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THE DEFENDER AND THE SAGE

Emotional Intelligence in the Context of Active Traumatization and Oppression

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Tenderness is what love feels like in private.

—Dr. Cornel West

» THE natural world has much to teach us about the way life works. Pay enough attention to the activity of the flora, fauna, and seasons that surround us, and it’s inevitable that insights about our own life, relationships, and the nature of existence will dawn. Relating to nonhuman animals can be especially revealing when it comes to understanding our own motivations and processes. Our brains really aren’t so different from theirs. We all share an archaic limbic system, responsible for our defensive fight-flight response. All primates also have a neocortex, which is heavily involved in generating our more elevated, socially connected, and decent sensibilities. The main difference between humans and most other primates is that we have a far more developed neocortex than they do. Ever wonder why dogs have much more expressive personalities and even something resembling a sense of humor when compared to cats? This is due, in part, to dogs having more developed neocortices. How strange that they—ahem—remain the inferior creature of the two. (I kid, I kid.)

If we are to understand anything about human behavior, we must understand that our brains and bodies aren’t really designed for the twenty-first century. We are built to hunt and gather. We’re more equipped for nomadic lifestyles. Our minds and bodies have all they need to address situations that are simpler and yet entail a much more severe precarity: identifying dangerous predators, finding adequate shelter, fending off other groups not known to ours. The emotional responses involved in such a life are far more intense than what most of us need to navigate our world today.

The limbic system, which is involved in all acts of aggression and violence, is basically a primitive being. For our purposes here, we’ll refer to this part of our brain as “the Defender.” The renowned neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel once said during a training that when we get angry, we can think of the anger of a mother fish in a pond in a cave protecting her eggs from a predator 500 million years ago. We can consider the fight-flight mechanism our defensive parts employ as having the force of half a billion years of evolution behind it. It’s ancient, but it is strong.

The neocortex is the seat of our compassion, morality, willpower, personality, and problem-solving ability, as well as our senses of identity and connection to others. It’s a little closer to a Buddha—gentle enough to appreciate the innate preciousness of all human life and connect with others, strong enough to weather stormy seas. It’s like a Sage—confident enough to assert itself and its worth, genuine enough to do the right thing even when nobody’s watching. It’s also, evolutionarily speaking, the youngest part of the brain. In other words, the sagely neocortex is yet to develop the sheer prowess that the Defender—the limbic system—enjoys. Though, in a functional sense, these two parts of the brain are tightly integrated, I find it helpful to delineate them to describe two polar opposite types of emotional responses.

No one has taught me more about these two types of emotional responses than Emma Goldman and Henry Lee, my two cats. (FYI, Henry Lee is named after the transcendent song by Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, not after the serial killer.) Most of the time, they’re love machines. I challenge you to find cats more aggressively affectionate. It won’t happen. Yet, I witness the strange metamorphosis they undergo every day in response to powerful and specific stimuli: even the slightest crinkling of a bag of cat treats, and they are transformed.

They’ll be in their natural state—pacific, purring, affection-prone. Bring out the cat treats, though, and they become los desperados. Their Defenders light up. In a flash, they’re edgy, pensive, anxious. They frantically consume at lightning speeds whatever I toss them. They also begin bullying each other, competing for more. And when treat time is over, they vigilantly scour the floor, just in case. You’d think I’d get some appreciation from them, being Gatekeeper of the Treats and all. But once treat time is over, should I try to pet them, they jump back away from me as if I’m a threat. When they finally realize that there are no more morsels to be had, they leave the room.

This used to confuse me to no end. In a flash, we go from a connected moment to a treat-induced mania, and then they turn against me. What gives?

SAFETY, REWARDS, AND BELONGING

At the neurological level, beings are driven by three basic things we need in order to thrive: safety, feel-good rewards, and belonging. These intrinsic, core motivations correlate with the three basic layers of the brain: brain stem, midbrain, and neocortex. When we perceive that we are safe and our basic needs are seen to, the brain stem’s basic functions are fulfilled. When we are in the presence of feel-good rewards—such as when we learn something new, engage in fulfilling work, or drive to the beach to enjoy the sun and the waves—the basic function of the midlayer of the brain is fulfilled. When we sense that we belong, when we connect with others, when we perceive that we are seen and valued and understood, the neocortex’s fundamental function is fulfilled. Indeed, the hum of life that courses through each of us is constantly reaching in these directions, just like a plant will always grow toward the sun. Even those who express hatred and commit vile acts of violence believe they must do so in order to be safe (think white nationals chanting “Jews will not replace us!”), in order to be rewarded (think domestic and foreign terrorists believing they’ll be favored in heaven), or to belong (think Charles Manson and his followers calling themselves “family”).

Emma and Henry enjoy a baseline of having these needs fulfilled. They eat better than I do (safety), we play often (rewards), and many are the head boops that go on in my house (belonging). These conditions give rise to a nearly automatic mental state in them scientifically known as Love Machine. But make no mistake, as much as we humans like to fantasize about living the lifestyle of a housecat or dog, the life of an animal is an anxious one. Hardwired into these cats are their wilder instincts, ones designed to contend with tremendous insecurity and uncertainty. In the wild, carnivorous animals must hunt down and eat another being alive every time they get hungry. And they are under constant threat of being eaten alive themselves.

What’s more, Henry and Emma are shelter cats who were rescued from the streets of New York City. Their earliest experiences involved the scarcity of food and the protection of shelter. Thus, their mental association with food—even with the indulgence of cat treats—is survival. They hear the rustle of any bag in the house that might be treats, and their Defenders come right out. In these moments, they are literally different beings—ambivalent to our connection, laser focused on one thing only: Get the treats! Eat the treats! Treats!! Wait—no more treats? We’re outta here. You’re dead to us, dude.

As the social reformer Dorothea Dix wrote, “No one wants to kiss when they’re hungry.”

Same thing with us humans. To the extent that we perceive that we’re safe, that life feels basically good, and that we feel that we belong (which includes feeling relatively worthy, good enough, seen, heard, respected, and like we matter), we are free to abide in the Sage. When these fundamental needs aren’t sufficiently met, however, we become stressed, and our evolutionarily ancient impulses are prone to take over. Stress literally hijacks us in an unconscious process that has no room for questioning or empathy. Rather, our brains begin to objectify beings and experiences into narrow binaries such as “safe versus unsafe” and “us versus them.” In Internal Family Systems, some of the Defender parts of us are actually called “firefighters.” You can think of such reactive defenses as swooping in, well-equipped to do a heroic job, but not having so much time to think. A building is burning, after all.

Please keep all this in mind as we walk through a true story (with all demographic information changed to protect confidentiality).

EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF POVERTY

CONTENT WARNING: violence and death involving children

The neurological cost of continuous stress is why poverty is one of the most traumatizing conditions a person can live in. One never gets to leave survival mode. Although I cannot write from inside the deepest levels of experiencing poverty and racism, I must report what I saw in the days that I endeavored to be with people in such places. I am not exaggerating when I say it is perhaps the most radical and ubiquitous form of terrorism around. In all honesty, one part of me is including this story to help us understand the relationship between active adversity and our emotions. Another part of me sees that stories such as these must be moved out of the margins and to the center if we are serious about connecting our inner work with our concern for others.

For two years, child welfare work routinely took me into the housing projects of NYC. What I saw there dispelled any notion I had left that we live in an integrated society. Witnessing vast communities, almost entirely nonwhite, sectioned off into an alternate and unequal society blew the doors off of my academic understandings of how systemic oppression works. Don’t get me wrong, I met plenty of people in the projects who embodied indefatigable faith and hope, who exuded love, showed me kindness, and celebrated life. Still, it’s one thing to understand the concept of marginalization; it’s another thing entirely to join with people in the margins they’ve been forced into; and quite another to be a foster care worker in their homes. Technically, I was there to help. Aspirationally, I was there to help. Honestly, I was yet another stranger who’d been given a whole lot of authority to dictate the outcome of their lives.

The police presence in the projects was heavy. Blindingly bright stadium lights surrounded many of the buildings and were left on all night. I learned there that emotional resilience for the good-hearted people I met most often did not look like cultivating mind-body awareness. It looked like trying to maintain their lives and families as best as they could while keeping their eyes open to the very real dangers all around them.

The first time I visited a family in my new role as a clinical foster care worker, the colleague I was training with informed me that a five-year-old girl had been murdered in a stairwell there just days prior. The killer was still at large. We knocked on the heavy steel door to the one-room apartment. A five-year-old girl we’ll call Betty opened the door. She repeated the horrific news to us within minutes of our arrival. Her brother had been taken into foster care after their mother inappropriately disciplined him physically—and yet Betty was left to stay. The girl, very small for her age—possibly from stress or malnutrition or both—was perhaps the smartest and most talented of all the kids I came to know in this work. But her situation was such that her innate strengths almost inevitably came filtered through the toxicity of her environment.

Betty learned early on that the best defense was a good offense. She was highly manipulative, spoke in ways that could make a sailor blush, and was prone to physical aggression. At such a young age, she was already possessed of an uncanny ability to read people for their weak spots. Once, during a court-mandated supervised visitation (often a humiliating experience for all parties involved), she became violent and was restrained by my supervisor. Betty screamed at her, “You cunt! You never helped anybody a day in your life!” My supervisor looked up at me, mouth ajar. The little girl had homed in on the biggest insecurity a bleeding-heart social worker could possibly have, and she went for it. She got after it just like any extremely bright kid who’d been conditioned to understand that their survival was constantly at risk would. Betty’s daily life had primed her for this.

Before we continue exploring the neuropsychology of our emotions in the context of active traumatization, there’s something that simply must be said: children cannot make mistakes. Children cannot be wrong. They don’t live in a mindset where right or wrong exist; none of us were born with that mindset. Rather, that’s a mindset we adults impose on them. They live in a world of spontaneous, thought-free impulse. All any child is ever doing is exploring and spontaneously expressing the life force within them. They don’t know what this world and this life are yet, and their only means of figuring it out is trial and error. Then they are conditioned by whether or not the result of their actions leads to—guess what—an increase in their subjective sense of safety, gratification, and belonging.

While it might be tempting to label Betty as a “problem child,” as is so often done, such judgments are delusion. They are out of alignment with the truth of who and what we humans are, of the innate wisdom that we are born with and the wild ways it can be shaped. What Betty was up to was done without awareness or even volition, really. It was a matter of instinct driven by biological imperatives. As children, this was true for you and me, too, no matter what untruths we internalized.

WE ARE COMPELLED TO RECREATE TRAUMAS

In his book Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine, perhaps the most important trauma theorist on the planet, tells the story of watching baby cheetah cubs being chased by a predatory lion on TV. The adult lion found the cubs while mama cheetah was out fetching lunch for them. The lion gave chase and was faster than the cubs, but the cubs were more agile. They managed to escape the predator by zigzagging back and forth, throwing the speedy lion off course. The cubs eventually made their way up a tree too flimsy for the heavy, adult predator to climb, and thus secured their survival.

What happened next, though, is most telling. Once the threatening beast was gone, the cubs came down out of the tree and reenacted what they had just been through. They took turns, one of them playing the predator while the other child-cheetahs zigzagged away from the play-lion and up the tree. Over and over again they rehearsed and relived this experience, which we can plausibly conclude produced two crucial benefits. For one, it gave them an avenue with which to discharge the intense stress of almost being eaten alive. And, two: they used the stress productively—to rehearse their important new survival skill. The stress produced by the terrifying experience ends up serving an exceptionally adaptive purpose.

When it comes to us human animals—whether we live in developmental housing or in a mansion—we are biologically compelled to repeat traumatic experiences. It’s crucial to understand that not all stress turns into traumatic stress and not all traumatic stress becomes post-traumatic stress disorder. What happens in the aftermath of intense adverse experience plays an enormous role in determining how it all consolidates into the nervous system. If we can discharge the stress, make meaning of it (such as when justice is served), be validated and empathically honored in the wake of the experience, it changes how the event comes to live in the body. If we are, however, met with judgment, told it’s our fault, or told we’re making it up or exaggerating, then the event is likely to take hold in the body in a very different way. If we have to walk down the street being catcalled every day, struggle with being differently abled, are made to live in poverty and surrounded by violence, or deal with other ongoing stressors in the wake of traumatic experience, it increases the likelihood that the experience will result in acute traumatic stress or PTSD.

All of this leads me to the question: Where in our so-called human civilization do we have places where we can discharge the stress of such frightening experiences? To go and make meaning of them? To speak the truth about those experiences and be empathized with, met with open arms? Most privileged people have a hard time finding such warm places to land in our world, not to speak of a five-year-old girl of color in the NYC housing projects. Thus, where else does this natural instinct to repeat what has terrified us have to express itself? If you had any judgment about Betty and her behavior before, I urge you to go back and reread the brief synopsis of her story now.

My express mission as a social worker—to help connect the mother to mental health and employment services, help her learn better parenting practices, and help her get out of poverty—turned out to be a fantasy. In the year and a half I worked with this family, nothing improved. Things only went backward. Betty’s single mom was a POC lesbian woman who had herself grown up in the projects in the Bronx. She was a survivor of severe sexual abuse and a recovering alcoholic who had never received quality treatment for her trauma or addiction. How was she supposed to get a job when, in addition to her emotional turmoil, she had a daughter whom no babysitting services would take and a son on the autism spectrum separated from her in foster care? The foster care system demanded that she be available for twice-weekly supervised visits, endless court dates, and weekly home visits, as well as attending her kid’s mental health appointments and attending her own weekly therapy and parenting classes. I’ve seen mothers lose their jobs over facing such demands. I’ve also seen parents not be able to get their kids back because they couldn’t participate in this time-intensive, soul-draining process; they would have lost their jobs, and they had other kids to care for.

This woman also had no agency over when most of these things were scheduled, and all of these services were delivered by burned-out, underpaid, entry-level social workers. And after all that, she had to go home and try to take care of a highly aggressive little girl who knew all too well that her mother could not protect her from the desperation and violence often found in their surroundings. Neither of these beautiful, bright, funny, creative humans—so full of feeling and spark, just like you and I—stood a fighting chance of addressing their trauma and improving their situation, not to speak of bringing home their son and sibling from foster care.

This is one of up to fifteen cases I managed at that time. All of them were this complex and awful. There are currently about seventeen thousand cases similar to this one in NYC alone—the financial capital of the world.

The story of Betty and her family is of the type that tends to become polarized in our tense political discourse. You know where I stand on the issue, but I know that many others would read the story and draw entirely different conclusions—the wasted tax dollars associated with ineffective government programs, the steep price of broken families. What I want to highlight in the next chapter is precisely in this arena—not about stories themselves but about how we interpret stories. What happens in our minds when another person or group seems different, even seems to be inhabiting an alternate reality? By what neuropsychological mechanism does difference become a stimulus for bias and hatred?