Mechanisms of psychological aversion
This post explains my understanding of a condition that seems to affect almost all people in our society. It is largely conjecture and I have cited no sources. My understanding is gleaned from various spiritual texts, conversations with friends, observations of others, and personal experience. I have stated many uncertain things as if they were facts. Welcome to Cybermonk.
Many people experience chronic muscle tension in their body. This physical tension is caused by a habitual psychological process that can be described as “resisting” or “managing” one’s sensory and cognitive experience, in the hope of avoiding particular sensations, thoughts, memories, or predictions about the future. One cannot easily detect this process in oneself, as it is natural to resist the awareness of the process itself. Some physical signs that tension exists include the presence of prominent veins in the temples; swollen lymph nodes around the ears, neck, and jaw; vague sensations of tightness or unease in the face, throat, chest, and stomach; asymmetry in facial structure, especially in the position of the eyebrows and the shape and size of the eyes; and premature creasing of the face, especially visible in those lines extending outwards from the inner corners of the eyes, and those that extend from above the nostrils around the mouth. Psychosomatic tension in the muscles and fascia can additionally cause astigmatism, male pattern baldness (in both men and women), some kinds of digestive problems, carpal tunnel and some other so-called repetitive strain injuries, headaches, sinusitis, a tendency for mouth-breathing, and tinnitus.1
One purpose of psychological tension is, as I said, the avoidance of negative experiences—including immediate experiences such as ongoing physical pain, imagined future experiences, and unpleasant memories. Another purpose is the maintenance of structures in the mind; for example, the defense of ideas about one’s nature, abilities, or situation. Suppose that I am fixated on the ideas that I am intelligent and competent, but these are not actually the case. Many experiences that I have—in my career, in social situations, when reading and attempting to understand ideas—will reveal that I am less intelligent than I want to believe. So tension arises to paper over this experiential data, lest the idea that I am intelligent collapse (and leave me with, perhaps, the unpleasant sensation of worthlessness or hopelessness—I suspect that these “structures” and “fixations” in the mind are themselves composed of tension in resistance of something deeper).
Each person automatically seeks to organize their conditions to minimize unpleasantness, and naturally avoids situations that are aversive. This is effected through some sort of reverse logical deduction; if neutral situation A is believed to be likely to bring about unpleasant situation B, then situation A is avoided. This process happens iteratively, stepping backwards through chains of implications. The more capable one’s mind, the more things one finds aversive, and the more time spent thinking about one’s conditions and the future—the more thorough this process of finding implications is. The boundary around one’s potential actions shrinks in proportion to the effectiveness of that process.
Now, this process does not proceed unhindered in the conscious mind. The thoughts themselves are often aversive—as we all know from experience, imagination has the same ability to trigger emotions and bodily reactions as real, physical experience does. Suppose that the mind suspects that if events A, B and C happen, unthinkable scenario D will come to pass. But bringing ideas about D into conscious awareness is aversive, since it carries an emotional valence similar to that of the real occurrence of D. By the very same process that works backwards from aversion, thoughts about A, B and C are cordoned off. If this process proceeds unchecked, the range of thinkable thoughts will shrink as well. One will more and more frequently feel the zap of the electric fence as one comes up against the edges of the allowable: the chains of implications threatening to rise into conscious awareness and trigger their emotional responses.2
This is why I believe the concept of agency is misguided, or at least incomplete. There is some way that the mind generates ideas for possible actions, some fount of creativity—the imperatives to increase one’s agency usually suggest that this source is underperforming. I suspect that the more common issue is that most of the ideas for actions are suppressed and ignored due to their scary implications. In fact, the total lack of motivation, accompanied by feelings of pointlessness or hopelessness, seems to be an advanced stage of suppression—as each potential action is automatically connected, correctly or otherwise, to unwanted outcomes.3 Furthermore, the way to train the source of ideas for action is through experimentation; if it’s working correctly, it will generate high-potential actions, and refine its predictions based on the results. This should happen automatically in the absence of suppression and likely will not benefit from conscious intervention.
To reiterate one of my core convictions: humans are ultimately rational, and any recurrent, unpleasant situation is almost always some local optimum of pleasantness given the environmental conditions. However, critically, the source of the unpleasantness is partially internal—which is why most people appear to behave irrationally. One may estimate, even correctly, that ignoring opportunity or sabotaging oneself will feel better than the opposite.
A lot of modern life is organized around distraction from unwanted experience. The obvious examples include scrolling social media to distract from unpleasant thoughts, and watching pornography in favor of facing the opposite sex—but there’s much, much more. Striving in one’s career to avoid the feeling of worthlessness. Fixating on health and longevity to avoid the awareness of inevitable death. Creating narratives of inequality and unfairness to avoid any inklings of personal responsibility. One disturbing aspect of our lives is that most actions are fundamentally framed in opposition to the bad.
So given all of the above information: what does one do? My understanding of the solution is incomplete, but my own practice has two parts. The first is meditation; specifically, I use a variety of “Do nothing” techniques (see e.g. here). The point is to stop managing experience on a moment-to-moment basis by letting go of fixations, thoughts, and aversions. After a few months of this particular practice (and a year and a half of meditating in general) I can intentionally enter states where I experience popping sensations all over my body, like rubber bands snapping, as the muscles and fascia relax. It occurs in the expected places (temples, jaw, neck) and in some unexpected places (tops of the feet, behind the knees, ankles). These muscle relaxations are paired with a sense of ease and lightness. Over time this ability has begun to manifest in non-meditative states, like during conversations or while otherwise participating in the world.
The second part is analytical, and has two prongs.
First, enter situations that you find challenging and learn to watch your own reactions. Do those reactions feel tense? If so, what feelings might you be avoiding? What structures or ideas might you be defending? Talk to people, or write, and find the themes—are you trying to prove something? What if you stopped?
Second, eliminate unnecessary sources of stimulation. The degree to which this is necessary varies by the person, but the point is that you need to notice things about your mind that you habitually ignore, and see further upstream along the conditioned patterns of thoughts. All the noise is what keeps those thoughts hidden.
All of these practices are demanding, require extensive reading, study, and reflection, and will likely never be complete. However, with time, everything changes. A few months ago I was negotiating the purchase of five tickets for a train departing in three minutes in another language (failure meant sleeping on the street) and only realized afterwards that I had forgotten to get stressed. I have this kind of experience—expecting a negative reaction that never comes—all the time now, and it’s incredibly satisfying. My mind and body are increasingly my own.
some of these things of course have other causes
I think situation largely overlaps with what people call anxiety, but that word has a definition already and I don’t want to argue about it.
And this one with depression.
great read!