What’s the cause of the turmoil in the world today? From a Relational Neuroscience informed view, the reason is disconnection.
The mainstream culture, driven by the domination hierarchy–now corporatized–separates us from ourselves, each other, and our place in the world. It deprives us of the vital, safe connections that integrate us, allow us to navigate human relationships, and even regulate ourselves.
Instead, we are sold a false bill of goods, cheap substitutes for what fosters the sense of well-being we desperately crave and lack. Rather than gathering together to sing, dance, drum, cry, express joy, and share sorrow, we watch it on TV. As we watch, we eat massive quantities of inflammatory foods we buy because we’re manipulated into thinking they will make us feel better. But the little dopamine hit is temporary, so we eat some more. And more and more. Bet you can’t eat just one.
Human beings, like all organisms, are heavily influenced by their environment. Our environment, particularly the psychosocial, sucks! It is inhumane, anti-human, and neuronegative. We need a cultural sea change. What we have is a culture of death. It is killing us slowly from the inside, as individuals, as a society, and as a species.
Unfortunately, the so-called mental health care system will not swoop in and save us. If it could, it would have done so a long time ago. Hundreds of years of psychology, and we have *more* mental illness. The mainstream medical – psychology – pharmaceutical complex is one of the most pernicious arms of the domination culture. As Dr Bessel Van der Kolk noted, “psychiatry is society in a white coat.”
Those men on high are tasked with determining who of us are “maladaptive” and what are our “dysfunctions” and “disorders,” and, should we not get better according to the one-size-fits-nobody biomedical formula, they can call us “treatment resistant,” and blame us for our lack of progress, rather than their own ossified, shame-based, neuroscience ignorant approach.
The main goal of psychology is to teach us we are defective and need to suppress who we are to exhibit appropriate, acceptable behaviors, no matter what has happened to us, no matter how badly our nervous system is dysregulated, despite our desperate need for safe connection. Psychology is not the answer. Humanity is the answer.
Each one of us must recognize that safe connection is a biological imperative, how we treat each other changes who we are, and that our quality of life and very lives are dependent on applying focused attention to safe connection.
#TraumaAwareAmerica
This post includes content generated by ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI. The AI-generated content has been reviewed and edited for accuracy and relevance
