Find Out What Really Drives Us from Within
(and why it Matters – A LOT!)
Understanding the Dynamics of ‘Deep Emotion’
(and why it Matters – A LOT!)
Understanding the Dynamics of ‘Deep Emotion’
Do we think about just what power our subconscious emotional archive might be having over the millions of choices that we have to make and how we live our lives today? If you do, then you’re not part of ‘the tribal spellbound.’ But most people know less about these issues than they do about the coming week’s television programs.
For all of us, though, it is necessary for us to get some understanding of ‘what’s going on’ in the human mind before we can CHANGE what’s going on.
We think we know who and how we are. In our society we pay much more attention to the importance of the conscious ‘thinking’ ego-centric mind than we do to the unconscious emotional mind – the ‘affect matrix.’ The term affect is defined as “a class of human feelings and emotions which may not be able to be verbalized;” affectology is the study of how significant affective learnings and habits are in the running of our mental, emotional, attitudinal and physical lives. The information contained in the study of affectology is securely based on the findings and research contained in the growing field of affective neuroscience (as distinct from neuroscience per se).
This presentation introduces you to the major underlying principles of Clinical Affectology and its derivatives, or more precisely, the science that underpins the affectology approach to personal development in all facets of your life.
It is designed specifically to ease you into a completely new and different way of thinking about human emotions and feelings, where they come from, and how it is that we can say that the common and time-worn (or time-“worn-OUT”) methods of psychotherapy and talk therapy (that is, analyzing affect points of origin within your life story) is an almost impossible task that must eventually be bypassed. But, we would hope that by reading this introductory presentation, you will realize that affectology presents apparently new material in a way that shows that it is in fact ‘age-old’ material.
And, like the way of the Tao, or Zen, we must return to the beginning in order to complete the cycle of being. As the philosopher Goethe rightly said,
If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
In therapy – in personal development – we say that in order to change anything, you need to be AWARE of it and understand a little of how it works. At the very least, acknowledgement is required.
Welcome to a new look at the old world of the human emotional matrix.
Chapter 1 - How “Feeling” is Learned
Emotion and Feeling
To clear up some misconceptions or confusions, we need to settle on some word definitions. In the affectological view of things, emotion is a symptom of feeling. So when we talk about feelings we are referring to the mind/brain dynamic that drives emotion:- in other words, a core response that lies below and before emotion. Because feelings is a word that’s used in many areas today, we’d prefer to refine this even further and mainly use the term affect, which (again) is defined as ‘a class of human feeling that may not be able to be verbalized.’
In the Beginning; before words
Note the term, ‘Before Words.’ This is what affectology approaches focus on to the exclusion of almost everything else. Coming to a realization that you were once a ‘baby’ – or if you believe in salience and sentience before birth, a fetus – then the impact of a realization that you spent a huge proportion of your life learning to be who you are ONLY on an affect basis (before cognition and language) can be nothing short of a shock.
Then, to discover that you didn’t leave those learnings behind is even more of a shock. And finally, to discover that much of your life – not only in the emotional sphere – is today influenced by those learnings AND that you don’t know it, AND that you cannot define or analyze how that’s working, AND that no amount of talk therapy can ever get to the nub of what’s driving the negative forces in life; well, that’s not just a shock: it’s astonishing!
But there’s no need to feel powerless over these non-verbal affect learnings that still exist today. There is a way to change them through Clinical Affectology – to grow them up; to mature them – and that way is through a process that involves ignoring words and attempts to define the complex trail of learnings that connect the older ‘infant’ part of you to the newer adult part.
So, reviewing this above, we come to explaining the word we use so often in affectology, and that word is preverbal – before words.
Every detail and theory that makes up the concepts of affectology is formed around and supported by existing affective neuroscience, its research and findings. In The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, prenatal researcher, Dr Thomas Verny clearly states that “the unborn child is a feeling, remembering, aware being,” and at six months of foetal development can understand – or at least ‘feel’ – its mother’s emotions.
For all of us, though, it is necessary for us to get some understanding of ‘what’s going on’ in the human mind before we can CHANGE what’s going on.
We think we know who and how we are. In our society we pay much more attention to the importance of the conscious ‘thinking’ ego-centric mind than we do to the unconscious emotional mind – the ‘affect matrix.’ The term affect is defined as “a class of human feelings and emotions which may not be able to be verbalized;” affectology is the study of how significant affective learnings and habits are in the running of our mental, emotional, attitudinal and physical lives. The information contained in the study of affectology is securely based on the findings and research contained in the growing field of affective neuroscience (as distinct from neuroscience per se).
This presentation introduces you to the major underlying principles of Clinical Affectology and its derivatives, or more precisely, the science that underpins the affectology approach to personal development in all facets of your life.
It is designed specifically to ease you into a completely new and different way of thinking about human emotions and feelings, where they come from, and how it is that we can say that the common and time-worn (or time-“worn-OUT”) methods of psychotherapy and talk therapy (that is, analyzing affect points of origin within your life story) is an almost impossible task that must eventually be bypassed. But, we would hope that by reading this introductory presentation, you will realize that affectology presents apparently new material in a way that shows that it is in fact ‘age-old’ material.
And, like the way of the Tao, or Zen, we must return to the beginning in order to complete the cycle of being. As the philosopher Goethe rightly said,
If you miss the first buttonhole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
In therapy – in personal development – we say that in order to change anything, you need to be AWARE of it and understand a little of how it works. At the very least, acknowledgement is required.
Welcome to a new look at the old world of the human emotional matrix.
Chapter 1 - How “Feeling” is Learned
Emotion and Feeling
To clear up some misconceptions or confusions, we need to settle on some word definitions. In the affectological view of things, emotion is a symptom of feeling. So when we talk about feelings we are referring to the mind/brain dynamic that drives emotion:- in other words, a core response that lies below and before emotion. Because feelings is a word that’s used in many areas today, we’d prefer to refine this even further and mainly use the term affect, which (again) is defined as ‘a class of human feeling that may not be able to be verbalized.’
In the Beginning; before words
Note the term, ‘Before Words.’ This is what affectology approaches focus on to the exclusion of almost everything else. Coming to a realization that you were once a ‘baby’ – or if you believe in salience and sentience before birth, a fetus – then the impact of a realization that you spent a huge proportion of your life learning to be who you are ONLY on an affect basis (before cognition and language) can be nothing short of a shock.
Then, to discover that you didn’t leave those learnings behind is even more of a shock. And finally, to discover that much of your life – not only in the emotional sphere – is today influenced by those learnings AND that you don’t know it, AND that you cannot define or analyze how that’s working, AND that no amount of talk therapy can ever get to the nub of what’s driving the negative forces in life; well, that’s not just a shock: it’s astonishing!
But there’s no need to feel powerless over these non-verbal affect learnings that still exist today. There is a way to change them through Clinical Affectology – to grow them up; to mature them – and that way is through a process that involves ignoring words and attempts to define the complex trail of learnings that connect the older ‘infant’ part of you to the newer adult part.
So, reviewing this above, we come to explaining the word we use so often in affectology, and that word is preverbal – before words.
Every detail and theory that makes up the concepts of affectology is formed around and supported by existing affective neuroscience, its research and findings. In The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, prenatal researcher, Dr Thomas Verny clearly states that “the unborn child is a feeling, remembering, aware being,” and at six months of foetal development can understand – or at least ‘feel’ – its mother’s emotions.
Prenatal neuroscientists show that even at a stage as early as 22 weeks (into gestation), the unborn child has the capacity – and uses it – to store information related to emotional (affect) experiences that it might be having, even in utero. The research proposes that at this stage in development, the limbic brain (see later in this chapter) and its associated neurological links, through the central nervous system, have become fully formed, and it’s inconceivable that the complex neural system remains idle until we, as adult observers, “think” it should activate.
In his immensely important book, From Conception to Birth, the late Dr Tony Lipson (Department of Genetics, The Children’s Hospital, Sydney) stated:
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“What are the facts? When does the spinal cord communicate with the processing and thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, where the grey and white matter resides? It is only when the vital connection between the spinal cord processing center, or the brain stem, and the brain itself is made at 22 – 23 weeks that feelings of the senses such as warmth, light, sound and pain have any real moral (or conscious) meaning and form part of experience. The spinal cord can then communicate with the true brain and vice versa, both responding to movement, feeling and position and presumably, albeit unconsciously, able to have memory which will influence the person for the rest of its life.”
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Human beings begin to develop abilities to think and experience in more sophisticated ‘reasoning’ ways, much later in life – at a time known as the verbal emergent stage, and that’s anywhere between 10 months and 2 or 3 years’ of age. And even older.
The bold new breed of affective neuroscientists, LeDoux, Damasio, Goleman, et al, have reached the definite conclusion that we human beings lay down our affect, or emotional personality during that stage in our development where we have no words, and our experiences can only be emotional or feeling experiences.
Affect Brain Structure
We can now go on to look at the ways in which the brain processes and stores affect memory and emotional encodings by first looking at the physical structure of that part of the brain most implicated in the process of emotional – or affect – memory.
You, of course, understand that the study of brain physiology is vast and complicated, so it’s appropriate to say at this point that our look at the affect brain complex is merely summarized in this short presentation. Because we are investigating the brain, this does not mean that the role of mind, spirit, or even soul is denigrated, but we are merely having a look at the processing neuro-engineering that allows our lives to be either enriched or impaired by our subconscious (unconscious) minds and our emotional experiences.
The “Affect Neuro-machine.”
Emotional and affect responses stem from storage facilities housed in particular centers of the brain, contained within a part that is called the limbic brain.
It is the centre of our subconscious emotional and affective processing and contains areas that give birth to our emotions, lay down and retrieve preverbal affect memories, and attend to our emotional comfort or ‘balance.’
The processes involved in affect memory storage are truly unconscious – that is, that they are below or beyond our capability to consciously understand them; at least, using words and word-oriented thoughts. That our emotions and feelings arise from a primal functioning area of our brain whose main, and sometimes only, task is to maintain emotional comfort and the means of returning to emotional comfort and equilibrium (stable affect attributional state).
The Limbic System
The limbic system of the brain is made up of many neural centers that go to driving the complex that is responsible for most of our experiences that are not a product of exercising conscious will. Experiences such as the restoration of conscious and episodic memory, and affect or emotional memory and trace-bridging to our earliest unconscious affect memories – our primal affect encodings (see later chapter).
The bold new breed of affective neuroscientists, LeDoux, Damasio, Goleman, et al, have reached the definite conclusion that we human beings lay down our affect, or emotional personality during that stage in our development where we have no words, and our experiences can only be emotional or feeling experiences.
Affect Brain Structure
We can now go on to look at the ways in which the brain processes and stores affect memory and emotional encodings by first looking at the physical structure of that part of the brain most implicated in the process of emotional – or affect – memory.
You, of course, understand that the study of brain physiology is vast and complicated, so it’s appropriate to say at this point that our look at the affect brain complex is merely summarized in this short presentation. Because we are investigating the brain, this does not mean that the role of mind, spirit, or even soul is denigrated, but we are merely having a look at the processing neuro-engineering that allows our lives to be either enriched or impaired by our subconscious (unconscious) minds and our emotional experiences.
The “Affect Neuro-machine.”
Emotional and affect responses stem from storage facilities housed in particular centers of the brain, contained within a part that is called the limbic brain.
It is the centre of our subconscious emotional and affective processing and contains areas that give birth to our emotions, lay down and retrieve preverbal affect memories, and attend to our emotional comfort or ‘balance.’
The processes involved in affect memory storage are truly unconscious – that is, that they are below or beyond our capability to consciously understand them; at least, using words and word-oriented thoughts. That our emotions and feelings arise from a primal functioning area of our brain whose main, and sometimes only, task is to maintain emotional comfort and the means of returning to emotional comfort and equilibrium (stable affect attributional state).
The Limbic System
The limbic system of the brain is made up of many neural centers that go to driving the complex that is responsible for most of our experiences that are not a product of exercising conscious will. Experiences such as the restoration of conscious and episodic memory, and affect or emotional memory and trace-bridging to our earliest unconscious affect memories – our primal affect encodings (see later chapter).
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Neurologically, the structures that are important to affect memory are processing centers such as the hippocampus, the hypothalamus and, most importantly, the amygdalae. The components of the limbic system are linked and interact in an amazingly complex way, with all its components working together simultaneously. BUT, it’s important to the affectologist to understand that emotionally charged information and material is processed, stored and consolidated initially by the amygdalae, a pair of small almond-shaped neural complexes (singular: amygdala) at the anterior aspect (front) of the limbic system.
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The “Spark” at the Beginning.
So, let’s now have a peek at the process involved in this storage. I could use any example of an experience at any time early in our lives, and for the sake of this example, let’s not talk about ‘in the womb’ experiences, but use perhaps an early infant experience.
When the young baby receives an emotionally charged stimulus (and this is registered merely as DISCOMFORT or DISEQUILIBRIUM), the information is carried instantaneously to the amygdalae by various neural pathways. It’s important to say that this information is merely basic – basically uncomfortable, that is – and cannot be processed by the baby in any sophisticatedly analytical way. The amygdala then does its job of storage of that affect memory (in some ways, its ONLY job is the housing of emotional memory).
In the limbic brain, the two most significant bodies in the process of storing memory are the amygdalae and the associated center, the hippocampus. The amygdaloid-hippocampal pathway is responsible for overall encoding of data that we can call unconscious memory. The hippocampus records memory of events and objects as facts, while the amygdala assigns emotional content to those facts. While the hippocampus is relatively slow to develop its full capacity to interpret events and episodes – that is, many months – the amygdala is immediately capable (also prenatally) of encoding and storing information about feelings and reactions to those feelings.
Affect Memory
Let’s expand on the example of the baby above. Remember that we are not settling on any one time or life-era in the development of the child, but using this baby example to show how fragile episodic memory (as opposed to affect memory) can be at any early stage in development.
Let’s say that at one point, the baby of, perhaps, just a day or so of age (just an arbitrary age) experiences a discomforting stimulus. This may be something as simple and benign as a change in its auditory environment; perhaps the parents with raised voices in the next room (not an argument), or an airplane flying low overhead, or some sudden noise like a dog barking or something dropping or crashing. It’s evident that all these experiences do not constitute ACTUAL trauma or danger to the baby, but it’s also obvious that this stimulus can create discomfort in the baby’s experience: – negative emotional arousal. It is natural that this is so – see the ‘fight or flight response’ in chapter 5. Note that the baby has never experienced this sensory input before. It’s a “first-of” experience.
Through the processing centers of the limbic system and surrounding bodies (the thalamus and the sensory cortex), this information is sifted and registered as naked discomfort, setting in train the same neurological dynamic that happens whenever we establish ‘something to be remembered’ as part of our life experience. When emotional arousal occurs, particularly in any discomforting way, the limbic system becomes alarmed and unleashes a flood of stimulating chemicals, mostly norepinephrine.
Norepinephrine empowers the memory, ‘burning in’ the emotionally charged crisis. This burning in is called taloning. It’s important now to say that in the taloning process, it's not the detail of the event, or the ‘story’ (verbal narration) of the episode that’s burnt in, but simply the sense of the emotional experience.
This part of the brain is interested only in basic affect stability, and as such, must create a reaction or a response to the ‘destabilizing alarm.’ At such an early age, we are incapable of rational strategies even if we understood what the discomfort is about (which we don’t), so the only reaction available to us is an emotional or affect one. We respond to the alarm or discomfort with a feeling. The feeling produces a secondary stage to the process; an emotion, something that is perhaps more complex and definable from an external perspective.
This emotion may go on to manifest as a behavior – an action (this may be crying or agitation or the opposite – the appearance of ‘shutting down’) designed, as a primal unconscious reaction, to get attention, and that action, in the majority of cases, causes us to get our basic needs met, whether by being re-comforted by our care-givers or by having the discomforting stimulus removed. And it’s at this precise point that we develop an unconscious construct that says, “when I feel any level of discomfort similar to this, I need to react in this way in order to get my needs met and my emotional stability restored.” But, remember that “react in this way” describes a primary response that is affect-only.
It’s important to be aware of the fact that the PRIMARY response of a feeling is the most significant to the limbic brain. The secondary and tertiary responses of emotion and behavior are, in any case, driven by that primary feeling or affect response.
In affectological terms, this constitutes the process of encoding affect response experiences that are designed to provide us with a template of how to respond in the future. This basis of initial learning and affect memory will influence us forever, going toward the initial building blocks of our emotional matrix, or our feeling subpersonality – our “sense of self.”
But the most important thing to remember about this section is that our building of emotional and feeling experiences and the unconscious memory (encoding) of them is a far cry from being the vague and gossamer-like process that so many of us think. There is no mystery. We LEARN our primary feelings and emotions.
Unconscious Activity
We know that all processing of emotional memory, its recorded experiences, the primal reactions, encoding and taloning takes place in the limbic system. All limbic system activity is unconscious – that is, it takes place in a way that is entirely separate and distinct from the rational processing abilities of our conscious, cortical, executive brains and minds. In neurophysiological terms, affect encoding is not influenced or affected in any way by the rational centers of the brain, the polymodal (cognitive) cortex of the brain. This, of course, points out that affect taloning and encoding has no rational basis and cannot be analyzed at any time later in life. It exists only as a reactive feeling memory at unconscious level.
Millions of words have been written about ‘the subconscious’ or the ‘unconscious mind’ and its relevance to our experience. Material repressed in the subconscious was, of course, the basis of Freud’s propositions and teachings; Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious have gained traction in our society, and most therapeutic approaches hold to some definition about how the subconscious mind fits in with the scheme of things.
The sheer fact persists that unconscious means un-conscious. There’s no such thing as a knowing of one’s subconscious or unconscious mind or its contents. The moment a cognitive construct (idea) related to the unconscious comes to our awareness, it is no longer unconscious.
So, we do not define the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘subconscious’ in terms other than that part of the non-aware processes of the brain and mind that create our emotional reactive self, store the information and access it at a later time.
Chapter Wrap-up:
- We talk a lot about ‘emotion,’ but in affective neuroscience, emotion comes second and is formed out of more influential affect, or feeling experience.
- Affect memories and emotional memories are stored at unconscious level in the amygdalae in the limbic brain. These are laid down very early in our life – may be prenatal, but are certainly preverbal (before word-use).
- They are very probably (almost certainly) the result of the baby misinterpreting whatever stimulant causes discomfort.
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Chapter 2 - How Feeling Memory Happens
All in the Interpretation
We’ve discussed that by the time any human being develops the ability for rational thought, verbal constructs or conscious level memory, they have already laid the foundations for how they experience and respond to the world at an emotional or affect (feeling) level. This is because in our early development we can only interpret the world around us at this level, and these unconscious foundations or emotional matrix will then influence all our future emotional responses and reactions. It’s unavoidable. We are empirical beings, and all our decisions and present day learnings are influenced by and based on previous learnings – particularly in the affect realm.
Developmental psychologists and researchers have, in the last few decades, had a hard look at just how the preverbal infant processes information and builds a long-lasting (perhaps life-long) emotional sense of self depending on those early life imprints and encodings. Infant psychiatrist, Daniel Stern’s book The Interpersonal World of the Infant is a seminal work in the development of an understanding about how we humans process information and environmental experience at an early age.
The research shows that all preverbal memory could only be interpretive in the present moment, and that often, when we are so ‘sure’ of our old memories, we are merely applying our adult egocentric desire to ‘be of good memory’
There are two aspects of Stern’s research that support the affectology proposition. These are the issues of amodalism, and RIGs (Registrations of Interactions that have been Generalized).
Amodalism
Great word, isn’t it. It doesn’t exist in my dictionary, but breaking it into its literal constituents, it simply means without mode, ‘mode’ meaning the sensory modes of sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. In our investigation, without mode really means without specifiable and distinct mode. It’s a “mish-mash” – a messy or confused mixture of different modes of sensory reception.
As adults, particularly since the unfortunate advent of psychoanalysis, we make what are fairly arrogant assumptions that we can scan back and perceive what it would have been like when we were such-and-such an age. The fact is that we were not the same person as we are now when we take into consideration our chaotic means of information-reception. We can NOT interpret as adults, the actual experience of just what modes of sensory input were relevant (or otherwise) to us as preverbal infants. Nor can we re-interpret any event, episode, or our behavioral response to it.
Our qualities of experience, because of amodal receptivity, were global, embracing all modes of perception, rather than any specific sensory mode.
Consider the implications of this when we scan our personal history. What part of you/us is convinced that we can remember the exact details of events and sensory input in those early years? We submit that it is the adult, ego-centric, ‘need-to-know-at-all-costs’ part of personality that is convinced that it’s possible … It’s not.
We’ll now look at the aspect of input experience at preverbal age that underscores this concept of the ‘arrogance’ of narrative therapy. That aspect is:-
RIGs - Registrations of Interactions that have been Generalized.
When we juxtapose the understanding of amodal perception and amodal sensory input with the probability that the amodal sensory experiences are then “generalized” and “re-interpreted interactions” before they are registered in such a way as to form the basis of encoding and imprinting,.
This notion that the preverbal infant mostly misinterprets stimulating information, generalizes it and then encodes the information is what constitutes the term known as RIGs.
Stern attests that “specific memories are deviant exemplars of a class of events.” The intention of this comment is to say that as adults, we cannot retrieve specific and exact memories from preverbal times without them deviating from actuality because they were subject to global amodalism and that the encoding was the result of a RIG.
At best, we can never be quite sure that memories of events are authentic.
At worst, we can be quite sure that all memories are corrupt, not by intention, but by amodalism and RIGs.
The Nature of Feeling/Affect Memory
Our investigations have shown us so far that we begin our emotional life at a time well before we are capable of any verbally oriented thought or experience. In affectology, the first affect encoding is called the Actual Point of Origin (APOO)*, referring to that experience (amodal, global and representative) from which all future learnings generate. Science tells us without equivocation, that this APOO must occur around, or shortly after, the period of time when our Autonomic Nervous System becomes a bio-constructive reality (somewhere around 23 to 25 weeks into gestation) – a time when it is obvious that we have no capacity to relegate experiences to constructs that result in verbalization.
On the other hand, Narrative Point of Origin (NPOO)* is that experience (usually an event) that can be recalled at conscious (memory) level and be verbalized. In terms of developmental science (and affectology), this cannot be the real point of origin of our primary affect learnings. Actual POOs and narrative POOs can never be the same.
Chapter 2 - How Feeling Memory Happens
All in the Interpretation
We’ve discussed that by the time any human being develops the ability for rational thought, verbal constructs or conscious level memory, they have already laid the foundations for how they experience and respond to the world at an emotional or affect (feeling) level. This is because in our early development we can only interpret the world around us at this level, and these unconscious foundations or emotional matrix will then influence all our future emotional responses and reactions. It’s unavoidable. We are empirical beings, and all our decisions and present day learnings are influenced by and based on previous learnings – particularly in the affect realm.
Developmental psychologists and researchers have, in the last few decades, had a hard look at just how the preverbal infant processes information and builds a long-lasting (perhaps life-long) emotional sense of self depending on those early life imprints and encodings. Infant psychiatrist, Daniel Stern’s book The Interpersonal World of the Infant is a seminal work in the development of an understanding about how we humans process information and environmental experience at an early age.
The research shows that all preverbal memory could only be interpretive in the present moment, and that often, when we are so ‘sure’ of our old memories, we are merely applying our adult egocentric desire to ‘be of good memory’
There are two aspects of Stern’s research that support the affectology proposition. These are the issues of amodalism, and RIGs (Registrations of Interactions that have been Generalized).
Amodalism
Great word, isn’t it. It doesn’t exist in my dictionary, but breaking it into its literal constituents, it simply means without mode, ‘mode’ meaning the sensory modes of sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. In our investigation, without mode really means without specifiable and distinct mode. It’s a “mish-mash” – a messy or confused mixture of different modes of sensory reception.
As adults, particularly since the unfortunate advent of psychoanalysis, we make what are fairly arrogant assumptions that we can scan back and perceive what it would have been like when we were such-and-such an age. The fact is that we were not the same person as we are now when we take into consideration our chaotic means of information-reception. We can NOT interpret as adults, the actual experience of just what modes of sensory input were relevant (or otherwise) to us as preverbal infants. Nor can we re-interpret any event, episode, or our behavioral response to it.
Our qualities of experience, because of amodal receptivity, were global, embracing all modes of perception, rather than any specific sensory mode.
Consider the implications of this when we scan our personal history. What part of you/us is convinced that we can remember the exact details of events and sensory input in those early years? We submit that it is the adult, ego-centric, ‘need-to-know-at-all-costs’ part of personality that is convinced that it’s possible … It’s not.
We’ll now look at the aspect of input experience at preverbal age that underscores this concept of the ‘arrogance’ of narrative therapy. That aspect is:-
RIGs - Registrations of Interactions that have been Generalized.
When we juxtapose the understanding of amodal perception and amodal sensory input with the probability that the amodal sensory experiences are then “generalized” and “re-interpreted interactions” before they are registered in such a way as to form the basis of encoding and imprinting,.
This notion that the preverbal infant mostly misinterprets stimulating information, generalizes it and then encodes the information is what constitutes the term known as RIGs.
Stern attests that “specific memories are deviant exemplars of a class of events.” The intention of this comment is to say that as adults, we cannot retrieve specific and exact memories from preverbal times without them deviating from actuality because they were subject to global amodalism and that the encoding was the result of a RIG.
At best, we can never be quite sure that memories of events are authentic.
At worst, we can be quite sure that all memories are corrupt, not by intention, but by amodalism and RIGs.
The Nature of Feeling/Affect Memory
Our investigations have shown us so far that we begin our emotional life at a time well before we are capable of any verbally oriented thought or experience. In affectology, the first affect encoding is called the Actual Point of Origin (APOO)*, referring to that experience (amodal, global and representative) from which all future learnings generate. Science tells us without equivocation, that this APOO must occur around, or shortly after, the period of time when our Autonomic Nervous System becomes a bio-constructive reality (somewhere around 23 to 25 weeks into gestation) – a time when it is obvious that we have no capacity to relegate experiences to constructs that result in verbalization.
On the other hand, Narrative Point of Origin (NPOO)* is that experience (usually an event) that can be recalled at conscious (memory) level and be verbalized. In terms of developmental science (and affectology), this cannot be the real point of origin of our primary affect learnings. Actual POOs and narrative POOs can never be the same.
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*APOO and NPOO are acceptable scientific terms used to denote extreme differences in points of origin as memories (one unconscious, the other, conscious).
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If this is the case, then verbal construct memory of early life is thrown into doubt, and we’ll look at that in the next section. On the other hand, the encodings that relate to APOO experiences remain authentic and largely intact later in life, in the way in which they were originally learned. So, affect memories are concrete, remaining basically unchanged by rational conscious effort.
To read more about how science (if you accept quantum and chaos theory as science) maintains that initial affect encodings remain to a large extent intact over our life-time – or at least are largely influential, you may like to go to this page for further notes.
Is Memory Authentic? What’s in a memory?
By now you should be questioning one of the cornerstones of classical analytic psychotherapy, and in fact, any therapeutic approach that employs “talking” in relation to remembering earlier emotional issues. And that is the principle that verbalization represents truth.
There’s no doubt that we can remember recent events and episodes with relative clarity and authenticity. But this idea of authenticity of memory fades into oblivion when we begin to look back over all that we’ve learned about just how fragile and (probably) misinterpretive earlier life emotional learnings were in the encoding.
Chapter Wrap-up:
To Continue to be fascinated, go now to PART TWO
To read more about how science (if you accept quantum and chaos theory as science) maintains that initial affect encodings remain to a large extent intact over our life-time – or at least are largely influential, you may like to go to this page for further notes.
Is Memory Authentic? What’s in a memory?
By now you should be questioning one of the cornerstones of classical analytic psychotherapy, and in fact, any therapeutic approach that employs “talking” in relation to remembering earlier emotional issues. And that is the principle that verbalization represents truth.
There’s no doubt that we can remember recent events and episodes with relative clarity and authenticity. But this idea of authenticity of memory fades into oblivion when we begin to look back over all that we’ve learned about just how fragile and (probably) misinterpretive earlier life emotional learnings were in the encoding.
Chapter Wrap-up:
- In this chapter we have seen that ‘affect memory,’ or, unconscious emotional memory, just doesn’t ‘happen.’ We have seen that there is a significant – in fact huge – difference between what we usually think we know is ‘memory’ and actual unconscious preverbal affect memory.
- This unconscious preverbal affect memory is stable when it is ‘taloned’ by the amygdala, but is almost certainly a neurological memory that has been formed within the dynamic of amodalism and misinterpretation of the stimulating environmental factors.
- Preverbal affect memory is never what you think it is.
To Continue to be fascinated, go now to PART TWO