WHERE IS MY AUTHENTICITY GONE? Pt. 4

What the science of social pain is beginning to reveal is the dark error at the heart of individualism.

In my extensive years living abroad the interplay between early social conditioning and our capacity to learn new behaviour and adapt to new environments have become somewhat more clear. Seven years in the exotically different culture of Japan,  for instance, have showed me that while it is possible to develop novel behaviors and understandings that seem radically different, or even unimaginable in our own culture, these behaviors are at best always competing with all our early socially conditioned behaviors.

In Japan, like in all the many cultures I have lived with, violent people are pushed underground, unproductive members are kept on the edge of social acceptance by wearing badges of guilt and shame, and rebellious non-conformist characters are given less opportunities for growth than more loyal and subservient ones. These are universal experiences of all human tribes, and so given enough time, all out-of-character behaviors are eventually tamed by these powerful universal demands, reminding us that our survival will always depend more highly on group approval and inclusion, than our own ideas of ourselves, no matter how ‘right’.

In the last decade, thanks principally to an impromptu experience professor Kip Williams had one afternoon, scientists have begun to properly understand why conformism wins over originality. Known as social pain, what’s really behind our preferences for conservative and unconscious choices of behavior, rather than reflexive and original ones, is the experience of pain that can be provoked by even a few members of our extended tribe rejecting or ostracizing us. This social pain, as it is now called, shares the same neural networks of physical pain, and so despite the thousands of years that separate us from the life-style and constraints of early hominid, social pain today is still very much an active brain funciton.

The story of how we came to this conclusion is interesting in his own right, and recounting it makes the concept of social pain clearer. So one warm afternoon of a summer day professor Kip was dozing off on the grass with his dog when a frisbee landed by his shoulder. Startled by the noise of the frisbee tumbling across his body he awoke at once and immediately caught sight of the frisbee. Eyeing around to spot the owners of the flying disk, professor Kip and his dog got on their feet, and, after identifying the likely owners threw it back to them. And here is where the story gets interesting, because to Kip’s surprise the person catching the frisbee threw it back to him, encouraging a back and forth exchange for a few times, until, just as suddenly and for no apparent reason, the guy turned around and went back to playing with his companion, leaving professor Kip tasting the bitter juices of ostracism.

No one there knew that Kip had been conducting research in social exclusion, and that this little incident would give him an idea that would fire up a cascade of research in social pain as we know it today. So when he returned to his laboratory he contemplated repeating the experience under an fMRI scanner, and went on spree of experimentation to test his social pain hypothesis.  By reconstructing the frisbee exchange situation digitally and administering it to participants under the sensitive brain scanner, professor Kip arrived at some profound conclusions.

When a person was engaged by two strangers in a catch game before suddenly being excluded, it affected their self-esteem, their sense of control over their environment, whether they felt acknowledged or invisible, their anger and their sadness.: “So people say social pain is all in your head, and that is indeed what it is, because that’s where you register both physical and social pain”. In other words, social pain can be no less painful than physical pain, so much so, that under some later experimental conditions, people preferred electric shocks to the experience of social pain.But there are many kinds of social pain: embarrassment, betrayal, bereavement, insult, exclusion by a group or individual, loneliness, and heartbreak. What they have in common, is rejection. What they don’t have in common, is the context in which they occur. Back when we roamed the earth in small nomadic tribes, during a period of 500.000 years in fact, the tribe provided us with food, water and shelter, none of which one could procure alone, so being rejected by the group was like being sentenced to a slow death. It was a kind of capital assault on our ancestor’s ability to survive the elements, and the reason why we have evolved to experience it as an agonising alarm.

Social pain is an alarm that developed to warn us of the impending possibility of social exclusion, telling us that there is something wrong in our social life that needs urgent attention. In this respect, it is no different from physical pain, which works as well as a warning for you to be careful how your use your body.

Anthropologists think ostracism was the foundation of civilization, because fear of it keeps you in line.

If the basis for our behavior is highly skewed towards avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, and the neural network that makes us experience social pain is shared with that of physical pain, our brains have naturally evolved to avoid social exclusion, and seek social validation instead. The mechanism is so powerful that summing his forty years pioneering career in trauma research, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk writes: “I have never met a child below the age of 10, who was tortured at home, and who had broken bones and burned skin to show, who, given the option, would not have chosen to stay with his or her family". Whatever the shape and form of the norm we are asked to conform to, that is, the feeling we get from being validated by our in-group, is as rewarding as the sweetness we seek in almost all foods we consume. This prerogative in our psyche spills in all our connections with others, so much so that initial likings of others most often work on this basis, an unconscious recognition of the familiar, even when that familiar may be a highly destructive addition to our lives.

People who have experienced traumatic relationship during their early development are many times more likely to re-experience the same hurtful dynamics later in life. For example, our little girl Marlene had parents who were neglectful. The narrow window of social inclusion Marlene experienced day in and day out, conditioned Marlene to unconsciously associate warmth with suspicion. Warm persons who praise and validate her are a threat to her sense of what is normal. To her, they appear as having hidden motives. Absent and often abusive persons, on the other hand, spark the unconscious warmth of familiarity she becomes attracted to. These people seem honest and transparent to her.

The point is that Marlene’s instinctive and terrifying fear of social ostracism, continues to stop her from recognising the conditional and limiting ways in which her parents loved her, and through this allow herself a range of behaviors that are more conducive to real positive, warm, trustworthy inclusions. This is where the idea of reconsidering the social conditioning processes of early childhood finds support. Science allows us to understand how early social conditioning processes are powerful molders of our adult behaviors, and filters of the realities we seek. Reviewing the rules that constrained certain parts of ourselves to the quieter and darker corners of our souls, is a chance to see how behaviors that might be generally valid and legitimate for many others, are not-acceptable in the milieux we belong to. In this sense, there is indeed an authenticity that remains unexplored beneath the unconscious preference for the familiar.

While desiring to be liberated from the inevitable pain of life through seeking an unchanging and authentic core self, is domed to fail, experimentation around behaviors we have not been given the chance to experience, may be the one thing that opens the door to a deeper sense of belonging. Authentic self or not, knowing that our ideas of the Self are social constructs, and that we have the power to be critical towards them, and even attempt to shift them around a bit, is, especially for those who suffer the prison of a destructive self-image, a somewhat vital notion.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko