Central European Time

Malka Ceh on Facebook
Malka Ceh on Instagram
Malka Ceh on LinkedIn

Malka Ceh, PhD, MSc, cNPA

Author: Malka Ceh

  • Teaching Hell and Calling It Love

    Teaching Hell and Calling It Love

    Most adults understand why you wouldn’t threaten a child with torture. But add ‘after you die’ and, suddenly, we’re discussing religious education. The child, meanwhile, has been given something terrifying to believe by the people they rely on to tell them what’s real. Evoking fear of hell constitutes emotional abuse, even more so when adults terrorize a child or use damnation to enforce obedience. Emotional maltreatment includes treatment that frightens children or undermines their sense of safety; religious threats belong under that scrutiny [1, 2].

    In psychoanalysis, we can examine what happens when you grow up believing that ordinary thoughts and wishes could earn you catastrophic punishment. A warning about hell can become a habit of accusing and frightening yourself, even when nobody is there to deliver it anymore. What you were taught matters, along with how you understood it and who made it believable. For a child, ‘Mom says so’ carries considerably more weight than an argument about whether hell exists.

    Recognizing psychological maltreatment

    Research on emotional abuse identifies terrorizing alongside rejection, isolation, and exploitation as forms of mentally harmful caregiving. These categories concern what adults do to children and how they use their authority. A child doesn’t need a physical injury for us to take the treatment seriously [1, 2].

    Repeatedly telling a child that they face eternal torture unless they comply fits the understanding of terrorizing. How often the warning comes, how graphic it gets, and whether the child can question it all matter. So does what happens when the child becomes frightened: do the adults reassure them, or take the fear as evidence that the lesson is working? Personalized predictions of damnation can make the message especially coercive. ‘You could burn forever’ is a fairly aggressive approach to teaching someone right from wrong. It makes no difference if the adults themself believe these warnings protect the child. They may deliver them calmly, with every intention of being loving, while describing suffering that supposedly never ends. The child still has to live with the fear. A gentle delivery does very little to improve the prospect of eternal torture, and an assessment of harm has to consider the child’s age and dependence on the person describing it.

    Emotional abuse can also go unrecognized because familiar parental behavior gets accepted as ordinary discipline. Research examining child-welfare records found substantially more emotional abuse than had been identified at referral, while research with child-maltreatment professionals documented difficulties recognizing and reporting it [1, 3]. These studies don’t measure religious abuse specifically, but they give us reason to question the reassurance that, surely, somebody would have intervened if it were that bad.

    How adults teach children to fear

    Children learn to fear things through what parents tell them. Nimphy and colleagues [4, 5] found a large average increase in fear after parents gave children threatening information; research with infants also shows that observing a parent’s fearful reactions increases fear and avoidance. You don’t have to experience the danger yourself to become frightened of it, the adults you trust can supply the fear quite effectively. That explains the concern about hell: a parent speaks with certainty about a supernatural danger the child cannot independently inspect, and other trusted adults may confirm every word. From the child’s position, who exactly is available to say this might be nonsense?

    We also have research on lasting trauma. Longitudinal research separately links emotional abuse and neglect with adverse psychological and developmental outcomes, while research on childhood verbal abuse finds associations with emotional and behavioral difficulties across the lifespan [6, 7]. Taken together, the findings give us good reason to take sustained threats seriously.

    Why the content of the threat matters

    We can distinguish doctrine from delivery without excusing the doctrine. When hell is described as endless torture for disbelief or ordinary desires, the content is already frightening. There is no reassuring amount of time after which the punishment ends, no point at which you’ve paid enough. That’s what ‘eternal’ means, and a child who takes the adults is being told they could be tortured forever. And the threat extends to things you haven’t done. If an all-knowing authority judges private doubts or unwanted thoughts, merely having a thought can seem dangerous. Being told that god loves you may do little to resolve this: you’re also being told that he might allow you to suffer without end. It’s quite a demand to expect a child to feel safe with both propositions at once.

    Clinical accounts describe parents using religious ideas to intimidate children and justify destructive family interactions [8]. Research measuring spiritual harm identifies threatening images of gods and controlling religious leadership among the experiences associated with that harm [9]. We need to examine both the teaching itself and how adults use it. If it harms children, being part of a religious tradition is no excuse.

    A psychoanalytic perspective on fear of damnation

    In psychoanalytic terms, fear of hell may become bound to a punitive superego: an internal authority that treats wishes and feelings as offenses deserving punishment. You may therefore have stopped believing in hell years ago and still feel frightened by a sexual thought or a moment of anger. Knowing you reject a belief doesn’t tell us how thoroughly the fear associated with it has been learned. We need to examine how that works in your particular experience.

    The caregiver who preaches about the danger may also be the child’s main source of comfort and the person who explains how to secure salvation. Questioning the threat can then feel like risking both salvation and the relationship you depend on. Compliance may preserve that relationship while leaving you terrified. Religious explanations of obedience and sin can also make it harder to identify the adult’s behavior as harmful, as philosophical work on the interpretation of religious abuse helps explain [10].

    In psychoanalysis, we examine what damnation has come to mean to you and when you still react as though punishment is imminent. That includes separating responsibility for things you actually do from guilt about thoughts and feelings. We learn to doubt, be skeptic, question. For someone taught that doubt could get them tortured forever, being able to disagree without fearing punishment can take some getting used to.

    When you’re terrified as a child, you’re dealing with feelings you don’t yet have much experience managing, and you depend on adults to help you recover. If those adults are the ones telling you about eternal torture, that help may be hard to find. Repeated fear can shape how your developing brain learns to recognize danger and respond to it, with consequences for how you handle later experiences. By adulthood, questioning hell may be considerably easier than changing the reactions you’ve developed around it. Working through those early fears and learning to feel safe can take time. Give yourself patience: you were a child trying to make sense of what trusted adults insisted was true, and you don’t deserve another round of criticism for how thoroughly you learned it.

    References

    [1] Trickett, P. K., Mennen, F. E., Kim, K., & Sang, J. (2009). Emotional abuse in a sample of multiply maltreated, urban young adolescents: Issues of definition and identification. Child Abuse & Neglect, 33(1), 27-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2008.12.003

    [2] Brassard, M. R., Hart, S. N., & Glaser, D. (2020). Psychological maltreatment: An international challenge to children’s safety and well being. Child Abuse & Neglect, 110, 104611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104611

    [3] Baker, A. J. L., Brassard, M. R., & Rosenzweig, J. (2021). Psychological maltreatment: Definition and reporting barriers among American professionals in the field of child abuse. Child Abuse & Neglect, 114, 104941. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.104941

    [4] Nimphy, C. A., Venetikidi, M., Elzinga, B., van der Does, W., & Aktar, E. (2023). Parent to offspring fear transmission via modeling in early life: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 26, 751-772. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-023-00448-1

    [5] Nimphy, C. A., Mitrou, V., Elzinga, B., van der Does, W., & Aktar, E. (2024). The role of parental verbal threat information in children’s fear acquisition: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 27, 714-731. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-024-00485-4

    [6] Strathearn, L., Giannotti, M., Mills, R., Kisely, S., Najman, J., & Abajobir, A. (2020). Long-term cognitive, psychological, and health outcomes associated with child abuse and neglect. Pediatrics, 146(4), e20200438. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-0438

    [7] Dube, S. R., Li, E., Fiorini, G., Lin, C., Singh, N., Khamisa, K., McGowan, J., & Fonagy, P. (2023). Childhood verbal abuse as a child maltreatment subtype: A systematic review of the current evidence. Child Abuse & Neglect, 144, 106394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2023.106394

    [8] Simonič, B., Rahne Mandelj, T., & Novsak, R. (2013). Religious-related abuse in the family. Journal of Family Violence, 28(4), 339-349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-013-9508-y

    [9] Koch, D., & Edstrom, L. (2022). Development of the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 61(2), 476-506. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12792

    [10] Panchuk, M. (2020). Distorting concepts, obscured experiences: Hermeneutical injustice in religious trauma and spiritual violence. Hypatia, 35(4), 607-625. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.32

  • Threatening Children With Divine Separation

    Threatening Children With Divine Separation

    Humans are intensely social animals. Our dependence on one another is part of our biology, and separation from someone we are attached to can produce agonizing distress. In affective science, WE call the neural emotional system involved PANIC/GRIEF: the system associated with the pain of separation and loss, and with the urgent protest that motivates us to seek contact again. It helps keep young mammals close to their caregivers and adult mammals cooperating. Crying and desperately trying to reconnect are expressions of a need on which our survival depended in the evolutionary past (Panksepp & Watt, 2011).

    Children face that distress with far fewer resources than adults. They cannot arrange their own care, have little experience recovering from overwhelming feelings, and depend on caregivers to help them regulate those feelings while the relevant brain systems are still developing. Research with children shows that a mother’s presence and cues associated with her can reduce emotional reactivity and support regulation (Gee et al., 2014). The person a frightened child needs is also the person whose disappearance they may be terrified of. That dependence makes threatened separation an especially severe experience.

    Now teach that child that a divine event could suddenly separate them from the people they love and depend on. They may be taken away, or someone they depend on may be taken from them. The threat concerns losing both the relationship and the person who helps them cope when they are frightened. From this developmental perspective, terrifying a child with sudden separation exploits an existing biological vulnerability. The event doesn’t have to happen for the distress to be real. An adult’s account of what could happen can be enough to make the child afraid.

    This is the concern with fear-based teaching about sudden extraction, gathering, or separation: the Rapture or Catching Away; the Translation of the Saints; the Gentle Wind or Breath of the Believers; Raigō or the Welcoming Descent; and the Harvest or Evacuation. The question here is how these beliefs are used with children. When a caregiver or religious authority uses them to frighten, threaten, isolate, or control a child in developmentally harmful ways, that is child abuse. The theological vocabulary doesn’t make the child’s dependence any less exploitable.

    When separation becomes a means of control

    Emotional abuse is defined as frightening, threatening, belittling, or otherwise hostile treatment by a trusted adult that causes actual or potential harm to a child’s development or dignity (Norman et al., 2012; Fortier et al., 2019; Matsumoto et al., 2021). Fear-based teaching about rapture or separation fits that definition when a caregiver repeatedly uses it to threaten or frighten a child, especially alongside humiliation, isolation, or coercion. Rigid threats about what will happen if the child fails to comply make the controlling function particularly explicit (Norman et al., 2012; Xiao et al., 2021; Fortier et al., 2019).

    Some theological ideas are inherently abusive because they create fear, worthlessness, and alienation in children. Parents can use religious ideas to intimidate and control, while the content of the teaching itself can leave a child frightened, lonely, and convinced they are worth less than others (Capps, 1996; Simonič et al., 2013). If you were taught that separation from the people you needed depended on your obedience, the adults had made a basic need for connection conditional on doing as you were told. That’s a brutal way to obtain cooperation.

    A single age-appropriate discussion of a religious belief is not necessarily abuse. The threshold at issue here is repeated frightening that harms development, within a relationship of responsibility, trust, or power. The child cannot realistically consent to the treatment, leave the relationship, or independently evaluate the claim (Fortier et al., 2019; Norman et al., 2012; Saide & Richert, 2020). The adult can insist the danger is real, impose the conditions for avoiding it, and control where the child can turn for another explanation. The child has very little power to contest any of it.

    The fear does not require the event

    Research on parental verbal threats identifies a direct route by which adults can teach children to fear. Threatening information from parents produces large effects on children’s fear, and fear learning has been observed across ages ranging from 30 months to 18 years (Nimphy et al., 2024). Children can acquire strong fears from words alone. When adults repeatedly use those messages to cause substantial distress, impairment, or coercive control, the practice fits established definitions of emotional abuse (Nimphy et al., 2024; Xiao et al., 2021). Nobody has to disappear for a child to become terrified of being separated from them.

    The consequences can extend well beyond the occasion on which the warning was given. Maltreatment heightens vigilance for danger and sensitivity to stress, leaving the child more alert to possible threats (Jaffee, 2017; Scott et al., 2023). Psychological maltreatment also predicts broad cognitive and social harm (Strathearn et al., 2020; Dube et al., 2023). The developmental burden includes what happens as a child grows up trying to manage the fear, alongside everything else they are supposed to be learning. Repeatedly frightening them has consequences for far more than their opinion of a religious story.

    Emotional abuse is serious abuse

    Emotional maltreatment is a recognized category of abuse with lasting mental health consequences (Norman et al., 2012; Bottoms et al., 1995, 2015). Emotional abuse shows particularly strong associations with depression and anxiety (Humphreys et al., 2020; Gardner et al., 2019; Xiao et al., 2021). Emotional abuse and neglect are also associated with PTSD-related symptoms and suicidality, poorer self-esteem, difficulties regulating emotion, and social difficulties. These associations are often as strong as, or stronger than, those found for some more readily recognized forms of abuse (Humphreys et al., 2020; Gardner et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2022; Gruhn & Compas, 2020). There is nothing minor about that list.

    Research also supports a causal contribution of maltreatment to later mental health problems (Baldwin et al., 2023). That strengthens the case that these experiences contribute to the harm, rather than merely occurring in families where other problems happen to exist. Threatening and frightening treatment is well defined as emotional abuse, and its links with depression, anxiety, suicidality, and impaired self-esteem and emotion regulation are consistently documented (Norman et al., 2012; Gardner et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2022; Gruhn & Compas, 2020). Describing the treatment as religious instruction doesn’t change what the adult is doing to the child.

    Religious authority and the betrayal of trust

    Documented cases show religion being used to justify abuse, including attempts to rid children of supposed evil and intimidation by people in positions of authority. Religious and spiritual abuse can produce shame and anxiety, grief, emotional and spiritual harm, and a rupture of trust (Bottoms et al., 2015; Perry, 2024). Accounts of clergy abuse and religion-related family violence likewise identify fear, coercion, betrayal of trust, and distortion of the child’s relationship with a god as central mechanisms (Sutton-Adams, 2023; Durkin et al., 2025; Hollier et al., 2022). The trusted adult’s religious authority becomes part of how the harm is inflicted.

    The risk is greater when the practice involves terrorizing, chronic threat, or coercive control than when a belief is taught without demonstrated harm (Perry, 2024; Dhirachaikulpanich et al., 2025; Elzamzamy et al., 2024). The decisive issue is whether adults induce fear in developmentally vulnerable children in ways that predict harm or function as intimidation (Nimphy et al., 2024; Simonič et al., 2013). An adult who uses the prospect of sudden separation to secure obedience is using the child’s need for other people against them. The child has to live with the consequences of that fear long after the adult has finished talking.

    Working with the fear in psychoanalysis

    In psychoanalysis, we work with what you were taught to expect and how that expectation still affects you. We talk about what the separation was supposed to involve, who you feared losing, and what you believed you had to do to prevent it. As you describe those experiences and the feelings attached to them, we can begin to understand how the fear shaped your responses. We also look at what happens in your relationships now: whether distance feels dangerous, for example, or whether disagreeing with someone brings an expectation that they will leave.

    We work on these fears together. We examine how you learned to manage the fear, what those responses once achieved, and why they may persist after the religious belief has gone. Feelings that were difficult or forbidden to express are spoken about and understood, including anger toward the people who frightened you. Through that sustained work, the expectation of sudden loss becomes less automatic and has less influence over how you relate to others. The point is to help you form and maintain close relationships without having to keep earning reassurance that you won’t be abandoned.

    Sources

    1. Gee, D. G., Gabard-Durnam, L., Telzer, E. H., Humphreys, K. L., Goff, B., Shapiro, M., Flannery, J., Lumian, D. S., Fareri, D. M., Caldera, C., & Tottenham, N. (2014). Maternal buffering of human amygdala-prefrontal circuitry during childhood but not during adolescence. Psychological Science, 25(11), 2067–2078. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614550878
    2. Matsumoto, M., Piersiak, H. A., Letterie, M. C., & Humphreys, K. L. (2023). Population-based estimates of associations between child maltreatment types: A meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(2), 487–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380211030502 PubMed
    3. Nimphy, C. A., Mitrou, V., Elzinga, B. M., Van der Does, W., & Aktar, E. (2024). The role of parental verbal threat information in children’s fear acquisition: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 27(3), 714–731. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-024-00485-4 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
    4. Norman, R. E., Byambaa, M., De, R., Butchart, A., Scott, J., & Vos, T. (2012). The long-term health consequences of child physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS Medicine, 9(11), Article e1001349. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001349 PLOS Medicine
    5. Panksepp, J., & Watt, D. (2011). Why does depression hurt? Ancestral primary-process separation-distress (PANIC/GRIEF) and diminished brain reward (SEEKING) processes in the genesis of depressive affect. Psychiatry, 74(1). https://doi.org/10.1521/psyc.2011.74.1.5
    6. Perry, S. (2024). Religious/spiritual abuse, meaning-making, and posttraumatic growth. Religions, 15(7), Article 824. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15070824 mdpi.com
    7. Petro, M. R., Rich, E. G., Erasmus, C., & Roman, N. V. (2018). The effect of religion on parenting in order to guide parents in the way they parent: A systematic review. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 20(2), 114–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/19349637.2017.1341823 tandfonline.com
    8. Saide, A. R., & Richert, R. A. (2020). Socio-cognitive and cultural influences on children’s concepts of God. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 20(1–2), 22–40. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340072 University of North Texas
    9. Scott, J. G., Malacova, E., Mathews, B., Haslam, D. M., Pacella, R., Higgins, D. J., Meinck, F., Dunne, M. P., Finkelhor, D., Erskine, H. E., Lawrence, D. M., & Thomas, H. J. (2023). The association between child maltreatment and mental disorders in the Australian Child Maltreatment Study. Medical Journal of Australia, 218(S6), S26–S33. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51870 PubMed
    10. Simonič, B., Rahne Mandelj, T., & Novsak, R. (2013). Religious-related abuse in the family. Journal of Family Violence, 28(4), 339–349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-013-9508-y Springer Nature Link
    11. Smith, J. (2021). Transmission of faith in families: The influence of religious ideology. Sociology of Religion, 82(3), 332–356. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraa045 Oxford Academic
    12. Strathearn, L., Giannotti, M., Mills, R., Kisely, S., Najman, J., & Abajobir, A. (2020). Long-term cognitive, psychological, and health outcomes associated with child abuse and neglect. Pediatrics, 146(4), Article e20200438. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-0438 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
    13. Sutton-Adams, H. (2023). Recognizing stones and snakes in children’s Christian formation: An introduction to religious trauma and abuse. Religious Education, 118(4), 356–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/00344087.2023.2227816 tandfonline.com
    14. Xiao, Z., Murat Baldwin, M., Wong, S. C., Obsuth, I., Meinck, F., & Murray, A. L. (2023). The impact of childhood psychological maltreatment on mental health outcomes in adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(5), 3049–3064. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221122816 PubMed
    15. Yule, K., Houston, J., & Grych, J. (2019). Resilience in children exposed to violence: A meta-analysis of protective factors across ecological contexts. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 22(3), 406–431. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-019-00293-1 PubMed
    16. Zhang, H., Wang, W., Liu, S., Feng, Y., & Wei, Q. (2023). A meta-analytic review of the impact of child maltreatment on self-esteem: 1981 to 2021. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(5), 3398–3411. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221129587
  • Judgment Day Starts in Childhood

    Judgment Day Starts in Childhood

    Imagine subjecting a child to the narrative of a final cosmic reckoning; an ultimate eschatological trial in which every hidden thought and transient impulse will be brought before an omniscient tribunal. A child who cannot yet regulate basic feelings, let alone comprehend the passage of a single week. Yet these events of universal audit remain a staple across world religions, whether framed as the Last Judgment, Yawm al-Qiyamah, Yom HaDin, Frashokereti, Ragnarök, or Mahapralaya.

    Enforcing submission through threats of ultimate divine judgment endangers psychological development. An immature prefrontal cortex cannot exert top-down inhibition over subcortical threat networks, just as a developing ego lacks the structural capacity to symbolize and bind an omniscient, totalizing threat before raw primary-process arousal overwhelms it. Instilling such fear meets established criteria for emotional abuse (Norman et al., 2012; Brassard et al., 2020).

    Definitions and Criteria of Emotional Maltreatment

    Child protection guidelines have a dry way of describing it. They define emotional abuse as nonphysical caregiver behavior: the threatening, frightening, humiliating, or rejecting that undermines a kid’s development and dignity (Norman et al., 2012; Cui & Liu, 2018). Strip away the bureaucratic phrasing, and you are left with deliberate intimidation, public or private shaming, and rigid expectations backed by implicit threats (Norman et al., 2012; Xiao et al., 2021). Because these patterns leave no physical bruises, emotional maltreatment remains widely under-recognized (Brassard et al., 2020). Yet when caregivers repeatedly rely on terror or coercion, they create a home life that systematically guts a child’s sense of safety and sets up severe mental health consequences down the road (Norman et al., 2012; Gardner et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2025; Coughlan et al., 2026).

    Doctrinal Fear and Divine Judgment as Emotional Abuse

    Bring cosmic reckoning into that dynamic, and the leverage becomes absolute. When adults use threats of eternal damnation or divine judgment to dominate, terrify, or control a child, they are practicing textbook coercive control (Cui & Liu, 2018; Brassard et al., 2020). Faith settings magnify this because kids absorb doctrine through relationships built on institutional power, trust, and absolute authority. Children in religious communities explicitly report that a fear of divine judgment undermines their felt safety, turning the way adults teach sin into a frontline safeguarding issue (Russell et al., 2022). Fear-based instruction crosses into abuse the moment it relies on repeated terror rather than a baseline of safety, love, and personal agency (Payir & Heiphetz, 2022; Morgan et al., 2025).

    Institutional Safeguarding, Power Dynamics, and Religion-Linked Harms

    Legal case files on religion-related abuse show how easily doctrine can justify cruelty, proving why child welfare must always override religiously motivated harm (Bottoms et al., 1995). At the extreme end, cases involving witchcraft accusations or exorcism rituals leave children with clinically significant depression and anxiety (Taramsari & Enshaei, 2022). Even without dramatic rituals, living inside an inescapable threat narrative impairs a child’s everyday functioning, regardless of whether the monster under the bed is physical or metaphysical (Hickman et al., 2021).

    Developmental Susceptibility and Cognitive Mechanisms of Threat

    Kids are uniquely ill-equipped to dodge this kind of psychological pressure. A parent’s verbal threats carry a direct causal power, instantiating acute fear in a child through words alone (Nimphy et al., 2024). Young children process punishment through concrete, automatic cognitive rules; unable to separate divine judgment from human authority the way adults do, they experience threats of cosmic trial with terrifying, immediate realism (Johnson, 1962; Payir & Heiphetz, 2022; Gerdin et al., 2025). Mechanistically, this exposure rewires how they handle the world. Chronic threat installs hypervigilance, disrupts fear conditioning, distorts emotion recognition, and locks the brain into a constant search for hostility (McLaughlin et al., 2016; Jaffee, 2017; Gruhn & Compas, 2020; Bérubé et al., 2021; Schäfer et al., 2022).

    Downstream Mental Health Consequences

    The downstream consequences read like a blueprint for long-term psychological fallout. Perceived parental mental control correlates steadily with child depression, while authoritarian parenting breeds emotion dysregulation and behavioral problems across every culture studied (Pinquart, 2017; Haslam et al., 2020; Chyung et al., 2021). Over time, childhood emotional abuse matures into shattered self-esteem, social anxiety, suicidality, and broad adult psychiatric vulnerability (Norman et al., 2012; Humphreys et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2022). In fact, the link between emotional maltreatment and later internalizing disorders is often just as strong as, and sometimes stronger than, the damage left by other recognized forms of abuse (Gardner et al., 2019; Humphreys et al., 2020; Xiao et al., 2021).

    The Psychoanalytic Remedy: Symbolization, Holding, and Structural Autonomy

    If you who grew up under the shadow of eschatological terror it’s hard to shake of the internal tribunal. The omniscient, punitive gaze of early caregivers and their deity turns inward during early development, hardening into a relentless superego that endlessly audits your self for stray thoughts and impermissible feelings. In psychoanalysis we start breaking down this internal panopticon. Psychoanalysis is a attuned, non-judgmental process, where you encounter a mental space that stubbornly refuses to play the role of the ancient judge. This setting gives you the quiet, reliable space where any feeling or thought can exist without threat.

    At its structural core, psychoanalysis works by turning raw, unbound panic into something that can actually be thought about, named, and held. Where your unfinished prefrontal brain was once flooded by subcortical threat surges, your adult brain uses the analytic dialogue to translate primitive terror into representational thought. Through free association and the work of transference, the unnamable cosmic dread gradually recedes into articulable history. As you build the structural capacity to process and integrate that raw primary-process arousal, chronic hypervigilance loses its chokehold on your nervous system, allowing your prefrontal networks to regain top-down regulation.

    Ultimately, psychoanalysis allows you to dethrone the internal prosecutor and reclaim your own inner world. When you project that terrifying tribunal and discover that the frame remains calm, human, and sturdy, the leverage of the early indoctrination gradually breaks. The rigid, fear-driven superego gives way to a flexible moral agency rooted in self-compassion and empathy rather than chronic threat. Through this structural realignment, we are restoring the fundamental human right that fear-based abuse tried to erase: your unmonitored freedom of a private mind.

    References

    Brassard, M. R., Hart, S. N., & Glaser, D. (2020). Psychological maltreatment: An international challenge to children’s safety and well being. Child Abuse & Neglect, 110, 104611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104611
    Chyung, Y. J., Lee, Y. A., Ahn, S. J., & Bang, H. S. (2022). Associations of perceived parental psychological control with depression, anxiety in children and adolescents: A meta-analysis. Marriage & Family Review, 58(2), 158-197. https://doi.org/10.1080/01494929.2021.1941496
    Gruhn, M. A., & Compas, B. E. (2020). Effects of maltreatment on coping and emotion regulation in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review. Child Abuse & Neglect, 103, 104446. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104446
    Nimphy, C. A., Mitrou, V., Elzinga, B., van der Does, W., & Aktar, E. (2024). The role of parental verbal threat information in children’s fear acquisition: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 27, 714-731. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-024-00485-4
    Norman, R. E., Byambaa, M., De, R., Butchart, A., Scott, J., & Vos, T. (2012). The long-term health consequences of child physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS Medicine, 9(11), e1001349. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001349
    Payir, A., & Heiphetz, L. (2022). Children’s and adults’ attribution of moral judgments to human and supernatural agents. Journal of Cognition and Development, 23(4), 524-544. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2022.2061975
    Russell, D. H., Stewart, J., & Higgins, D. J. (2023). Safeguarding in church: Children and young people’s perceptions of safety in religious and other faith-based settings. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(3-4), 4459-4485. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605221117548
    Xiao, Z., Baldwin, M. M., Wong, S. C., Obsuth, I., Meinck, F., & Murray, A. L. (2023). The impact of childhood psychological maltreatment on mental health outcomes in adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(5), 3049-3064. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221122816

  • Tree Rings of Feeling: Understanding the Layers of Your Emotions

    Tree Rings of Feeling: Understanding the Layers of Your Emotions

    An emotion can be ancient and at the same time unmistakably yours. You inherit the capacity to fear, seek, rage, attach, care, play, and desire. You also inherit sensitivities and tendencies that influence what attracts your attention, which situations acquire emotional significance, and how readily particular responses arise. Experience meets a mind already prepared to treat certain events as threatening, rewarding, frustrating, sexually salient, or worthy of care.

    Personal history gives these systems particular objects, associations, and meanings. Fear is part of a mammalian inheritance; what you fear develops through the encounter between that inheritance and the life you have lived. The same is true of whom you miss, what provokes you, how you seek pleasure, and the kinds of closeness you find comforting or dangerous. Even the person you become around your emotions grows from this continuous exchange between inherited organization and experience.

    A tree keeps the history of its growth in concentric layers. Its earliest formation remains at the center while every later season develops around it. Your emotional life also carries its earlier organization forward. The newest layer contains language, reflection, values, and a conscious sense of who you are, while the older layers continue to supply its affective force.

    Your own experience is the only one directly available to you. Other people can describe what fear, longing, or delight feels like to them, yet language can only approximate a comparison between two minds. When someone says a date was “interesting,” you still have to discover whether they mean full of warm surprises or I have returned with several new concerns. Every conversation about feeling is a delicate translation.

    The same difficulty appears when you try to understand yourself. An emotion may reach awareness as a bodily sensation, an impulse, a thought that will not leave, a change in atmosphere, or a familiar reaction whose origin remains obscure. To know your emotional self, you have to distinguish the layers of an experience while remembering that they act together.

    How We Divide What Arrives as a Whole

    Emotion has puzzled psychologists and philosophers partly because lived experience presents its components as a whole. A flushed face, racing heart, alarming interpretation, urge to escape, and conscious feeling of fear may arrive so closely together that their order becomes difficult to discern. Theories separate these elements so that their relations can be examined.

    The James–Lange theory places bodily change at the center of emotional feeling. In William James’s account, you encounter something significant, your body responds, and the perception of those bodily changes constitutes the feeling. The Cannon–Bard theory proposes that conscious feeling and bodily response arise in parallel. The Schachter–Singer two-factor theory gives a larger role to interpretation: physiological arousal acquires its emotional character through the meaning assigned to the situation.

    Each theory draws attention to a different feature of experience. You can notice what happens in your body, how quickly a feeling becomes recognizable, and which interpretation turns arousal into embarrassment, anger, anticipation, or fear. Theories of emotion are maps drawn at different scales; each makes certain features easier to see.

    Another group of theories asks how emotions should be classified. William James discussed grief, fear, rage, and love as “coarser emotions” with conspicuous bodily reverberations [1]. Paul Ekman later identified six widely recognizable facial expressions associated with anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise [2]. Jaak Panksepp approached the question through comparative neuroscience, studying the emotional systems shared across mammalian brains.

    Panksepp used electrical and chemical stimulation, pharmacological interventions, localized lesions, and observations of animal behavior to identify seven primary affective systems: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, CARE, and LUST [3]. These systems are evolutionarily ancient and generate characteristic forms of affect, motivation, attention, and readiness for action.

    Theories of basic emotion answer a horizontal question: what fundamental varieties of affect exist? Panksepp’s primary, secondary, and tertiary processes add a vertical question: how does inherited affect become connected with learning, reflection, and a conscious sense of self?

    The primary level contains evolutionarily prepared affective systems. The secondary level develops through conditioning, emotional memory, habit, and social learning. The tertiary level brings language, symbolic thought, autobiographical understanding, values, and conscious reflection into the proceeding. These levels remain closely connected through ascending and descending influences. Every later layer develops through the affective organization that preceded it.

    A schematic representation of the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of emotional processing.

    The Oldest Ring: Core Emotions

    The primary affective systems come with you. Their deepest foundations lie in the brainstem and other evolutionarily ancient regions of the brain. They give experience its earliest directions, preparing you to approach, avoid, resist, attach, nurture, play, and reproduce before personal learning begins.

    These systems are often compared with other survival-regulating processes. Hunger directs you toward food, thirst toward water, and pain away from bodily damage. Primary emotions organize more complex forms of engagement with the environment. They influence what becomes important, how the body prepares, and which form of action becomes appealing.

    In adult life, a primary system rarely appears by itself. Learning gives it particular triggers and expectations; reflection supplies names, interpretations, and judgments. Still, the primary affect remains active within the elaborated human experience.

    • SEEKING impels you to explore, investigate, pursue, and anticipate. It once helped your ancestors search for food and shelter; it can now participate in researching your next holiday late into the night, reaching for a new dress in a shop, following an absorbing idea, or lingering in a conversation that has opened somewhere new to go.
    • RAGE mobilizes resistance when movement toward something desired is obstructed or when your boundaries are crossed. It may appear in open confrontation, in finally objecting when someone cuts ahead of you, in standing your ground with an overstepping friend, or in deciding that a demanding message will remain unanswered.
    • FEAR organizes vigilance, avoidance, and protection in the presence of danger. It may sharpen your attention during a tense meeting, tighten your chest on a dark road, or make a seemingly ordinary situation feel charged before you have identified the source.
    • PANIC/GRIEF responds to separation and loss. It draws you toward attachment figures, creates the ache of absence, and may prompt you to contact a friend when you feel alone or reach for your partner after an argument. Prolonged separation can lead toward grief and withdrawal when attempts at reunion have failed.
    • PLAY supports joyful social engagement, experimentation, and the testing of strength, skill, and limits in relatively safe conditions. Its human extensions can be found in teasing, humor, games, sports, imaginative activity, and parts of artistic life.
    • CARE supports nurturance and protection. It appears in soothing a distressed child, tending to someone vulnerable, noticing what another person needs, or sending a friend the message that helps them feel accompanied.
    • LUST supplies sexual interest and desire. Its influence extends into courtship, attraction, the wish to become desirable, and some forms of self-presentation or status-seeking—from climbing a social hierarchy to choosing the dress in which you feel particularly alive.

    The systems are shared, yet they never produce identical emotional lives. Their thresholds differ. They become attached to different people and situations, enter into different alliances and conflicts, and acquire meanings through the lives into which they arrive. The inherited foundations remain active throughout this personalization.

    The Rings a Life Adds

    Secondary emotional processes develop as the primary systems encounter the environment. The pleasant and unpleasant affects generated by those systems guide learning from the beginning. They mark experiences with biological value, making certain people, places, actions, tones of voice, and sequences of events worth approaching or avoiding.

    During childhood, you gradually acquire expectations about closeness, danger, approval, conflict, and loss. A person’s expression may become associated with comfort; a change in tone may predict humiliation or anger. Reaching for help may bring relief in one family and disappointment in another. The inherited systems direct this learning by determining which outcomes carry emotional importance.

    FEAR therefore develops beyond immediate physical danger. It may become attached to displeasing someone whose anger once frightened you, speaking where mistakes attract ridicule, or revealing a wish that previously threatened a relationship. PANIC/GRIEF becomes organized around the availability of particular attachment figures. RAGE learns where resistance is possible, where it is costly, and which indirect routes remain open when direct protest feels dangerous.

    These learned patterns are heirlooms from your early environment. Some continue to serve you with remarkable accuracy. Others preserve the emotional conditions under which they formed, carrying an old expectation into a present that resembles the past only in some unnoticed detail.

    Inheritance also continues to shape which lessons are learned most readily. Temperament, sensitivity, reward responsiveness, sociability, and the relative strength of different affective systems influence how two people experience the same surroundings. Even siblings raised in one household encounter that household through somewhat different nervous systems, occupy different positions in its relationships, and collect different histories.

    Secondary learning gives the emotional self much of its particularity. The capacity for separation distress is ancient; the person whose departure becomes unbearable is personal. The RAGE system is inherited; whether anger becomes immediate protest, quiet resentment, self-criticism, or an intellectual case against someone develops through a much longer history.

    The Reflective Layer

    As cortical capacities mature, primary affect and secondary learning become connected with language, abstraction, reflection, and autobiographical identity. Panksepp described these as tertiary processes: higher mental operations through which you interpret feelings, anticipate consequences, form values, and understand yourself across time.

    Tertiary thought develops inside the affective organization it attempts to understand. Reflection can observe a feeling, give it a name, compare it with earlier experiences, and connect it with a conscious principle. Its materials still come from the older layers. A thought matters because some affective system has already given it significance.

    Consider anger during a conversation in which someone repeatedly interrupts you. At the primary level, obstruction may activate RAGE. Secondary learning may connect interruption with earlier experiences of being dismissed, humiliated, or unable to defend yourself. At the tertiary level, you may interpret the event through a belief such as people never take me seriously, or through an identity organized around remaining composed and reasonable.

    Conscious awareness may receive only the uppermost form. You might experience yourself as intellectually offended by the person’s argument while the bodily tension, learned expectation of dismissal, and primary protest remain less clearly recognized. Another person might feel immediate fury in the same situation; a third might lose their train of thought and become anxious. The shared affective systems have passed through different histories.

    Tertiary processes also shape what you permit yourself to feel. You may regard sadness as evidence of depth, weakness, attachment, self-indulgence, or love. Anger may enter your self-understanding as strength, danger, vulgarity, moral clarity, or something that “people like you” simply do not experience. These interpretations influence which feelings can be named, which receive another name, and which disappear from your conscious account while continuing through behavior, bodily states, and private associations.

    Identity belongs to this reflective level, although it draws upon every layer beneath it. When you describe yourself as independent, calm, passionate, careful, difficult, generous, or incapable of jealousy, you organize emotional experience into a story about the kind of person you are. The story may capture something true. It may also leave out feelings that complicate its coherence.

    Every emotional experience therefore contains several ages of you at once. An ancient system supplies affective urgency. Earlier learning provides expectations and familiar routes of response. Reflection names the experience and places it within the person you believe yourself to be.

    Knowing the Emotional Self

    Basic-emotion theories give you a framework for asking more exact questions about your experience. The primary level indicates which ancient concern may be active: threat, obstruction, separation, exploration, care, play, or sexual desire. The secondary level reveals what your experience taught that system to notice and expect. The tertiary level shows how the resulting feeling has been named, judged, explained, and incorporated into identity. A reaction that seems disproportionate at the surface may become more intelligible when followed through these layers. The present event activates more than its visible circumstances. It touches an inherited sensitivity, awakens learned associations, and enters a conscious interpretation whose connections may initially remain outside awareness.

    No classification can tell you the whole meaning of a feeling. Two experiences of FEAR can differ in their objects, memories, bodily character, imagined consequences, and place in the self. The category identifies a foundation; closer examination reveals what has been constructed upon it. This is why knowing that you feel angry, sad, afraid, or attached provides only the beginning of acquaintance. The fuller question concerns the particular form the emotion takes in you: what summons it, what it anticipates, which earlier experiences survive within it, what it moves you toward, and how it fits or conflicts with the person you understand yourself to be.

    The oldest emotional systems come with you, and they remain active within every later elaboration. Experience teaches them particular objects and routes; reflection gives them language and a place in your account of yourself. Each layer preserves something of those that came before. To know your emotional self is to read the rings without mistaking the newest one for the whole tree.

    Sources

    [1] James, W. (1890). The emotions. In The Principles of Psychology. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin25.htm

    [2] Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3–4), 169–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068

    [3] Panksepp, J. (2010). Affective neuroscience of the emotional BrainMind: Evolutionary perspectives and implications for understanding depression. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 12(4), 533–545. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3181986/

  • Mental Difficulties as a Ready-Made Identities

    Mental Difficulties as a Ready-Made Identities

    Before TikTok began explaining your personality to you, Tumblr had helped make being unwell into an aesthetic. In parts of its 2010s culture, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders acquired a recognizable vocabulary, a visual style, and communities organized around them. You could find people who understood your unhappiness, then gradually come to understand yourself through the unhappiness you shared. A label became an identity signifier. In their account of this history, Gayathiri Rajkumar and J. D. Haltigan describe a “pseudo-normalization” in which mental illness acquired social appeal and recovery could recede from view. Being troubled had become a way of being somebody.

    The vocabulary has since become more adventurous. Today, you can join a “BPD Baddie Club,” giving borderline personality disorder the branding of an exclusive social circle. You can discover that you are a “dark empath,” a research-derived personality label that has acquired an online life considerably more glamorous than its scientific beginnings. The name alone suggests that your relationship difficulties deserve a film adaptation. Then there are videos treating sleeping with “T-rex arms” as evidence of ADHD. Apparently, even your wrists have something to confess. Psychiatric disorders, neurodevelopmental conditions, and nonclinical personality labels end up displayed together, each offering another way to reveal what sort of person you are.

    A sound diagnosis can explain difficulties that have troubled you for years, help you obtain appropriate care, and relieve considerable shame. Finding people with similar experiences can also make life less lonely. Those benefits help explain why the labels carry such force. The glamorization of mental illness as a social identity takes that appeal further: a condition becomes a recognizable persona, complete with a manner of speaking, an account of your past, and a community prepared to recognize you on sight.

    You can see the attraction, especially if your answer to “who are you” has become a little uncertain. A ready-made identity supplies an explanation for your feelings, a vocabulary for your difficulties, and people who share your experience and offer additional insight about it. You can introduce yourself with a few letters and feel that something substantial has been communicated. Much of the interpretive work appears to have been done for you. You belong somewhere, your experience makes sense, and your peculiarities have acquired the reassurance of a category. That is quite a lot to get from a label.

    Working out who you are through the particulars of your own life is a painfully slower business. You have to examine what you want, what you value, which loyalties you inherited, what you resent, and why you keep making certain choices. The answers interfere with one another. You may value independence and arrange your life around being needed; enjoy solitude and feel wounded when people leave you alone; pursue an ambition whose achievement would oblige you to abandon something else you love. A useful understanding of yourself has to accommodate all of this. A tidy description is considerably easier to manage.

    Social media is exceptionally good at providing these tidy descriptions. A creator lists a handful of familiar experiences, gives them a clinical name, and invites you to recognize yourself. The distinction between describing one person’s experience and making a claim about everyone with a condition can disappear in seconds. A 2025 study of popular ADHD TikToks collected in 2023 found that fewer than half of the symptom claims matched DSM criteria; acknowledgments that the experiences could occur in people without ADHD were rare. Most creators who stated a credential cited lived experience, and half of the creators were selling something or otherwise seeking financial support. Expertise was optional. An audience offered rather more tangible advantages.

    The invitation is seductive because recognition feels like understanding. You see a description that resembles you and experience the pleasure of being explained. Yet a resemblance leaves plenty to investigate: how often something happens, under what circumstances, how much it affects your life, and what else might account for it. A video can offer a useful starting point. The trouble begins when the starting point becomes your finished account of yourself, and every subsequent experience is recruited to confirm it.

    Once other people recognize you through that account, the attachment can become social as well as personal. Clinicians Jane Harness and Hayley Getzen called attention to a “sick-role subculture” on TikTok. The phrase captures an uncomfortable possibility: illness can become a role through which you gain membership, attention, and social capital. A disorder identity can make you distinctive enough to be interesting and familiar enough to belong. That combination has always had a market.

    Such performative mental illness carries many risks. An audience can shape sincere distress. If certain accounts of your experience receive recognition, you may learn to emphasize them, repeat them, and notice more of the experiences. Rajkumar and Haltigan propose that these incentives can also encourage exaggerated symptom presentations. Social rewards shape behavior. Being recognizable to your community can start to govern how you describe yourself, until the performance helps decide which parts of you receive attention, including your own. You can become quite practiced at being the person everyone has agreed you are.

    My concern is the narrowing that can follow. If you organize your identity around a disorder, the features that fit it can become disproportionately important, while your other interests, capacities, conflicts, and possibilities receive less consideration. You may begin to treat a difficulty as a permanent statement about what you can do. An improvement can even become socially awkward if your friendships and your place in a community depend heavily on a shared account of being unwell. You have acquired an explanation, and now you have reasons to preserve it.

    What you lose in this arrangement is your individuality. You set out to explain what makes you particular and end up describing yourself in language shared by thousands of strangers. Even an accurate diagnosis leaves most of your personhood unexplained. It says little about why a particular compliment embarrasses you, why success sometimes disappoints you, what you hope another person will notice, or which desires you can admit to yourself. These details matter because they concern the way you actually live. They are also considerably harder to put in a bio.

    Developing an identity of your own requires sustained acquaintance with those details. You begin with plenty of material: your temperament, history, relationships, culture, and the roles you have already learned to occupy. The work involves understanding what you have inherited, discovering what you have overlooked, and deciding what you want to continue. Your account of yourself changes as you learn. You can become clearer about what matters to you while remaining capable of surprise, contradiction, and revision. That flexibility gives your identity room to develop with your life.

    This is the kind of exploration we undertake in psychoanalytic conversations. We begin with your experience and follow its particularities: a reaction that puzzles you, a recurring wish, an association, an incident you keep returning to. I bring psychological knowledge, questions, and interpretations; together, we examine how the details connect and what those connections might mean. If you describe yourself as someone who always avoids conflict, for instance, we can look at the conflicts you avoid, the people involved, what you expect would happen if you spoke, and the occasions when you are quite capable of arguing. The familiar description starts to acquire some useful complications.

    I use psychoanalysis outside the clinical framework for this work of self-knowledge; clinical care has its own place whenever it is needed. In our conversations, you have time to develop an understanding of yourself that can hold more of your experience, including the parts that make your preferred explanation inconvenient. You participate in forming an identity you can understand, question, and revise. It takes longer than recognizing yourself in a video. You do, however, get to have a say in who you become.

  • Why You Can’t Argue with Faith: A Look Inside the Believer’s Brain

    Does it happen to you? You meet someone new, and they seem kind and interesting. The vibe is great, the conversation is flowing, and you just mentally categorize them as a rational adult.  Then they casually drop a theological bomb right in the middle of the small talk. One minute, you’re agreeing on the best local coffee, and the next, you are witnessing mind-blowing leaps in reasoning that defy the basic laws of physics. You throw out a well-established scientific fact; they parry with an emotional anecdote. You highlight a massive logical contradiction, and they give you a serene, unfazed smile. 

    In psychoanalysis, there is a fundamental concept called reality testing. It is the critical ability to distinguish what’s going on inside our own heads (our wishes, thoughts, and fantasies) from what is objectively happening in the external world. When you talk to a believer, it can feel like their reality testing has been put on short-time working. It can be maddening to follow their astonishing mental processing. The reason is that their brain is physiologically altered, and you two are playing by different biological rules. To accommodate faith, the human mind is neurologically hijacked and modified to tolerate, and even reward, the holy gibberish. Neuroscience will help you understand how the neural differences translate directly into the biased thinking, logical gaps, and emotional defenses you witness in your believing fellow humans.

    The “Gut Feeling” Default vs. The Analytic Pause

    The way our brains idle at rest tells you a bit about how we process the world. Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies show that, even at rest, non-believers naturally display a lot of deliberative, analytic neural processing. Believers, on the other hand, tend to rely heavily on intuitive and automatic processing (Nash et al., 2022). When we switch on our thinking machines, the distinctions increase.

    When evaluating claims and facts, non-religious folks rely much more on left hemisphere memory networks (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019). We literally pause to retrieve factual information from our mental archives. Unsurprisingly, this reliance on analysis makes skeptics slower but more accurate at logical reasoning tasks compared to believers (Pennycook et al., 2013). Believers bypass the analytical pause, opting for a mental shortcut conditioned by religious principles of punishment and reward.  

    The Broken “Oops!” Detector

    So, why don’t they care when you definitively prove their dialectics wrong? The main defendant is their Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). The ACC is essentially our brain’s cognitive conflict center, or its “Oops!” detector. It fires up when you make an error, face uncertainty, or encounter information that clashes with what you know. Research consistently shows that religious conviction is linked to significantly reduced ACC reactivity (Inzlicht et al., 2009; Senderecka, 2016). Meaning that when a believer faces a logical contradiction, their brain literally does not sound the alarm. They do not feel the uncomfortable pinch of cognitive dissonance. They remain blissfully unbothered by discrepancies. In this way, their faith acts as a neurological buffer against the anxiety of life’s uncertainty (Inzlicht et al., 2009; Senderecka, 2016).

    Logic Replaced by Ego and Reward

    If they aren’t processing facts, what exactly is firing in a believer’s brain during a religious discussion? Emotion and the defense system of their core sense of identity.

    Functional MRI (fMRI) imaging reveals that evaluating religious statements heavily activates several specific brain regions:

    • The Anterior Insula: The brain’s emotion hub (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019; Gaw, 2019; Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Grafman et al., 2020; Yeung et al., 2025).  
    • The Precuneus and vmPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex): The areas responsible for self-representation and identity (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019; Gaw, 2019; Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Grafman et al., 2020; Yeung et al., 2025; Han et al., 2008).  
    • The Ventral Striatum: The brain’s reward and motivation center (Harris et al., 2009; Rim et al., 2019; Gaw, 2019; Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Grafman et al., 2020; Yeung et al., 2025).  

    Translation: To a believer, a theological debate isn’t a logical operation! It is an exercise in processing feelings, defending their literal sense of self, and getting a dopamine hit. You are engaging in heavy thinking, while they are just being sentimental.

    Invisible Friends and Peer Pressure

    We also see massive differences in social processing. Non-religious individuals show far less neural sensitivity to peer influence. Meaning we have much less neurological pressure to conform to the herd (Thiruchselvam et al., 2017).  

    Believers, however, heavily engage their “theory-of-mind” networks, the brain regions we use to figure out what other people are thinking and intending (Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Kapogiannis et al., 2009). They use these social circuits to constantly monitor the presumed intent and emotion of supernatural agents (Kapogiannis et al., 2014; Kapogiannis et al., 2009). Their brains are working overtime to model what an invisible entity thinks of them.

    Structural Changes

    These long-term mental habits even correlate with the physical volume of the brain. Studies indicate that having a pragmatic, doubting personality is associated with an increased volume in the right precuneus (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). Conversely, fear-based religiosity actually correlates with a decreased volume in the left precuneus and the orbitofrontal cortex (a region crucial for decision-making) (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). There is also evidence linking the periaqueductal gray, a primal region involved in fear modulation, to spirituality and religiosity (Ferguson et al., 2021). This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The threat of divine punishment has always been religion’s favorite stick. It literally hooks into the brain’s ancient survival circuits to keep the flock terrified, obedient, and in line. And that psychological terror is physically mapped onto their fundamental neural architecture.

    An intimate, perceived relationship with a deity has also been linked to increased volume in the right middle temporal cortex (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). This is a region of the brain heavily involved in navigating social interactions and figuring out what other people are thinking. Essentially, believers spend enough time talking to an invisible friend and trying to decode their mysterious will, that their brain starts treating it like a very real, demanding social bond. Their brain is structurally adapted for maintaining a deep, intimate connection with the supernatural entity.

    The Grim Reality

    Ultimately, a believer’s brain is accommodated to belief, not to testing reality. When the human mental system is tasked with the survival of a religious worldview, objective reality becomes a liability. To keep the belief alive, the mind must deploy a heavy arsenal of defense mechanisms: outright denial, endless rationalization, compartmentalization, and projecting human intent onto the empty sky. In the religious brain, protecting the belief is given absolute priority. These defense mechanisms override logic, they override reasoning, and as the neuroscience shows, they even override basic perception. 

    So, maybe save your breath and keep your sanity, otherwise you are bringing a knife to a gunfight. You are showing up with objective reality, science, and logical syllogisms. But they are operating with a muted “oops” and a temporal cortex that is physically beefed up to maintain a relationship with an invisible friend. No matter how pristine and flawless your data is, it simply will not run on a machine that has been biologically wired to reject it. You cannot fix a hardware problem with a software update. It makes me sad, too. Should we just let go?

    References

    Barnby, J., Bailey, N., Chambers, R., & Fitzgerald, P. (2015). How similar are the changes in neural activity resulting from mindfulness practice in contrast to spiritual practice?. Consciousness and cognition, 36, 219-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.07.002

    Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function.. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7 3, 119-124. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00031-7

    Dickinson, D. L. (2024). Deliberation, mood response, and the confirmation bias in the religious belief domain. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2024.102161

    Elk, M., & Aleman, A. (2017). Brain mechanisms in religion and spirituality: An integrative predictive processing framework. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 73, 359-378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.12.031

    Ferguson, M., Schaper, F., Cohen, A., Siddiqi, S., Merrill, S., Nielsen, J. A., Grafman, J., Urgesi, C., Fabbro, F., & Fox, M. (2021). A neural circuit for spirituality and religiosity derived from patients with brain lesions. Biological psychiatry, 91, 380 – 388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.06.016

    Gardner, S. M., Andrade, G., Ho, P. A., & Nasrallah, H. A. (2026). Electroencephalography, Religious Belief and Practice, and Their Psychiatric Correlates: A Scoping Review. Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 37, 4 – 15. https://doi.org/10.1177/10401237261417737

    Gaw, A. (2019). Religious Belief at the Level of the Brain: Neural Correlates and Influence of Culture.. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. https://doi.org/10.1097/nmd.0000000000001016

    Grafman, J., Cristofori, I., Zhong, W., & Bulbulia, J. A. (2020). The Neural Basis of Religious Cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29, 126 – 133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419898183

    Han, S., Mao, L., Gu, X., Zhu, Y., Ge, J., & Y. (2008). Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing. Social Neuroscience, 3, 1 – 15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470910701469681

    Harris, S., Kaplan, J., Curiel, A. R., Bookheimer, S., Iacoboni, M., & Cohen, M. (2009). The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief. PLoS ONE, 4. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007272

    Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I. M., Hirsh, J. B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural Markers of Religious Conviction. Psychological Science, 20, 385 – 392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02305.x

    Kapogiannis, D., Deshpande, G., Krueger, F., Thornburg, M. P., & Grafman, J. (2014). Brain Networks Shaping Religious Belief. Brain Connectivity, 4, 70 – 79. https://doi.org/10.1089/brain.2013.0172

    Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M.-D., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity. PLoS ONE, 4. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007180

    Kapogiannis, D., Barbey, A., Su, M.-D., Zamboni, G., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2009). Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 4876 – 4881. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0811717106

    Kiang, M., Cupid, J., Ahmed, S., Lepock, J., & Girard, T. (2020). Religiosity is associated with less prediction of the typical: an event-related brain potential study.. Biological psychology, 107884. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2020.107884

    Lindeman, M., & Lipsanen, J. (2016). Diverse Cognitive Profiles of Religious Believers and Nonbelievers. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 26, 185 – 192. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2015.1091695

    Miller, L., Balodis, I., McClintock, C., Xu, J., Lacadie, C., Sinha, R., & Potenza, M. (2019). Neural Correlates of Personalized Spiritual Experiences.. Cerebral cortex, 29 6, 2331-2338. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy102

    Nash, K., Kleinert, T., Leota, J., Scott, A., & Schimel, J. (2022). Resting-State Networks of Believers and Non-Believers: An EEG Microstate Study.. Biological psychology, 108283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2022.108283

    Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2013). Belief bias during reasoning among religious believers and skeptics. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20, 806-811. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0394-3

    Pontes, M. C. L., Diógenes, V. R. B., Rodrigues, N. C. M. D. N., De Fátima Lima Vasconcelos, E., De Queiroz, M. C. O., De Paula Miranda, A., Pacheco, B., & Nóbrega, K. F. (2021). Neural factors that define religiosity: neurophysiological distinction between the individual with religious and non-religious beliefs. São Paulo Medical Journal. https://doi.org/10.5327/1516-3180.694

    Rim, J. I., Ojeda, J. C., Svob, C., Kayser, J., Drews, E., Kim, Y., Tenke, C., Skipper, J., & Weissman, M. (2019). Current Understanding of Religion, Spirituality, and Their Neurobiological Correlates.. Harvard Review of Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1097/hrp.0000000000000232

    Saroglou, V., Clobert, M., Cohen, A., Johnson, K. A., Ladd, K., Van Pachterbeke, M., Adamovová, L., Blogowska, J., Brandt, P., Çukur, C. S., Hwang, K., Miglietta, A., Motti-Stefanidi, F., Muñoz-García, A., Murken, S., Roussiau, N., & Valladares, J. T. (2020). Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging: The Cognitive, Emotional, Moral, and Social Dimensions of Religiousness across Cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 51, 551 – 575. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022120946488

    Senderecka, M. (2016). Brain and faith. Neural correlates of religious beliefs. Philosophical Problems in Science, 165-188.

    Thiruchselvam, R., Gopi, Y., Kilekwang, L., Harper, J., & Gross, J. (2017). In God we trust? Neural measures reveal lower social conformity among non-religious individuals. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, 956 – 964. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx023

    Van Leeuwen, N., Weisman, K., & Luhrmann, T. (2021). To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding. Open Mind : Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 5, 91 – 99. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00044

    Yan, A. (2024). Religion on the brain: A look into the neurological impact of religion and spirituality. Scholarly Review Journal. https://doi.org/10.70121/001c.124866

    Yeung, A., Wong, N., Tsui, I. S. Y., & Lee, T. C. P. (2025). Neural correlates of religious behavior related to Christianity: an ALE meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1557796

  • The Illusion of Separating Emotion from Reason: Damasio’s Challenge to Descartes

    The Illusion of Separating Emotion from Reason: Damasio’s Challenge to Descartes

    You are having coffee with Alex. After years of false starts, they have finally acquired something solid: a stable position at a logistics firm, decent pay, health insurance, even a desk with their name on it. It is their first reliable foothold in adult life. Now, over lukewarm cappuccinos, Alex announces that they are resigning to establish a luxury mushroom-jerky company.

    They have no experience in food production and no discernible business plan. Only last month, they asked you what a VAT number was. Still, Alex speaks with conviction about functional fungi, an underserved market, and a “deep alignment” they discovered after reading a Medium article. The explanation is elaborate enough to sound considered. As you listen, however, the reasons begin to resemble the spokesperson for a decision made somewhere else.

    Alex is brilliant. They once explained quantum entanglement to a cab driver in a way that made sense. Yet their intelligence has never protected them from choices whose logic becomes most impressive after the emotional conclusion has already been reached.

    Most of us know this arrangement in a less spectacular form. You may have assembled an impeccable explanation for a decision whose attraction, urgency, or necessity remained obscure to you. The explanation may have been entirely sincere. It may also have contained only part of what moved you.

    The distance between intelligence and self-knowledge is where we are turning to Antonio Damasio.

    The Patient Who Could Think but Could Not Choose

    In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, published in 1994, neurologist Antonio Damasio examined what happens when the neural systems involved in emotion and valuation can no longer participate normally in thought. His observations challenged the familiar assumption that emotion interferes with reason and that clearer decisions should follow once feeling has been removed from the proceedings.

    One of his best-known patients, whom he called Elliot, had developed a brain tumor. The tumor and its removal left damage in the ventromedial region of his prefrontal cortex. Before this event, Elliot had led a stable life and enjoyed a successful professional career. Afterward, his practical existence began to disintegrate. He lost his job, entered disastrous business ventures, divorced, remarried, and divorced again.

    The peculiar feature of his condition was the preservation of abilities that might ordinarily be expected to support good judgment. His intelligence remained intact. His memory, language, attention, and capacity for abstract reasoning appeared largely unaffected. He could understand social conventions, anticipate possible consequences, and explain what a sensible person ought to do.

    Yet he could spend an extraordinary amount of time deciding how to organize a set of documents. Choices with serious consequences received the same cool consideration as trivial ones. He could enumerate the available possibilities without acquiring a felt sense of which deserved priority.

    Elliot’s affective responses had become strikingly attenuated. He recounted personal disasters with a detachment that surprised Damasio. The events remained available as facts, although their significance no longer seemed to register with the force required to guide his behavior. Later studies of people with ventromedial prefrontal damage likewise found impaired real-life judgment despite relatively preserved conventional intellectual abilities, along with reduced anticipatory bodily responses to disadvantageous possibilities [1, 2].

    Reason had survived. Something that ordinarily gives reason direction had been lost.

    The Inheritance of the Divide

    Damasio chose Descartes for his title because Cartesian dualism offers an influential expression of the division between mind and body. Descartes distinguished thinking substance from extended matter, allowing the mind to be imagined as something essentially separate from the physical organism.

    The philosophical history is more complex than a single culprit and his unfortunate sentence. Still, the separation entered Western habits of thought and remains visible in everyday language. We speak of “mind over matter.” We admire people who keep a cool head, rise above their feelings, and prevent emotion from clouding their judgment. Rational thought appears elevated and clean, while feeling carries traces of animality, bodily disturbance, and unreliable appetite.

    Once reason and emotion have been assigned to opposing sides, good judgment seems to require victory by the rational faculty. Damasio’s patients revealed the biological weakness of this ideal. People whose emotional participation in decision-making had been severely diminished did not become unusually lucid decision-makers. They often became unable to organize their lives around stable priorities.

    Damasio’s argument begins with the embodied character of mind. Thought occurs in a living person whose brain continually represents and regulates the condition of the body. Every possibility you consider enters a system already concerned with safety, attachment, opportunity, status, loss, effort, and the maintenance of life. Some of these concerns arise from evolutionary history; others acquire their particular form through your own.

    Logic can compare means and consequences. Affect participates in establishing which consequences matter.

    How Feeling Gives Weight to Thought

    Damasio developed the somatic marker hypothesis to describe how affective and bodily signals contribute to decision-making. As you encounter situations and experience their consequences, certain possibilities become associated with changes in bodily and neural states. A similar situation can later reactivate these states, sometimes before you have consciously analyzed what you are seeing.

    A somatic marker may take the familiar form of a tightening stomach, a quickening pulse, a sense of expansion, or a faint reluctance that seems to arrive without explanation. The process can also occur through what Damasio calls an “as-if body loop,” in which the brain simulates an expected bodily response without waiting for the full change to unfold throughout the body [3].

    These markers influence attention. They make some possibilities vivid and allow others to recede. An option associated with danger may acquire an immediate aversive quality; another may appear unusually promising. This affective marking reduces the number of alternatives that require prolonged conscious analysis.

    Imagine opening a restaurant menu containing fifty pages and having no appetite, preference, aversion, habit, or passing desire to narrow the field. Every dish would require equal examination according to price, ingredients, nutritional value, portion size, and the probability that the kitchen handles aubergine competently. Closing time could arrive before dinner.

    Real decisions often contain far more possibilities than any menu. Emotional marking helps determine which ones receive consideration and how heavily their consequences weigh. Its operation may remain unconscious, leaving you aware only that one alternative feels right, another feels intolerable, and a third barely appears as an option at all.

    A gut feeling is a compressed verdict assembled from evolved dispositions and personal experience. Its accuracy varies. It may register a subtle danger that your conscious attention has missed, carry an old expectation into a situation where it no longer applies, or express a conflict among several things that matter to you. Whatever its predictive value, its presence tells you how some part of your self has appraised the situation.

    Reason Has a Body

    Damasio distinguishes emotion from feeling, although the words are often used interchangeably in ordinary speech. Emotion refers to an organized pattern of neural and bodily changes: alterations in heart rate, muscle tone, posture, facial expression, hormonal activity, attention, and readiness for action. Feeling is the subjective experience of changes represented in the brain.

    The distinction helps explain why an emotional process may influence you before you can name it. Your attention may narrow, your body may prepare, and one interpretation may become more available than its alternatives. Conscious recognition arrives later, perhaps as unease, excitement, shame, attraction, or a conviction that seems to require no argument.

    Every deliberation begins in a body with a history. When you imagine accepting a job, ending a relationship, moving to another country, or revealing something private, you do more than calculate future events. Your brain partly simulates what each future might be like for you. The imagined possibility acquires a bodily tone and a felt quality through which it becomes personally significant.

    This does not make every feeling a mysterious form of wisdom. Emotional responses were shaped by recurring evolutionary problems and further formed by individual experience. They reflect what your nervous system has learned to approach, avoid, preserve, or recover. Their priorities may coincide with the life you consciously wish to lead. They may also preserve assumptions, loyalties, and expectations that you have never examined.

    A feeling therefore offers information about two subjects at once: the situation before you and the person encountering it.

    What a Decision Reveals

    Popular accounts of Damasio’s work often end with an instruction to trust your gut. The more interesting implication concerns what the gut contains. Bodily feeling supplies emphasis without explaining its grammar. You know that something matters before you necessarily know what it means.

    Consider an attractive professional opportunity that evokes an inexplicable reluctance. The reluctance might register a genuine feature of the situation. It might also carry the memory of an earlier humiliation, a fear of becoming more visible, resistance to resembling an ambitious parent, or grief over the life that accepting the position would require you to leave behind. Several of these meanings may coexist.

    The conscious argument in favor of the opportunity may be equally layered. Prestige, income, intellectual interest, social approval, and the prospect of escape can all appear under the respectable heading of career advancement. A reason may be valid and still provide an incomplete account of its own importance.

    Rationalization often consists of sincere truths arranged around a motive that remains unnamed.

    Psychoanalytic and phenomenological inquiry stay with the disagreement long enough for its construction to emerge. The hesitation itself receives attention. So do the images attached to each possibility, the memories that arise unexpectedly, the future scenes that seem unusually vivid, and the private associations between the present choice and earlier forms of yourself. Free association allows one element to lead toward another without requiring the conscious mind to know in advance which connection will prove significant.

    This kind of examination may reveal that the conflict never concerned reason and emotion in the abstract. One wish may be protecting continuity while another seeks expansion. A familiar role may promise security and threaten confinement at the same time. The available options may touch different versions of the person you have been and several people you can imagine becoming.

    Even Alex’s fungal revelation may contain more than commercial foolishness. The luxury mushroom-jerky company could express a desire for authorship, resistance to an ordinary working life, fear of becoming fixed in adulthood, or a genuine attraction to building something independently. The market analysis cannot tell us which of these is active. Alex’s “deep alignment” cannot tell us either.

    Whether the company succeeds is one question. What Alex is attempting to become through it is another.

    The Self Behind the Choice

    The division between thinking and feeling can be experientially vivid. You may understand one course of action and desire another. Your conclusions may remain stable while your body recoils from them. You may feel drawn toward something that withstands no serious examination.

    Such conflicts arise within one mental life. Different processes evaluate the situation according to different histories, levels of awareness, and time horizons. One response may register immediate danger; another considers consequences years ahead. A wish formed in childhood may encounter values acquired much later. An evolved disposition can meet a cultural demand, a private attachment, or an identity you have deliberately chosen.

    Self-knowledge develops through attention to the relations among these responses. Feelings carry evolutionary and personal histories. Reasoning arises from those histories as well and can serve discovery, defense, explanation, or concealment. Intelligence is perfectly capable of constructing an elegant account of what you ought to want. Affect may preserve priorities you hesitate to acknowledge. It can also repeat an appraisal whose original circumstances have disappeared.

    No single response arrives with guaranteed authority. Each tells us something about the organization of the person in whom it appears.

    Damasio’s work gives us a richer description of the chooser. A decision emerges from a mind whose thoughts remain connected with bodily regulation, emotional memory, learned value, and processes that never enter awareness in verbal form. Conscious reasoning participates in the decision, although it may know less about the whole proceeding than its eloquence suggests.

    A choice may make perfect sense while continuing to feel wrong. Another may feel inevitable and resist every explanation. In both cases, the conscious account has failed to contain all the available evidence. We can listen to the reasons and the feeling, trace their histories and connections, and discover what kind of future each is attempting to secure.

    Every decision carries some knowledge of the person making it. Much of that knowledge arrives before it has words.

    Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error remains a rewarding account of the inseparability of body, emotion, and reason. You can find the book here. (Affiliate link.)

    Sources

    [1] Bechara, A., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (1996). Failure to respond autonomically to anticipated future outcomes following damage to prefrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 6(2), 215–225. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/6.2.215

    [2] Bechara, A., Tranel, D., & Damasio, H. (2000). Characterization of the decision-making deficit of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions. Brain, 123(11), 2189–2202. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/123.11.2189

    [3] Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 351(1346), 1413–1420. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1996.0125

  • Evolutionary Psychology of Faith: A Survival Feature or a Mind Bug?

    Evolutionary Psychology of Faith: A Survival Feature or a Mind Bug?


    If religion were a person, how are things between you two? Are you even on speaking terms? Are you just awkwardly tolerating each other at family gatherings, giving a polite nod from across the room? Or do you cross to the other side of the street when you see them coming?
    Our relationship has moved through distinct eras. When I was younger, I had a more …. let’s say fierce attitude. Then, for a time, I mostly just forgot about it, and gradually became more tolerant on the rare occasions when I interacted with a religious person. Things were chill.

    Until last year, when religion crashed into my life like an intense friend from middle school who suddenly moved in next door. You know the type that you hadn’t thought about in twenty years, but suddenly they are knocking on your door with beer and want to discuss deeply personal stuff when you run into each other in the hallway. You find yourself frantically messaging old classmates to figure out what this odd cookie’s deal is and how to handle their now-constant presence.

    Religion … has many faces. At the individual level, it can offer comfort. It is a ready-made antidote to existential dread. It comes with a community that secures a sense of belonging. Societally, it is the ultimate glue, aligning thousands of strangers under a shared moral canopy and a great potential to mobilize them for common causes. Good or bad causes. Meaning, the shadows are dark. Societally, the exact mechanism that binds an “in-group” together inherently creates an “out-group.” The cohesive glue easily hardens into a weapon for tribal conflict, xenophobia, and systemic oppression. On an individual level, it can breed deep-seated shame, massive biases, and the severe suppression of one’s real self.

    You want to know how a cognitive phenomenon with such volatile, double-edged outcomes evolves in the first place? I got you. Basically, we have two models that explain why all human societies persistently exhibit this trait.

    The Evolutionary Advantage or The “It’s a Feature” Camp

    The first model looks at religion as a straightforward adaptation. It argues that religion evolved because it actively helped humans survive, cooperate, and reproduce.

    While Darwin (1871), in The Descent of Man, and even early sociologists like Émile Durkheim (1912), in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, theorized the social binding function of religion, the modern evolutionary framework was developed by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and anthropologist Richard Sosis. in his Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society, Sloan Wilson is focusing on group-level adaptation. Group-level adaptation is the idea that evolution doesn’t just reward the fittest selfish individuals, but actually favors entire groups that figure out how to operate together as a single, cooperative unit. Richard Sosis, on the other hand, focuses on costly signaling, which is basically the ultimate lie-detector test for loyalty. It is the idea that making people do difficult, painful, or time-consuming things proves to the rest of the group that they aren’t faking their commitment. So basically, Wilson and Sosis argue that religion solves the free-rider problem. What is that?

    Humans didn’t conquer the planet by being the fastest or the strongest. We rule the world because of our unmatched capacity for teamwork. From Darwin’s early notes to modern scholars like Michael Tomasello (“shared intentionality” in Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny), Joseph Henrich (“the collective brain” in The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter), and Brian Hare (“survival of the friendliest” in Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity), the scientific consensus is that extreme cooperation is sapiens’ ultimate evolutionary superpower. But cooperation is risky. Groups are always vulnerable to “free riders”: the guys who happily eat the mammoth meat but conveniently sprain an ankle when it is time to do the actual hunting. Religions solve this.

    A shared belief in an all-seeing, punishing deity acts like an invisible police force, keeping antisocial behavior in check even when nobody is looking. On top of that, religion demands “costly signaling.” Think of fasting, painful rites, strict dietary laws, or time-consuming prayers. If you are willing to endure all of that, you prove your absolute loyalty to the group. A free rider simply won’t pay that high a cost. The result is a highly cohesive, fiercely loyal collective that easily outcompetes fragmented, non-religious groups. Religion, in short, served the host.
    Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, expands on this framework by introducing the concept of the “hive switch.” He argues that religious rituals, like synchronized chanting or dancing, temporarily shut down the annoying, self-serving ego. They allow individuals to merge seamlessly into a larger collective organism, vastly improving the group’s chances of survival. Additionally, Ara Norenzayan, in Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, developed the “big gods” variant. He theorizes that as human settlements grew from small bands into large agricultural societies, kin-based trust broke down. You cannot personally know everyone in a city. Belief in “big gods”, omniscient, moralizing deities, was the necessary evolutionary bridge that allowed thousands of anonymous strangers to trust each other and build civilizations.

    It all sounds incredibly elegant, doesn’t it? Like religion is the ultimate evolutionary lifehack for building societies. But there is a second camp of thinkers who look at this exact same phenomenon and see something different. What if we are giving religion way too much credit for being “helpful”? What if it isn’t a tool that we use, but a tool that uses us?

    The Parasitic Meme or The “It’s a Bug” Camp

    This model kind of flips the script. It argues that religion is a byproduct of human cognitive workings. It acts as a cultural parasite. In this view, religion does not exist to serve the human host; it exists solely to replicate itself.

    To understand this, you have to look at ideas as replicators: memes. Before the internet hijacked the word, a meme was originally defined as the cultural equivalent of a gene. It is a unit of information—like a fashion trend or a religious concept—that spreads from brain to brain.

    Just like genes, memes mutate, compete for survival, and replicate. Think of a juicy piece of gossip. Someone tells a story, and as it spreads from person to person, people instinctively embellish the details to make it just a little spicier. That is memetic mutation. Eventually, the most shocking, dramatic version of the rumor grabs everyone’s attention, completely crowding out the boring truth. That is memetic competition. And because the new, embellished story is now so incredibly scandalous, you simply cannot resist passing it on to your friends. That is replication.

    But why are some ideas so incredibly sticky? Why did you instantly forget a math formula, but remember your friend’s phone number from the 90s to this day? Because the most successful memes survive by actively hacking your deepest evolutionary hardware. Think about an outrageous clickbait headline, or one of those old chain letters that threatened you with bad luck if you didn’t forward it. These ideas survive because they hijack your primal instincts, like your need for connection, your deep-seated fear of danger, your desire for social status, or your tribal outrage. A meme does not care if it is factually true, and it certainly does not care if it is good for your mental health. It only cares about being copied. By triggering your highest-arousal emotions, it turns your own biology into its personal copying machine.

    Who came up with the concept, by the way? Dawkins, of course. He coined the term “meme” in 1976, and in 1993 he explicitly formalized the parasitic framework in his essay Viruses of the Mind. He explained that just as a biological virus latches onto a vulnerable cell, a mind virus exploits a vulnerable brain. And religion is a highly contagious “memeplex”: a clustered group of cooperative memes that hijacks your pre-existing cognitive hardware.

    Think of, for example, the survival mechanisms of a human child. Children evolved a necessary cognitive trait: absolute, unquestioning trust in authority figures. If a parent tells a toddler, “Don’t eat those red berries; they are poisonous,” a kid who demands proof probably won’t survive the afternoon. We are biologically hardwired to absorb warnings from authorities as absolute truth. The religious memeplex sneaks right through this open door. The meme “believe in this specific God or you will burn in hell” hijacks the exact same survival hardware as “don’t eat these berries”.

    But a successful virus doesn’t just infect; it protects itself. The religious memeplex bundles itself with brilliant, built-in defense memes. One meme says, “Faith without evidence is the highest virtue.” Another meme says, “Doubt is a punishable sin.” A third meme says, “You must convert others to save them.” Together, these ideas act like a highly evolved virus. They hijack human psychology to aggressively ensure their own survival and transmission, sometimes actively harming the host’s actual biological fitness in the process, like demanding lifelong celibacy or encouraging martyrdom.

    In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett elaborates the idea of “domestication.” He argues that early animistic beliefs were “wild” memes. Over time, human institutions domesticated these memes, engineering organized religions that act like highly evolved viruses, complete with sophisticated defense mechanisms against skepticism. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore focused on how the religious memeplex uses psychological immune-system overrides. She highlighted how religious memes bundle themselves with instructions that actively forbid questioning, think of maxims like “faith is a virtue” or “doubt is a sin.” This ensures the parasite is hardly eradicated by rational thought.

    The Verdict: A Feature, a Bug, or Both?

    The reality is, biology is rarely neat and tidy. These two models don’t necessarily have to cancel each other out. It’s very possible that faith started out as a crucial evolutionary feature, the social glue that allowed our ancestors to survive, cooperate, and build cities. But once that cognitive infrastructure was in place, it became the perfect, warm host environment for parasitic memes to move in, mutate, and take over.

    We are walking around with ancient brains running legacy software. Whether it’s a brilliant survival tool that outlived its original purpose or a mind virus that hacked our childhood trust, the result is the same: the religious memeplex is deeply embedded in the human operating system.

    So, how do these explanations affect your attitude toward religion? How will you handle the religious memeplex when it shows up on your front porch? Will you lean into pure tolerance, accepting it as an inevitable, perhaps even useful, quirk of human nature? Roll your eyes and dismiss it? Or will you go on the offensive and actively dismantle the dogma wherever you see it?

    References

    • Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford University Press.
    • Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. John Murray.
    • Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
    • Dawkins, R. (1993). Viruses of the mind. In B. Dahlbom (Ed.), Dennett and his critics: Demystifying mind (pp. 13–27). Blackwell.
    • Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Viking Penguin.
    • Durkheim, E. (1912). The elementary forms of the religious life. J. W. Swain, Trans.
    • Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books.
    • Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Harvill Secker.
    • Hare, B., & Woods, V. (2020). Survival of the friendliest: Understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity. Random House.
    • Henrich, J. (2015). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press.
    • Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Harvard University Press.
    • Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press.
    • Sosis, R. (2004). The adaptive value of religious ritual. American Scientist, 92(2), 166–172.
    • Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. MIT Press.
    • Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society. University of Chicago Press.
  • Obscure Sorrows and the Power of a Name

    Obscure Sorrows and the Power of a Name

    Some experiences enter awareness without an adequate name. You recognize their return, yet the usual words; sadness, unease, longing, frustration, fail to say exactly what is happening. The experience hovers among feeling, thought, memory, and circumstance: familiar, specific, and difficult to hold still.

    A name gives it contours. Once an experience can be identified, it becomes easier to revisit, compare, and connect with other aspects of yourself. You may begin to notice when it appears, which memories it recalls, and how it influences the directions your thoughts take. Naming does not exhaust an experience. It gives you a closer view of something that had been present without being fully known.

    The Science of Naming the Ghost

    Affect labeling is the scientific term for putting feelings into words. Research has often examined it in relation to emotional regulation: naming an emotion can alter its intensity and influence the interaction between cortical and subcortical brain regions [1]. Positive feelings may also become more pronounced when they are named with precision [3].

    The implications extend beyond regulation. Naming helps transform a diffuse internal occurrence into something you can recognize and examine. The difference between I feel bad and I feel disappointed is already considerable. The difference between disappointment, humiliation, disillusionment, and grief may reveal even more. Each word distinguishes one form of experience from its neighbors and makes finer self-observation possible.

    Recent accounts describe affect labeling as a process of accumulating evidence until a particular emotional concept seems to fit what you are experiencing [2]. The quality of the recognition therefore depends partly on the concepts available to you. If your vocabulary offers only a few broad categories, experiences with very different meanings may receive the same name. A more precise lexicon allows more of their particular character to come into view.

    The brain was not built all at once. The brainstem contains some of its most evolutionarily ancient foundations. Many subcortical affective systems developed upon them, while the extensive cortical networks involved in language, abstraction, and reflective thought were elaborated later [4]. The image of an ancient basement and newer outer layers is necessarily simplified, since these systems are densely connected and continually influence one another. Still, it captures an important fact: feeling has older neural foundations than the words through which you come to understand it.

    Naming does not transfer an emotion from a primitive region into a thoughtful one. It connects linguistic and reflective capacities with affective activity already unfolding across the brain. The experience remains embodied, yet it also becomes available as a concept—something you can remember, distinguish, and place in relation to the rest of your self.

    A Lexicon for the Unnamed

    John Koenig created The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to give names to experiences that conventional dictionaries rarely capture. His words are literary inventions. They make no claim to diagnostic status. Each offers a possible recognition: the sudden discovery that an experience you considered vague or peculiarly your own has a distinct form.

    As you read, notice whether any of these words seems to recognize something in you that you had never clearly separated from the surrounding atmosphere of your life.

    • Adronitis: The frustration of how slowly genuine acquaintance develops; the long interval between meeting someone and knowing the particular person beneath the available facts.
    • Altschmerz: Weariness with the troubles you have carried for years—the familiar anxieties, habits, and sensitivities whose every turn you seem to know.
    • Chrysalism: The enclosed, almost amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm while the world outside flashes and roars.
    • Énouement: The bittersweet feeling of reaching a future you once imagined while being unable to return and tell your earlier self how everything unfolded.
    • Exulansis: The tendency to stop speaking about an important experience because others cannot quite understand it, and every unsuccessful telling seems to diminish it.
    • Jouska: A hypothetical conversation repeatedly rehearsed in the mind, complete with anticipated objections, polished replies, and endings that reality never supplied.
    • Liberosis: The wish to care less intensely—to loosen your hold on outcomes, expectations, and all the significance attached to them.
    • Mauerbauertraurigkeit: An inexplicable impulse to create distance from people you love or admire, even while another part of you longs for closeness.
    • Monachopsis: A persistent sense of being subtly out of place, as though everyone else received instructions for the occasion and you arrived without them.
    • Nodus Tollens: The realization that the storyline through which you understood your life no longer explains where you have arrived.
    • Occhiolism: An acute awareness of the smallness and incompleteness of your perspective among the innumerable possible views of existence.
    • Onism: The frustration of being confined to one body, one place, and one life while knowing how much of the world you will never experience.
    • Rückkehrunruhe: The unease that follows your return from a transformative journey as its vividness begins to fade and your former life quietly reasserts itself.
    • Sonder: The recognition that every stranger possesses a life as vivid and complex as your own, filled with histories, attachments, disappointments, and private preoccupations.
    • Vellichor: The wistfulness of a used bookshop, surrounded by old volumes whose former readers and private meanings remain inaccessible to you.

    From Feeling to Recognition

    These words name configurations of feeling, thought, memory, impulse, bodily state, and circumstance. Jouska includes emotion, yet it also contains imagined dialogue and mental rehearsal. Nodus Tollens describes a recognition that changes the meaning of earlier events. Rückkehrunruhe gathers a place, a former self, a present self, and the awareness that an experience is already receding.

    From an evolutionary perspective, affects were shaped to organize attention, interpretation, physiology, and action in recurrent situations bearing on survival and reproduction. These processes operate together so closely that a trigger, its meaning, the resulting feeling, and the impulse to act can arrive as one continuous event. You may know the event chiefly through its atmosphere or through what you find yourself doing next.

    Language gives you another way to encounter it. A precise name can reveal that what appeared to be one familiar feeling has several forms, each with a different history and direction. It can show that your wish to withdraw carries the particular quality of Mauerbauertraurigkeit, or that your dissatisfaction is less about the present than about the repetition contained in Altschmerz. The word does not explain the whole experience, but it makes distinctions available where there was previously only an impression.

    Once recognized, an experience can be followed through its associations. Its earlier appearances become easier to recall. Connections with particular people, situations, wishes, and versions of yourself begin to emerge. You gain a more articulated sense of what occurs in you and of the many forms your inner life can take.

    The power of a name lies in this recognition. What once appeared only as a vague ache can be differentiated, remembered, and connected with the wider self. The experience was already yours. With a name, you become more fully acquainted with it—and through it, with yourself.

    Sources

    [1] Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706

    [2] Givon, E., Meiran, N., & Goldenberg, A. (2026). The process of affect labeling. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 30(5), 422–433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.09.017

    [3] Vlasenko, V., Rogers, E., & Waugh, C. E. (2021). Affect labeling increases the intensity of positive emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 35(7), 1350–1364. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2021.1959302

    [4] Solms, M., & Panksepp, J. (2012). The “Id” knows more than the “Ego” admits: Neuropsychoanalytic and primal consciousness perspectives on the interface between affective and cognitive neuroscience. Brain Sciences, 2(2), 147–175. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci2020147

  • Childfree, Apparently a Cause for Concern

    Childfree, Apparently a Cause for Concern

    Tell someone you don’t want children and you may accidentally have requested a psychological assessment. Perhaps you’re afraid of responsibility. Perhaps your childhood needs investigating. Perhaps you haven’t met the right person, whose reproductive enthusiasm will apparently overwrite your personality. Somewhere in this conversation, someone who has known you for eleven minutes becomes very confident about what will make you happy at sixty. You were discussing your plans for the weekend and suddenly they are supervising your life.

    Underneath these exchanges sits the persistent assumption that wanting children is self-explanatory and not wanting them requires an explanation, preferably one that reveals something wrong with you. You might even get gaslit into wanting to know what research on childfree adults has to say about it. Do people who don’t want children differ psychologically from people who do? Are we looking at a distinctive personality, a different set of priorities, or a collection of perfectly ordinary people whose reproductive decisions have upset the seating plan? The findings give considerably less reason for concern than the unsolicited advice would suggest.

    First, Are We Even Studying the Same People?

    Before getting into them, though, we need to distinguish people who don’t want children from people who wanted them and couldn’t have them. Both may appear under “no children” on a questionnaire, but that shared answer tells us very little about their experience. Someone grieving a hoped-for family and someone delighted never to attend a school parents’ evening are not describing the same life. Research that combines them can blur precisely the difference we need to understand: whether someone’s circumstances correspond to what they wanted. The literature repeatedly identifies this distinction as essential to interpreting findings about well-being [1,2].

    Once we make that distinction, the fantastic story of the secretly miserable childfree adult becomes harder to sustain. Studies find no meaningful differences in life satisfaction between childfree adults and parents, or other groups of nonparents [3]. Treating eventual misery as the predictable consequence of declining parenthood is far of, just like establishing that childfree people are happier, wiser, or better at being alive. You can be thoroughly pleased about not having children and thoroughly displeased with your job, your relationship, or your own behavior last Monday. A reproductive decision cannot organize the rest of your psychology for you. Equally, a miserable week doesn’t expose your childfree life as a terrible mistake. Parents are generally allowed to have a bad days without someone suggesting that the existence of their children explains it. The same courtesy would be lovely.

    A Personality Type? Hold the Matching Jackets

    Personality findings are more mixed than a neat “childfree personality” profile would suggest. Research shows that childfree respondents score higher on independence and lower on agreeableness and extraversion than parents or people who wanted children [4]. That is interesting, although it leaves the direction of the relationship unresolved: these results don’t show that choosing a childfree life makes you independent, or that independence necessarily leads you away from parenthood. After demographic adjustments, no significant personality differences between childfree adults and parents remain, though; the only difference persisting is the slightly lower agreeableness among childfree adults compared with people planning to become parents. So sadly, however convenient that would be for writing a punchy article, sharing a decision about parenthood does not give us a shared personality. We could nevertheless commission matching jackets for the fiercely independent, gloriously disagreeable childfree population [3].

    Your Decision, Their Moral Outrage

    Where the research does get more revealing is in how people respond to that decision. If you ask people to evaluate a married adult described as having chosen either no children or two children, the childfree adults elicits moral outrage and are judged less fulfilled. This applies to both male and female targets [5]. Notice what is being measured: other people’s judgments about someone’s fulfillment. Nobody needs to establish that these fictional childfree people are spending their evenings weeping into decorative cushions, it’s simply assumed that childfree adults are less fulfilled. The moral outrage is unfounded: disliking someone’s preference is one thing; responding as though they have failed an obligation is another. Research shows that parenthood can function as a moral expectation, making refusal look like a breach of duty. It offers an confirmation of the experience in which your explanation is heard and rejected because you are apparently not entitled to want that.

    Apparently, Your Future Has Already Been Decided

    Then comes the future: You’ll regret it. You’ll be lonely. Who will look after you? Research on regret makes an important distinction between people who chose not to have children and those who wanted them. Voluntarily childless women report greater well-being, more autonomy, and a stronger sense of being able to manage their lives than involuntarily childless women. They were also not likely to report child-related regret [1]. The social setting also matters. A study of 24,195 adults over forty across 24 European countries found that the association between childlessness and poorer psychological well-being varied between countries, particularly among women. The disadvantage was smaller in countries where attitudes toward childlessness were more accepting and social contact was more common [6]. This study examined childlessness broadly, however, so its findings cannot be attributed specifically to childfree people.

    A Final Note: You also Don’t Owe Anyone an Extraordinary Life

    The research gives us little reason to treat a childfree life as inherently less fulfilling. My additional note is that you also shouldn’t have to prove its value by becoming exceptionally accomplished, permanently available to your friends, or impressively useful to society. You can care for people without becoming a parent, but you shouldn’t have to submit a portfolio of alternative caring activities before your decision is accepted. The same goes for enjoyment. You do not owe anyone evidence of a sufficiently fabulous life. If you spend a Saturday doing laundry and watching something mediocre, you have not squandered your freedom. You are allowed an ordinary life, including its less photogenic uses of an afternoon.

    That freedom from having to justify yourself matters in psychoanalysis, too. Your decision about children can be explored, but only with the same neutrality as other consequential choices and zero quiet appointments of parenthood as the correct outcome. You may have mixed feelings about having children, feel pressure from your family, or want to understand how you approach commitment and independence in other parts of your life. Or you may be perfectly fine about not wanting children and prefer to discuss something else. You don’t want children. It would be lovely if that could occasionally be the least interesting thing about you.

    Sources

    [1] Jeffries, S., & Konnert, C. (2002). Regret and psychological well-being among voluntarily and involuntarily childless women and mothers. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 54, 89–106. https://doi.org/10.2190/J08N-VBVG-6PXM-0TTN

    [2] Stahnke, B., Cooley, M. E., & Blackstone, A. (2022). A systematic review of life satisfaction experiences among childfree adults. The Family Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/10664807221104795

    [3] Watling Neal, J., & Neal, Z. P. (2021). Prevalence and characteristics of childfree adults in Michigan (USA). PLOS ONE, 16(6), e0252528. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252528

    [4] Avison, M., & Furnham, A. (2015). Personality and voluntary childlessness. Journal of Population Research, 32, 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-014-9140-6

    [5] Ashburn-Nardo, L. (2017). Parenthood as a moral imperative? Moral outrage and the stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men. Sex Roles, 76, 393–401. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0606-1

    [6] Huijts, T., Kraaykamp, G., & Subramanian, S. V. (2013). Childlessness and psychological well-being in context: A multilevel study on 24 European countries. European Sociological Review, 29, 32–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcr037

    [7] Teerawichitchainan, B., Kim, D., & Ho, C. (2024). Childlessness, social network profiles in midlife and late adulthood, and their implications for subjective well-being. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 79. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbae055

Powered by