“Yes, that’s right.”
“You know,” she adds, “I’ve noticed that they often purposely stop people from shaking when we get them to the hospital. Sometimes they strap them down tight or give them a shot of Valium. Maybe that’s not so good?”
“No, it’s not,” the teacher in me confirms. “It may give them temporary relief, but it just keeps them frozen and stuck.”
She tells me that she recently took a course in “trauma first-aid” called Critical Incident Debriefing. “They tried it with us at the hospital. We had to talk about how we felt after an accident. But talking made me and the other paramedics feel worse. I couldn’t sleep after we did it—but you weren’t talking about what happened. You were, it seemed to me, just shaking. Is that what brought your heart rate and blood pressure down?”
“Yes,” I told her and added that it was also the small protective spontaneous movements my arms were making.
“I’ll bet,” she mused, “that if the shaking that often occurs after surgery were allowed rather than suppressed, recovery would be quicker and maybe even postoperative pain would be reduced.”
“That’s right,” I say, smiling in agreement. (39. I am relieved at the restoration of my intellectual faculty and my “reserve capacity” when the going got rough.)
And I leave you, dear reader, once again with the wise counsel of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes:
When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences.
—I Ching, Hexagram #51 (circa 2000 BC)
PART III
Instinct in the Age of Reason
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
—Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
We may be special animals, we may be particular animals with very special characteristics, but we’re animals nonetheless.
—Massimo Pigliucci
CHAPTER 10
We’re Just a Bunch of Animals
My approach to healing trauma rests broadly on the premise that people are primarily instinctual in nature—that we are, at our very core, human animals. It is this relationship to our animal nature that both makes us susceptible to trauma and, at the same time, promotes a robust capacity to rebound in the aftermath of threat, safely returning us to equilibrium. More generally, I believe that to truly understand our body/mind, therapists must first learn about the animal body/mind because of the manner in which our nervous systems have evolved in an ever-changing and challenging environment.
Who are we? Where do we come from? How did we get here? These are the focal questions posed by theologians and biologists, by anarchists and zoologists, and by UFOlogists and psychologists. Each of these specialists postulates theories with diverse viewpoints of what stuff we are made of and who we really are. They all look at our humanity through very different lenses. But they’re not necessarily overtly antagonistic. While all religions are organized around creation myths, there isn’t, for example, a passionate rift between the big bang theory and the idea of biblical creation. Certainly, we do not hear of an active dissent and insistence calling loudly for the teaching of religious doctrine in place of physics and cosmography in our schools and universities. However, there is an almost violent schism lurking in our cultural zeitgeist. Let’s face it: the fight against evolution by the proponents of “creationism” and “intelligent design” is not really about the professed gaps in the fossil records; rather, it’s about whether or not we are basically animals.
Charles Darwin, in the publication of The Descent of Man, helped to locate our anatomical and physiological place among the animal kingdom. By doing this he become, today, an even more feared incarnation of what Kinsey represented more than half a century ago in his reports to puritan America. A throwback to the Scopes trial, the visceral fight against Darwinism by the American “religious right,” is about the deeply rooted negation and fear of our animal nature. Such a disavowal reflects a fundamental disconnect between “higher man” (reason and morality) and “lower (sexual) animals.” This denial of the instinctual life is also shared by strange bedfellows, many modern behavioral scientists.
The rejection of our animal nature is understandable as we have become (overly) socialized. This denial and its dehumanizing consequence, however, are summarized by the physician Max Plowman in his Introduction to the Study of Blake:
In all cultivation, native instinct is the most difficult force to remember and take into account. Just because our civilization is old, our distance from the primal centers is as the distance of twigs upon an oak from the farthest contributory roots. We have become so cultivated that we do not know we have drains until they smell. We have become so confident in the mechanical use of intelligence that we take for granted the functioning of our instincts, even to the point of thinking it immaterial whether they can find true and natural expression or not. In time the instincts rebel against our want of care for them … then there is consternation.
It seems that as we distance ourselves farther and farther from our instinctual roots, we have grown to be a species hell-bent on becoming better and better at making life worse and worse. We have been quite “successful” in distancing ourselves from our vital core. Instinct’s role in guiding and informing that which makes us both animal and, in the finest way, most human is illustrated by the following vignette.
A nature photographer stood by in abject horror as he watched a wild elephant kicking, again and again, the lifeless body of its stillborn calf. As he continued observing and photographing this gruesome scene for three hours, something truly unexpected happened. The infant stirred. Remarkably, the mother had resuscitated the calf, bringing him back to life by stimulating his heart. It was instinct and instinct alone that accomplished this miraculous task; the mind would have been quite useless.
Swan Lake
Even in “lower” species, we are taken by the apparent intelligence of instincts in guiding complex behaviors we associate with mammals. Sitting by the edge of the emerald Vierwaldstättersee (the clear, glacial Lake Lucerne in Switzerland), the ducks and swans “proudly” parade their young chicks past the table where I am seated eating breakfast. A slight abrupt approach on my part toward the female would evoke frightening, hissing, aggressive reactions—unexpected for these otherwise staid and regal birds. As they drift peacefully by, I carefully toss out some small pieces of bread. It is curious to observe how the adults stand back, carefully monitoring their chicks while allowing them to peck and feast. Only after they have filled their fluffy bellies do the adults take some morsels for themselves. So it seems they not only ferociously protect their young from outside harm but with patient restraint show an uncharacteristic deference, protecting them from their own gluttony. When they are not parents, these gracious lily-white swans show their true colors as nasty aggressive beasts, jousting with one another for any crumbs thrown their way.
In mammalian development the instincts for protection and care were greatly extended and elaborated, flourishing with a wide range of nurturing behaviors. Then, in the evolution of primates and Homo sapiens, care of the young made a monumental jump; this involved paradigm shifts such as diverse altruistic and mutually supportive social behaviors. Then bonding, through direct physical touch and eye contact, promoted focus on one potential mating partner at a time. And that procreative connection between male and female—the one above all others—was cemented by the orgasm’s commanding neurochemical surge.* We find ourselves, consequently, rising to the perennial saga of mustering the courage to love that which time will claim for its own; love, sexuality and loss were now forever and intrinsically entwined, becoming the broad business of the world’s poetry, art, music and prose.
We humans do not hesitate to speak of the almost superhuman power of unconditional parental love; otherwise how could we explain the profound feelings and actions we take toward our newborns, wit
h their slimy, wrinkled-prune bodies that know little else but to defecate, urinate and wail in ear-piercing shrieks of frantic discomfort? We gaze at them, listen, coo and smell; we hold and rock them; we become hopelessly and ridiculously smitten in love. And this, as any parent knows, is only just the beginning of trial by fire and infinite patience. Evolution has given us the most compelling of all feelings to direct and organize the critical acts of care and nurturance. The Darwinian emotions and behaviors of “love” have evolved, presumably, for the protection and care of the babies in a species bearing one offspring and compressing an eighteen-month gestation (arguably because of its large head) into nine. For these underdeveloped creatures to survive, special, extended, and therefore highly motivated caregiving behaviors were required. Such an enduring task demanded nothing short of love, perhaps the same emotion that drives soldiers in the heat of battle to rescue fallen comrades, pulling them to safety even at the supreme risk to their own lives. And love, in the final analysis, may be our collective antidote—the salvation for a species with such a penchant for senseless killing and carnage. Love is the glue that holds family, tribes, and—perhaps in times of need—even societies together. It is also the potion that binds the human animal to the divine through the highest religious and spiritual feelings of oneness and connection. Was I, at the lake’s edge, witnessing an early precursor to that love supreme in the primitive instinctual programs that so nonchalantly inhibited the adult birds from exhibiting their normal voracious competitive appetites so that their young could fill their bellies first?
An Open Window
Science is our new religion and its holy water is disinfectant.
—George Bernard Shaw
In spite of persistent rejection of our animal nature, there was a vital and rich window of time during the twentieth century when six Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded on the subject of instincts.† Darwin, a century and a half ago, emphasized just how nuanced and intelligent instincts are. In Notebook M (1838) Darwin mused, “The origin of man is now proved. He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” In this regard it was recently demonstrated that a mere one or two percentage points differentiates the human and chimpanzee genomes (with not much more distinguishing humans from other mammals). Indeed chimps can outperform college sophomores in a fairly sophisticated math exercise, and yet psychology, purportedly a natural science, still seems to favor overlooking the reality that we are, in the last analysis, animals.
Even our sense of wonder may be shared by our nearest cousins, the apes. Jane Goodall, a leading primatologist, has suggested the existence of primal spiritual feelings in the chimps she had carefully studied over many years. Here she describes the behaviors of a troupe visiting an especially beautiful place with a waterfall and river:
For me, it is a magical place, and a spiritual one. And sometimes, as they approach, the chimpanzees display in slow, rhythmic motion along the river bed. They pick up and throw great rocks and branches. They leap to seize the hanging vines, and swing out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind until it seems the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. For ten minutes or more they may perform this magnificent “dance.” Why? Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of the water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control?108
Ironically, despite the creationists’ rejection of their animal roots, religious awe may be yet another confirmation of the Darwinian continuity of the species and of our profound instinctual heritage.
To many reasonable scientists, the attribution of “religious awe” to nonhuman primates would seem a stretch at best. At the very worst, it could be seen as an extreme case of anthropomorphism gone amok. However, there is a solid, empirically based tradition of studying the behaviors and emotions in chimpanzees as evolutionary antecedents to human morality. Beginning with Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s seminal work, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns,109 and recently culminating in Frans de Waal’s beautifully written Our Inner Ape,110 a compelling case is made for certain social behaviors of monkeys and apes as precursors for various human moral behaviors, including highly refined deportment such as peacemaking. These forerunners include reciprocity of grooming, maintenance of social ranking and violence attenuation. Easy to appreciate are clear examples such as an adult chimp helping a juvenile climb a tree or zoo-confined chimps (who are known to be unable to swim) jumping into the moat in a futile attempt to rescue a drowning chimp. Such altruistic behaviors conjure images of fireman entering buildings engulfed in flames to rescue trapped families or soldiers running directly into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade.
De Waal’s views are based on many decades of observing aggression in primate societies. He noticed that after fights between two chimps, other chimpanzees would appear to console the loser—a behavior requiring both the capacity for empathy and a significant level of self-awareness. De Waal also describes female chimpanzees poignantly removing stones from the hands of males readying to fight so as to head off the brawl or at least to prevent them from inflicting mortal harm. Such “reconciliation” efforts may preserve group solidarity, thus diminishing vulnerability from outside attackers.
Human morality organizes around questions of right, wrong and justice. According to de Waal and others,111 it originates with concern for others and in understanding and respecting social rules. This is seen in a multitude of mammalian groups. The orchestration of such premoral behaviors requires a highly sophisticated level of emotional and social functioning. Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University, has extended these notions and regards the brain as having genetically shaped mechanisms whose function is the acquisition of moral rules based in complex feeling states.112
In the face of such robust observations, the social sciences often appear to manifest their distaste for the human-as-animal supposition, most notably by sanitizing their terminology around the concepts of instinctual behavior. In fact, the word instinct is rarely found in modern psychological literature. Rather it is purged and replaced with terms such as drives, motivations and needs. While instincts are still routinely drawn upon to explain animal behaviors, we have somehow lost sight of how many human behavior patterns (though modifiable) are primal, automatic, universal and predictable. For example, as the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground, instinctually driven people ran until their feet were bleeding. They ran for their lives like their ancestors who were chased by the predatory cats on the ancient Serengeti. They then regrouped, seeking the safety of their dens and communities, as they walked in an orderly fashion, over bridges leading to each of the five boroughs.
When we collapse in grief at the death of a loved one, we share this innate response to loss with the other highly developed mammals. Jane Goodall’s description of the matriarch Flo’s death and the subsequent self-starvation of her young male offspring in the tree above her corpse is one such example.‡ Yet another comparable instance of a grief response comes to mind with the listless pets we frequently return to after what seemed to us a short weekend away from home. Road rage and sexual fixations are disturbing manifestations of other instincts—in these cases, instincts gone awry. Grief, anger, fear, disgust, lust, mating, nurturing of young and even love (as well as all the action patterns that go with them) are universals among humans. All bear a remarkable resemblance to similar behaviors in mammals.
Charles Darwin, more than any other human being, clarified the essential connections between the human and other animal species. Aside from discovering the evolution of form and function, he further recognized the similarities of movements, action patterns, emotions and facial expressions shared by mankind and anim
als. Darwin’s masterworks addressed the continuity of emotional expressions among mammalian species. He was struck not only by the similarities in physiological and anatomical structures, but also by inborn, instinctive behaviors and emotions across species. In The Descent of Man Darwin writes,
Man and the higher animals … have … instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuition, sensation, passions, affections and emotions, even the more complex ones such as jealously, suspicion, emulation, gratitude and magnanimity; they practice deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule, and even have a sense of humor; they feel wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason … though in very different degrees.113
The omnipresence of instincts dazzles us in mating rituals such as the stunning display of feathers by the male peacock. This provocative announcement is as successful in attracting mates as it is beautiful. These two outcomes are, arguably, one and the same. Most mating rituals begin with an initial phase of “flirting,” followed by a sequence of strutting. This strutting demonstrates not only the male’s physical prowess, but also something less tangible. For example, in certain bird species it is the male’s unique and creative use of notes, rhythm and phrasing that the female finds attractive.§ On the other hand, the defense of territories also can involve combat and killing. In fact, 70% of male monkeys in a monkey troupe never get to mate, and they die in isolation.114 Evolution is about life or death; if love fits in there, so much the better (for us).
The combination of raw instinct and artful shaping is also found in human mating rituals. Clearly, however, one must beware of what has been called “zoomorphism”—the uncritical extension of conclusions drawn from animal behavior to humans. Having said this, anyone who has seen a well-executed rendering of a dance such as the tango or samba has witnessed an exquisitely instinct-rooted mating ritual. Seen simply as formalized movements, devoid of their primal sexual rooting, the steps lose their vitality and credibility. Equally important are the unexpected and creative variations as well as the partner’s response to those surprises that make the dance simultaneously instinctual and artistic. I once watched the mating dance of two scorpions, and had to laugh at just how it resembled (including the gift of a rose—in the form of a twig) the tango in its basic structure. Imagine seeing, in a split screen, a couple passionately engaged in a tango, along with two scorpions coupled in the fervor of their mating dance. One would be struck both by the unexpected, almost bizarre, similarity as well as by the difference in the sense of nuance and variation. Let us not forget the millions of lovers the world over who, at this very moment, are gazing into each other’s eyes. With their enchantment, originality, creativity and perfection ignited, they are engaging the instinctual stepping-stones for an entire life together. Unfortunately, when this dance goes awry, there are also the instincts that drive the jealous rage of brokenhearted lovers.
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