Love and Power Institute

Inside Out Act 2: Adolescence, an Uphill Climb. Blog #2

By Norman Brown, Ph.D. Once initiation to womanhood (perhaps via the unmentionable experience of menarche) sets the main plot in motion, the most dynamic new character appears: the bright orange, big wide toothy-mouthed Anxiety, always hyper, with pin-ball eyes and fireworks-mohawk infecting everygirl by making everything imperfect into a problem that can’t be solved. Anxiety’s purpose is to anticipate future social dangers and make sure anything bad will get worse. In fact, she spoils Riley’s encounters with an older girl gang while alienating her old friends and foils her attempts to join the varsity ice hockey team that’s above her abilities and worsens these social catastrophes by overreacting.  Though Anxiety’s purpose is to make a mess out of every unfamiliar scene, she quickly becomes the star of this new teenage period, the antagonist to Joy’s protagonist. With Anxiety’s help, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness get stronger and the plot takes a downward turn to enter the movie underworld’s perilous life tests. Anxiety also brings her own entourage of characters, all of them negative. First there’s Ennui who slumps over, a limp dark purple balloon oozing out her life-force with eyes barely open as slits. Ennui and Anxiety team up to promote not knowing how to act to please the older girls and not trust either parents or her old friends. Ennui isolates herself and lies in a hammock or couch in listless boredom, not finishing anything she starts and gazing back at the dwindling past. The twinkle in Joy’s Tinkerbelle sputters at the edge of giving herself up.  Along comes blue-green Envy smaller in stature than the rest. For she’s gazing with overflowing pupils at the larger-than-life statuesque figure of Valentina, admiring and wishing to be just like her—is she yearning but not trying? She seems entranced but  not able to act, contemptuous towards anyone inclined to look, but nobody does. She has nothing to offer but unhelpful criticism. But Embarrassment has a massively oversized body; he’s the shy, well-intentioned unhappy fat boy from everybody’s high school, unable to hide in his faded grey oversize hoodie. His whole pudgy face and bulbous nose blush rosy, and he tries to hide his eyes every time that something challenging happens but can’t keep from looking anyway. When he finally turns his hulking back on us, his oversized hoodie and slumping pants leave an inch-high slice of uncovered skin revealing his butt-crack. This closing surprise triggers our own embarrassing suppressed laughter, enlarging the silent embarrassment we all share to a crescendo as piercing as every adolescent girl might dread. Anxiety is the most dynamic adversary by far, pushing the action ever forward. She intensifies the tension between Riley and Valentina’s older hockey team and girl-gang. Later on Anxiety whips up a hurricane that knows no bounds and even invades the usually protected headquarters of her carrier’s brain. Taking over everywhere inside, she hurls and whirls all of the stable fixtures against the control tower’s inside walls until the central console—that is her grey matter–is wiped clean of any arms and legs and the whole operating system shuts down. Joy then gathers her bedraggled band together and sets out on some confusing journeys in search of ways to restore direction and sanity in herself. In one particularly psychological adventure, Joy and emotions reach the back of her mind and manage to clamber up the loose mountain of mostly negative emotional memory-bulbs at the top. Joy’s gang is stuck there with a self-conscious and self-hating image of herself until an unspecified construction-guy aims a cannon and blows the mountain up so they can float back to some new normalcy. Joy eventually manages to restructure her emotions with some respect for each of them, whether they’re experienced as negative or positive. From a disembodied voice with godlike authority, Joy and the theater audience hear the words, “Don’t let your emotions tell you who you are.” Now if I were an ordinary college-educated man, I’d think that sounds like a metaphor for the 18th century Enlightenment or a lightning bolt from a graphic novel. I’d also wonder who taught Joy how to rearrange and regulate the other emotions and how she developed the skills and wisdom to act adroitly and firmly to remake her personality so quickly. I’d suspect there was a mighty wise therapist on her shoulder or a new AI deity fumbling with the machinery behind the scenery.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              If I was an ordinary man-in-the-street, I’d think the best way to get rid of that nasty pile of memory-bulbs is to get an AR-15 and blast away at everyone around me. I’d know all women are insecure, hit bottom almost every week and act emotionally crazed for a bit of the days at their “time of the month.” They’re also dreamy, lazy, catty and worried they’re ugly, no matter how good they look. 

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What Inside Out 2 shows us about Emotions. Blog #1

by Norman Brown Ph.D. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 opened in mid-June is now the highest grossing cartoon ever made, making 1.46 billion in its first six weeks. It’s unusual, like the first Inside Out, in that it doesn’t thrive on either violence or romance. Its tomboy heroine Riley plays on a girls’ ice hockey team in Middle School and seems to be destined for a glorious future in high school hockey until the emotional storms of puberty wreck the control panel somewhere inside her body, probably in her brain. This disastrous demolition sets off an unexpected emotional avalanche affecting all of her relationships with others. All of these are girlfriends her age or girl-gang members one or two years older, except for her parents. Of the latter, her father seems to be a goofy cheerleader, and her mother is a colorless prop who seems to be a backstage function.  Since the movie shows the nature of pre-teen and pubescent girls’ emotions, I won’t follow the plot line but explore the emotions instead, as symbolized by the characteristics and behavior of the cartoon figures. First, and most closely identified with our hero is the willowy yellow-glowing and multicolored figure of Joy, with a normal flesh-colored face on a head taller than the others that signals that she’s the leader over everyone. She usually has a buoyant, enthusiastic open-mouthed cheery smile, despite acting almost always as the decision-maker for the four other emotions in her entourage. As a many-generation offspring of the Disney imagination industry, Joy shares genetics with Tinkerbell, since she’s often radiant and apparently motivated by the pursuit of happiness for everyone. Thus it’s unsubtly shown that joyousness is the desirable path to social success, at least among women. Oddly enough, this big-smile joyousness appears now to be the winning strategy of Kamala Harris’s successful presidential campaign. Is that really natural, or just what the culture expects of women? The others always follow Joy, while occasionally expressing disagreement toward the matter at hand. First, there is Sadness, with a round pale-shadowy blue fragile-hearted face, who lets out weak sighs when the plot gets rough. She sometimes airs some doubts about what Joy wants, but always goes along with her. So Sadness also secretly symbolizes weakness, even helplessness, implying thereby that a sad female will also be weak. If I’m a man-in-the-streets reacting intuitively to this character, doesn’t that mean sadness is a weak feeling, so real men don’t get sad?     By contrast, Anger is a sputtering, all red stocky body, with a double-hump head and bulb-eyes like a Disney frog and angry intense-eyebrows and flaming spiky-hair, a hopping frustrated immature boy-bully, but usually impotently fuming. He never gets anything done. What does the little fuming frog suggest as a symbol? A boy having a temper tantrum because he’s too small to be effective and nobody ever pays attention to him. So in my every-man eyes anger never does anybody any good, and it’s certainly gets juvenile detention at any school. Fear’s pale purple body has an uncertain-gender chimney-head freaking out and wildly blowing smoke. S/he’s blabbering incoherently, in a frenzy to escape from whatever’s happening but hanging on to the others for dear life. At least Anger is ready enough to give and take a punch or two, but Fear is so unpleasant that her ungendered whole scene is just extremely shameful, and no normal human, male or female, would be caught dead feeling it unless in a Disney horror movie and already dead.  In a surprising contrast, Disgust is a slinky overdressed grass-green slippery snob in high-heels with constant negative reactions, saying “ee-uw” down her nose, recoiling from everything around and also without any impact. At least she can show us how to react to the others: with superior dismissal. So, I’d wonder, are all of these follower-feelings worthless without Joy at their head? If Riley’s the guide for how a budding adolescent girl would feel, it’s meeting every moment with an insistent cheery smile that conceals and stores her timid sadness, boiling rage, jibbering panic and quietly superior rejection. And as an everyman or boy in the streets, how should I react? Don’t believe that smiley-face. Play the same game she does, but expect volcanic drama if she’s triggered. Don’t worry, though. You can reassure and ignore her sadness, placate rage (and use flowers if she’s a grownup), reassure (and condescend to) her fearfulness and just stonewall her disgust. And now stay tuned for the second act.

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Climate Action – Are we planning for an Economic and Environmental Collapse?

India’s Election Oversights: The Looming Threat of Climate Change India has just concluded a massive and intense election exercise to decide the future of the nation. However, there was almost no focus on plans and actions for combating the emerging threats of global warming and climate change, which pose prime existential risks to life and property, with looming economic losses for the nation. Climate change impacts such as extreme heat, rapid glacial melting, and unexpected devastating floods are becoming more frequent and severe, leading to increasing economic losses worldwide. Yet, the main cause of excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—over 50 gigatons per year—remains unmitigated and is, in fact, still increasing unabated. The random exploitation of Earth’s resources also continues to rise, destroying the rich biodiversity that has allowed human civilizations to evolve and prosper. The UN-based IPCC has warned humanity that whatever damage control can be achieved with urgent global climate actions before 2030 will determine the future of our next generations—our children and grandchildren. The problem is indeed global in dimension, but the solutions largely lie in regional or local actions that must combine coherently to create global-level solutions. However, even at regional levels, very little is happening, aside from the shift to renewable energy sources like solar, wind, or bioenergy, which are now cheaper than fossil-fuel-based polluting energy. Although humanity has very little time to recover and restore the Earth’s carbon balance, there has been no concrete action taken yet for serious and rapid decarbonization. It is well known that while visible atmospheric particulate pollution kills over 7 million people every year, the invisible GHG emissions will soon cause much wider death and destruction once we cross certain global atmospheric tipping points. The absence of action by leadership and society amounts to planning for disaster. One emerging solution is to make polluters pay at the individual level to reduce per-capita GHG emissions. This could involve heavily taxing communities where per-capita GHG emissions are above the global average. Funds collected under UN oversight could then be directed to low per-capita emission-poor countries to enhance their capacity-building efforts for climate resilience and adaptation activities. All these are measurable parameters and can be implemented transparently as a first step towards establishing climate justice. By Prof. Amitav Mallik,Founder Member and Trustee, PIC Source: PIC

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Water Over Bridge: Dream Interpretation

Dreamer: I am in late middle age, and born as the middle of 5 children. All of my life I had a dream that I am on one side of a bridge but water is fast flooding over it. My family is on the other side and I can’t get over to them. Just this past year I have stopped having the nightmare. Interpreter: It would help if you could point out particular times when you had that nightmare and connect them to what was happening in your life. It could also help if you could suggest a few things about your life that have changed in the last year. Dreamer: I have had the dream on a regular basis since I was very young. I can’t say anything in particular brought it on or stopped it. Interpreter: Okay. I’ll tell you what the symbolism of your dream might mean: If there are no details about the bridge, I’d guess that the bridge represents an unconscious separation between you and the rest of your family, with the ground of your existence or your sources of meaning and value different from those of your family. The water flowing over, it represents the emotional possibility of being swept away if you try to cross over to rejoin your family. It’s a well-known observation of middle children that some of them don’t feel like they have a particular niche or meaningful belonging to their family. In your case you might have continued yearning for easier closeness until last year, and you might have yearned for this ever since you were a child. Middle children are often better at getting along with others, especially when they don’t feel included among their siblings in their family of origin in the same way most of the others seem to be. These others typically include first borns, last-borns, oldest girl and oldest boy, and any child in any birth order whose role is well-known—such as smart one, funny one, cute/pretty one etc.  Interpreter Question: Does some of this normal unconscious emotional meaning fit for you?  Interpreter: If so, you might instinctively expect that trying to be re-welcomed into your family of origin would set off a tremendous flood of emotional distress in you, which might be more than you could cope with. Therefore you might actually never take the risk of trying to get the respect, meaning and signs of  love you want from the others in your family who all seem to have an easier time fitting in with the family than you do. Interpreter Conclusion: Dreams come to deliver a higher wisdom perspective on your life. So reviewing your thoughts and feelings about yourself vis-a-vis the others in your family might open up new possibilities for acting differently towards the siblings and parents that you may have felt more estranged from than you’ve realized. It might also suggest that you could begin to build individual bridges to one sibling at a time, instead of imagining that your whole family is different from you and you’re the only one that doesn’t fit in as well as the others. A similar sense of alienation might be present for some of the other siblings in your family, especially if there were certain ways of thinking, feeling and acting that seemed to be favored by the dominant people and other ways were considered outliers. Those siblings with “outlier attitudes” would be the first ones who could be delighted to receive an invitation to develop an individual relationship with you. That flooding water on the bridge between you and the other family members symbolizes a psychoactive event such as a flood of emotions that could begin to occur when you start to make a more stable connection with any of your family members. For the sense of safety and belonging, and its opposite, the alienation and longing for communal life, exist in many families to some degree. But you might be the one in your family who’s been most aware of it. Interpreter Question: What do you think about this perspective? Dreamer: Thank you. Your answer very much makes sense!

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Lactating But Single: Dream Interpretation

Lactating but single: dream interpretation Dreamer: I had a dream that I was secretly expressing milk from my breast because my breast just started lactating. They were squirting milk! I’m single, not married and don’t have a baby… What does this mean???? Interpreter: The purpose of mother’s milk is to keep a baby alive and growing. A baby represents either a new creative project in your life or a new aspect or branch or part of yourself that’s just beginning to appear in your world & your self-awareness.  Yet in this dream the baby is not present, but your milk to feed it is. So either in your inner or outer environment, you have generated the conditions to birth and grow a new creative project, or a new creative extension of yourself—and when you’re single, it’s likely that “creativity” means both creative productivity and a new dimension or growth for yourself.  So the possible guidance contained in this dream is that your personality development can make a dramatic (for you) growth spurt if you take the risk of committing yourself to whatever new creative, entrepreneurial, relationship, or self-development possibility you may be aware of. Perhaps you aren’t aware of anything, which could be the significance of the fact that—unusually for this type of dream—there’s no baby of any kind (not even a kitten) in the dream. Interpreter Conclusion: If you’re unaware of new growth options, then you could incubate another dream to point the way by spending 10-15 minutes in meditative self-reflection each night before drifting off to sleep. Think about possible creative projects, or career, relationship and self-development possibilities that might get emotional juices flowing– for your life-milk needs a new aspect of personal growth to feed!

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Every Man I’m Attracted To Dies

Every Man I’m Attracted To Dies Every Man I’m attracted to dies in my dreams. Questioner: I’ve been having dreams about any man I’m very interested in dying right in front of me. It happens every time I realize how much I like someone and it’s weirding me out. It’s always very traumatic and I watch them die and it’s affecting my waking life. They’re always murdered in a shocking way from an outside force I don’t know. I never see who does it. I’m always hyper fixed on them. Dr. Sleeveheart: The first thought that pops up for me from my years of studying romantic relationships for the textbook I published in 2000 is that women who lost their fathers through death are likely to fear the death of any man they ever love. For the first man they completely trusted and naturally loved DID die. Did this happen to you? If it did not happen, then we’ll look further to find out if something else happened in your earlier life that might also translate into unconscious imagery of the man you love dying in front of you. In addition, there was a very good interview research project conducted over 40 years ago that found significant differences in attitudes toward love between college age women whose fathers had died and those whose fathers had left them through divorce, and both of these in comparison to those whose fathers were still married to their mothers. And furthermore my now deceased wife’s father died suddenly at work when she was 11 and my present fiancee’s father died at the breakfast table in front of her when she was 11. But it’s still possible that something different happened in your life history, so what happened in your relationship with your father that might be out of the ordinary? Questioner responds: My father is a drug addict who was in and out of prison throughout my life. He left us and divorced my mother when I was 11 and has been in and out of my life since then. I don’t currently have a relationship with him or communicate with him regularly. I do resent him for choosing drugs above his family. Dr. Sleeveheart: I didn’t see the part about the man being murdered by an outside force before I wrote my response. The outside force that’s murdering your father is the drugs he takes. You keep getting retraumatized when he comes into your life and then goes again, with NO chance on your part to get him to prefer your relationship to the drugs he takes. So this suggests to me that the most self-preserving road for you to take with every man you are attracted to would be to suspect yourself of being attracted to men who are attracted to the soul-curdling effects of powerful drugs, including also alcohol. So you would help yourself by making sure you’ve talked with the man enough to find out if he does any drugs or alcohol or has a history of doing them that suggests he could still be attracted to them. And don’t form your love relationships online, because it’s far too easy to cloak one’s lifestyle in online conversation. Do you have any more questions? Questioner: The man I am involved with does have a history of drug abuse and currently drinks more than normal. That makes a lot of sense to me. Dr.Sleeveheart: Your experience actually fits both types of daughters in the interview research who had lost their fathers. For those whose fathers divorced and visited occasionally had had exciting, somewhat eroticized relations with their fathers, and those whose fathers had died expected any man they would love to traumatically die. If you’re worried about who might be murdering each man you begin to love, it’s your unconscious mind, because that part of you knows that every man you love will traumatize your heart sooner or later. But believe it or not, there are many lovable men who aren’t attracted to drugs, though they might not be similar enough to your father’s personality to attract you beyond your conscious understanding. I’d guess you’re still fairly young (early 30s or less), so it’s not too late for you to take more steps to change your patterns. And of course you’re going to give your present relationship everything you’ve got unless and until the curdling of his soul gets too smelly for your intuition. We’re not helpless, and we can learn from both conscious and unconscious minds.

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Reflections on the Movie “Inside Out 2”

Reflections on the Movie “Inside Out 2” It is actually quite wonderful that Disney’s Pixar has produced not one but two movies about the emotions given that there has been remarkable little study of emotions in the psychological literature and remarkable little awareness of emotions in our daily life, especially for men.  In our culture men are discouraged from feeling fear, surprise, sadness, joy, and especially shame/embarrassment and women are discouraged from feeling anger.   In the animated film “Inside Out 2” the main emotion that takes the lead is Joy.  The other emotions, which are fear, sadness, anger,  and disgust portrayed in “inside Out 1, here joined with anxiety, embarrassment, envy and ennui now that our central character, Riley, has entered  puberty.  All of these emotions play a role, especially anxiety, in the themes of the movie.  But one wonders if Riley were a boy, would he have as large a palate of emotions does the female Riley? Let’s imagine Riley as a male, also named Riley.  What would a typical adolescent (American) boy be like emotionally?  First, what emotion would be the lead emotion, leading all of the others?  Would it be joy?  Unlikely.  More likely it would be a more serious emotion, one with intent, perhaps interest or curiosity.  And because American culture discourages males from feeling anything that appears “weak,” the emotional palate for the male Riley would be limited.  Not a good emotional range for the main character in a movie that wants to use as many as five primary emotions (joy, sadness, fear, disgust , and anger, with the later additions of envy, ennui, embarrassment (shame) and anxiety).  Maybe only two or three of all those emotions are easily accessible to a typical adolescent boy.           Indeed, it is because she is a girl that the emotion of Joy can be the ruling emotion in the film, since women are strongly encouraged to manifest happiness/joy.  I might even go so far as to say that while boys are expected to be serious, girls are expected to be happy.  They are expected to be good at smiling…all the time.  The result of this imperative is that girls, most especially when in public, smile a lot more than they would if they were expressing their honest emotions.  If they aren’t looking happy when in public someone often will ask them if there is a problem.  As though being serious, when female, suggests she is experiencing a problem, rather than not feeling like smiling. I know something about this since I was a very serious adolescent while being female.  My home life was chaotic and unsupportive as well as impoverished and I was bright and wanted to go to college.  I knew the only way I could was with scholarships to pay the way.  However, despite my good grades, I was only rewarded a small scholarship to attend the University of California, my college of choice.  When I asked my high school counselor why I didn’t receive more financial aid, she said, “You don’t smile enough.  We don’t want someone who looks unhappy to represent our high school.” I recognized even then the discrimination in her words.  I knew the boy who had received full scholarships and he was someone who was serious all the time.  He, like me, rarely smiled. So what then is the message of the film?  Well, certainly the film was breaking new ground in that it placed emotions in the center of the action, much like real life, and showed their influence.  But it followed the biases of the culture in depicting Riley, a girl, as at the whim of her emotions, and someone whose main emotion is, or should be, joy.  In depicting joy as the leader of the girl’s emotional life, the film reinforces one of our culture’s messages to women:  If you aren’t happy then there must be something wrong with you. So smile!!

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What is Emotional Versatility Training?

What is Emotional Versatility Training? The scientific study of emotions began with Charles Darwin, who first taught that all higher mammals are driven by emotions that foster survival, reproduction and societal success. That means that all emotions help us succeed in our environment, even though over half of them feel more bad than good. In the twenty-first century, however, the ways we act on our emotions have made us a threat to our environment and ourselves. Our high intelligence has made us so powerful that we’re degrading our land, waters and air and spoiling our habitats, and our capacity for love has led us to vastly overpopulate the earth and drive many other animal species towards extinction. We must stimulate our own evolution or we may go extinct ourselves. Shortly after Darwin embedded humans in the animal world, Freud told us that much of what drives us is unconscious, and 60 years later Silvan Tomkins told us that some of the most important unconscious drivers are our emotions. In the last 30 years most scientific research has focused on investigating the brain, while some in the therapeutic community are trying to change how we operate with our emotions now. At the Love and Power Institute we are introducing people to the nine inborn emotions and studying how they work, separately and together, as well as with action and thinking, so that we can become more conscious of what drives us—besides hunger, thirst and sex and much more often and intricately. These emotions include interest-excitement, joy, surprise, distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust and contempt. All of them support the survival and success of human groups, since we’re not just individuals but a herd species.  Each emotion has unique beneficial and challenging aspects, so understanding them helps us navigate the emotional landscape we share with others. Men and women normally approach emotions differently and are outspoken in some and hidden and shy or unconscious of others. Exploring this honestly can improve our skills in mixed groups. Though some emotions feel good, like interest, joy, contempt and sometimes anger, and others feel uncomfortable, like distress, fear, shame and disgust, surprise just makes the emotion following it stronger. But studying emotions actually feels pretty good, since it is interesting, that revises how any other emotion feels. There are many fascinating pair-relations between emotions, such as interest and shame. For when we’re interested enough in a person to call or text them on our cell phone and all we get is an answering device or no response at all, we may start second-guessing what might be happening. We may stay uncomfortable until either they intervene to reassure us or we can switch our attention to something else. Hurt feelings also warn us that a damaged personal connection needs repair. Another powerful pair of emotions is joy and distress. When someone we like or love is gone for longer than we want, separation distress can, “make the heart grow fonder.” So when we get together again we’re “overjoyed,” and the person we have missed becomes more valuable to us. The balance between these opposite feelings regularly makes relationships more durable. Both distress (as anxiety and sadness) and shame (as shyness, embarrassment, hurt and guilt) are regularly handled defensively by withdrawing, by blaming oneself or others, and by immersing oneself in work, addictions, or anything that gives us joy or excitement. These substitutes can be quite valuable as regular habits, but sometimes we need to examine our own patterns to find the suffering behind them.   This is just a sample of the breadth and depth of emotional versatility we gain in this class. And much of the learning is experiential, through many methods, such as pair sharing, group dramatizing and two-chair work. With the trust that develops from these encounters participants can explore and resolve emotional problems in their own lives. They can work on damaged relationships through roleplaying and learn the courage and language to restore them. Finally, outdoor walks to admire and connect with a particular plant, animal, insect or natural feature combined with writing, sketching or meditation will help us expand our love for nature, as we have enhanced our emotional fluency in the human sphere.

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