When toddlers feel something, they can’t imagine ever not having felt that way or that they will ever feel differently in the future. Their feelings seem permanent and unchangeable. To be fair, memory of past emotional states is brief even for adults. Psychologists call the phenomenon state-dependent recall; information learned in one mood or emotional state is most likely to be recalled in a similar mood or emotional state. When resentful toward a spouse, you can remember everything he/she did to offend or disappoint since the day you married. But you’ll recall only nice things about your spouse when you feel sweet and loving. When depressed, we tend to think of only sad things, and when we’re happy, we tend to think exclusively of happy events. When we’re angry, we think of offensive things, and when compassionate, we recall our more humane experiences. When feeling helpless and dependent, we forget that we’re fairly competent and creative most of the time.
Negative emotional states are especially susceptible to state-dependent recall, due to their more urgent survival importance. If a saber-toothed tiger swatted at early humans from the side, that information was necessary for survival. However, it wasn’t necessary to have it in consciousness all the time, where the intensity of the memory would impair performance of other important tasks that require conscious attention. So the information is “filed” under fight-or-flight arousal and recalled only during similar arousal. (The flashbacks of PTSD constitute a breakdown of state-dependent recall, which allows memories of extreme threat to intrude on relatively benign emotional states.)
State-dependent recall is generally an efficient mode of information processing. But the emotional state that leads to most self-defeating behavior—anger—is processed in milliseconds (thousandths of a second) and cannot be selective in recall. We tend to feel the urgency of attack every time something happens to stimulate anger. This response is helpful if the stimulus is really a saber-toothed tiger, but not so great if the challenge is a stubborn teenager, distracted spouse, rude driver, or narcissistic coworker.
State-dependent recall keeps us in whatever part of the brain we’re in at the moment, simply because we’re accessing only those memories associated with the current emotional state. When feeling helpless in the Toddler brain, it seems that we’ve always been helpless. When feeling dependent, it seems that we were always dependent on someone else or some substance. When depressed, it seems that we never felt well. When feeling destructive, it seems that we’ve always been devalued, disrespected, disregarded, angry, or bitter.
Fortunately, state-dependent recall works in the Adult brain, too. When feeling compassionate, we can’t remember ever feeling resentful. And when feeling confident, we’re apt to forget mistakes we’ve made in the past, while implicitly remembering the corrections we made. For example, I won’t remember in the Adult brain banging my thumb with a hammer, but I’ll implicitly recall how to hold the nail and swing the hammer for maximum efficiency.
Despite the illusions of state-dependent recall, negative feelings are transitory. A toddler can express hatred for you in a temper tantrum and a few minutes later climb onto your lap in loving affection.
The negative feelings that lead to repeating mistakes over and over last a long time only when we try to justify violations of our deeper values. For instance, the subtle guilt I’d feel for being attracted to a movie actress would last much longer if I were to justify the attraction by thinking of times my wife disappointed me (ignoring the times I disappointed her). Justifying emotions amplifies, magnifies, and prolongs them. In the Adult brain, we know that negative emotions are either motivations (my subtle guilt goes away once I follow its motivation to connect with my wife), or, if it’s a bad mood, it will pass, like the flu or a cold. In the Toddler brain, negative feelings seem eternal.
Mistakes we repeat with regularity rise from the Toddler brain. They turn short-term setbacks into long-term losses and temporary pain into long-term suffering. In the Adult brain, we learn from past mistakes, grow from them, and soar above them.
Emotions vs. Feelings
Emotions move us. The word emotion, derived from the Latin, literally means “to move.” The ancients believed that emotions move behavior; in modern times we say they motivate behavior. They prepare us to do things by sending powerful chemical signals to the muscles and organs of the body.
Feelings are the conscious and most misunderstood component of emotions. In contrast to the simplicity of basic behavioral motivations—approach, avoid, attack—feelings are complex, ever-changing, and subject to moods (like depression), sensations (like warmth, cold, pleasure, pain, comfort, discomfort), and physiological states (like metabolism, hormonal variations, hunger, thirst, and tiredness). All these can seem like “feelings,” and that is why people often give psychological meaning to anything that feels uncomfortable. Discomfort seems close enough to negative emotions to keep us hopelessly confused, as long as we’re in the Toddler brain, where the focus is on feelings rather than effective behavior. When a toddler is uncomfortable, you had better look out! Same with adults stuck in the Toddler brain.
As part of the human motivational system, feelings are not ends in themselves but a means of getting our attention, so we’ll act on the motivation of the present emotion. For instance, if you’re interested in something and don’t focus on it, the usually unconscious emotion of interest starts to feel like anticipation, excitement, a nagging hunch, or anxiety. If you have ignored someone you love and don’t approach to kiss and make up, the usually unconscious emotion of guilt will begin to feel like impatience, frustration, anxiety, or depression. If you’re in the Toddler brain, you’re likely to blame it on your partner. If you do, the unconscious guilt becomes anger and resentment, as in, “She had it coming!” or “Why should I feel sorry for him?”
When we act on the basic motivation of emotions, we’re usually aware of few or no feelings. That’s how you can get interested in something, look up at the clock, and notice that several hours have passed during which you were largely unaware of any feelings. It’s also how you can pay no attention to someone you love and be sincerely surprised or defensive when he accuses you of ignoring him, which you were entirely unaware of doing when interested in something else. Of course, you can become aware of feelings if you reflect on them, but that will often stop the motivation and change the behavior, as well as distort the feeling. For instance, you can probably recall a romantic moment, like walking on the beach or lying in front of a cozy fireplace, when your partner almost ruined it by asking, “What are you feeling right now?” You had to stop sharing interest, enjoyment, and intimacy to think about what it feels like to share interest, enjoyment, and intimacy.
The Toddler brain is dominated by feelings, with no awareness of the motivational function of emotions. Feelings become an end in themselves rather than part of a motivational system. The problem for adults who get stuck in the Toddler brain is that thousands of experiences over a lifetime have conditioned a rather limited number of feelings. For instance, you may have associated feeling shame with your mother’s raised eyebrow, your father closing the door to his study, a teacher who made you feel dumb, the text your boyfriend read while you talked to him, as well as many other experiences. Any of these—or anything remotely like them—can trigger confusing “feelings,” when motivation is weak and we’re more prone to Toddler brain regression. For example, if you are not really interested in learning facts related to a task at work, the look on your boss’s face might drop you into the Toddler brain by reminding you of your mother’s disdain whenever you disappointed her as a child. This association made during low-
interest motivation will feel enough like shame to disorganize your thought processes, inhibit your ability to remember relevant facts, and probably result in mistakes. However, if the motivation to learn is strong—that is, you’re really interested in the task—your boss’s facial expression will make no difference—you’ll remain task-oriented in the Adult brain. Similarly, if the motivation to connect with the texting boyfriend is weak, the Toddler brain response of jealousy will prevail, making you feel less loving and attractive. But if the desire to connect is strong, the Adult brain will regard the texting as a minor bump in the road and try more loving ways of connecting, which are more likely to succeed.
The Psychology of Emotional “Need”
The dominance of feelings in the Toddler brain leads a person to confuse preferences—what they would like to have—with needs—what they must have. In the Toddler brain, all strong feelings represent emotional “needs.” Adults who get stuck in the Toddler brain under stress create hell, or at least purgatory, when they perceive themselves to have emotional needs.
An emotional need is a preference you’ve decided must be gratified to maintain equilibrium: you can’t be well or feel whole without it. The perception of need begins with a rise in emotional intensity, feeling more strongly about being with someone or having something. As the intensity increases, it can feel like you “need” to do or have it for one compelling reason: It’s the same emotional process as biological need. (You can observe the biological process by planting your face in a pillow; emotional intensity rises just before you struggle to breathe. Or think of how emotional intensity increases when your get near home after a long drive, just before the urge to urinate grows acute.) When emotion suddenly rises, as it does when reminded of the girlfriend who dumped you, your brain confuses preferences with biological needs. In other words, the perception of need becomes self-reinforcing: “I feel it, therefore, I need it, and if I need it, I have to feel it more.”
In terms of motivation, perceived emotional needs are similar to addictions, without the intense stimulation of reward centers in the brain when gratified or the cellular contraction in various parts of the body during withdrawal. You might say that the body decides that you have an addiction, while the conscious brain decides that you have a need. But once the brain decides that it needs something, pursuit of it can be just as compelling as addiction.
It’s easy to confuse wanting with needing in a culture that readily conflates the two. “Getting your needs met” has become the motto of the times. We “look out for number one” by construing preferences as needs and striving at all costs to get them met. My preferences are superior to yours because mine are “needs,” while yours are just ego fluff. Some authors suggest that you can’t feel secure at work merely by doing an outstanding job; you must make yourself “needed,” not by your hard work, but through manipulation. Desire is not enough for Toddler brain love. “I need you” feels better than “I want you.”
Adults have only one emotional “need,” and that is to act consistently on deeper values. If we do that, all the preferences that seem like emotional needs will either be satisfied as a byproduct of meaningful living, or they’ll be deemed unimportant in the course of a purposeful life. The best chance of attaining the life you most want to have is to approach it out of desire—that is, from the Adult brain—not from the emotional neediness of the Toddler brain.
Where Pain Becomes Suffering
As a lifesaving alarm system, pain keeps us focused on distress for the purpose of relieving it. Pain motivates behavior that will help heal, repair, or improve. A pain in the foot, for example, motivates taking the rock off it, getting more comfortable shoes, soaking it in a tub of warm water, or visiting a podiatrist.
If we do not act on the motivation to heal-repair-improve, or fail in our attempts to do so, the alarm of pain intensifies and generalizes. The toothache becomes facial pain; the sore foot seems to throb along the whole side of the body. When pain intensifies and generalizes over time, it becomes suffering. Suffering is repeated failure to act successfully on the natural motivation of pain to do something that will heal, repair, or improve. In the Toddler brain, we’re more likely to focus on the alarm and ignore the motivation to heal, repair, or improve. In the Toddler brain, pain becomes suffering.
Like its physical counterpart, normal psychological pain (not caused by brain disease or severe disorder) is localized in the beginning, usually in the form of guilt or anxiety about something specific. Also like physical pain, failure to act on the motivation to heal-repair-improve intensifies and generalizes the alarm. Guilt becomes shame (feeling inadequate or defective) or depression (nothing matters), and anxiety becomes chronic dread or inability to relax, sleeplessness, and hypervigilance—expecting danger everywhere.
When it comes to emotional pain, the behavior choices that will heal, repair, or improve are not always clear. As psychological pain generalizes, it seems to be about the self—a kind of self-ache. (In the Toddler brain, everything is about the newly emerging sense of self.) As the alarm of pain intensifies, it strengthens focus on our own distress, making us self-obsessed. Eventually we identify with the pain, in a subtle or overt victim identity. At that point, we can scarcely perceive other people’s pain that does not seem to match our own experience. This heightened self-obsession makes the alarm of pain louder and more general, impeding genuine connections that heal and promote growth.
Those who suffer psychologically have gotten into the habit of trying to numb or avoid the pain signals that would otherwise motivate healing, repairing, or improving. They inadvertently turn pain into suffering by virtue of toddler coping mechanisms, which we take up in the next chapter.