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Sontag spurned the connection between emotion, personality, and illness more forcefully and articulately than anyone—and, too, with bitter and unintended irony. The life and death of this powerful thinker, etched with tragedy, has much to tell us.
my facility in disconnecting from my feelings
We might cherish kindness, charity, and community-mindedness—our “better natures,” so to speak—but these are often spoken of wistfully, as exceptions to a hardwired rule.
We can be noble and narcissistic, generous and genocidal, brilliant in our ingenuity and buffoonish in our stupidity. We are, it seems, all of the above.
When we reify—set in stone, mentally speaking—the particular way human behavior shows up in a certain place and time, we commit the fallacy of conflating how we’re being with who we are.
we had best disabuse ourselves of any fixed, limiting beliefs about what we’re all about, and instead ask, What circumstances evoke which sorts of outcomes?
Your physiology alters: you feel tension as your body tightens, your heart rate goes up, and your breathing becomes shallower.
Why? According to the neuroscientist and seminal researcher Stephen Porges, one of our inherent needs is reciprocity, to be attuned with—“well met,” as the archaic greeting goes. It is what he calls a neural expectancy. Our brain may process the lack of welcoming response as an assault, a threat to safety.
In fact, the impacts go well beyond the content of thoughts: research has shown beyond any doubt that early experience molds behaviors, emotional patterns, unconscious beliefs, learning styles, relational dynamics, and the ability to handle stress and regulate ourselves.
Emotional rather than intellectual interaction serves as the mind’s primary architect.”6
“I didn’t know up from down,” he says, “because up could become down at any moment, depending on what mood the two of you were in, or the state of your relationship on a particular day. I had recurring nightmares as a kid where the ground kept opening up under me, and I’d fall through into another dimension, only for it to happen again. The dreams aren’t hard to decipher: in the world of my childhood, the floor
was not the floor.” Indeed, without a “floor” of secure attachment, a young person is hard-pressed to feel any stable ground on which life can be experienced.
We cannot teach maturity; nor can we cajole, entice, or coerce a child into it.
emotional and neurological imprints embedded in the cells and nervous system of the human organism. The psychiatrist Thomas Verny calls this process “bodywide memory.”
Essential neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine that later play key roles in mood regulation, impulse control, attention, motivation, and the modulation of aggression—and are implicated in the very learning, behavioral, and mood difficulties the article mentions—are affected by prenatal stress on the mother.
The social context for procreation in our world assigns women untenably stressful roles in every facet of life, including intimate relationships. Besides being the bearers of children, they’ve generally been expected to assuage the psycho-emotional stresses
of the men in their lives. Mothering a child may be a mandate from Nature, but mothering a grown man is both unnatural and impossible.
I can’t think of one single instance where a man is told what he can and can’t do with his body, but women are told this every day.”
A person’s body seizes up in the absence of safety and emotional connection, especially under the effect of sensitizing hormones.
In this, as in other crucial ways, our culture has become contact-starved.
Extensive touch and constant physical presence, including touch with movement (carrying and holding)
Especially in infancy, but throughout childhood, the young human uses the emotional and nervous systems of the caring adults to regulate her own internal states. The interpersonal-biological math is elementary: the more stressed the adult, the more stressed the child.
In place of people we know, we encounter strangers purveying mass-manufactured products. Economic interactions once informed by personal relationships, whether at the bank, gas station, or large-store checkout counter, have been increasingly replaced by emotionally sterile and ever more mechanized transactions.
Children, like the young of many species, must attach to someone in their lives: their neurophysiology demands it.
To shut down emotions is to lose an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and, beyond that, an indispensable part of who we are. Emotions are what make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, and meaningful. They drive our explorations of the world, motivate our discoveries, and fuel our growth.
It fosters boredom, impairs genuine intimacy, undermines curiosity and learning, fuels the demand for distraction from the present moment, and drives a compulsion for overstimulation through competitive games, unrelenting background noise, hazardous social situations and behaviors, the hunger for products, and the pursuit of escape through substances.
Although the threat posed to children’s brains and minds by the ubiquitous, compulsive, commercialized world of digital devices and media raised profound alarm from the start among those who were observing the impacts, it continues to burgeon and metastasize. I refer here both to the use of digital devices by young children and to their compulsive use by adults in their presence.
The pleasures and boons of online connectivity can neither keep pace with the burgeoning crises of disconnection nor allay concerns about what the digital world is encoding into our kids’ cognitive and emotional operating systems.
Not to talk on a cell phone or text, but to make face-to-face interactions. All these things are neural exercises that provide resilience, creating an ability for an individual to regulate their internal emotional states.”
To be up front: I think the influence of the digital/screen problem is almost unfathomably pernicious.
Just what time does all that leave for free, creative, emergent, interactive, individual, or collective play? What kind of brains are we creating?
In our times, the context of all contexts is hypermaterialist, consumerist capitalism and its globalized expressions worldwide.
In a rehab program for substance addiction, she had been assigned the exercise of writing down her own values. “I realized,” she said, “that I could not think of a single value that did not belong to somebody else.”
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”3
I have wondered how it is that so many good people can be hypnotized into compliance with the indefensible.
In an image-mad culture that sustains itself in large part by making people feel inadequate about themselves—or, more insidiously, capitalizing (pun half intended) on these preexisting feelings—the media holds out ideals of physical perfection against which young and old measure themselves and which lead people to be ashamed of their very bodies.
“There are nursing mothers taking Botox,” Peter told me. “They are not able to communicate their emotions with their babies, or even pick up the babies’ emotions. They lose that kind of contact.”
And that’s just the point: the social character hatched by our consumerist society confuses desire with need, to the point that the nervous system becomes riled when the objects desired are withheld. Supply, meet demand.
When we talk about addiction, whether it be to drugs or whether it be to other forms of behavior, they all symbolize the sense of feeling of being devalued as a human being within a system. That’s basically it: feeling alienated within the system.”
The institutions of the society are constructed, so as to reduce, modify, limit the efforts and control of one’s own destiny.”
These all contribute to the inner emptiness, the void that addictions and covetous compulsions will later attempt to fill, even as our independent spirit is subjugated to the demands of an imbalanced, materialist culture.
studies have shown that repeated drug use leads to long-lasting changes in the brain that undermine voluntary control.”3 Translation: when it comes to addiction, “free will” is in many ways a neurobiological non sequitur.
The fact is, personal and social life events, filtered through the mind, shape the brain throughout the lifetime. You cannot, scientifically, cleave biology from biography, especially when it comes to a process as psychologically layered as addiction.
The problem is that, in typical medical fashion, the disease paradigm turns a process into pathology. Note, too, that “treatable” is a far cry from “healable”—which says less about the nature of addiction than about the medical system’s failure to understand it.
an attempt to soothe the pain of injuries incurred in childhood and stresses sustained in adulthood.
What benefit is the person deriving from their habit? What does it do for them? What are they getting that they otherwise can’t access?
To inner peace; to calmness, empowerment, a sense of self-worth; to community and friendship; to unfettered self-expression; to an elusive sense of comfortable normality; and to love?
When it comes down to it, all addiction’s incentives can be summed up as an escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane, lived-in experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one’s own skin. Underneath however many surface layers of “normal” functioning, that alienated discomfort can be disturbing to the point of torment: a persistent sense of being abnormal, unworthy, and deficient.
“It was a search for oblivion, I suppose … the convolutions you go through just not to be you for a few hours.”7
Addiction calls to us when waking
