evolution | The People's Therapist

Posts Tagged ‘evolution’

Not a baby bird

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged evolution, placing the fault within, regression on June 1, 2010| 10 Comments »

Here’s a letter I received recently. Yes, it’s real, but I’ve removed anything identifiable to protect the sender:

Hi Will,

I read your thoughts of the legal profession on Above the Law and thought you neatly summarized my situation. I wish I was the type of person who could expel all the anger but instead I feel my self esteem disintegrating. It’s starting to become apparent to my co-workers (i.e. I cry at work). There’s one other female associate in my office and she’s going through the same thing. My problem is I believe the negative things my bosses tell me. I explained this to my boss (when he asked why we were crying) and promised him I would try to develop better coping skills. How do I make myself not care when he goes off on me?

For better or worse, this letter is typical – I hear a lot of stories like this.

An institute director I used to work with – a grizzled veteran of the therapy trenches – used to tell patients he wished he could make the world a better place, but he couldn’t. He could only better prepare them to deal with the world the way it is.

That’s how I feel about law firms. They can be brutal, and I can’t do much about that. But there are ways to deal.

My advice to this woman is to stop acting like a baby bird.

Allow me to explain.

Under stress, it is natural to regress to a child-like way of relating to the world. That’s because stress makes you feel overwhelmed, which is how young children, who are small and helpless, feel all the time. Feeling small, helpless and overwhelmed takes you back to a time early in your life, and old behaviors can kick in. You can start relating to authority figures like parent figures, focusing on pleasing them and forgetting that you have an adult’s right to judge your own behavior on your own terms, and to fight back and defend yourself.

There’s a good evolutionary reason why children are such natural parent-pleasers. A child evolves to survive by pleasing a parent. That’s because nature can be brutal – and so can parents. It has been shown again and again that, lacking sufficient food, a mother bird will toss a new-born chick out of the nest to die. It happens in most species, and at some level, the parent animal is selecting the child that fails to please for culling.

Baby chicks are warm and fuzzy. Nature is not. When a little bird fails to please its parent, that chick quite rightly panics and blames herself – and frantically tries to please as though its life depended on it.

You don’t have to act like a baby chick. Not at a law firm.
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Gay is good, especially for children.

Posted in Current Events, Thoughts and Musings, tagged adaptation, adoption, evolution, extinction, gay adoption, gay adoption in Florida, gays, lesbian, LGBT, pair-bond, raising children, same-sex couples on February 20, 2010| 5 Comments »

When gay people come out of the closet, they usually run into some variation of the “but that’s unnatural” argument. This is the apparently sensible claim that it doesn’t make sense to be gay. Isn’t sex for procreation? Why would two males or two females become romantically involved if they can’t have a child together?

It seems like a reasonable argument. You can point out that some sort of gay behavior occurs in every species in the animal kingdom – which is true – or that gay sex is simply fun – also true. But that only begs the question. Why? Why are there so many gay animals, and people, in the world when reproducing your own kind is the basis for a species’ success? Having fun doesn’t seem to explain this apparent contradiction.

The answer is that gay people help nature hedge its bets. A successful species typically keeps extra cards up its sleeve because the rules of the game can change without warning. Gay people represent some important extra cards. They are a natural, genetic variation that helps guarantee the successful raising of young.

Many species show wide genetic variation. Dogs, for example. You can breed a chihuahua that weighs 2 pounds. Or you can breed an Old English Mastiff that weighs 300 pounds.

Why should canine genetic material be so mutable? Because being tiny – or being huge – might come in handy. You never know.

The ultimate disaster for a species – extinction – happens when its members fail to adapt to an altered environment. That’s why you want to have as much flexibility as possible to respond and survive when something unexpected occurs.

It could be a meteor striking the Earth. Or a volcano erupting. Or a pandemic disease wiping out three-quarters of the population. The game can change – and a species has to change too – sometimes a lot – in challenging new circumstances.

Having gay members of your species could make the difference between survival and extinction. Gays are unique – and vitally important -because they do something no other members of that species will do.

I don’t mean have gay sex.

I mean raise other people’s children.

Gay animals are perfectly happy to pair-bond and mate with members of their own sex, so their sexual relations are non-procreative. They do not have children with their partner. That means they are available to raise another animal’s children.

Say a heterosexual zebra, or otter, or muskrat or human is killed and leaves behind a helpless child. Heterosexual animals, who can have children of their own, will probably refuse to raise this other animal’s child, or at best do so grudgingly. They have their own children, who are a higher priority because they will pass on their genetic material. But a gay member of the species will happily step in and raise that helpless child.

He has no reason not to. He is not caught up in the battle to mate and reproduce. His preoccupation is caring and nurturing within a relationship.

If a male animal loses a female partner and is left with children who need care, he might have trouble locating another female willing to raise these children. But a gay male would happily accept the job.

If a female animal loses her male partner and is left with young to raise, another male might reject the task of raising those children. But a gay female would, similarly, be happy to help out.

Gays play a role in increasing the success rates for child-rearing in all species. In the event of a large-scale disaster, resulting in many adult deaths, gays could fill an especially vital role in helping to raise the young. They would not compete for sexual partners. But they would help out with the kids.

It could make the difference to a species’ survival.

That’s what’s happening right now, with humans.

Many heterosexual human couples have children they are unable or unwilling to raise. These children are put up for adoption – but there are too many of them to be cared for solely by heterosexual volunteers, who usually prefer to raise their own children.

That’s why, throughout the world, gays are the unofficial backbone of the adoption system. Without them, many children would suffer terribly, never finding wiling, dedicated adoptive parents.

It is an open secret that in most states, the adoption system would collapse without the participation of gays and lesbians. In 2007 it was estimated that there are 270,000 children living with same-sex couples in the USA. Of these, one-quarter, or 65,000, have been adopted. Gays are a small minority, perhaps as few as 4% of the general population. But there is no question that gay people do a lot of adopting and provide loving homes for hundreds of thousands of children who desperately need them.

Unfortunately, in a few states, right-wing religious zealots have persuaded politicians to ban gay adoption. It is not clear whether this misguided attack on children and the rights of gay people is constitutional. A court battle is raging in Florida.

Meanwhile, these laws prevent gay people from playing a role nearly as ancient as life itself. That is a tragedy, which could result in a calamity.

It’s also unnatural.

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This is your brain. This is your brain on psychotherapy.

Posted in Thoughts and Musings, tagged brain, evolution, lizard, mammal, psychotherapy on January 27, 2010| 4 Comments »

How does psychotherapy actually work?

Good question. The answer is interesting and has to do with how your brain works.

The basic idea of psychotherapy is that you take emotional content from a primitive part of the brain and bring it to another more sophisticated, thinking part, where it can be examined and understood.

Here’s a quick primer on the design of your brain.

Due to quirks of evolutionary history, the human brain contains three distinct parts, which evolved separately.

In the center, there’s a small, rather rudimentary brain. It resembles the brain of a lizard.

Wrapped around that, a second brain evolved much later – the paleo-mammalian brain. It resembles the brain of a dachshund, or any other warm-blooded animal.

Sitting atop these two brains, there is the cortex. That’s the grey, wrinkly stuff that you probably think of when you think of a brain. It’s much larger than the other two brains, and is unique to humans, having evolved only very recently.

Like all higher animals, you have five basic emotions: anger, fear, caring, hurt and happiness. They exist entirely in the two more primitive parts of your brain – the lizard and dachshund parts.

Your thoughts – and your sense of awareness – exist only in the outer, sophisticated brain – the cortex.

There’s a reason for this. All animals feel some emotions, but only humans have higher consciousness. We alone think. (Actually, it could be argued that dolphins and some higher apes do too, but I’ll set that debate aside for now.)

Anger and fear reside in the innermost, lizard brain, because they reflect the primitive fight or flight instinct. Faced with a ferocious predator, a tiny lizard needed to reflexively know whether to get angry and fight, or get scared and flee for its life.

The other three emotions are located in the paleo-mammalian brain. That’s because they relate specifically to childcare instincts.

A lizard lays eggs – lots of eggs, and it doesn’t invest much time in caring for its young. But a mammal bears only a small number of live young, and its off-spring are helpless for a period after birth. So while a lizard might ignore its own large brood of young (or even dine upon a few of them), a mammal, with its small number of helpless off-spring, developed three important emotions related to childcare: caring, hurt and happiness.

These emotions, located in the paleo-mammalian brain, lead the parent to care for its young, love them, and find happiness in caring for them, or hurt if they leave before the parental bonds are detached.

That’s your emotions, explained. Now for psychotherapy.

Speech, and communication in general, including non-verbal communication like art and dance and music, are located in the cortex. Psychotherapy is talk therapy. A therapist’s goal is to get you to put your feelings into words. In neurobiological terms, the idea is to take emotional material from the two inner, primitive parts of the brain – the lizard and dachshund parts – and translate them into speech – forcing them through the neural passageways of the cortex.

In essence, the thinking you is forced to process material from the feeling you.

In Freudian terminology, the two inner brains are the “unconscious” (the superego and the Id) and the outer cortex is the “conscious self” (the ego). By funneling primitive brain activity into communication, therapy forces the unconscious into consciousness, integrating the self.

It’s a bit like an intellectual holding a conversation with a lizard and a dachshund, which is why the process isn’t always easy, and can take a while.

In any case, it’s better than living unconsciously – walking around thinking you know what’s going on while a lizard and a dachshund are secretly operating the controls.