Focus And Diffusion

You may have noticed during the explorations of the emotions that in both the explorer's experience of the emotion and in the guide's perception of its expression, some emotions are more "focused" than others. Specifically: anger is highly focused, fear highly diffuse, joy relatively focused, grief relatively diffuse.

Imagine you are walking along a path in a dangerous jungle. You hear a rustle in the bushes in front of you. You "freeze" and listen. At the same time your eyes open wide. Your visual focus is very diffuse. You are somewhat frightened and your eyes want to be open to all possibilities: where does the sound come from, is it threatening, is it advancing or retreating, is it slight or great? Suddenly, a wild boar trots out of the bushes and stands in your path. Its tusks seem huge. You take it in with a glance, and your eyes dart from side to side seeking escape. There seems to be none: the bush is impenetrable. You begin to back off. Should you turn and run, or is the wild boar faster than you? You look at it again. But wait. It is not moving toward you; in fact, it seems uneasy, pawing the ground and turning its head to one side. In fact it is not so big after all. Those tusks which seemed so huge are only a few inches long, and turned downwards so that only the curved part would hit you. Quickly you stoop and pick up a thick stick you have noticed when glancing around. Abruptly you bring it up in the air and take a step forward. You are frowning and your jaw is sticking out. Your eyes narrow and blaze, and you look into the boar's tiny eyes. "Get off!" you shout......

A fantasy. But it illustrates that it is biologically natural and useful for your perceptions to become diffuse in fearful anticipation, and sharply focused when it is time to take vigorous action. In the explorations earlier, it is the adoption of an expression of extreme diffusion and lack of focus which has enabled the explorer to imitate and perhaps experience fear. It is the expression of extreme focus which has imitated and perhaps evoked rage.

Now imagine that, faced with the wild boar, you rush toward it with your stick. Suddenly your nerve fai Is you. The boar is bigger than you expected. Your eyes lose their narrow glare and open wide: your mouth gapes open and your nostrils flare. As the boar begins to advance toward you, the whole jungle becomes a blur, you lash out wildly and blindly with your stick.....

Here, as fear takes over from the action of rage, your focus becomes more and more diffused, until any focused action is impossible or ineffective. This happens frequently in life, and not always as appropriately. In the case of anger, we tend to lash out blindly and instead of removing an obstacle, we try to destroy it in a wave of panic. For example, if we want to express anger to a partner about them being late to a rendezvous but feel rather afraid of displeasing them, a certain panic may cause us to lash out more broadly: "If you go on being late like this, I don't know what I'm going to do, I'll have to call the police." Many nasty quarrels begin in such a way. Literally, we have lost our focus because of fear.

When we are frightened, even though it may be wise to acknowledge this, we may repress it through an acute attention to detail. About to go on stage for our first performance in the big part, instead of allowing ourselves to curl up for a few minutes on the floor and let ourselves shake, we focus on the details of our lines and on how many steps exactly we will make as we enter the stage. As a result we may walk out into the lights and freeze, struck dumb in a sudden confusion.

It helps to know that anger is focused, fear is diffuse, so that we can identify something of their blocking, in ourselves and others.

That grief is diffuse is not quite so obvious, since in deep sobbing we may focus on a particular loss or humiliating event. Nevertheless, in grief the whole world seems black, with any new event easily "the last straw": our feelings can be hurt even by someone trying to intervene helpfully, we are too depressed to be able to tell the difference between a helping hand and a harming one.

Conversely, although in joy the whole world may seem sunny at first, we tend to discriminate eventually. A person feeling joy is apt to point out one thing after another: "Look at the light on those clouds! The leaves are really moving today! When I hold your hand it makes me remember the time when. . ." The excited perceptions in making love, our joy in the partner's whole person and body becomes more and more focused on genital fusion.

Within the eyes this fits the physiology of pupil dilation and constriction: the pupils dilate in a diffuse perception in states of fear and grief, they constrict in a more focused perception in states of anger and joy.

Focus/diffusion is also a kind of pulsation: the more alive we feel, the more we tend to move back and forth between an easy and diffuse perception of the whole context of our experience (the "ground," in Gestalt psychology terms), and a focused zeroing in on its main elements ("figure").

Chronic Emergency Responses

In an emergency, whether it is a physical threat like the wild boar in the jungle or an emotional threat like someone becoming angry or hysterical about something for which we are responsible, there are a number of possible reactions: "freezing" (fright paralysis, or fright rigidity), running away, or aggression.

"Freezing" may not seem immediately useful, but it is an essential phase before action (movement toward or away from the threat). It may last a moment or much longer, although the longer it lasts the more dangerous the situation may become. This is not only true for wild boar: if we are under emotional threat from another person and we "freeze" for too long, the other person's anxiety level will rise in the lack of our response. Conversely, if we do not allow ourselves to freeze for at least a moment in an emergency, we lose the opportunity to gather our energies (to pull back before leaping, as it were) and we risk our necks in an impulsive move.

In other words the three emergency responses of fright, flight, and fight are all functional. I would also claim that there is a limited variety of such emergency responses. Fright may be in the form of a paralysis where the organism is completely powerless or has given up (a baby or a small animal will take this position if severely threatened). Or it may be in the form of a muscular rigidity which precedes action. Flight is most obviously away from the source of threat but it may also be toward a safe refuge or protection. In modified form it may become a kind of submission or appeasement in which the movement is toward the threat itself. Fight may be in vigorous action or on the emotional level, in aggressive words or gestures.

To sum up, the possible chronic emergency responses are: fright paralysis, fright rigidity, flight away, flight toward, and fight.

This fits with the work done in ethology (the study of animal behavior) on approach and avoidance. You may be able to add some further emergency behaviors but most would belong under one or other of the basic reactions given above. The limits of physical behavior in an emergency are clear—a human being does not, for instance, have the option of vanishing into thin air—and emotional alternatives are similarly limited.

A further category of ambivalence, confusion, or panic might be proposed, as might that of suicidal resistance. But these mixed situations still operate around the basic options given.

Experience in therapy indicates that frustration, or even threat in itself, does not create muscle armoring in young children. Some people grow up quite unarmored even if they have had a parent who has been threatening and strict. But in these cases, their emotional reaction itself has not been subjected to threat. More simply: if you say no, even if you yell no, to a young child, and even if you do it frequently, this does not create armor (though if you surround the child with a barrier of prohibitions, some armor against spontaneous movement will develop).

Most armor is created if your "no" to the child becomes directed against his or her reaction to your prohibition. You say no, the child yells or cries with frustration, and you say no to their emotion.

An example is the too-common remark to a crying child: "If you go on like that, I'll really give you something to cry about." Or a parent yells angrily at a child and when the child raises its voice in reply, sends it to its room. In such cases, the emotional bottling up which the child finds necessary must be reinforced by a muscular bottling up.

This is achieved by chronic spasms of the musculature of chest, shoulders, throat and jaw. Some blocking in the diaphragmatic area and abdomen so as to limit the breathing and thus the sensation of pain may also occur. Since there is usually a continuum in the sort of treatment a child receives from its parents, the child's response becomes appropriate to the continuum. This is common sense: angry parents create a defiant child; brutal parents of a very young child who cannot fight back and be defiant create a frightened child; capricious or manipulative parents create a submissive child.

In such cases, the range of possible emergency responses becomes limited. The child becomes stuck in a particular emergency response, and will fall into this particular response even as an adult. In other words, the armor becomes set in specific patterns which determine the person's later behavior. This is why Reich referred to the "character armor." He also described certain "circumscribed character types," using psychoanalytic language. I will later discuss ways in which these can be alternatively described in terms of chronic emergency responses.

For now, though, it may be useful to test the concept of chronic emergency responses with reference to the explorations you have been doing. When working on the mattress, which emotion did you find easiest? Is this an emotion you express often? Look at some situations where you have been under emotional stress: have there been times when your response has been in terms of your most familiar or frequent emotion instead of another which, in retrospect, may have been more appropriate? Can you identify your basic emergency response? Is this chronic to the extent that you have no other emotional options? How does your basic pattern of response affect your relationships with others? All these questions may be discussed with your partner.