Introduction to stimulation

The staihuman model is a structure designed to give you a guided pathway through your childhood history and its impact on you now in a digital age that is fast becoming unrecognisable from the old one. The staihuman programme will help you understand how and why these new kinds of stimulation (digital, artificial, fast and complex) impact on us, as they do – and how we can manage and profit from this impact in ways that improve the quality of our lives whilst adding protective factors to secure these improvements.

staihuman is ‘not’ anti-technology

Without this guide, your life risks becoming a big blancmange of events, pleasures, triumphs and long forgotten pedestrian experiences that you might call the ‘past’. You may be harbouring an untapped repository of tragedies, lost opportunities and thwarted ambitions you’d prefer to forget all about. The staihuman programme has been designed to give you some structure to your psychological essence and existence, as it stands today – it will help reveal areas of vulnerability we are all exposing to each other. And it will map these vulnerabilities to the powerful technologies designed to tap into them. staihuman is NOT anti-technology – rather, it provides an opportunity for us to expand the potential of our capacity as humans to make the best of it, and to protect us from the worst of it.

Structure is key – because, left to our own devices (and those of a coach or therapist) we risk travelling across the emotional terrain of our humanity, through a fog of psychology, philosophy, finance and feelings – with no clear idea of what to focus on. Structure helps.

This first module: stimulation, will provide you with the evidence of the value of structure for all humans – and the real learning happens when you ‘talk’ about what you’ve learned – with friends and family, or on a facilitated staihuman speak out session. The choice is yours. So there’s no need to take notes.

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Get what you need first…

What we want doesn’t always turn out to be what we really need. In the old fable, the dog’s attention was steered toward food, which he already had enough of. What he lacked was nourishment for his brain – someone to be with perhaps, a job to do, a journey to take, that would lead to somewhere of importance. Becoming aware of our real but often unseen deficiencies, is perhaps one of the most humbling and noble experiences we can give ourselves.

Being in ‘need’ is neither weak nor sub-standard – but perhaps to refuse to engage with these ‘needs’ is. By not acknowledging what our real needs are, we starve ourselves. To notice, accept and respond to our own needs first is to relieve others of their need to keep fixing us, for when we’re in need, our less than perfect behaviour impacts others.

That said, we are and always will be, in need of each other. First lesson, first module, the danger here, is that I come across as pompous or verging on the religious. I’m not either. I’ve always believed in the pursuit of pleasure – why else are we here? Power, money, fame and glory – these jewels are the byproducts of pleasure and pleasure is only felt deeply when we’re in good mental health. When power, money, fame and glory become ends in and of themselves – therein lies the madness.

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Connection = stimulation

This core module on ‘stimulation’ will help you to understand how and why we seek connection with others. Please humour me and watch the short film that follows for an illustration of the fundamental value of connecting with others. The wiring for that connection is plumbed into our brains and our bodies before we were even born.

Strokes = recognition, attention, care & abuse

Your brain began life outside the womb with one job on its mind – to keep you alive. You as a helpless infant had no understanding of what could happen to you. You couldn’t walk or talk but you could – if there was anyone in earshot who cared for you – you could wield an enormous amount of power by screaming the place down.

The infant child can be a tyrant. In most families, when this tyrant expresses their distress, someone will feel duty bound to take notice of them. The carer then asks, what do they need? When the need of the infant is recognised, the child receives a ‘stroke’ or a ‘unit of recognition’ – a stroke delivers an electrical zap to the child’s brain which informs them, they’re alive.

Stimulation (strokes) built the foundations of your relationships

When the crying stops and the baby is calm, success!!!! And in a healthy family, baby wins every time. What is happening when a baby is being cared for? Their brain receives stimulation. The baby experiences touch, taste, smell – they hear the voice of others, they see their carers smile or frown. They experience the world from a pram, or a knee, lying in someone’s arms or left on a bed. The baby’s eyes, ears, nose and mouth – the holes in their head and the pores in their skin – these holes let the world in – and the world goes straight to the baby’s brain.

Without this stimulation, the baby would not thrive. Without healthy stimulation, adults don’t fare well either.

So who’s really in charge?

Your infant brain was team leader – not your parents or primary carers. Their job was to listen to your brain and respond appropriately. If they heard you – great. If they understood you, even better as your needs would get met and you would live to cry another day. If you were NOT heard, seen, noticed or responded to – your brain would have flooded your bloodstream with stress hormones – adrenalin and cortisol. These hormones act like rocket fuel – the fuel is adrenalin which helps to power up the lungs so you could carry on screaming, but even louder. FEED ME!!!!

Every time you were picked up, cradled, fed, played with, talked to, snuggled and held – you were receiving ”strokes’, a term coined by Eric Berne, the founder of a social psychology he called Transactional Analysis. Forget the name – it’s not important. Understanding Berne’s rationale for creating an easily accessible way for people to understand their social origins is far more important. He believed, that being human is primarily a social activity, and not a solo adventure. It’s our relationships (good and bad) that will determine our future, despite and in spite of, the scope or limits of the potential within us.

From our connection to the mother in the womb, to the physical contact we receive as needy infants, we are programmed to be in relationship with others – without others we starve. Building on this physical contact, the child learns to use symbols – language and behaviours to cement the most important relationships that will determine their survival.. We learn how to belong, be accepted and be looked after, by following the ‘stroke’ patterns set up by our carers. We get praised for good behaviour and admonished for bad – but in truth, our brains don’t care whether we’re getting positive or negative strokes – so long as we get noticed enough to be fed and watered and kept safe from predators that threaten our physical survival. The infant brain doesn’t care if the child is having a nice time or not – that’s the truth of the matter. Every stroke – every time the brain is stimulated by another person, the brain receives an electric surge of acknowledgment – it feels the power of ‘the other’ and as a helpless infant, can believe themself safe. Adults are no different. Negative attention is better than none at all – at least someone knows we’re here, right? In the ‘deeper insight’ lesson, you’ll learn why that’s a bigger problem today, than it has been the past.

Your parents/carers: for or against them – you’re still a function of them

Unfortunately, the quality of our relationships in adulthood reflects the quality of the significant relationships we formed in our childhood. That’s not to say we replicate all that we were taught – on the contrary we may well rebel against everything we were subjected to – but that doesn’t really matter. We’re still a function of the teachings we enjoyed and endured – whether we replicate or disown them.

Your power – your potential

The truth is, we could all achieve greatness but most of us won’t or don’t because our learned motivations don’t guide us anywhere near such lofty ambitions. But what is ‘greatness’ anyway? For me it is this:- living authentically, giving, loving, learning and enjoying – there is peace of mind in all these activities. For you, greatness might be in legacy, riches and fame – I consider these by-products of greatness, not the greatness itself. Greatness is a feeling inside not something bestowed on us – if we turn to others to determine our value, we give away our power, our potential. Potency is power. When your world is built around how many strokes you receive from others – how much they noticed you, liked you, agreed with you and sought to connect with you – you become powerless. When you let others judge your value and worth, you have no power.

Living authentically, loving, giving and learning and enjoying – these are the ingredients of your divinity – your ‘aliveness’ – and they are the currency of your ‘now’ – which as Eckhard Tolle so eloquently reminds us, is all we really have. Now is your only true reality. The past is gone and the future not yet determined. When we spend our ‘now’ worrying about where the next ‘storke’ is coming from, we fail to realise our potential because we’re killing it, second by second, minute by minute. How much power are you giving away? How much potential do you have?

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WHAT NOW?

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WHAT NOW?

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Your stroke patterns – regular or irregular?

We’ve looked at how from an early age, your need to be fed not just food but stimulation, has helped allow you to live and thrive. We can imagine if not recall how distressing and disturbing it may be for an infant or child to be deprived of the stimulation they need to feel safe, well and looked after. The brain is wired for survival and any hint that this ambition may be thwarted, puts the brain into a state of threat. The brain’s vigilance for threat is unrelenting – even as we sleep, our brain’s wake up to unusual noises, smells and disturbances (if we’re not drunk or on drugs).

If when we were children, we received regular strokes that fed and nourished our brain as much as the food that nourished our stomach, then our brains would have developed in ways that as adults, allow us to be, for most part, level headed, rational, empathic, thoughtful, fun and curious. The truth is, this can really only happen if our parents/carers were, for the most part, level headed, rational, empathic, thoughtful, fun and curious. I say for the most part because of course, even the best parents have their off days and indeed, these ‘off days’ are a great source of learning for children as they learn to differentiate ‘safe’ from ‘not so safe’.

If you grew up in a chaotic household where strokes were hit and miss – don’t worry. We can re-train the brain by forging new and healthy relationships now. All is not lost – indeed, overcoming difficult childhoods is one of the greatest journeys you can embark on. I know.

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Not all strokes are good strokes

Your brain doesn’t care if you’re having a good time

They say the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity. The same could be said for strokes. Your brain would rather get negative attention than no attention at all. That’s because negative strokes can provide us with as much stimulation as positive strokes – sometimes more. For a child and an adult, negative strokes allow us to feel noticed, alive, and real. When friends, family or colleagues insist on repeating dysfunctional behaviours, it may be their unconscious way of getting recognition from you. If you provide them with healthy strokes instead of accepting their invite to give them negative ones – their behaviour will adapt to seek out positive stories instead. – genuine, honest, timely, meaningful strokes – their need for dysfunctional ways to attract strokes, diminishes. Try it.

People who were over-protected as children may grow up needing a lot of strokes. People who were ignored, rejected, or overlooked may also need more strokes than you. Children with disorganised caregivers receive mixed messages. When care (positive strokes) is inconsistent, children cannot work out a clear pattern for getting strokes and indirectly, getting their needs met. If one response gets ignored on one day, but on another gets lots of attention, the child can’t learn what the best strategy (for food, comfort, knowledge, safety) might be. A parent might cheer aggression in one situation but punish it in another. For a child, this makes the world feel unsafe and unpredictable.

A child in such an environment learns to stay on guard, always watching out for the next negative stroke. And if no stroke comes – they may unconsciously do something to provoke one. Unfortunately these strategies get carried into adult life. These are wobbly foundations to grow up on, and it’s on these wobbly foundations that many lives have been built – including my own.

Parents who ignore their children will raise children who must create their own strategies for getting noticed. These are known as troubled children’.

You will learn in the next lesson ‘the neuroscience of stimulation’ to understand why consistent parenting (routines, structure, unconditional acceptance, rules with rationale for them provided) creates more resilient mentally healthy children and adults later on. If a brain (any brain old or young) can’t predict care, attention, safety, and doesn’t feel a sense of belonging (a stroke hungry brain) , it shifts into a state of stress. if this state of stress becomes a child’s norm, they will grow up predicting dangers, believing they’r enot safe and finding ways to get ahead of their pain by sabotaging any efforts to support them. to dial down the stress created ommunicate with carers – contentment signals were smiles, gurgling, eye contact and calm breaths, distress signals were tears and tantrums, distorted body postures, hyperventilation and lots of noise. You could only ever survive infancy with someone willing to communicate with you.

your brain you had but , may have heard the phrase ‘stroking the ego’ – this phrase quite possibly informed Eric Berne’s concept of ‘strokes’ which he defined as units of ‘recognition’ and which we will call, units of ;connection’.. That could be a nod of the head, a hug, a way of letting another person know that they’ve been seen. Watch the film that follows to understand how hunger for food and hunger for strokes are hardwired into our psyche – our brain. Satisfying the hungers is how we reward ourselves. Reward is a strange word to use – the neuroscientists insist on it – but the word has a touch of the ‘deserving’ about it. We are not seeking reward when we seek food – we want to survive. We are not seeking reward when we seek companions, comfort or sex. We want to live, and feel like we belong. The scientists refer to the brain’s ‘reward’ system – it’s a ‘survival’ system that is plumbed into our unconcious brain circuits. Watch the following film to get a feel for how this works.

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Ultimate concerns

Irvin Yalom curated a list of fears or ‘ultimate concerns’, resulting from his extensive study of philosophy. These are ‘existential fears’ if you will. At the very root of our subconscious, these fears direct our behaviour in ways we rarely stop to consider. Like hunger and thirst, these fears serve as boundary conditions for ‘life’ but not for psychological life rather than biological. They are that important. Just as we don’t wish to go without food for very long, we have no wish to think about dying, we rebel against total isolation, we fall into an abyss of depression if we can’t find any meaning to our lives – no joy, purpose, connection, and finally we tire of freedom much sooner than we want to admit to – a future full of choice and no limits on our movement, is a future of decision making and decisions can be wrong. We prefer structure. So the four existential fears or ultimate concerns are as follows:-

Uncertainty = Fear

All of these ‘existential fears’ are linked to life’s uncertainties – let’s think about that word with a bit more concentration than we would usually. Uncertainty for the brain means threat. Not knowing what is coming next. The truth is none of us do, but we believe we do, because we have structured our lives around a routine.

When an infant is fed regularly, goes to sleep at the same time overnight, is greeted with smiles by their carers, and regularly receives cuddles, reassurance, novelty and peace in equal measure, the child’s brain wiring is in the optimum condition to withstand or tolerate uncertainty. There is sufficient evidence for the child to use (past experience) to confidently predict that, what will happen ‘next’ won’t be painful, harmful, frightening or humiliating. That’s in a ‘healthy’ household. Most of us didn’t grow up in one of those – especially so if you’re an older generation (children were seen, not heard or had the rules of life beaten into them)

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Reviewing the learning

In part 1, we learned that your brain needs stimulation to feel alive – that your brain’s chief job is to keep you alive. We learned that humans help keep each other happy by recognising the value of each other, as human beings, family members and contributors to the community. But we also learned that a deficit of stimulation can cause us to see it in places that are not designed to keep us mentally healthy – rather to make profits for technology companies. this is a risk for adults and children alike.

We learned that in childhood we need contact and recognition as much as food and water as both are important in the development of a child’d brain. We also learned that if a child can’t rely on being cared for, they will not feel happy. As adults these fears are grounded in profound experiences of uncertainty that show up as isolation, meaninglessness, the tyranny of freedom and death.

Stimulation fends off fear. If we’re stimulated we feel alive. If we’re connected to people by touch, by talk, by activity – we feel seen and heard. If what we can offer is needed, we feel a sucker punch of gratitude, when we give to someone – reinforcing that sense of ‘aliveness’ in a visceral way.

If we can structure our lives so we can be of value to others, so we can connect with them in ways that are tangible, visible and visceral, then we’ve cracked all 4 ultimate concerns all at once. That’s why stimulation is the lifeblood of our psychology – as important to our brain as food.

1. l
2. Self-stroking is key – I’m OK, You’re OK – power dynamic – cultural genogram
3. Which hungers are you OK with? What hungers does your client lack?
4. Observe the client – when are they most stimulated – energetic?

Ultimate concerns

Irvin Yalom curated a list of fears or ‘ultimate concerns’, resulting from his extensive study of philosophy. These are ‘existential fears’ if you will. At the very root of our subconscious, these fears direct our behaviour in ways we rarely stop to consider. Like hunger and thirst, these fears serve as boundary conditions for ‘life’ but not for psychological life rather than biological. They are that important. Just as we don’t wish to go without food for very long, we have no wish to think about dying, we rebel against total isolation, we fall into an abyss of depression if we can’t find any meaning to our lives – no joy, purpose, connection, and finally we tire of freedom much sooner than we want to admit to – a future full of choice and no limits on our movement, is a future of decision making and decisions can be wrong. We prefer structure. So the four existential fears or ultimate concerns are as follows:-

Uncertainty = Fear

All of these ‘existential fears’ are linked to life’s uncertainties – let’s think about that word with a bit more concentration than we would usually. Uncertainty for the brain means threat. Not knowing what is coming next. The truth is none of us do, but we believe we do, because we have structured our lives around a routine.

When an infant is fed regularly, goes to sleep at the same time overnight, is greeted with smiles by their carers, and regularly receives cuddles, reassurance, novelty and peace in equal measure, the child’s brain wiring is in the optimum condition to withstand or tolerate uncertainty. There is sufficient evidence for the child to use (past experience) to confidently predict that, what will happen ‘next’ won’t be painful, harmful, frightening or humiliating. That’s in a ‘healthy’ household. Most of us didn’t grow up in one of those – especially so if you’re an older generation (children were seen, not heard or had the rules of life beaten into them)

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Reviewing the learning

In part 1, we learned that your brain needs stimulation to feel alive – that your brain’s chief job is to keep you alive. We learned that humans help keep each other happy by recognising the value of each other, as human beings, family members and contributors to the community. But we also learned that a deficit of stimulation can cause us to see it in places that are not designed to keep us mentally healthy – rather to make profits for technology companies. this is a risk for adults and children alike.

We learned that in childhood we need contact and recognition as much as food and water as both are important in the development of a child’d brain. We also learned that if a child can’t rely on being cared for, they will not feel happy. As adults these fears are grounded in profound experiences of uncertainty that show up as isolation, meaninglessness, the tyranny of freedom and death.

Stimulation fends off fear. If we’re stimulated we feel alive. If we’re connected to people by touch, by talk, by activity – we feel seen and heard. If what we can offer is needed, we feel a sucker punch of gratitude, when we give to someone – reinforcing that sense of ‘aliveness’ in a visceral way.

If we can structure our lives so we can be of value to others, so we can connect with them in ways that are tangible, visible and visceral, then we’ve cracked all 4 ultimate concerns all at once. That’s why stimulation is the lifeblood of our psychology – as important to our brain as food.