Tragedy and Theory: Some Basic Why's and How's of Reactivity

“I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.”

                             -- Arthur Miller, Tragedy and The Common Man (from Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic by James Gilligan)

The tragedy in the above quote is the often unseen or unknown reality that every person possesses personal dignity and worth -- it's not something we can earn or lose, be given or have taken away. It is always there by virtue of our existence. But, many of us forget this (or never knew it in the first place). Instead, we pin our self-worth and value on external opinions or personal achievements or the temporary benefits we get from reacting, and we neglect to integrate ourselves internally or externally. It is this "dis-ease" of self that is at the core of reactivity.

Theory
So, how is this tragedy related to reactivity? The answer lies in our early development, as understood through empirically supported theories such as Object Relations, Self Psychology, and Attachment. For example, the mother-infant microanalysis research by Beebe and others supports a focus on bi-directional impacts of early relationships throughout the lifespan (i.e., how caregiver and infant mutually influence each other).

This mutuality cannot be understated. Though the caregiver has a special responsibility to "hold" both the child's and the caregiver's experiences and initiate repair of any ruptures in the relationship, early developmental processes may be derailed just as easily by the child as by the caregiver. For instance, a child may have a temperament or personality or biology that inhibits attunement with and by a capable caregiver. Or, the same may be true of a caregiver with a capable child. Or, there could be varying degrees of inhibitory traits in both people.

However it happens, the important point is that this disruption is a critical part of early (object) relational processes (i.e., evolving notions of self and other) whereby connection is thwarted. When connection is thwarted, shame gets evoked and associated with perceived threat (from the disconnection) and, by extension, biological fight/flight/freeze/feint reactions to perceived threat. These associations between (dis)connection, shame, perceived threat, and threat reactions continue to operate unconsciously throughout our lives and subsequent relationships.

***These moments of disconnection are critical for and contribute to healthy development if and only if the caregiver repairs the ruptures (because the child can't do it yet) by empathically joining the child's mental state and then shifting them both to a more tolerable state. This repair process continues the critical (object-) relational processes. That is how the child develops a healthy sense of self and other (i.e., boundaries of internal vs external reality), learns to tolerate or "hold" experience, and learns that feelings, needs, relationships, and people are not dangerous. This is how the child learns how to repair and thus be in relationship.

Everyone experiences absence of repair to some degree. If lack of repair occurs on a consistent basis, these moments of disconnection may chronically destabilize a child's sense of self, agency, and corresponding equilibrium, thus unconsciously perpetuating fear, fear reactions and, by association, shame. Moreover, this may interrupt what Winnicott called the Transitional Process whereby we learn to see others primarily as they objectively are (warts and all), not primarily as our subjective, idealized projections. This process of building the ability to objectively see and know others is the developmental basis for attunement.***

Universality of the Theory
I think of disconnection as momentary impairments in the capacity to attune to others and ourselves: to see and know and therefore be able to predict the behavior of others and ourselves. I call this capacity our 7th sense. The loss of this sense makes us relationally deaf, dumb, and blind and therefore may be terrifying. In any case, loss of this 7th sense unconsciously activates implicit memories of fear/shame states from early development.

In my view, since no parent/child dyad perfectly attune and repair all the time (caregivers of securely attached children attune ~ 30% of the time), everyone is confronted with mis-attunement and lack of repair to some degree and so as infants and children must derive alternative strategies to maintain connection with the caregiver. Therefore, there exists a continuum of attachment trauma, depending on the quality and consistency of repair and the frequency and severity of the mis-attunement.

Reactive Relational Rules
These strategies included various ways to ignore or dismiss our own feelings and needs so as not to threaten this vital connection. We may have learned that:

• *our feelings and needs are dangerous and are therefore not allowed
• *we have to be different from how we are
• we have to be "perfect" (from the caregiver's perspective)
• people are objects to be used to manage self-esteem, as we were ourselves objects used to manage our caregiver's self-esteem

We bring these unconscious rules into every subsequent relationship. [*from Co-Creating Change by Jon Frederickson]

Connection to Shame
Which brings us to shame. Shame is the relational “water” in which we swim: shame can be understood socially as inequality in relationships, one person "up" or idealized (e.g., caregiver) while the other is "down" or devalued (e.g., child). This false idealization or devaluation literally diminishes our sense of self on the level of form (i.e., ego) no matter which side we are on, thereby representing a threat and unconsciously evoking those reactive relational rules.

Shame is attack on self. The unconscious innate and learned reaction to shame is to “flip” the “up/down” positions, thus avoiding “dangerous” feeling, temporarily gaining pride, safety, or other positive benefits, and preserving relationship (in our minds). Our natural tendency is to "flip" when our ego self has been diminished (i.e., attacked) in some way.

This is the go-to psychological defense that characterizes those people who may struggle with the aforementioned "dis-ease" of self. However, it may also be unconsciously employed by anyone encountering a threat trigger they unconsciously associate with shame. Our different tendencies to employ reactive behaviors (as opposed to responsive ones) are mitigated by our unique environments, temperaments, relational/developmental histories, and our individual abilities to cope with stress in any given moment.

Another way to understand this is through affect theory. Shame affect is defined as the sudden interruption of positive affect, or disconnection. The times our caregiver(s) mis-attuned to us or failed to mirror us and repair relational ruptures over hundreds of thousands of interactions (i.e., attachment trauma) evoked the shame affect (and threat perception) in us each time (as it did in them when we did not attune). Eventually, we learned to make sense of this and insure our survival by splitting (i.e., keeping the caregiver "good" and devaluing ourselves) or employing some other defense strategy.

In other words, we (our feelings and needs, our very Self) were what was "wrong" with the relationship and what threatened it. We learned to perceive reality through our caregiver's eyes and change ourselves so as not to evoke their anxieties and thus threaten the connection, a state of "perfection" that was unconsciously encoded into our relational rules. As a result, we associate threat triggers today -- the sudden halt to our own internal sense of safety or "perfection" -- with those early shame experiences and tend to react by "flipping", as we did as infants and children.

Summary
So, very early on, we may have learned that to be in relationship means one person is valued while the other is devalued. Now that we know this on a conscious level, we can have "equal" relationships and talk about our painful feelings (shame, anger, sadness, fear), right? Not so fast. It’s hard! It’s hard to create the space to do this, especially if we or others around us have never done it and don't know how to do it.

And, if we don't create the space to hold these feelings and process experience, then it’s hard not to take things personally, react, and trigger people. And, then it’s just this never-ending cycle of chain reactions, constantly putting each other (or ourselves) down to reap temporary gains, and never getting to what’s really going on (i.e., our feelings and needs). How can trust survive in that environment? I believe this is the tragedy of American family life and relationships in general, as depicted in heartbreaking plays such as A Long Day's Journey Into Night and Death of a Salesman.

But, there is a way to live life without suffering, which I will talk about in future posts.

Here are some visuals that illustrate how I think about reactivity: