—nor does blaming the parents.
when a syndrome rises sharply in frequency over a short period of time, genetics cannot possibly be the cause.
voluminous research has linked the symptoms of ADHD to trauma or early stress, and has shown that both can impact the dopamine circuits of the brain and that adversity can interfere with a child’s subsequent capacity to focus and to organize tasks.
The time has come to address the swiftly changing and ever more stressful environments our children are growing up in, before we interfere chemically with children’s brain physiology.
“Of more interest is the fact that certain environmental and social conditions affect the appearance of ADHD symptoms,” reported Psychology Today. “Dogs which have lots of social contacts with other dogs and many interactions with people seem to show fewer symptoms [typical] of ADHD. The more that you physically connect with and play with the dog, the fewer the problems. Dogs that are left alone for extended periods of time are also more likely to show hyperactive symptoms on your return.
This desperate drive to seize some command at least of their own body amid turmoil is almost universal among people with anorexia or bulimia that I have interviewed.
this stage in our exploration of trauma, illness, and healing I would only add that the main determinants of human emotional stress extend from the personal to the cultural. We are, in effect, biopsychosocietal beings.
Capitalism’s influence today runs so deep and wide that its values, assumptions, and expectations potently infuse not only culture, politics, and law but also such subsystems as academia, education, science, news, sports, medicine, child-rearing, and popular entertainment. The hegemony of materialist culture is now total, its discontents universal.
All stressors represent the absence or threatened loss of something an organism perceives as necessary for survival. An impending loss of food supply, for example, is a major stressor for any creature. So is, for our species, the absence or threatened loss of love, or work, or dignity, or self-esteem, or meaning.
Studies in the United States showed that the risk of stroke and heart attacks in people fifty-one to sixty-one years of age more than doubles in the aftermath of prolonged job loss.
“The political system seems to be failing as much as the economic system,” Stiglitz writes in his 2012 book, The Price of Inequality. In the eyes of many, he continues, “capitalism is failing to produce what was promised, but is delivering on what was not promised—inequality, pollution, unemployment, and most important of all, the degradation of values to the point where everything is acceptable and no one is accountable.”
I’m often asked what lessons we may derive from the COVID-19 pandemic. Chief among them, surely, is the indispensability of connection—a quality globalized materialism has increasingly drained from modern culture, long before the isolation imposed by the virus reminded us of life’s spiritual impoverishment without it.
A society that fails to value communality—our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us—is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human.
We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy.
Loneliness, the researcher Steven Cole told me, can impair genetic functioning. And no wonder: even in parrots isolation impairs DNA repair by shortening chromosome-protecting telomeres.
“Research consistently shows,” he told me, “that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society.”
The tide that keeps flooding the ship, Dr. Lustig says, stems from a culture in which many major corporations, unregulated by governments, have deliberately and with the utmost ingenuity targeted the brain circuits of pleasure and reward to foster addictive compulsions.
What the system sells as happiness is actually pleasure, a philosophical and economic distinction that makes all the difference between profit or loss.
While similar in some ways, pleasure and happiness run on different neurochemical fuels: pleasure employs dopamine and opiates, both of which operate in short-term bursts, while contentment is based on the more steady, slow-release serotonin apparatus. It is very hard to get addicted to serotoninergic substances or behaviors.
The costs in health and longevity are far greater than even the worst projections for the COVID-19 pandemic. A report published in the Lancet found that eleven million deaths worldwide in 2017 could be attributed to diets deficient in vegetables, seeds, and nuts but laden with salt, fat, and sugar.
Not all food- or tobacco-related ill health can be ascribed directly to the commercialized “hacking” of the public mind, any more than the epidemic of prescription drug deaths is due exclusively to corporate manipulation. It is truer to say that the manipulation is made possible by the very stresses, disconnections, and dislocations of life entrenched by globalized capitalism.
Narcissism and sociopathy describe corporate America,” he told me. “But it’s flat-out wrong to think in twenty-first-century America that narcissism and sociopathy are illnesses. In today’s America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies. And they’re very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment.”
In the logic of profit, greed is creed, and health nothing but collateral damage. “It’s not that they want you to die,” the endocrinologist Rob Lustig told me in a tone of mock reassurance. “They only want your money. They just don’t care if it kills you.”
I am still prone to having blind spots around what people from other backgrounds are carrying, what trials they must endure. It’s all too easy for the privileged among us to assume we walk the same streets as everyone else. Though a satellite view of Earth may suggest we do, that’s not how it plays out at ground level. Do Indigenous people in Canada or Black people in America tread the same ground as their Caucasian counterparts, face the same daily obstacles, navigate the same sorts of adversity? Surely not.
Self-rejection has powerful physiological dimensions that pertain to every aspect of well-being. From an early age it is one of racism’s sharpest and most intimate harms.
Coates tersely asserts, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” In other words, the very concept of race emerges from the distorted imagination of the racist. Though racism’s impacts are real, in physiological or genetic terms race does not exist.
A study that examined the chromosome-protective telomeres of Black American men found that overt experiences of racism and the assaulted sense of self, including the internalization of racial bias, “operate jointly to accelerate biological aging.”
childhood mechanisms of self-suppression are reinforced by persistent, gendered social conditioning. Many women end up self-silencing, defined as “the tendency to silence one’s thoughts and feelings to maintain safe relationships, particularly intimate relationships.” This chronic negation of one’s authentic experience can be fatal.
this array of self-abnegating traits that predispose to disease: a compulsive and self-sacrificing doing for others, suppression of anger, and an excessive concern about social acceptability. These personality features, found across all autoimmune conditions, are precisely the ones inculcated into women in a patriarchal culture.
Mothers looking after emotionally challenged children were found to have abnormal cortisol indicators, poorer metabolic functioning as measured by blood testing, and less healthy distribution of body fat.18 As mentioned in chapter 4, they also have shorter telomeres, indicating premature aging.
Some men are aware of the care they receive only in its absence and experience intense resentment when it is withdrawn; for example, when their female partner is preoccupied elsewhere, as when children are born. Many a woman has complained to me that her spouse becomes distant and punishing when she so much as catches a cold.
Toxified masculinity, like the suppression of the feminine, is lethal. It claims its victims through many pathways, including alcoholism and other substance addictions, workaholism, violence, and suicidalityfn5—all defenses against or escapes from vulnerability, grief, and fear.
The closer I look at who populates the political landscape—the people at the top and we ourselves at its base (or somewhere in between, for the more privileged among us)—the more I see the wounded electing the wounded, the traumatized leading the traumatized and, inexorably, implementing policies that entrench traumatizing social conditions.
“Second nature,” as we noted before, is nobody’s real nature. No one’s original nature impels them to lie; there are plenty of congenial liars, but no congenital ones.
Abetted and amplified by the profit-driven media machine, political culture plays on our deepest longings for surety, security, and even supremacy, targeting our damaged “inner children” with force and precision.
When I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement toward wholeness. Notice that I do not define it as the end state of being completely whole, or “enlightened,” or any similar psychospiritual ideal. It is a direction, not a destination; a line on a map, not a dot.
Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval.
When we heal, we are engaged in recovering our lost parts of self, not trying to change or “better” them.
True healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We acknowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they have touched both our own lives and those of others around us.
“It is very difficult to look life in the face.”
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret,” the fox advises the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved tale: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
