Everything Is F*cked(14)
The Thinking Brain is objective and factual. The Feeling Brain is subjective and relative. And no matter what we do, we can never translate one form of knowledge into the other.33 This is the real problem of hope. It’s rare that we don’t understand intellectually how to cut back on carbs, or wake up earlier, or stop smoking. It’s that somewhere inside our Feeling Brain, we have decided that we don’t deserve to do those things, that we are unworthy of doing them. And that’s why we feel so bad about them.
This feeling of unworthiness is usually the result of some bad shit happening to us at some point. We suffer through some terrible stuff, and our Feeling Brain decides that we deserved those bad experiences. Therefore, it sets out, despite the Thinking Brain’s better knowledge, to repeat and reexperience that suffering.
This is the fundamental problem of self-control. This is the fundamental problem of hope—not an uneducated Thinking Brain, but an uneducated Feeling Brain, a Feeling Brain that has adopted and accepted poor value judgments about itself and the world. And this is the real work of anything that even resembles psychological healing: getting our values straight with ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world.
Put another way, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how not to get punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decided we deserved it.
Chapter 3
Newton’s Laws of Emotion
The first time Isaac Newton got hit in the face, he was standing in a field. His uncle had been explaining to him why wheat should be planted in diagonal rows, but Isaac wasn’t listening. He was gazing into the sun, wondering what the light was made of.
He was seven years old.1
His uncle backhanded him so hard across his left cheek that Isaac’s sense of self temporarily broke upon the ground on which his body fell. He lost any feeling of personal cohesion. And as the parts of his psyche put themselves back together, some secret piece of himself remained in the dirt, left behind in a place from which it would never be recovered.
Isaac’s father had died before he was born, and his mother soon abandoned her son to marry some old rich guy the next village over. As a result, Isaac spent his formative years being shuffled among uncles, cousins, and grandparents. No one particularly wanted him. Few knew what to do with him. He was a burden. Love came difficultly, and usually not at all.
Isaac’s uncle was an uneducated drunk, but he did know how to count hedges and rows in fields. It was his one intellectual skill, and because of this, he did it probably more often than he needed to. Isaac often tagged along to these row-counting sessions because it was the only time his uncle ever paid attention to him. And like water in a desert, any attention the boy got he desperately soaked in.
As it turned out, the boy was a kind of prodigy. By age eight, he could project the amount of feed required to sustain the sheep and pigs for the following season. By nine, he could rattle off the top of his head calculations for hectares of wheat, barley, and potatoes.
By age ten, Isaac had decided that farming was stupid and instead turned his attention to calculating the exact trajectory of the sun throughout the seasons. His uncle didn’t care about the exact trajectory of the sun because it wouldn’t put food on the table—at least not directly—so, again, he hit Isaac.
School didn’t make things any better. Isaac was pale and scrawny and absentminded. He lacked social skills. He was into nerdy shit like sundials, Cartesian planes, and determining whether the moon was actually a sphere. While the other kids played cricket or chased one another through the woods, Isaac stood staring for hours into local streams, wondering how the eyeball was capable of seeing light.
Isaac Newton’s early life was one hit after another. And with each blow, his Feeling Brain learned to feel an immutable truth: that there must be something inherently wrong with him. Why else would his parents have abandoned him? Why else would his peers ridicule him? What other explanation for his near-constant solitude? While his Thinking Brain occupied itself drawing fanciful graphs and charting the lunar eclipses, his Feeling Brain silently internalized the knowledge that there was something fundamentally broken about this small English boy from Lincolnshire.
One day, he wrote in his school notebook, “I am a little fellow. Pale and weak. There is no room for me. Not in the house or in the bottom of hell. What can I do? What am I good for? I cannot but weep.”2
Up until this point, everything you’ve read about Newton is true—or at least highly plausible. But let’s pretend for a moment that there’s a parallel universe. And let’s say that in this parallel universe there is another Isaac Newton, much like our own. He still comes from a broken and abusive family. He still lives a life of angry isolation. He still prodigiously measures and calculates everything he encounters.
But let’s say that instead of obsessively measuring and calculating the external, natural world, this Parallel Universe Newton decides to obsessively measure and calculate the internal, psychological world, the world of the human mind and heart.
This isn’t a huge leap of the imagination, as the victims of abuse are often the keenest observers of human nature. For you and me, people-watching may be something fun to do on a random Sunday in the park. But for the abused, it’s a survival skill. For them, violence might erupt at any moment, therefore, they develop a keen Spidey sense to protect themselves. A lilt in someone’s voice, the rise of an eyebrow, the depth of a sigh—anything can set off their internal alarm.