Traumatic Individuation Under Persistent Cultural Threat: A Primer
What if we're not built for individuation?
Background
A core spiritual practice for me is simply talking, sometimes with psychedelics (especially Low-5), but usually with just a bit of cannabis. I worked from home for 15 years and for the last three of them I would pace my house or neighbourhood while speaking into my AirPods whenever I had something I needed to process. When typing you can get writer’s block. With speech, you just keep going, and sometimes, you surprise yourself.
Sometimes, I convert myself. Sometimes I fall back in love. Sometimes I speak forth a pattern that my body has recognized long before I had a name for it, and insight seems to cascade further when the patterns receive appropriate naming.1
This is the result of naming that pattern many, many times over the last three years. I call it Traumatic Individuation Under Persistent Cultural Threat. At its heart it asks: are we really built for individuation? What kinds of dysfunctions might we expect from a social ape forced into atomized individuation? Could this explain some facts of our world, and could we use this for some healing?
This theory doesn’t acknowledge the boundaries between anthropology, sociology, psychology, spirituality, and biology, for both better and worse.
Some days I would wake up early, before everyone, and just speak and try to capture a comprehensive take on this theory that I could share publicly. I liked this one the best of this group and I’m completely abandoning my plan to turn it into cleaned-up prose or re-record it with better diction and audio quality.
I cleaned up the transcript with an LLM a bit if you prefer text to audio, but otherwise no LLM oracles were consulted in the creation of this theory.
Transcript
Yesterday, I tried to record what I’m calling my core thesis here, which is Traumatic Individuation Under Persistent Cultural Threat. To say it a little more briefly: individuation is unnatural. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it’s unnatural.
If we were in an environment—and for human beings, our environment is always primarily, at this point anyway, a cultural environment—if we were in a cultural environment that was safe and communal, we would never individuate. And this has, of course, been the case throughout most of human history. The sense of the self as an individual is a relatively recent innovation. We would never have thought of ourselves that way, and we’ve only been able to think of ourselves that way as we’ve gone through generation after generation of traumatic individuation.
So let’s get a little more into this. What do I mean?
Firstly, and primarily, for most human beings—I won’t say for all, but for most—the process of becoming an individual is a trauma response. It’s not something we really want to do, but something we have to do. Firstly, it’s necessary because there’s no way to survive in this world without becoming some level of an individual, without some level of individuation. Secondly, it’s really just the only strategy available to us. And we’re so wonderfully flexible that we can adapt to all kinds of unnatural environments.
Again, I don’t use “unnatural” pejoratively. I’m saying that what has happened is that we’ve formed a cultural environment that is itself unnatural. And again, I don’t say that pejoratively. I just mean this is an environment that has been constructed, created, made by humans. That’s everything from the level of ideas—being able to conceptualize ourselves as an individual self and believe that’s the normal state of affairs—all the way to the way we’ve terraformed the earth. We’ve killed off most of the other apex predators by being the apex of the apex ourselves. We’ve terraformed the earth, or more specifically, androformed the earth. We live in what’s called the Anthropocene.
Of course, it’s a strong statement to say that to become an individual, as a Homo sapiens, is unnatural. But you see this colloquially. What do you hear from people? “I want to be part of something bigger than myself.” “I want to belong to something bigger than myself.” This is a natural impulse. It’s what we were selected for in evolutionary history.
One of the interesting things, if you look at the work of Richard Wrangham—the anthropologist who wrote The Goodness Paradox—is that he makes the case that Homo sapiens are a species that have self-domesticated. We selected for the features of domestication ourselves. He talks about the Russian experiments where they domesticated foxes—now called silver foxes—just by selecting for lower and lower levels of reactive aggression. That’s the hallmark of domesticity: lower reactive aggression.
It’s basic: you can touch a silver fox without it trying to bite you. A wild fox will try to bite you. Homo sapiens selected against reactive aggression. This enabled us to work closely together without constantly triggering hierarchical dominance behaviors. Not that dominance hierarchies don’t exist today, but they were built later, on top of a substrate that was radically non-aggressive—or at least non-reactively aggressive.
Wrangham’s point is that we still have strong proactive aggression, which is what enabled us to collaborate to eliminate dominators in our midst—to literally murder them, to assign them the death penalty. This gives an interesting shading to René Girard’s thesis on the scapegoat mechanism. Girard’s work interleaves fruitfully with Wrangham’s “murdering the dominators” idea in our path toward self-domestication.
What makes us distinct is our propensity for mimesis—imitation. And that only happens if we can remain in each other’s presence without driving each other away through reactivity. You only get the full flowering of mimesis in low-reactivity environments, where you can be in each other’s presence constantly without the need for one to dominate the other. This produces the kind of egalitarian, flat social structures you see in hunter-gatherer tribes.
A big source for me here is the work of E. Richard Sorenson, especially his seminal essay Preconquest Consciousness, where he describes pre-contact tribal societies functioning as a kind of hive mind—what he calls liminal consciousness. Sorenson points out that this mode of being is unintelligible to most of us, being so heavily individuated—what I would call traumatically individuated. His observations are indispensable.
It’s also profound to see the breaking of that group mind in these tribes—the fall of liminal consciousness—under the pressures of post-conquest life. Contact with the outside world, and all its aggression and violence, shatters it. Sorenson’s reports are heartbreaking: weeping, wailing, blank looks in the eyes, sleeplessness, screaming in the night, night terrors. He notes how much people turn to sex in the aftermath, having lost more compelling forms of sensuality. This liminal sensuality was strongly pleasurable—rapturous—and there were immense rewards for living that way.
So what went wrong?
First, liminal consciousness only scales to about the size of a tribe—around Dunbar’s number, 100–120 people, maybe as low as 80. Second, even in such groups, reactive aggression hasn’t been eliminated entirely. There are always more prickly individuals, less able to sync with the group. That creates discord. Girard’s point is that our shared mimetic field becomes problematic when both of our attentions fixate on the same scarce resource—mates, children, food, or status. Status, by definition, is limited. That competition spreads like wildfire through the group, creating chaos.
The instinct then is to use the “disgust” reflex: get rid of whatever is causing the discord. We already knew how to get rid of dominators, per Wrangham’s self-domestication thesis, so we find someone to blame and kill them. Girard’s point is that in killing the scapegoat, believing they are responsible, we restore unity—a pacific, rapturous field, or in Sorenson’s terms, the restoration of liminal consciousness. We act together against the “evildoer” and come into one accord.
The trouble is, it feels permanent at the time because the before-and-after shift is so strong—but it isn’t. The conflict always returns. We resort to sacrifice again and again. Modern people don’t realize how saturated in blood human history has been. The long peace of the West is a historical aberration. I pray it lasts, but history is not on my side.
Eventually, within the cultural milieu, violence against the scapegoat stops producing unity. We can’t form unanimities anymore because we no longer believe the scapegoat is guilty. But we haven’t stopped looking for scapegoats. So one of the persistent cultural threats we live with is the knowledge that other people are out to get us.
In the ancestral environment, threats were external—other tribes, predators, the environment. Inside the tribe was safe. Among social mammals, the group is the refuge. The scapegoat mechanism converts an internal threat into an external one. This matters because in response to threat, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs an escalating cascade: hot, active responses; then cold, passive responses.
Imagine you’re a zebra at a watering hole.2 You hear a rustle in the bushes. You get more alert. You’re starting to activate your threat response cascade, moving toward what’s called state one, which is alertness—paranoia, anxiety. But you scan the environment, and there doesn’t seem to be anything there, so you return to what’s called state zero, what polyvagal theory calls “safe and social.” Rest and digest.
This is the natural state, where you’re not afraid. You’re at the oasis, drinking water, hanging out with your zebra homies. Life is good. This is as good as it gets: state zero, no problems, everything’s fine.
Another rustle in the bushes—alertness. Your ears perk up, your heart rate rises, a little bit of adrenaline is injected into your system. Time slows down a bit as you assess the environment. Sure enough, there’s a lion in the bushes. It froze when it was spotted, so now there’s this attention standoff. It was trying to sneak up and stepped on a twig. All the zebras are now alert and paying attention to it.
You’re locked into state one—persistent alertness—and you can stay there indefinitely. When this gets locked in for a human being, we might call it generalized anxiety disorder, or “I’m just an anxious person,” because you never again feel safe enough to let your guard down. Constant vigilance.
State two is when the lion charges. Now you fully trigger the defense response: the fight-or-flight response. There’s a big adrenaline dump, and the zebra tears off running. The lion tries to separate one zebra from the pack, and it’s chosen you. You run, run, run. If you were a fighting animal instead, you’d be fighting, fighting, fighting. This is active defense: the desperation to survive, giving it everything you have.
Sometimes that’s enough to survive, but in this case, it isn’t. The lion catches you, jaws around your throat, and takes you to the ground. Now we move into the passive defense cascade. The active defense of the sympathetic nervous system gives way to the passive defense of the parasympathetic nervous system—cold responses, numbing. There’s no longer a spike of anxiety; now you move into numbing because you’re going to die.
You move into numbing when active defense has been exhausted and you can’t escape or fight. The lion has you on the ground. Your body dumps a lot of its own morphine supply—endogenous opioids—into your system to numb you. If you’ve had a traumatic injury, you’ve felt this as “going into shock.” You just can’t feel your body. This is nature’s gift: as you’re about to die, you’ve got your own painkillers onboard. It doesn’t hurt that much, and you’re not screaming in agony. Prey animals mostly go limp as they’re about to die, a passive acceptance of death.
But state three still has a glimmer of hope. You’re still paying attention to the environment in case conditions change so you can get away. Imagine the lion has taken you down, but suddenly a pack of hyenas arrives. The lion is distracted, competing for the kill. While their attention is caught up in each other, you take the opportunity and bolt.
Now, state three—numbing and dissociation—gives way back to state two: fight-or-flight intensity. You run with everything you’ve got until you feel you’ve gotten away. Then you come back down the activation ladder, deactivating in the reverse sequence: from state two to state one. You scan the environment—nothing, nothing, nothing—until you finally feel safe. But the full safety doesn’t happen until you’re back among your herd.
In social mammals, the safety cue that it’s actually safe now—safe enough to fully deactivate—comes when you’re back in the group. And in nature, what often happens is that the zebra starts to shake, literally shaking off the activation energy still in the system. The system is trying to restore itself to homeostasis, back to state zero: safe and social.
If no hyenas come and the lion moves in for the kill, state three gives way to state four: the full flood of numbing. The lion’s teeth are on your neck, and your body does one last big dump of opioids as you die. Nature’s gift again.
The trick for humans is twofold: we can inhibit the threat cascade’s natural drive to resolve, and we can live in environments so uncertain we never feel safe enough to get back to state zero.
To feel safe, we need the presence of others—our pack, our family, our tribe. As long as the threat is out there and it’s safe in here, the system works normally. But for human beings, the biggest threat is other human beings. And when you can’t tell which ones are safe, you can end up in a perpetually activated state.
In the nuclear family—again, a recent development in human history—if your family is the threat, you’re never safe. You can’t fight, though some try. You can’t run away, because society will give you back to those abusing or neglecting you. So it’s never safe.
What we call trauma is when the activation to threat never goes away and it gets locked in. You can get locked into any of the states I’ve described except for state two, which can’t be sustained. You can get stuck in state one—generalized anxiety and vigilance—or in states three or four—numbing and hopelessness—because there’s no way out.
As a child, I had no way out. I couldn’t get away from my tormentors, who I had to see as my refuge even as they were my threat at the same time. We form these splits, and they do enormous damage. We form a sense of self as an isolated individual because we can no longer merge with the hive mind—we don’t know who’s safe, and in fact nobody knows how to do that anymore.
We fail to update to our environment and feel safe even after the threat has passed. In my case, I’m 45 years old and haven’t lived under the same roof as my parents in 25 years. And yet, my inner system has found it incredibly difficult to update to the truth of my present. I locked in on the prediction that it’s hopelessly unsafe all the time. The only way to cope with that hopelessly unsafe state, when you can’t get away and you can’t fight, is to numb, to dissociate, to just live there—and to start feeling like any kind of intensity is itself threatening and must be eliminated.
In relation to individuation and the threat cascade, here’s another theory I have. When you’re under threat, a social mammal’s sense of self-boundary contracts. It keeps close track of the body’s boundaries—its integrity—because this is about survival. You need to know where your body is in relation to the threat. So you contract your awareness into the boundaries of your individual body to evade or escape the threat.3
But the natural state is for the boundary of the self to be at the level of the group—the tribe, the pack. Inside is the group; outside is everything else. Under individual threat, the sense of inside/outside contracts to the body. “I’ve got to look out for myself here. I’ve got to take care of myself.” When this contracted self-boundary under threat gets stuck, you produce the self.
Individuation is a stuck threat response.
This is why contemplative traditions aim at dissolving that stuck threat response—the self. They de-center the subject-object split so you can feel yourself flowing within a larger whole, because you’re no longer just trying to survive. Moving into that flow often feels like ego dissolution or ego death: the contracted, protected self falls away because it was constructed.
Moving in the Tao, or in Rigpa, often gets called the natural state—the state of flow—because you’re safe. That’s what happens when you’re safe. But our cultural environment produces individuals who have never felt safe in their lives, and who have never tasted the rapture of disappearing into the collective.
We see the creation of new rituals to temporarily give people that experience. This is part of the appeal of high-dose psychedelics: they dissolve the buffered, protected self. That can be terrifying—hence “bad trips”—or it can be deeply relieving if the contracted state is all you’ve ever known. The first time I took a high dose of mushrooms and my sense of self dissolved, I was relieved. To no longer be identified with that contracted, fearful self was a gift.
This is my theory of traumatic individuation under persistent cultural threat. It suggests that therapy can start at the individual level, but it can’t stay there. We need group work. Even one-on-one therapy is only a start. We need to pursue broader kinds of group therapy, dissolving the self back into the hive mind so we can feel real safety and vitality again.
When done without wisdom, this is what cult dynamics look like. People are so desperate for the group-mind experience that they’ll put up with a lot of abuse as long as it delivers that feeling of safety—where the inside is the group rather than the individual, and the outside is outside the group rather than the body. But the group has to actually be safe.
We’re so starved for it that we’ll put up with a lot. This is how cults happen. It’s important to see the individual self as a defense mechanism, part of the threat cascade that got stuck. Humans can get stuck in those places, and our environment now is primarily cultural—made by humans, constructed. That doesn’t make it less real; it just makes it different from nature. And we are not very well adapted to this cultural-technological environment.
We’re quite unhappy in it, even as it’s been effective in many ways.
That’s it. That’s one of the better times I’ve tried to explain this—about 45 minutes. Time to put on the dad hat. And if everything goes well, I get to do some drugs today.4
Postscript
This snapshot is all analysis and could be taken fatalistically if you believe that, if my analysis is taken as true, that there’s not much to be done. I certainly don’t think so. I highly commend both Saj Ravzi’s Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy and Doug Tataryn’s Bio-Emotive Framework and its NEDERA Process. It’s especially important to note that while you can gain some benefit from doing either alone, there is a critical attachment repair component that comes with in-person working that you will never get working solo, and probably not over a video call either.
I also think that there’s a kind of version of liminal rapport that can be entered into selectively and volitionally to form highly-connected, probably near-psychic connectivity in human collaboration. We are built to work together. This is our advantage, syncing up with each other, modeling each other. But we have to both drop our masks, and be safe enough to do so (part of that safety is the freedom to selectively don the mask). You could also use language around the buffered and unbuffered self around this.
We must individuate. We cannot go back to a kind of naive liminal consciousness. There is no retvrn, only going forward. Just as Ricouer theorized about a second naivete, we need a kind of second liminal consciousness on the other side of a clean, complete, individuation. There is nothing wrong with individuation, some even do so with low/no trauma due to sufficiently supportive relationships. But I think this is probably a disturbingly small minority, at least in the West.
So much more to say in a future “so what to do about this then” post and now I’m in danger of trying to defend and support other parts of my thesis and I’m just done for now. It’s imperfect, incomplete, and I think it’s right.
This “naming of the body’s truth” is at the core of Focusing and its evolution into the Bio-Emotive Framework. I finally resolved the substantial majority of my past stuck traumas and/or attachment repair with Doug probably around six months after recording this. One of the ironic things in this piece is that a huge theme of our work was individuation, and how I needed to continue my process in that. See more in the Postscript on this theme.
Although I don’t give credit, this is all drawn from Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy by Saj Razvi, which I go over in this twitter thread. Razvi trained under Eric Wolterstorff, who trained under Peter Levine. Their combined work on the ANS threat cascade, how it gets stuck, and how to complete the incomplete threat response and return to baseline, is still far too little known for how critically important I believe it to be.
By this I mean that the sense of the individual self could be a kind of repurposing of the proprioceptive sense.
86mg 5-MAPB, 15mg FMA, 5mg 5-MeO-MiPT - this homemade Borax Combo went very well indeed. Topped with some 5-MeO-DMT vapes.