Emotional Survival Rules

Perceptions happen. We have senses that detect different types of sensory data. We have a brain/mind that assembles the data we have detected into perceptions. The mind then evaluates the perceptions in the moment and figures out what to do.

Based on the results that happened from how we handled the moment, we learn, we will derive a rule, which is a working hypothesis about what our perceptions mean. The rules we derive comprise our personal operating system, our matrix, our psyche, which then feeds forward into the following moment to influence what we perceive and how we act in our world.

Sometimes the rules we derive are conscious, which means we are aware of them, and sometimes we have rules that are unconscious, that we are not aware of.

Rules allow us to predict and to innovate. We are blessed (and sometimes cursed) by the rule-deriving capabilities of the mind. For example, a girl could ‘see’ (which means to detect a visual data pattern) a creature she had never ever seen before (perhaps an okapi) and she would unconsciously deduce, based on previous rules she had learned, that what she was seeing was not a visual data pattern that should be called a house, person, or a tree- it would be a visual data pattern that should probably be called an animal. The girl  “knows” the okapi is an animal.

On the other hand, it can be a curse to have a mind if the girl has derived some rules that result in her “knowing” that she is a loser, a bad, lazy, selfish person who deserves to be punished and who can never hope to be happy.

Minds are a great thing to have when it comes to learning how to survive and comprehend the physical world.  We can learn physical survival rules from our own experience and we can learn from the wisdom of others. We can remember, predict, and innovate. We can figure out how new ways to survive and stay safe. We can learn from our elders and our culture that it isn’t smart to eat certain mushrooms and we should not stand in front of a charging elephant. We can invent new tools and we can discover more effective methods for protecting and enriching our lives. We can predict seasons and natural cycles.

Most humans eventually learn through experience or from others that fire and other hot things will burn us. Fire burns all of us equally around the planet. When we know what it means to get burned, our mind remembers and tries to make certain we never get burned. The mind creates a burn-avoidance rule, which is a derived relationship between getting burned and certain behaviors like touching a hot stove or getting to close to fire.  Any situation that looks like it has potential to burn us should elicit burn-avoidance behavior. Our minds try to keep us from getting burned.

Physical survival rules can be found in the world of biology, of physics, of chemistry.  Learn how the physical world works. Do what keeps you alive, don’t do what kills you. Physical survival rules come from positive and negative physical experiences like pain, pleasure, fear of death or injury, feeling secure from threats, etc.

When we are alone in the wildness of Earth we have to know how the physical world works. Gravity works everywhere on Earth.  A fall from a high place can kill no matter what our race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

In addition to living on Earth, we humans also inhabit an emotional and relational space, the world of self, family, tribe, culture, society. This is the world of I and You, of We and Us and Them, a subjective interpersonal world which is created through interacting with others.

The mind uses the same type of thinking to survive in the social world as it does to survive in the physical world- deriving rules, learning, remembering, predicting, and innovating.  To survive in the physical world, we learn to detect important patterns in the physical world (such as “fire burns”).

To the naive reactive mind, a threat is a threat. An emotional threat can evoke a full-blown adrenaline reaction identical to a physical threat. And, since we humanoids can derive rules that allow us to predict, we can imagine an emotional threat that might occur tomorrow which triggers a here-and-now fight-flight reaction. Have you ever gotten nervous thinking about some sort of speech or performance you had to deliver at a future time?

Rules needed for emotional survival are dependent on family and culture rather than on the laws of nature, so the emotional survival rules that we derive are based on relational patterns that we perceive as important.

The emotional survival rules are locally and culturally determined. For example, marital infidelity goes unpunished by some cultures and in other cultures infidelity can result in death or incarceration.

Emotional survival lessons come in the form of positive or negative physical and/or emotional treatment by others. Social and relational experiences such as acceptance, shame, humiliation, praise, scorn, affection, and anger are but a few of many interpersonal interactions that shape us, teaching us what we need to do to keep getting accepted, included, and cared for.  Just as we need to know how to act around fire to keep from getting burned, we must know how to behave in order to be OK emotionally.

Humans are social creatures and, when we are young, our very survival depends on others accepting us enough to care for us. For a human infant, rejection can be fatal. Children are wired by nature to figure out the rules that will result in them being acceptable in order to get their needs met by the adults.

Because they are dependent on adults, children must focus on adapting to the adults. There is a huge power differential between children and adults for many years.  Much of the power differential is biological. It takes almost twenty years for most humans to reach their full adult size and strength.  For the first twenty years of their lives, children can be dominated by adults who are simply bigger, stronger, and know more.

In addition to the biological power differences between adults and children there are culturally mandated differences. In many cultures children are dependent on and subservient to adults for more years than is biologically necessary for the children’s survival. Children are not as autonomous as are adults due to cultural prohibitions. In the current US culture, for example, citizens below the age of 18 cannot vote, buy cigarettes, or join the US military of their own free will.  Other cultures set different restrictions based on age or some other culturally determined marker. Thus children have to adapt to the world of the adults for a long time.

In the family crucible, children often learn very different emotional lessons. What is an emotional threat in one family might not be an emotional threat in another. For example, let’s take two children from the same town who are living next door to one another. They are the same age, the same ethnicity, and the same religion.  However, one child experiences harsh punishment and parental rejection for failing an arithmetic test while in the other home the parents do not care at all about their child’s school work. The child who is punished for failing the arithmetic test will derive different emotional rules than will the child who is not punished for failure. As adults, they will function quite differently in their interpersonal worlds based on the emotional rules they learned from their childhood experiences.

We start learning emotional survival rules from the treatment we receive from our first caregivers. The lessons that we learn in our family are with us for the rest of our lives.  We continue to operate by the basic emotional survival rules we internalized as infants until something forces us to change.