HUMANITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

It is sad to see how most psychologists still live under the shadow of Freud, Lacan, Skinner, Pavlov, Vygotsky, Watson, Wundt, to name a few. Most recent studies have shown that traditional TALK therapies, where you go to tell your whole life, even your deepest secrets to the psychologist, in most cases do not work. When we remember some trauma or get emotional, the left side of the brain is turned off, our rational, logical, linguistic brain stops working, this means that you can not reason correctly and you can not verbalize what is happening to you. The emotional right brain reacts as if the past is happening in the present. I am not saying that these authors have not made immense contributions to Psychology; But what happened to the rest of the human minds? Your minds and thoughts? your experiences? You, the reader, simply got carried away by what all these great thinkers said and you never learned to do your own analysis of human behavior. You did not learn to analyze yourselves? Didn’t you learn from your experiences?

During my university studies, I was surprised, sad and angry every time I asked a one of my psychology teachers, why do some kids bite? Why do some people eat so much and others don’t want to eat? Why does a little girl or boy wet the bed? Is it normal for someone to have many nightmares? Why am I afraid of dogs? They always answered me, according to "Freud", according to Vygotsky or according to some author; very rarely could they give me an analysis based on their own knowledge and their years of experience in the field.

It’s not their fault, they were simply victims of an authoritarian upbringing, where they learned to obey and in that way they were shaped to repeat information instead of thinking for themselves. You don’t believe me? Look at the results of the 1961 Milgram Experiment, on obedience and authority. Since we are very young we are told, "you have to do what I tell you" "you have to obey" and if you do not obey then punishment comes, which in fact is the preferred method of most of the parents I know. But it is not the punishment that causes discontent in humanity; it’s fear of punishment.

We are afraid of physical and mental harm, or anything we perceive as a threat to our physical and mental well-being. Fear of what people will say, fear of being alone, fear of animals, insects, fear of losing, all the fears we learned from our parents or our earliest caregivers. We are the product of the mix of the behaviors of our parents and the people around us. We learn to regulate our emotions by watching our parents or caregivers handle difficult situations in life. We learn by "IMITATION".

What about children victims of abuse, neglect, abandonment or who were brought up with violent parents, alcoholics or mentally ill? How many children are there in the streets, sleeping under the bridges, on buses? They are everywhere. There we have the perfect recipe for mental disorders. According to Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, the mother-child connection is the most powerful mental health intervention known to mankind; but if they did not have their mothers, they did not have good role models to follow? This is the reason why prisons are full of people. Just ask them about their childhood, they will tell you how they were abandoned, tortured, abused verbally, physically and psychologically, in most cases by their closest caregivers, parents, grandparents, uncles, brothers, even their own mothers.

It is very common to hear people say "I am not afraid", in fact it is the most common lie you will hear in your life. Without the emotion of fear we would be extinct as a human species. For our survival the fear created two answers: 1) Hypertension to flee or fight and 2) Body contraction and paralysis as a last remedy. From ancient times the reaction of freezing has helped people and animals not to be detected by predators. When we feel fear, all the blood goes to the vital organs, the heart, lungs, liver, etc. Blood flows to the legs preparing us to flee or fight. During all this the arteries in the stomach contract and our digestive system stops working completely. When we feel fear we can do everything or nothing, depending on all our past experiences.

What generates discontent in humanity is not knowing how to regulate emotions, especially fear, which puts us in states of "hypertension or paralysis" unbalancing our nervous system. If you are raised in a hostile environment, you are predisposed to live with your nervous system altered; Always on alert, because you don’t feel safe in your own bodies. In nature some animals are paralyzed when they perceive a threat, this is because it reduces the possibility of being noticed. In humans it was possible to see this same behavior during the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in the state of Colorado, many students said they had been paralyzed by fear and fell to the floor and thus avoided being shot by the murderers. The same behaviors were observed in the massacre at Virginia Tech University in 2007 as well as in the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

We all come to the world pre-programmed with seven emotions that will help our survival; surprise, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, sadness and joy. Each of these emotions will unleash a physiological response in the body, mobilizing us to take action. From the moment we are born we are learning to regulate these emotions by imitating how our parents or early caregivers behave and how they react to difficult situations in life. From babies we learn to be expert readers of the non-verbal language of our caregivers, in fact the right brain or limbic emotional brain is the first to develop within the womb of the mother and establishes non-verbal communication between the mother and the child.

We have two primary purposes in life, survive and procreate. Without survival there is no life and without procreation the human species would have disappeared. Our mind was designed to contribute to our survival and it is emotions that will maintain make us or break us. It is incredible that in 2018 there are still people who believe that what motivates us, is hunger, thirst, and sexual desire. If we think about this for a moment, a person will not eat if his only source of food disgusts him. There are people who have never had a sexual relationship because of fear and people who take their own lives due to depression. It is the emotions that through our evolution allowed us to still exist, mobilize us to deal with the important things in life in a way that has been successful in the past and without having to take the time to think about it.

We live in a concrete jungle where our social environment has undergone dramatic changes, full of imaginary fears. We got trapped in time; we were designed for an environment with hierarchical order where the strongest survives. We adapt to things only after the environment has changed.

First something changes and than we adapt slowly to those changes. We have not adapted to the modern environment and its new challenges because we did not learn to correctly regulate our emotional responses. They never taught us. When we come to the world, from package we are the best computer in the world. Able to perform any task or objective that is presented; but our earliest caregivers come and put us a software full of viruses, of badly adapted behaviors that they also learned from their parents and their parents learned from their parents. It is a vicious circle from which we must leave. We learn by imitation. People who have had a good upbringing, tend to see the world beautiful and full of opportunities, traumatized people see the world full of chaos and destruction.

Pablo A. Clavijo

Creador de la Psicología del Movimiento y Emoción

US Marine, Veterano de la guerra de Iraq, 2005

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