I have 3 discussion posts I need someone to reply to and respond faithfully
post 1- Weal
- What struck you about the contents of this podcast?
What surprised me about it was the truck driver’s belief that he was entitled to compensation as a result of the collision. In situations like this, I’m always confused. I was driving the ambulance for a shift around 4 years ago, and I was in a car park traveling to the outer edge to park. However, as I drove by the business, a man stooped down (it was raining, and he was trying to stay dry) and rushed into the other side of my vehicle, hitting my rearview and slipping down near my vehicle until he fell to the ground. He basically T-boned my vehicle with his own body. I expected him to sue since everyone wants money, and my firm did finally settle despite the fact that he was found to be the cause of the tragedy. I still can’t even drive into the petrol station; thus, I could just have sued for mental distress based on this concept.
2 – Some of the ideas about emotions and the way trauma impacts the brain might be controversial. How did you react to these ideas?
To be honest, I completely get the premise. After witnessing footage of color blind individuals obtaining special spectacles that restore their vision and enabling them to perceive color, I connected it to my own thoughts. My question was if they just perceive various shades of grey, then how did they become so conscious of green and yellow? Which led me to the conclusion that we don’t actually understand what colors are since someone named them years ago, and that’s all there is to it. However, this would be my mode of understanding if my parents told me when I was a kid that red color was blue color and blue color was red color.
The notion of learned thoughts and feelings does not shock me; after all, if everything else can be learned, why can’t emotions be studied? I see it all the time with my niece or any small child. Therefore, when a kid falls, and their parents hurry to comfort them and pick them up, the child learns that every time they fall, then they will be comforted by their parents. If, on the other hand, the kid falls down and the parent check to see if they’re okay and help them to pick them up while remaining comforting, the youngster learns to comfort themselves.
3 – How would you challenge those ideas or how might you be intrigued to explore more?
I would not really question the idea, but I would question our society’s acceptance or lack thereof of conventional mental health/ emotional therapy, despite the fact that acceptance is increasing. Why not consult a mental health specialist for our minds? We all go to the doctor at least once yearly physical, unwell or not. I recently began to see a therapist (currently asymptomatic, proactively, but I have battled in the past, operating in a hectic ALS 911 EMS sector, I have experienced things and even had self-traumas; hence, I understand that in order to remain healthy, my mind must be present as well) but also just one discussion has enabled me to understand more about how my brain functions and seeks to safeguard me from myself.
To avoid getting too far into the weeds of the present situation of the United States, I feel one of the big issues present in this country is that the bulk of us was not trained to discuss “hot subjects.” We were taught “don’t speak about race, religion, sexual orientation or politics.” and so on” out of fear of offending someone else. That, on the other hand, does not educate us on how to appropriately handle these things as adults, and it prevents us from having these uncomfortable talks. When they do, it can cause serious problems amongst otherwise decent friends who don’t understand how to properly present themselves or appreciate what other people have to say on a given subject.”
References
Invisibilia (2017). Emotions. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/530928414/emotions-part-one
2- SNEE
- What struck you about the contents of this podcast?
- Some of the ideas about emotions and the way trauma impacts the brain might be controversial. How did you react to these ideas?
- How would you challenge those ideas or how might you be intrigued to explore more?
The contents of this podcast were filled with a lot of knowledge of how people view emotions, and the psychological trauma that can occur when we don’t handle our feelings correctly as a child. I was intrigued to learn the comparison of both Amanda, and Tommy and how they both handled emotions a different way. I enjoyed how the podcast gave a back story to both Amanda, and Tommy. I loved the beginning of the podcast where they described Amanda with this pickle box. It made the podcast feel that this story was going to be a happy, and positive one. When we learned that Amanda’s pickle box was ruined by her father, and Amanda was not allowed to feel her emotions I knew there was going to be some type of trauma from the story. In Amanda’s story she was told that emotions are a burden, and something she just has to deal with. In Tommy’s case he was told to control your emotions and just suck it up when his father was hitting him. Both individuals were told to feel the pain yet to not express it. Hide it, and run away from these feelings. Later we learned that culture, science, self-worth, and past experiences cause us to have his idea of introspection of concepts in our mind that can be changed over time.
The ideas of trauma can impact the brain in many different ways. The podcast gave PTSD as an example in both Tommy, and Amanda. Tommy and Amanda both experienced trauma but it affected them in different ways. Although Tommy was not family, he felt similar pain that Amanda was feeling. He truly felt like a killer, and could not be a father to his own children. They appeared to both have sadness, regret, worry, defeat, and low self-worth. I remember the feeling I had when the podcast stated the date “June 8th, 2004”. I had this feeling of worry when they stated the date, and knowing they spoke earlier that it was raining that day. It was if my brain knew something horrific was going to happen. I also remember a part in the podcast where they focused on Mikayla being buckled in safely, and giving her mom a big long hug. This emphasis of safely, and comfort between the mom, and Mikayla caused me to think something was going to happen to one of them. When the podcast described how the car looked, I felt a feeling of sickness in my stomach. I thought that the imaginary of how the car looked was similar to the way people act when they have a brain injury. The podcast stated “the car looked like an animal, ripped apart like a pack of wolves. Totally mangled with the parts all in the wrong places”(National Public Radio, 2017). I got this view in my mind of a damaged brain. The car is the brain, and people can act like animals when they are angry, and feel sadness. They are not themselves. The wolves are the pain we experience in life, and the parts all in the wrong places are our minds trying to figure out how to put the right emotions in the right place. The way our mind heals after trauma is a lot like putting the “parts” back in the right place. This is why I felt that Tommy had a right to sue for emotional pain. He took much longer to “put his parts back in the right place”, in compared to Amanda that bounced back after just a couple months. I did not agree with Amanda towards the end of the podcast when she stated that Tommy didn’t have the right to feel that way. Everyone has the right to feel the way their body responds. It is up to us to take the concepts and understand if this feeling is appropriate for each specific trauma.
Ideas that I would challenge is when Lisa Feldman stated that you can not choose how you respond. Emotions are built into our brain, and there is nothing your can do. There was an example of “If you cut us, we bled; a child dies we cry”. I do not feel that everyone experiences this same feeling. The example of getting cut, and then bleeding is scientific, yet a child dying will not cause everyone to cry. Some people do not have that emotion of sadness that is connected to loving children. People with brain injuries, and the neurodiverse population will not necessarily cry if a child dies. Some may laugh, some may cry, some may not feel anything at all. Emotions are more of the concepts of what the brain sends to the body, telling the system what to feel. This is why the special needs population will not experience the same emotion, because there is damage to their system. To learn more about this idea I feel I might listen to another podcast of lnvisibilia, or read more books about how the mind, and emotions are related to trauma.
References
NPR. (2017, June 1). Emotions. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/530928414/emotions-part-one.
3- DOU WO
The first thing that struck me was that the new view of emotions sounds similar to combining social learning theory and cognitive dissonance theory. Instead of theorizing, only behaviors are learned through social interactions; emotions are also learned through social interactions. We as a culture appear to create a set of rules around emotions and pass it through generations. More specifically, our culture defines our perception of the world, which subsequently influences how we feel about things around us. For example, different cultures view death differently, which results in people worldwide reacting to deaths differently.
Tommy learned from his father that men have the ability to control their emotions, and he also learned that he is a skilled driver because society identifies him as a professional driver. Tommy’s case demonstrated that when the accident created dissonance between his cognition (that he is a skilled driver and has control of his emotions) and behavior (a collision resulting in a child’s death), Tommy suffered mental stress. Since there is no way to justify a child’s death or change any past behavior, the only resolution for Tommy is to change his cognition and understand that men cannot control their emotions, and the child’s death had nothing to do with his driving skills.
To apply this in disaster settings, responders often learned from our culture (TV shows, news, everyday interactions) that their roles are to save lives, and the braves will save lives. They learned that there are expectations of their professions. Maybe we can reduce the dissonance early on and mitigate some of the post-incident mental stress through cultural changes? Maybe by calling responders “heroes,” we are setting them up for future dissonance?
I partly agree with Barrett’s statement that emotions are not “hardwired”, although I thought it was a bit sensationalizing. To my understanding, Barrett suggests that since our emotions construct the world around us, we can control our emotions by changing and relearn how we perceive the world. However, this notion does not change the results of our existing emotions and perceptions. Once emotional trauma is done, we cannot go back in time to change our existing perception of the world to undo the trauma. Let’s use lung cancer as an analogy: discovering the link between smoking and lung cancers does not help cure lung cancer. Just as discovering that we can relearn or control our emotions, does not mean PTSD is not real or that we can undo the physical damage caused by stress. Obviously, this is a much deeper topic than just “emotions” and we should take a more comprehensive approach to look at stress: what causes emotional stress, how it translates to physical stress on a systemic level, and how it translates to genetic changes. Barrett’s finding may only be a very small part of a really big picture.
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