A hostile environment can increase the pain, which makes the fear reaction stronger. You get 1 unit of pain from the rejection, and perhaps 10 units of pain from people who keep mocking you for weeks. So your memory associates the event with 11 units of pain, instead of 1. This alone is enough to explain why the situation is worse.
I am suggesting that it may work a lot like this but a little bit differently. The main difference is that I’m suggesting that there is something uniquely painful and harmful about, not the mocking that follows the expression per se, but the inhibited expression of the pain that happens because of the mocking (the inhibited expression of the pain of the original insult but I suppose expression of the additional pain caused by the mocking itself will also be inhibited). Our emotions are functional. We do not have them just to make us miserable or to make us happy. They serve an evolutionary function ( is there any other kind of function in living things?). So my idea here is that when a person, (or animal for that matter) is prevented from expressing an emotion it is uniquely damaging, much more so than whatever damage the event would do if they could express it.
I heard a guest on a psychology podcast that I listen to (shrinkrapradio.com #321) describe how a facial tic that he’d had all his life went away after re-experiencing a car accident that he’d been in when he was a child. He hadn’t connected the tic to the car accident but after re-experiencing it he understood it as a continual triggering of his initial attempt at a defensive reaction. The tic was on the same side of his face from which the other car had hit the car he was in. He believes that once he was allowed to complete his natural defensive reaction the tic went away. The reaction had been triggered over and over and over in his life but had never been allowed to complete. In one session, where he allowed it to run its course, it was gone forever and he hasn’t had it since. So what is happening there? He hasn’t gone out in a buch of car rides to desensitize himself. In fact in his life since the accident he’d probably ridden and/or driven cars thousands of times and it had no effect on the tic. Simple behavioral learning theory doesn’t explain this. There is more going here. Something about not completing the natural reaction to the situation created a recurring problem.
I’m not exactly sure what is going on in a case like this but I’d be curious to hear anyone’s theories.
I want to add that I think, and this may be obvious, that this also applies to entirely emotional reactions. I don’t see any reason why emotional reactions would be subject to different rules than physical protective reactions.
I like this :
I am suggesting that it may work a lot like this but a little bit differently. The main difference is that I’m suggesting that there is something uniquely painful and harmful about, not the mocking that follows the expression per se, but the inhibited expression of the pain that happens because of the mocking (the inhibited expression of the pain of the original insult but I suppose expression of the additional pain caused by the mocking itself will also be inhibited). Our emotions are functional. We do not have them just to make us miserable or to make us happy. They serve an evolutionary function ( is there any other kind of function in living things?). So my idea here is that when a person, (or animal for that matter) is prevented from expressing an emotion it is uniquely damaging, much more so than whatever damage the event would do if they could express it.
I heard a guest on a psychology podcast that I listen to (shrinkrapradio.com #321) describe how a facial tic that he’d had all his life went away after re-experiencing a car accident that he’d been in when he was a child. He hadn’t connected the tic to the car accident but after re-experiencing it he understood it as a continual triggering of his initial attempt at a defensive reaction. The tic was on the same side of his face from which the other car had hit the car he was in. He believes that once he was allowed to complete his natural defensive reaction the tic went away. The reaction had been triggered over and over and over in his life but had never been allowed to complete. In one session, where he allowed it to run its course, it was gone forever and he hasn’t had it since. So what is happening there? He hasn’t gone out in a buch of car rides to desensitize himself. In fact in his life since the accident he’d probably ridden and/or driven cars thousands of times and it had no effect on the tic. Simple behavioral learning theory doesn’t explain this. There is more going here. Something about not completing the natural reaction to the situation created a recurring problem.
I’m not exactly sure what is going on in a case like this but I’d be curious to hear anyone’s theories.
I want to add that I think, and this may be obvious, that this also applies to entirely emotional reactions. I don’t see any reason why emotional reactions would be subject to different rules than physical protective reactions.