Raising Children - A Wrong Turn 10,000 Years Ago.

The depth of research done since I had my experience in 1968 and even more since I wrote the piece 1998 is wonderful.  Much of it is above my pay grade so to speak but the work is available to read and learn. 

The concepts here are of critical importance for having a future.

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In 1968, while fishing on the causeway between Miami and Miami Beach, I had an epiphany. I had just finished a BS in anthropology and had studied psychology for many years (and went on later to get a degree, become licensed and practice for 20 years).

I was looking at the skyline of Miami (boy I bet it has changed) and realized that it couldn’t go on. “Civilization” was asking too much of us. We are too separated from nature.  We are too pack in together.  Our original child development situation had warped.  Our connection to our brethren had been lost.  We had allowed our hubris and arrogance to blind us to our situation.

In 1972, Limits to Growth came out.  So besides not being healthy for humans psychologically, sociologically or spiritually, we are creating an unsustainable, environmentally devastating and devastated world.
 Then Energy for Survival by Wilson Clark, Energy Basis for Man and Nature by Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum, The Fires of Culture by Carol E Steinhart,  Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford,  Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics by Henderson, Hazel.

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This comes from an essay I wrote around 1998.

Consider it this way.   If humanity is seen as a person who is 100 years old, the first 99 years of her life would have been spent as gatherer and hunter.  She would have only one year to adapt to the changes in family structure, living arrangements, child rearing and all the other pressures and stresses that the shift to agriculture brought.  This same 100 year old person would have five or six days to adapt to the enormous changes brought about by the industrial revolution.   And less than a day to adapt to the mass of information made available by electronics.

Each adaptation moves us further away from the original social and physical environment of our emergence.  Is it bad or wrong?  This is not the criteria.  There is no fault.  Each accommodation comes from necessity and is the best we know at the time.  At the leading edge of human history is an accumulation that can expand and deepen the knowledge of our travels. It can also cause great confusion and grief.                                                                             

From: SUPERMAN PLAYS WITH KRYPTONITE DICE      

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.htmlhttp://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.html

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The list of hunting and gathering childrearing traits I had learned in anthropology was one of the underlying reasons for my reaction in 1968.  So I went looking again recently which is one of my ways to understanding.

I was fortunate to find this book when doing an interlibrary search.  Narvaez, Darcia; Panksepp, Jaak; Schore, Alan and Gleason, Tracy.   2013.  Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development.  Oxford.  London.  

Darcua Narvaez listed the experiences of our earlier evolution and development.

•   Lots of positive touch – as in no spanking – but nearly constant carrying, cuddling and holding;

•   Prompt response to baby’s fusses and cries. You can’t “spoil” a baby. This means meeting a child’s needs before they get upset and the brain is flooded with toxic chemicals. “Warm, responsive caregiving like this keeps the infant’s brain calm in the years it is forming its personality and response to the world,” Narvaez says.

•   Breastfeeding, ideally 2 to 5 years. A child’s immune system isn’t fully formed until age 6 and breast milk provides its building blocks.

•   Multiple adult caregivers – people beyond mom and dad who also love the child.

•   Free play with multi-age playmates. Studies show that kids who don’t play enough are more likely to have ADHD and other mental health issues.

•   Natural childbirth, which provides mothers with the hormone boosts that give the energy to care for a newborn.

Ross A. Thompson added in his entry "Adaptations and Adaptations"

·   cosleeping with caregivers

·   Living in social groups (i.e. high social embeddedness)

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I wrote Darcia Narvaez and she sent me several of her papers and names of other books. I am interested in researching further the psychological and social result of not having our original childrearing practices.

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I think our present political, economic, social, and environmental situations not only here in the USA but also globally in many places is bring home to roost the wrong turn we took some 10,000 years ago.  I think this modification came with horticulture/agriculture and we have become more estranged ever since.   I believe it may well be at the root of our assault on nature and the multiple dilemma that we now face globally.  I also believe the Dumbar number (groups of 200) may have been more critical than we know.  Moving beyond a certain group size undercut social control of individuals and unleashed again our assault via technology on nature.

Consider this:

Insecure attachment. Crittenden (1998) and Fosha (2003) describe three psychological ways in which infants adapt over time to habitual non-responsive caregivers developing forms of insecure attachment: “feeling but not dealing,” “dealing but not feeling,” and “neither feeling nor dealing.” When the caregiver is rejecting or inconsistent, an insecure attachment develops with that caregiver. When caregivers are rejecting of a young child’s overtures for affection or need satisfaction, the child learns to suppress emotion and develops an avoidant attachment (dealing but not feeling). When caregivers are inconsistent in response, the child learns to use affect as a way to get attention and needs met, shutting down cognition (since it is unreliable predictor of caregiver behavior), developing an ambivalent or anxious attachment (feeling but not dealing). When the child is abused, the child does not develop in feeling or thinking and ends up with a disorganized attachment (neither feeling nor dealing). Those with insecure attachment become inflexible and self-centered in social situations—they emotionally withdraw, attack or manipulate.

Narvaez, D.    2014. “Natural Morality, Moral Natures and Human Flourishing.”   In B. Musschenga & A. van Harskamp (Eds.), Why be moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral. [Springer Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy] Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

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From:

“Moral Heritage1: Engagement of the Heart”

Narvaez, Darcia; Panksepp, Jaak; Schore, Alan and Gleason, Tracy.   2013.  Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development.  Oxford.  London.

“The companionshop care that children receive in these societies contributes to the capacities for social enjoyment and face-to-face compassionate morality, providing a baseline for what I call an engagement ethic”.  pg. 94

“The engagement ethic comprises capacities such as social pleasure, presence, reverence, sysnchrony and intersubjectivity, empathy, mentalizing and perspective taking.”  pg. 106.

“Presence.  Full emotional presence, or resonance with the Other in the moment, represents one of the key features of the engagement ethic.  Presence is relational attunement to life in the vicinity, encompassingthe sense of connection to all of life.” pg. 96

“Reverent hospitality  .  .  .  .  Reverence is a perception of the phenomina related to a thing or entity, its being-nature” pg. 97

“Synchronized intersubjectivity involves emotional attunement with Other.” .  .  .  .  Our bodies, as social animals, have ‘evolvedsympathetic detection  .  .  . of the motives inherent in one another’s ways of moving’ and our social cooperation ‘depends on this mysterious intersubjective sympathy.”  pg. 98

Empathy is attunement with another’s feeling and needs.   The ability to feel with another – to feel the same emotion – is fundamental to the mammalian mind.  pg. 98

Perspective taking.  Early experience with intersubjectivity facilitates the development of the neurobiological underpinnings for perspective taking or mentalization, the ability to imagine another’s viewpoint and understnd what might be motivating their behavior, a critical capacity for effective human relations.  pgs 99-100.

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In addition, I think our original milieu maintained constraint so we maintain an ongoing sustainability:

I believe there are five natural factors that determine and will continue to determine our history and future.

* All life reproduces to the maximum their environment allows(population density).

* All life will use all the resources in its environment to promote its present living (population pressure).

* Much of life manifest an us against them protectionism (even plants release poisons to the soil to protect their territory. This is the convergence of territoriality (which is manifest by all life) and the need to belong for this dependently social animal called human.

* We are immersed in an environment of our own making and our "brilliance" threatens us with unintended consequences (whether agriculture or nuclear power).

* Groups larger than the small group of 30 to 200 people, which is the social environment in which we evolved for a million years, creates power-over and inequality.

These five factors are a natural part of life and being human. For more detailed exposition:  http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-here.html

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Some Bibliography

Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom (Narvaez; W.W. Norton, 2014)**

Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing (ed. with Valentino, Fuentes, McKenna, & Gray; OUP, 2014)

Narvaez, Darcia; Panksepp, Jaak; Schore, Alan and Gleason, Tracy.   2013.  Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development.  Oxford.  London.  

Live and Learn; Learn and Live

There is an old adage: live and learn.  This is the first half of life experience. The first half of life is the work of shaping and expression.  The infant already has many forces that have shaped her at birth.  There are inherited traits of her family going back into the distant past.  There are the influences from the womb.  The infant does not enter the world an unshaped lump of psychological, physical or spiritual clay.  There are many experiences in the womb such as loud noises or chemicals released by or passed through the mother’s that shape the growing fetus.

Once born the child’s most important task in the early years is learning how to fit in.  Her humanness has many needs that are seeking to be fulfilled.  There are the obvious ones of protection and feeding.  There are the very important human ones of nurture, guidance and being important.  Her family environment teaches her what she must do to get those needs met.  What she learns is what things are significant, how that significance effects her, and how to express what is significant to her. 

She also learns the other side of fitting in.  In learning to adapt her needs, she may have to tone down, warp or even hide her young self.  The developing child learns meaning.  She learns meaning so that she can survive.  Some of this meaning is fairly straight forward physical survival information. It is the kind that warns that a fire is hot.  It also teaches what responses her cries for food, attention, fear, or frustration will get. It is teaching her how to belong to her family. 

Most of us spend the first half of life verifying what we have learned.  We seek and/or create environments and people that confirm this early shaping.

Learn and live” of the second half of life is not an easy job.   Nor does it every end.   As we experience our patterns, we must learn “how we got to be the way we are”.   What are the many experiences, often mercifully buried, that shaped our young ego.  As we learn how we were molded at the same time we must learn “how we are”.  This is different than the shaping influences.  “How we are” is the expression of our early adaptations in the first half of life. 

It is interesting to note that there are usually three to seven primary experiences that act as themes for our ego expression.  We may have been beaten every day of our life but there is one beating that is the defining theme of that experience and how we assimilated it into our self image.  It is each of these three to seven thematic experiences that we must meet and grieve to learn in the second half of life.

These early shapings are the source of brain chatter.  It is the dos and don’ts of adaptation that keep the human animal within the bounds of acceptable behavior.  With illumination we bring to consciousness the themes and energy behind the patterns of our behaviour.  This is a necessary first step.

Illumination is not fault finding in its orientation.  It is critical and gentle assessment.  For example when assessing anger it is examined in various ways. How do I display or not display anger?  What were my childhood models for anger?  Was there a rageful person in the past that made anger displays a non choice because of a wish to not emulate and/or a fear of display?  Was it a home where anger (or any emotions) was proscribed?  What happens with angry thoughts?  Is there guilt?  Is there shame?  If anger does not come out straight how does it display?  Which of my behaviors are sideways expressions of anger?  How has my anger and other’s anger influenced my relationships?  If there was no good role model for anger what are a my personal, acceptable expressions of anger?  How do a I learn to practice these expressions?

Illumination work encompasses all of our patterns. How do I control my world?  All life needs to have a sense of control or efficacy.  Are there moods that I use?  Do I fail inorder to succeed or the reverse?  How do I define my territory?  All life defines territory if no other way than occupying a space. What displays do I do to indicate when my territory is invaded?  How close is intimate, personal, social?  What did I learn about sex, sexuality and sensuality?

How we got the way we are is one component of illumination.  We must also learn how we are.  This is very difficult to do alone.  We need a trusted environment and trusted others to be mirrors for us.  It is the old trees for the forest problem.  If we can know that the feedback is in the now and not put someone else’s face (for example a mother) on the person giving the information then we are on our way to learning our old patterns and beginning new patterns.

This is hard work.  We were shaped at a very young age.  The breadth and depth of awareness and development of the emotions were very immature.  As new behaviors are attempted there are screams of protest and covert sabotage from our early shaping in the name of survival. The adaptations established were put in place at a very young immature age and they were design to meet at least minimally the requirements of the environment that allowed the child to get its needs met.

Energy constantly follows thru and around us.  When we are wounded - when our love is imageless - when our hope is dammed - when our dance is bound then the energy does not flow.  Two birds are hatched in our chest.  The one flies with a broken wing.  The other hides in the nest afraid to fly. 

Hiding in the nest we hold dreams of goodness and fantasies of loud applause as we would soar.  The broken wing flier goes in circles; so the world always looks and feels the same.  We learn to fly this way.  This is how flying is done.  When flying is not done this way we fear falling.  The world must always look the same or . . . ! ! ??

The point to the two birds is that our adaptations are the circling bird.  Who essentially maintains the wounds.  We in some ways selectively live in situations that keep us circling.  Why should the child within (the bird hiding in the nest) trust you the adult who continues to apply the constraints and “abuses” and continues to exist in situations that apply these constraints and “abuses.”  So we must make friends with ourselves.  Learn to trust ourselves. 

The true move for healing is switching our feelings of shame to feelings of guilt.  Then we are dealing with our behavior and not our personhood.  With shame changed to guilt we can do things that atone for the behavior and begin to have a deeper sense of belonging.  We may also decide that the behavior is not one to feel guilty about; that the making the behavior negative was someone else’s problem and the behavior is a natural and acceptable part of ourself.  We can learn to accept mistakes, weaknesses, and inabilities as well as our gifts and abilities.

We do not change.  I think we can face our devils and neutralize them by moving shame to guilt which is impowering because then it becomes behavior.  I think we can learn that what was our onus is also our gift and learn to use it as such.  I think we can release some of the early energy tied up in wounds so we are can be more childlike and not childish.  But I don't think our essence or the early shaping of it can change. We become aware.  We move from the powerful shapings of self-talk and shame to the choices of mature self reflection. 

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SHAME

Shame is a critical part of our humanness.  Shame can be looked at as a feeling of not belonging, of exclusion from the group.  For a highly and imperatively social animal, our lifelong development of attachment/bonding is pivotal to belonging.  We have a genetically based need to find structure, process and meaning within a social context that arises from both our evolutionary path and the very composition of our information processing.  It is an interplay of biology, language, family, society, culture, and cosmology.  It is a dynamic, ongoing, relational process within ourselves and with others.

It is important to understand the core of shame is not belonging.  As a totally social animal, not belonging is a powerful motivator.  As example, shame arises when we, as children, have no socially acceptable release for our natural frustration/anger.  Or where our natural feelings of flight manifest as fear or terror are condemned.  Shame is the feeling that arises when a behavior that is manifesting a naturally occurring internal state invokes the social response of disgust; of being cast out; of not belonging.

With the social response imprinted very early on our basic survival patterns, self- consciousness acts to maintain a sense of shame whenever the disallowed internal experience occurs.  This is often below awareness because recognition of this aspect of our self is a threat to belonging; hence to survival.

Shame’s counterpart is guilt. Guilt arises from the disapproval of our behavior as opposed to rejection of our personhood.   When guilt occurs, a way is taught for rectifying our error and for the acceptable expression (no matter how convoluted) of our experience within the social context.  Guilt provides a process for continued membership in the group.  In this way it provides continued support for the “traditional” patterns of socially accepted behavior.

Shame and guilt are decidedly different experiences.  Guilt offers continued membership while shame banishes. The pathway to human belonging is channeled and powered by these two emotions of reference that arise through the functioning of self-consciousness.   I believe these two emotions of reference are primary in the processes of personal and social change. 

(The concept of emotions of reference comes from Lewis, Michael. 1992. Shame-The Exposed Self. The Free Press. N.Y.)

A few readings:

Gilbert, Paul and Andrews, B.  1998.  Shame: Interperson Behavior, Psycholpathology, and Culture.  Oxford U. Press. Oxford.

Lewis, H.B.  1987.  The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation.  Eribaum Ass.  Hillsdale, N.J.

Lewis, H.B.  1971.  Shame and Guilt in Neurosis.  International University Press. N.Y.

Lewis, Michael. 1992. Shame-The Exposed Self. The Free Press. N.Y.

Lynd, Helen Merrell.  1965.  On Shame and the Search for Identity.  Science Editions. N.Y.

Peristiany, J. G.  1966.  Honour and Shame.  University of Chicago Press.  Chicago.

Scheff, T. and Retzinger, S.  1991. Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts. Lexington Books. Massachusetts>

Schieffelin, C.  1985.  "Anger, Grief, and Shame: Toward a Kaluli Ethnopsychology."  In Person, Self, and Experience.  Edited by G. M. White and J. Kirkpatrick.  Univ. of California Press. Berkeley.

Schneider, Carl.  1977.  Shame, Exposure, Privacy.  Beacon. Boston.

Sroufe, L. Alan.  1995.  Emotional development: the organization of emotional life in the early years.  Cambridge U.  N.Y.   Page 68 for 18 month old shame.

Tangney, June and Fischer, Kurt; editors.  1995.  Self-Conscious Emotions: The Psychology of Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride.  Guilford.  N.Y.

On the bioeconomics of shame and guilt

                  Klaus Jaffe, Astrid Flórez, Marcos Manzanares, Rodolfo Jaffe, Cristina M. Gomes, Daniel Rodríguez, Carla Achury

http://atta.labb.usb.ve/Klaus/art202.pdf

Abstract

Shame has biological roots, possibly enhancing trust, favoring social cohesion. We studied bioeconomic aspects of shame and guilt using three approaches: 1—Anthropo-linguistic studies of Guilt and Shame among the Yanomami, a culturally isolated traditional tribal society; 2—Estimates of the importance different languages assign to the concepts Shame, Guilt, Pain, Embarrassment, Fear and Trust, counting the number of synonyms listed by Google Translate; 3—Quantitative correlations between this linguistic data with socioeconomic indexes. Results showed that Yanomami is unique in having overlapping synonyms for Shame, Fear and Embarrassment. No language had overlapping synonyms for Shame andGuilt. Societies previously described as “Guilt Societies” have more synonyms for Guilt than for Shame. A large majority of languages, including those from societies previously described as “Shame Societies”, have more words for Shame than for Guilt. The number of synonyms for Guilt and Shame strongly correlated with estimates of corruption, ease of doing business and governance, but not with levels of interpersonal trust. We propose that cultural evolution of shame has continued the work of biological evolution, but its adaptive advantageto society is still unclear. Results suggest that recent cultural evolution must be responsible for the relationship between the levels of corruption of a society and the number of synonyms for Guilt and Shame in its language. This opens a novel window for the study of complex interactions between biological and cultural evolution of cognition and emotions, which might help broaden our insight into bioeconomics.