Grooming deprivation and self-directed behaviours

Dr Harris' bestselling self-help book on transactional analysis

My approach to psychology is largely influenced by evolutionary theory.  The brain is an organ that developed to help man survive during the 200,000 year period in which he lived as a hunter-gatherer.  In comparison, what we understand as modern man begins with the commencement of agriculture 10,000 years ago.  In the popular mind modern man is younger than this even - he is identified with the computer age , a period kickstarted by the industrial revolution less than 200 years ago.

Not surprisingly, our perception of ourselves as modern means we do not really understand ourselves very well - by which I mean our needs.  Because we fail to understand what our brains evolved for, we fail to raise our children to be happy and well-balanced.  Parents often believe that because their child is fed, clothed and is safely watching TV that their job is done.  But if the child feels lonely or misunderstood and gets angry or demanding the parents too become childish and angry in response.  They may remind the child that s/he has been given more than they ever had and that such outbursts are indications of ingratitude and poor character.  'I don't know who he takes after' or, 'He has the devil in him,' they may say.  What the parent has failed to understand is the situation of the child from its point of view.

The child' experiences the world differently to the adult.  The child is physically smaller than the adults and may feel powerless, intimidated, separate and isolated.  The child has less freedom than adults - he must be accountable for his behaviour and if he is unhappy at home can hardly leave and get himself a place of his own.  He may feel confined - even trapped!  Above all, the child is reliant on the relationship with his parents to support his emotional needs.

 We can think of a child's needs - for understanding, attention, approval and recognition - as a need for grooming or stroking.  Grooming in primates requires a state of trust between the two groomers.  In both, the act of combing and stroking fur invokes calmness, pleasure and facilitates bonding - whereby a sense of separateness gives way in light of the close attention devoted to performing the grooming motions.

In humans, words as much as physical strokes are integral to grooming. ('Hi, how's it going?' and the like.)  Both serve the purpose of conveying to the other person that someone cares about how they feel and how they are doing. Both are acts of attention and recognition.

When a child has a parent that cannot provide this sense of well-being the ancient brain changes because for it grooming (or its lack) is a matter of survival - regardless of whether food, clothes and TVs are in abundance.  Grooming signifies closeness and bonding and without this survival for a hunter-gatherer is compromised.

In Dr Miller's book I'm Okay-You're Okay he discusses how a child unable to elicit grooming from its parents will change.  He will come to perceive himself as not okay and his parents as not okay too.  This, I'm not okay - You're not okay position is damaging because it is one of hopelessness.  The child learns the lesson that no grooming is obtainable and the adult component of his personality, which functions to obtain grooming (i.e. manipulate the social environment), gives up.  As a result he will aim to just get through life, to survive - but have no expectation of anything more than this.

How our parents treat us affects how we view others around us.  If there is no love (i.e. grooming and stroking) at home then we can see all people as 'not okay' i.e. unable to provide us with what we need.  Dr Miller views this mindset as one that leads to self-harming behaviour.  Self-hitting is a way of acting out the frustration of not being able to elict grooming from others.  The child is saying that, If I am not okay ( I need but cannot obtain grooming) and you are not okay (you are unable to provide grooming) then this (the body/self) is useless and I shall smash it. 

In my view, people who feel some part of them is unacceptable and is therefore blocking any possibility for grooming may do this too.  For example, people who feel that they are too fat, or ugly and feel unable to change this aspect of themselves may self-harm too. 

Sometimes grooming is available from the parent but it is inappropriate and approaches a taboo such as incest.  In this case, the child must oppose the impulse to be groomed by the parent because it fails to have the soothing effect he needs.  In such a case hair-pulling behaviour may emerge as a way to deactivate the approach behaviour that is triggering the incest taboo.

As we get older we must try to recover the child from the situations in which negative feelings took over - including when self-directed behaviour was first encountered.  The aim is to reconnect with and relive the situation as it was experienced at the time.  Transactional psychology aims for this but says that change can only come by evaluating the data from the past with the faculty of the adult in the present.  It is not all about the past but about the present too!

More on unnatural environments - the family unit

Since most of us grow up within family units it is useful to consider this social context in which most self-directed behaviours emerge.

Hair pulling, for example, usually appears in later childhood and the early teen years and is more widely reported in girls than boys – a statistic that may reflect the greater cultural importance of hair to women. But the real point here is that developing humans are more at risk of developing odd behaviours than fully grown ones. This is because when we are growing our bodies and minds are growing into their environment and becoming 'wired up'. Once this process is completed the pattern of wiring is more stable or set and so there is less risk of new patterns emerging - but equally abnormal patterns of behaviour that emerge during this key window are more resistant to change.

Where a disturbed behaviour is linked to the mechanics of the family unit a doctor may recommend a family therapist be brought in to study the picture. Family systems therapy grew out of work in the 1970s when the family became viewed as a network of relationships that could be directly affected by benign intervention. Preceding such intervention parents commonly brought a child to their doctor, complaining that s/he was the black sheep of the family whereas everyone else was 'normal'. However, once the family therapist analysed the social transactions between family members a very different picture would often emerge. Often the 'problem child' was being scapegoated for a systemic failure in the greater scheme of the way family relationships were ordered. It would not be until a new social order was created within the household that the scapegoated child's behaviour altered for the better – along with new relationship balances among all the family members.

By viewing the family as a system or network that embodies a greater social order (and not as made up of separate individuals) it becomes easier to identify the emergence of self-directed behaviours. A classic example is the one of the aloof father who does not support the mother with the children so that she feels isolated and depressed. One or more of the children feel forced to take on the role parent towards the mother and may become overloaded with stress and more vulnerable to self-comforting behaviours as a result. In this instance family therapy would need to focus on the parents' relationship first and not be blinded by any symptoms exhibited by the child.

Where the social order of the family is so askew that it does not reflect the wider social order outside of the home a child may well feel isolated from parents and peers, feel unable to bring people into the home environment or trust anyone enough to talk about the situation. Such extremes might include cases of incest, severe emotional neglect and the consequences of serious economic deprivation such as alcoholism, domestic violence or prostitution. Where the family system has failed a child, one can expect that some form of compensation will be found in self-directed behaviour. But pinpointing precise causes to particular self-directed behaviours is, for now, elusive.

Social order is important to human beings and where it breaks down within family relationships feelings of isolation, rejection, distrust and shame rise to the surface. All of these feelings are warning bells that tell us something is wrong and that corrective action is needed. For example, isolation should promote social attachment seeking; rejection will lead to attempts at retrieving the lost bond or self-removal from the relationship; distrust signals the need for caution and tighter self-regulation; shame may increase the tendency for hiding and self-loathing. In short, these are feelings we cannot ignore or bury but in many cases people do just that because no course of action to resolve the problems may seem available. So, people try to block out the feelings or deny them. And it is at this point that I believe we are most vulnerable to developing self-directed behaviours.

Blocking or inhibiting any part of the self sets up the scene for internal conflict. When this conflict is between two opposing impulses a sort of short circuit may occur and out of this unwanted and unexpected behaviours emerge. These have been viewed in a number of ways by ethologists and psychologists over the years. For example, Freud saw in these strange behaviours the overflow of energy and its re-channelling (or displacement) into undesirable behaviour. But more modern thinking views self-directed behaviours as unconscious strategies of self-regulation (e.g. self-comforting/grooming) or 'mental programs' that become engaged in particular conditions.

Of course, the family in itself is not an unnatural environment. But under certain conditions (e.g. where no love or approval is available to a child) it can be experienced as a captive state, one of confinement and one in which normal social roles become obscured to the extent that people lose their social sense of place and function. These are the conditions that must be guarded against.

A brief review of displacement behaviours...read all about it!

Displacement behaviours are usually self-directed actions that may appear to have no relevance to the situation in which they occur.


In this blog I focus a lot on hair pulling as an example of such phenomena.  Essentially, I believe people pull out hair in situations that reveal prolonged discomfort, embarrassment or disruption to normal behaviour. The hair pulling emerges non-consciously.

Other behaviours that have been noted as displacement behaviours are as follows:

• yawning when not tired (Krout, 1939)
  
• grooming, cleansing or modifying the attractiveness of the face (Eckman and Friesen, 1972)
  
• wetting the lips when they are not dry
  
• clearing the throat when there is no obstruction or cold
  
• hair smoothing (we see this at football matches when a goal is narrowly missed)
  

Waxer (1977) identified the mouth, torso, hand and eyes as the most common sites and targets for displacement behaviour.

To the list above I would also add these too:

• other modes of hair manipulation
  
• head scratching
  
• chin rubbing
  
• Umming and ahhing in speech (and other speech disturbances)
  
• lip biting
  
• nose picking
  
• scalp picking
  

Psychologists and ethologists have often noted that these behaviours are associated with emotional conflicts and are indicative of discomfort and anxiety.

A further interesting example is social coughing, whereby people will cough in conflict situations.  One theory is that such coughing is an automatic reflex that allows the cougher to keep his ambivalence or aversive feelings at an unconscious level. (Grumet, 1987).  In this respect, social coughing could serve as a reflex distress call or protest during an emotional conflict situation.

One theory that I find fascinating is that displacement behaviours may be a means a way of blocking speech or sound making (Elanan and Friesen, 1969).  In this sense, the behaviour emerges in a conflict situation that can neither be avoided nor met - an intolerable situation that requires the body to find some 'neutral' course.  By not speaking or expressing anything that can be construed as aggressive the person targets safety and/or comfort through behaviour that may appear odd to the outside observer.


By considering the irrelevance or superfluousness of speech or verbal expression to any of the behaviours listed above, maybe it can be shown that speaking and displacement behaviours are mutually incompatible.


One quick experiment:  Tell a member of your family to be quiet or shush them in a forceful manner (for example, on the grounds that you want to hear the news) and see if they yawn or perform a self-directed behaviour.

References:

Eckman, P. & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repetoire of nonverbal behavior:

Categories, origins, usage and coding. Semiotica, 1, 49-98. 

 

Eckman, P. & Friesen, W. V. (1972). Hand movements. The Journal of

Communication, 22, 353-374. 

Grumet, G.W. (1987). Psychogenic coughing: A review and case report.

Comprehensive Psychiatry, 28(l), 28-34. 

Krout, M. H. (1939). Understanding human gestures. Scientific Monthly, 48-49,

167-172.

Waxer, P. H. (1977). Non-verbal cues for anxiety: An examination of emotional

leakage. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 86, 306-3 14.

What philosophy can teach psychology

Martin Heidegger's Black Forest cottage, where he wrote Being and Time

In my view one of the greatest philosophers, who inspired Sarte's existentialism but who is sometimes criticised for being  mystical in writings, is Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger sought inspiration for his philosophical ideas from common everyday situations and in this respect he was very much a philosopher of everyday life. Perhaps his greatest ideas came to him whilst spending time alone in the Black Forest in his wooden cottage, where he would go walking, chop wood, perform practical chores whilst all the time reflecting on life and his own behaviour patterns.

His isolated ruminations led to his greatest work, Being and Time – which Sartre would be inspired by and go on to write his own follow up work Being and Nothingness.

In Being and Time, Heidegger sees human actions as movements towards the future - or futural actions. He offers the example of a craftsman making a barrel which requires the use of a hammer, nails and other materials. In the making of a barrel the craftsman must perform a sequence of movements and actions until an object that we recognise as a barrel emerges. To reach this point each action towards its construction must surpass the one that came before it. In this respect, each action by the craftsman is one that transcends his previous action in a continuous flow of activity or Being. The craftsman knows each action that he must make to create the barrel before he makes it; his body picks up and puts down tools without resistance as if the body and tools are one and each skilled movement is one more on the way to the future goal of a finished barrel. Heidegger highlights this act of making to reveal transcendence and through this idea he synthesises Being and time.

This is a psychology blog, but since psychology is itself a synthesis of biology and philosophy these ideas of Heidegger are notable. What they tell us is that all human behavioural patterns are futural actions. They are movements in time towards the next behaviour (and the mental goal state that it is a means to achieving) and the next. What's more, as soon as we know what we intend the moment passes us and is gone and a new state of being emerges.  In this process an end point can never be reached for life is a never ceasing process of becoming.

For me, self-directed behaviours are what occur when futural actions are transferred away from environmental goals and become focused upon the body. In other words, futural actions towards the world beyond the body have been somehow prevented or derailed. In artificial environments this can happen because without a supportive environment behaviour patterns are disrupted and the normal flow of actions toward the world may not be possible.  But the point is that in such situations the body does not stop, nor can it.  Something must always happen; transcendence or a rising above of what came before must occur.

One way to imagine this is to consider an actor who forgets his lines on stage and yet he cannot rewind or go back in time, but must go forwards. He may mumble, or stumble or even run from the stage but his actions remain futural ones; they are acts of transcendence still. Lines or no lines recalled he must get through this moment of crisis somehow. Only a stuck record can literally go backwards – living organisms cannot. Self-directed actions exemplify this point well. When normal behaviours have not been supported or hosted by the environment, self-directed behaviours emerge that are repetitive and ongoing movements that occur in a cycle that once completed begin again and again.  Each cycle, though repetitive, transcends the one before, in the same way a person knitting transcends the previous stitch with each new one. In hair pulling each pulled hair leads to the next and the next etc. 

Using Heidegger's philosophical insight psychology can speculate on the kinds of conditions and environments in which self-directed behaviour emerges. When normal behaviours can find no natural motion or transcendence through movements that promote environmental exploration, creativity or the attainment of mental goal states (such as sex, comfort, attachment etc.) because social relationships are dysfunctional then self-directed behaviours appear!  Childhood isolation, separation, rejection, symbiotic relationships between carers and children – are socially disruptive situations that are highly likely to create the disturbing frustration of normal behaviour patterns.  Any lack of reciprocity and responsiveness, especially in a young, developing organism produces the frustration of psychological inertia.

When normal behaviour patterns are derailed it means that psychological or mental states

that accompany those behaviours cannot occur either. It is the psychological inertia that partners behavioural inertia that causes problems such as hair pulling in my opinion.  The environment that does not support an organism in its species specific behaviour produces displacement actions - unless there is some means of escaping it. 

It is a shame Heidegger's name has become associated with Nazism because this blight on his name sometimes obscures what an amazing thinker he was and how vital his insights are.

Do hunter gatherers pull out hair?

Evolutionary psychology has a lot to tell us about why our brains produce odd self-directed behaviours as well as other behaviours that have adverse effects on our lives.

The humans we are today are not essentially dissimilar to the humans we were thousands of year ago.  Okay, today we have electricity, computers, biotechnology, gadgets galore, the internet – but these are all things that have come along within the last 100 years or much less.  The complex organ inside our heads is much, much, much older than any modern changes…older too than the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Humans became the species that we are today during a vast period of time spent as hunter gatherers – possibly 250,000 years or more.  This is the period during which natural selection acted upon us so that those best equipped to survive went on to reproduce and passed their genes forward.  Those who were less good at adapting fell away.  

Survival in a genetic sense was afforded to those who were successful in staying close to caregivers and avoiding predators in their youth.  Later, success went to those who could attract a mate by providing resources (males) or producing healthy offspring (females).  Many other aspects of our humanity developed during this long epoch in man’s history including our whole motivational system that underlies different behaviours.  Seeking comfort, safety, sex, preferring fatty foods, working in teams, competing, tribal identification or bonding rituals, etc.

Today we go to football games and cheer our team, work with others in the factory or office to compete against business rivals, devour cheesecake, lock our front doors at night, relax in front of the TV…different manifestations but the same fundamental motivations.  In this respect, the human of today lives in a very changed environment but his brain does not know that he is no longer a hunter gatherer. For the architecture of the brain still bears the hallmarks of our ancestral past.

Of course very few of us live nomadic lives - we are rooted to our homes, jobs and families. But a lot of our problems stem from the fact that we evolved to be mobile, problem solving, tribal living people.  The disparity between what natural selection over thousands of years made us and how we live today can sometimes be so great that problems are inevitable.

Obesity from eating too much sugary food, not exercising enough and sitting at a desk all day is one example.  Another is isolation despite living in close proximity to people in cities, where forming strong attachments based on trust is a common problem of modern city life. 

In this blog I focus on self-directed behaviour and most particularly displacement behaviour.  I believe that people sometimes find themselves in situations which they have not evolved to cope with properly.  For example, if a child is unhappy s/he may not have a large family or supportive social network that can be trusted.  As a result, s/he may feel isolated and become introverted and cut off from peers.  In this sense, they lose touch with their social environment because they are unable to respond via behaviours that once served their ancient ancestors so well, e.g. attachment and co-operation seeking.  Maybe they turn towards an alternative strategy: an abundance of fatty food at the supermarket (chocolate, sweets, sodas) leads to overeating for comfort.  But this can make people feel fat and even more unhappy because it does not solve the original problem of isolation.  It is ats such a point as this, when the environment seems to offer no relief and available behaviours fail to offer a sense of control over the world, that self-directed behaviours may emerge. 

I think hair pulling fits this brief quite well.  For example, a behaviour that is denied expression (e.g. attachment seeking) because the environment is unnatural in some way (e.g. a rejecting caregiver) will eventually be repressed.  But the innate need behind its expression remains and a tension is established between the ongoing activation of the behaviour and its repression which that produces a third displacement behaviour, such as hair pulling.  It can appear from seemingly nowhere and  baffles everyone, including (and sometimes especially) the person displaying it. 

In such cases it is the environment that needs to get fixed as soon as possible but often time is lost because the presenting symptoms and not the underlying factors are easier to pinpoint.  In time the unwanted behaviour will become stereotypical and very hard to change because the puller will losetouch with the feelings and thoughts that preceded his pulling  and  he will be oblivious to why s/he is doing it.  In fact, the comfort derived from doing it will actually become a desirable mental state, though followed by guilt or anxiety at having pulled out hair…and from there that cycle can persist for years or even a lifetime.

By the way, if anyone knows if hunter gatherers or nomads develop unwanted self-directed I would love to know.