On Human Experience

 

On Human Experiences

Am I not capable or broken? Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment has drifted over the years, and I’ve seen certain developments over the course of my career. It has moved from something fewer people thought about or identified with to sometimes seeming like everyone is disordered, or they fear they are or are certain someone close to them is disordered. Of course, in those 40 years of practice in mental health care, the development of the www, the internet, media and social media has contributed amazingly to the instant access to information and the spread of opinions. Some of that is good, and some is bad. There are several elements we usually need to move through to have some framework for understanding the effects, impacts of life experiences, our responses to those life experiences and potentially how one might go about moving toward healing and into flourishing or wholeness which is usually the clear goal for most of us. 

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” From Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.

In understanding and considering our brokenness, we must distinguish between the biologically disabled or limited and the experientially broken. Am I disordered or am I traumatized? Again, there has been significant development and learning over the course of these past several decades in the understanding and awareness of the impact of experience, primarily negative experience as a major player in leading to disruptive and non-helpful responses to the sometimes very understandable circumstances of suffering. One of the most significant developments in this understanding came from the ACE study, which tracked adverse childhood experiences across a large population over time. It found a strong, direct link between stressful or traumatic early life events and poor mental and physical health in adulthood. 

We only know dysfunction from its relationship to function. It fits the pattern of many measures of system or medical health where there is a healthy range of function on a continuum between the outliers — over function (hyperfunction) on one end and under function (hypofunction) on the other. Think blood pressure, for example. There are problems on both ends of the too-much and too-little range. Symptoms of high or low blood pressure can indicate other potential issues to watch for with your doctor's assistance.

So, it fits that we must have some understanding of relative normal or healthy function to be able to say something is then dysfunctional. Human cognition, emotion and behavior are measurable in our healthy development as adaptive and functional as we proceed in our pursuit of happiness, in flourishing or wellness. When is it healthy and normal to experience the range of thoughts, perhaps distractions or explanations or presumptions about what is happening? How about those pesky emotions, fear, anger, sadness, guilt or delight? Where is the cut-off for understandable grief and a depressive episode? Is it ok for you to be angry because you understand the reasons, but not me, because you don’t know where it is coming from when we sort through relationship dynamics? 

In general, when we experience or encounter a bad experience, we can experience disruption in thinking, feelings and behavior in response to the situation.

Stimulus => Emotional/physiological response => Subjective feeling => Behavior

Much of the time we can likely understand and validate the experience and its effects if we take the time. Something bad happens and we feel bad. That's good, in that it validates and verifies our active sensory system is online and reading the situation correctly. Bad = bad. Good = good. Hot = hot. Cold = cold. Etc. And not just from a physical-sensation point of view — most of us would also respond using a broadly shared moral framework. To be treated unfairly, or without kindness, or without consideration for our choice in the matter, generally creates a common recognition of the "badness" of the incident — assuming we've considered all the facts. 

Perceiving and identifying truth is imperative in forming an opinion or judgment on a particular situation. This could lead into the philosophical challenge of considering where morality comes from and why it is useful. A further step into that question could take us down that rabbit trail, so I'll suffice it to reflect — and accept — that Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas, a mid-13th-century friar, priest, theologian and philosopher) thinks moral law is neither simply "God says so" nor merely an evolutionary or social construct, but something rooted in the very nature of being, and therefore ultimately in God. 

I hope we can discuss these various questions and trails more completely over the course of several reflections — how differences in perception, categorization and behavioral response to common stimuli arise between us; how some of what we observe moves through what's been called by Daniel Kahneman, our "slow" system, generally associated with cognitive clarity, while our "fast" system moves us toward or away from something whether we're aware of the why or not. It may often be that “fast” system that is running some of those less than helpful responses or reactions. To say we are impacted by the experiences we have had is not too big a stretch at this point. 

Perhaps a simple yet truthful way to say this is that all of us use the past to explain the present — our experiences have value in the development of, and quick response to, the situations and circumstances we encounter. We’re not just old, we’re experienced! I guess Hemingway might have to acknowledge that in our surviving over time, we may indeed be the stronger.

Let us appreciate the sophistication and efficiency of many of our responses to the situations we encounter. Not all of them are equally functional, necessarily — but I will say they are good systems.