Aim Inhibition involves desires and goals that we believe or realize that we are unable to achieve. In aim inhibition, we lower our sights, reducing our goals to something that we believe is actually more possible or realistic. Aim inhibition may well include elements of rationalization and displacement, although the primary drive is the creation of achievable goals.

Avoidance, also characterized as an Avoidant Personality, displays a number of symptoms that can include some or all of the following: The person tends to draw inward. They don’t wish to be involved in relationships or social activites, usually showing a fear of commitment. They fear of rejection from their peers, family, or even strangers. This withdrawal can create a sense of timidness and appear as a lack of confidence in their own beliefs, hopes or achievements.

Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. A person may use:

• simple denial: deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether
• minimization: admit the fact but deny its seriousness (a combination of denial and rationalization)
• projection: admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility.  Think Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking.

Displacement  is an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects effects from an object felt to be dangerous or unacceptable to an object felt to be safe or acceptable. Displacement operates in the mind unconsciously and involves emotions, ideas, or wishes being transferred from their original object to a more acceptable substitute. It is most often used to allay anxiety; and can to the displacement of aggressive impulses or to the displacement of sexual impulses.

Intellectualization is a defense mechanism where reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress, by using excessive and abstract thinking to avoid difficult feelings.It involves removing one’s self, emotionally, from a stressful event. Intellectualization is a ‘flight into reason’, where the person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic. It was one of Freud’s original defense mechanisms. Freud believed that memories have both conscious and unconscious aspects, and that intellectualization allows for the conscious analysis of an event in a way that does not provoke anxiety.

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings. Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them. An example of this behavior might be blaming someone else for self-failure.

Rationalization (also known as making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism in which perceived controversial behaviors or feelings are logically justified and explained in a rational or logical manner in order to avoid any true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable– or even admirable and superior– by plausible means. Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly subconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt). Sometimes rationalization occurs when we think we know ourselves better than we do.

Reaction Formation  is a defensive process in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration (hypertrophy) of the direct opposite tendency.

Repression is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one’s own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one’s conscious awareness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious.

Sublimation is a defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior. As used by Freud, the word designated the concept of a spiritual redirection of the libido. A more sinister example might be when a sadist becomes a surgeon or a dentist.

Suppression arises when the threat of thinking fearful thoughts triggers anxious impulses. Suppression is the process of deliberately forcing the unwanted thoughts out of awareness and replacing them with less anxiety-producing thoughts.

Transference is a phenomenon characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. One definition of transference is “the redirection of feelings and desires and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood toward a new person.” It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or children (i.e., cross-generational entanglements). For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.

In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of transference without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.

A modern, social-cognitive perspective on transference, uncovered by Dr. Susan Andersen at New York University, explains how it occurs in everyday life. When we encounter a person who reminds us of someone whom we do or did like and who is or was important to us, we infer, unconsciously, that this person is indeed like our significant other (whether a lover, friend, relative, or other person). Myriad effects arise from this, including inferring that traits belong to the new person that in fact belong to the significant other.This perspective illuminates how we tend to repeat relationship patterns from the past in the present.

Most of this material was obtained from Wikipedia.

My draw to this work isn’t all that altruistic. It’s more the result of how it makes me feel when I do it: it seems to trigger an oxytocin and endorphin release in my brain and body. Oxytocin is the peptide most responsible for reducing fear and increasing trust – good experiences to have in our daily workplace. They helped me to answer The Big Brain Question, “Yes.”

The Heart’s Energetic Torus

Heart Torus

The Evolution of the Heart

Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his book, The Biology of Transcendence makes the claim that in spite of wars and recurring economic and political turmoil, human beings are still in the process of evolving. While certainly open to scientific debate, where that evolution is taking us, Pearce claims, is in the direction of hooking up more and more neurons from the brain to the heart. He identifies the heart as our “Fifth Brain,” one we potentially begin making early connections to in childhood. To the extent those early connections are supported and encouraged and given repeated opportunities for growth and development, Pearce argues, they will tend to strengthen and increase, much as the neural networks in any part of the head brain tend to do.

Reasons of Its Own

Ever the scientist, and fascinated with this line of inquiry, after being diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma, Dr. Paul Pearsall made the most of serendipity. When he found himself recovering from radiation treatments on a hospital ward together with a number of heart transplant patients he was curious to know what it was like to have someone else’s heart beating in their chest. So he began to interview these transplant patients. It turns out that the hearts these people received apparently came with pieces of the donor’s personal history, pieces these recipients could actually remember. For a compelling account of these folk’s experience, check out this short video: Transplanting Memories.

Deeply intrigued by what he discovered, Pearsall extensively researched and wrote The Heart’s Code. In it he provided a “cardio-energetic portrait of the heart”:

The heart is our most powerful organ. There is no subtleness about the immense physical power of the heart. The brain’s power pales by comparison.

The heart responds directly to the environment.

The heart reacts neuro-hormonally to the outside world not only in response to the brain, but sometimes without the brain’s awareness.

The heart is a dynamic system. It expresses itself as energy, matter and information.

The heart is the conductor of the energy of the body’s cells. The subtle energies of the heart produce “info-energetic cellular memories.”

The heart is the body’s primary organizing force. It is the creator of the gestalt we call “me,” and the catalyst for the mind that results in our experience of “us.”

The heart resonates with information-containing energy. Energy, matter and information are one and the same. Whenever any one of these characteristics are present, the other two are also there in some form.

The heart is the body system’s core. The heart’s energy transmission becomes highly influential for our body and for all the bodies around us.

The heart “speaks” and sends information. We can learn to access this information by quieting our brain.All hearts exchange information with other hearts and brains. When one heart sends energy to another, that energy becomes part of the receiving heart’s memory. Transplanted hearts come with their own info-energetic cellular memories.

Holding Our Children Heart to Heart

I’m firmly convinced that we must model and teach our children how to access the intelligence of the heart in order to bring balance to the extensively employed and often misused “sharp edge of intellect;” intelligence is different than wisdom. Scientific evidence is accumulating that suggests doing so will help our children make better decisions and manage life risk more effectively. And when they grow up to be soldiers, politicians and work on Wall Street, isn’t such work something we want our kids to be able to fully bring the heart’s wisdom to?

The brain is perhaps best thought of as a collection of interconnected endocrine glands – roughly 52 individual parts controlling different actions. They all must work together to “process energy and information.” Thinking about the brain in such terms – as a network of organs that must optimally process the energy and information of our daily lives – turns out to be a very useful template to help us understand our own and our children’s reactions to the world, and to make good decisions about what might be best for them. Ideally, we only want our children involved in activities that their brains are developmentally suited to handle, and perhaps a little bit more. It’s the “little bit more” that can become tricky, which is how we build resilience in our kids. I’ll be discussing resilience often in these columns.

As you might suspect, timing plays a significant role in the kinds of energy and information our children’s brains can process at any given point in their development. So does the source of that energy and information. It can come from outside us, as well as from inside the body (exogenously and endogenously).*** Timing also determines the quantity and quality of energy and information a child’s brain can process. An obvious example is that for the first few years, children’s brains cannot process language very well. However, they can process sound, and children are particularly sensitive to the loudness, frequency and cadence of the mother’s voice. This is known as prosody, and in future columns we’ll talk a lot about prosody’s extraordinary capacity to not only grow and change children’s brains, but also a spouse’s brain as well!

Another important way to think about your child’s brain is as an associative organ. By that, I simply mean that it learns a lot by putting things together. Things like words and pictures, up and down, hot and cold, thoughts and feelings. By pairing things that make the brain feel good with things that we want our children to learn, the neurons in the brain become richly connected. A variation of this is sometimes known as “Grandmother’s Rule: You may do what you want to do – when you’ve done what you need to do.” By pairing preferred actions with less exciting necessary duties, like brushing teeth and going to bed at a set, regular time, reinforced learning takes place. It is such associations, repeated frequently over long periods that produce what we generally think of as learning. One interesting finding about such learning by Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist, Eric Kandel is that learning involves five pulses of serotonin, “The Happy Molecule.” Therefore, it begins to make perfect sense that children learn much more when they are happy than when they are not. Thus, learning and play go hand in hand, and not only during childhood, as I am sure a number of you readers have already figured out!

        Finally, one last thing to realize and remember about the brain and the business of trying to change it, is that the brain is exquisitely “plastic.” What I mean by that is parents can do a lot of things less than perfectly with their children and the possibility for later improvement and correction remains not only strong, but something you can almost always count on the brain to try to accomplish. I like to refer to this as “healing constantly trying to happen.” In future columns I will be addressing many of the ways that new scanning technology – machines like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulators, that make us briefly brilliant and let us see parts of the brain at work in real time – is offering us clues to some of the best ways we can begin to take advantage of neural plasticity.

        *** Many friends and writing teachers caution against using big words in columns like this, claiming “if you want to be read widely, you have to use simple words.” I disagree. I think any one of us can read and understand little words and big words, if a writer cares enough to take the time to explain what they’re talking about.