Battling the Inner Dummy: The Craziness of Apparently Normal People by David L. Weiner
Author:David L. Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2015-05-26T16:00:00+00:00
On the morning of June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo, a chauffeur misunderstood his instructions, made the wrong turn, tried too late to correct his mistake and in so doing, delivered his passengers, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent of Austria-Hungary and his wife Sophie, into the direct sight of Gavrilo Princip, who fired two shots at them and mortally wounded them both. This single event set off a series of vengeful political actions based on power and territorial challenges that culminated with the start of World War I. By the end of the war, in November 1918, more than 65,000,000 men had been mobilized for the opposing armies, of which 8,000,000 died and 21,000,000 were wounded.1
In her book, Therapist's Guide to Clinical Intervention, Sharon L. Johnson created a “List of Feeling Words,” divided between “Pleasant Feelings” and “Difficult/Unpleasant Feelings.”2 I counted 116 “Pleasant Feelings,” such as peaceful, thankful, passionate, engrossed, determined, tenacious, spirited, thrilled, confident, devoted, loved, joyous, optimistic, and cheerful. I counted 139 “Difficult/Unpleasant Feelings,” including ashamed, powerless, fearful, crushed, desperate, confused, embarrassed, miserable, sulky, infuriated, enraged, insensitive, suspicious, menaced, rejected, and tense.
In addition, I added about sixty more unpleasant feelings from a perusal of a pocket dictionary, putting the total at approximately two hundred. The limbic brain's portfolio of feelings apparently includes far more to punish than to reward us, which could be interpreted to mean that if there is any Ultimate Designer it is not exactly trusting of our good sense.
To gain a better understanding of how the punishment is triggered, we might envision these feelings as being programmed onto a metaphoric hard disk in our brains, ready to be punched up by the emotional sentinel that Daniel Goleman described in his book Emotional Intelligence.3
For example, let's imagine that we have a significant other whom we love and cherish and who has just returned from a two-week trip out of town. He or she begins a conversation about the interesting events of the trip, which we listen to rationally interested as we put the silverware out on the kitchen table. Our emotional sentinel is at rest. It is presumably only triggered when one of our limbic-drive expectations has been fulfilled or disappointed.
But then our significant other abruptly stops talking, looks us in the eye, perhaps with a tear or two welling up, and tells us that he or she is leaving us because of a new love. Bang!! This is an unfulfilled expectation for each one of our core limbic programs: power because our status is in jeopardy; territorial because our home is in jeopardy; sex because our reproductive potential is in jeopardy; nurturance because our primary attachment is in jeopardy; and survival because our security is in jeopardy.
For our emotional sentinel, this would be the equivalent of sensing a four-alarm fire. It begins punching an array of punishment buttons, which we might metaphorically envision as a series of letters on an imaginary keyboard in our brains.
For example, it might begin by punching
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