In the telling of his oppression, he is permitted visibility only under strict conditions. If he is to be seen, he must be legible at a glance. His history should be easily compressible into a headline or absorbable between advertisements. His complexity is too much of a defiance. His contradiction is a liability. He is half a man.

His anger is familiar to us only as a fiction. Boundless and irrational. His allegiances opaque but dangerous. He does not speak in full sentences, only in insinuations, in coarse, raised voices, in the background noise of breaking news. His existence justifies preemption. His silence confirms suspicion. He is not asked what he has lived through, only what he might do.

The alternative is containment, martyrdom, victimhood. Here, he is permitted to appear as long as he arrives diminished. He must recount his losses without tracing their architecture. He must describe destruction without naming its authors. Expulsions, exiles, dispossession, erasure, occupation, annihilation, infanticide, humiliation, desecration, heartache, bereavement, orphanhood, imprisonment, surveillance, theft, plunder, thirst, deprivation, torture, famine, poverty, isolation, fragmentation, defeatism, coercion, blackmail, sacrifice, and the slow attrition of living. His grief is acceptable only when it floats, unanchored from politics, from interests, from histories, as though it emerged miraculously rather than from decisions made in rooms far away. If he is analytical, he is suspect. If he is vengeful, he is disqualified. The acceptable register is sorrow. Steady, sterile sorrow.

I wonder if this is because the anger of the Arab man is particularly loud. Consequential. It suggests that he has made connections, that he has drawn conclusions that extend beyond his own body. It implies that he might speak not only of loss, but of responsibility. And responsibility is precisely what must remain obscured. So his anger is redirected or pathologised. If it cannot be contained, it is used against him.

So a negotiation takes place within our Arab man. Words are measured, inflections softened, entire lines of thought abandoned before they are spoken. He is not allowed the full range of contradiction that defines a life. He cannot be both wounded and accusatory, both grieving and analytical, both a victim of violence and capable of it.

But of course, he is.

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The range of human thought and feeling is limitless and lawless, and yet we employ a tool like language, limited and law-bound, in an attempt to capture it. Communication is strangled by it and yet almost impossible without it. When we become conscious of our inner life in relation to another (a thought, a feeling, a worry, a desire, a hesitation), we attempt to wrap it and transform into a sort of parcel, using the only packaging we have: words. But when it arrives, it is delivered into a mind already stocked with its own meanings and associations attached to the words we have chosen. The contents are handled, interpreted, reinterpreted, and so what is received is never quite what was dispatched. Language is a flawed courier.

Wittgenstein drew the boundary of the world at the limits of what can be said. We tend to think of the world as the larger thing, vast, indifferent, and pre-existing, and language as the smaller thing we use to point at it, imperfectly and after the fact. Wittgenstein inverts this intuition. For him, the world is not a totality that language strains to describe; it is, in a precise philosophical sense, constituted by what can be described. A fascinating idea, though one I’ll bracket here, as the central thread of this essay leads somewhere else. At the very least, we can conclude that language shapes thought and allows an ‘other’ to inhabit, briefly, partially, our same structure of sense. It is what makes psychotherapy, for example, possible. And so here, it makes sense to ask the question: are some languages better couriers of thought than others?

I want to make the claim that Arabic is. The lexical structure of the Arabic language has been able to preserve psychological meanings that English can only gesture toward. Insight, in Arabic, is not down to the application of poets or philosophers, but built into its grammar, so that the ordinary speaker, reaching for an ordinary word, finds themselves in possession of a theory of mind they never had to consciously construct.

The mechanism is the triliteral root (the masdar). Arabic builds almost its entire vocabulary from a system of conceptual three-consonant skeletons into which different patterns of vowels and affixes are breathed to generate families of meaning. This matters in communication because it means that Arabic does not allow its speakers the luxury of treating related things as unrelated. The conceptual bonds are structural, not decorative.

Consider the Arabic word for relationship, ʿalāqa (عِلَاقَة). The triliteral root is ʿa-l-q (ع-ل-ق) which has a primary meaning of to cling, to stick, to bear weight, to be suspended from. In Arabic, to be in relation with someone is to have them weigh upon your interior, alter your state. The Arabic word for relationship carries inside it a theory of what relationship does: it hangs to you. It has mass. The conceptual meaning even mirrors the idea of attachment. English, on the other hand, permits relation without gravity. In English, I can speak of my relationship to a colleague, to a city, to a phase of my life, with the same flattened neutrality, as if all connection were the same kind of connection. Arabic does not extend this courtesy. Its grammar insists that to be related is to be weighted, attached, suspended, or altered. Whoever and whatever you are in relation to, you are also, in some sense, carrying.

Or consider what the Arabic language does with ‘heart’. The word for heart is qalb (قلب), from the root q-l-b (ق-ل-ب), meaning to turn, to flip, to reverse. The heart in Arabic is not a pump or a seat of feeling in the way English tends to imagine it, it is the part of you that turns. It is defined by its movement, its variability, by its capacity to be overturned. It is something essentially kinetic. It’s really quite intuitive. Certainty can often turn to doubt, love can turn to aversion, clarity can turn to confusion. The same root gives you inqilāb (انقلاب), an overturn or revolution. It allows for a conception of the self that is dynamic rather than static.

A philosophically fascinating case is the root w-j-d (و-ج-د) which has a primary meaning of to find. From it comes wujūd (وُجُود) meaning existence, or being. Wujūd is the term Arabic philosophers used to translate what the Greek called τὸ ὄν (to on). And from the same root comes wajd (وَجْد) deep emotion, or intense longing; and wijdān (وِجْدَان), the inner emotional life. Existence and finding share a root. They are grammatically fused. To exist, in this language, is to be findable. To find is to touch something’s existence. And the emotion, wajd, is the inner event of that encounter, the tremor that runs through you when your searching meets a world.

Heidegger spent decades in German trying to articulate something like this: that existence is not a neutral property but a relational one, that to be is always to be available to disclosure, that consciousness and world were not two sealed chambers but a single event of mutual finding. He coined words, tortured syntax, multiplied hyphens. Arabic had already done it in the structure of its vocabulary. A medieval Arab speaker asking where something was, using the ordinary verb wajada, was already enacting a metaphysics. Finding is the form that existence takes when a conscious being moves through it.

You could of course have a deflationary response to this: all languages embed theories in their words; English does it too; consider how understand implies a spatial metaphor of standing beneath something, how grasp turns comprehension into seizure. True enough. But the trilateral root system gives Arabic a peculiar intensity in this respect, because the relatedness of words is so transparent, so unmistakable, so present to the speaker as they speak and, perhaps more importantly, the listener while they listen. A child learning Arabic learns not just words but meaning clusters. The conceptual architecture is pedagogically inseparable from the vocabulary.

English may have its own embedded wisdom. Every language does. But English has also undergone centuries of philosophical pressure toward abstraction, toward the stripping of connotation from technical terms, toward the ideal of a neutral language in which things are named without being framed. It is why so much of its meaning is subjective in communication. “I love you” can mean anything from a passing warmth to a binding declaration, from a habit of speech to an attempt at total self-exposure. Its apparent clarity concealing a wide spectrum of emotional and existential distance between speaker and listener. Arabic resisted this, or more accurately, its root system made it quite impossible.

This is not to say that its speakers are wiser, nor that the language is superior, but that to capture exactly what you mean with words is much more precisely done in Arabic. A theory of mind folded into the vowelless bones of the root.

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The gentleman had no previous psychiatric history.

How I Got to Know Psychosis

Psychosis is a condition I once became quite familiar with, though never as intimately as the patients I was treating. My introduction to the psychiatric world began in an A&T unit, working closely with patients in the throes of psychosis. The patients themselves are etched into my memory. I can still recall their faces. I still say their names in my prayers. I grew unexpectedly fond of them.

A day in the unit was relentless. The three minute walk it took me to turn in and walk through the high security unit doors, was a three minute immersion into chaos. I usually got in around 7:30am, as the night shift was ending, and immediately some symphony of moans, mutters, and sporadic screams would blast through the corridors. There was shouting, hiding, threatening, crying, pleading, throwing, obscene sexual behaviour, but above all, there was fear, so much fear. Psychosis, I quickly came to realise, is a condition defined by terror. And the eyes truly are the windows to the soul when you study the face of a psychotic.

For a moment, consider a world where nothing your senses produce can be trusted. Where every fiction your mind produces is coloured by your worst fears. Where your faculties betray you, and you are left without a single measure of reality. The reality my patients perceived was real only in its capacity to terrify. Every familiar thing became strange until nothing could be trusted. A mind untethered.

One patient, for example, was utterly convinced without so much as a shadow of a doubt that she was dead or dying (Cotard’s syndrome). She had permanently bloodshot eyes and no eyebrows (thanks to her trichotillomania) and was so convincing in the physicality of her terror, that there were moments I believed her. Not for the facts, but for the felt reality of her mortality. Every morning she would re-experience her imminent death, the cessation of her pulse. Every morning, for no longer than fifteen minutes, she would bellow and cry out that she could feel her soul tearing itself from her body. Nurses would rush into her room to administer benzodiazepines. Then, silence. A catatonic silence. The rest of her day would be spent stood still, staring ceaselessly at her reflection in the narrow windows fitted into the ward doors. As if astonished by what was staring back at her.

I began to feel a real dissonance working there. I spent eight to twelve hours on some days amongst these petrified souls, and leaving felt disorienting. The world outside seemed dulled, monotonous, without a sense of humour. Normal human behaviour warped by comparison. Because, amidst all the fear and horror, psychosis allowed for moments of unfiltered absurdity. Patients could be unintentionally hilarious, their laughter and misperceptions would cut through the darkness in ways that were both outrageous and oddly human. In my time away from the ward, my mind was captive to the hours spent inside, endlessly replaying whatever I had witnessed. Every interaction with a patient felt deeply meaningful to me. In hindsight, I was, in many ways, obsessed with them.

Fear in the ‘other’ does something strange to us. It compels us to comfort, to counsel, to provide at least a facade of safety. I think we can be more uncomfortable with the fear of another than of our own sometimes. Think of a frightened child, the impulse to reassure is immediate. It does not require thought. Stay around the terrified long enough and the ‘facade of safety’ can begin to harden. You become a counsellor by definition, by identity. That is perhaps what happened to me. It’s been years and I still think of them. I still feel some duty of care to them and their peers: psychotics.

The case of the gentleman in Gaza has, therefore, stayed with me. All the more so because he has no prior psychiatric history; a detail that has haunted me a little.

Where Psychosis is Born

Like most matters of the psyche, the experience of psychosis can only be understood within the social and relational contexts in which it developed. From a psychoanalytic perspective, psychosis arises not simply because the brain chemically misfires, but because the self’s capacity to trust its own perceptual and emotional data breaks down. In infancy and early childhood, we develop our ability to interpret sensory information into an accurate perception of reality. However, this only takes place against a rigid backdrop of social instruction. This social instruction is informed by the most compelling voices in a child’s life: what caregivers tell us is safe, what is dangerous, what is good, what is bad, what is real, what is fake. Over time, if the conclusions of a child’s real-time environmental data processing consistently conflict with what its caregivers insist is ‘true’, a child may learn to abandon any attempt to independently perceive reality, setting the stage for a pretty cataclysmic fracture between experienced reality and trusted experience.

R.D Laing wrote about this process extensively in Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. He details eleven case studies in which children, subjected to painful or abusive family dynamics, were made to forsake their own sensory perception for the convenient realities imposed by adults, leading later in life to psychosis an schizophrenia. Some of the contradictions are not as extreme as you might think. In one case, Laing details how, after many harsh, contemptuous explosive outbursts from a mother toward her daughter, the daughter seeks to resolve the tension by initiating a conversation. The attempt is immediately foreclosed. She is told, without discussion and without the possibility of dissent, that their relationship is wonderful, that she loves her mother very much, and that the two of them are the best of friends.

This places the daughter in an impossible position. Her lived experience, of hostility, contempt, disgust, and emotional injury, contradicts with the version of reality presented by the person who holds the greatest power in her world. If she trusts her own perception, she must accept that her mother is denying something plainly real; that her mother is wrong. But if she accepts her mother’s version of events, she must conclude that the evidence of her own senses cannot be trusted. For a child, whose survival, security, and very existence depends on maintaining attachment to this caregiver, the latter path is safer. To deny your ‘self’ is safer as a child than to deny the authority of your mother. The child learns to distrust her own immediate experience and instead defer to externally imposed definitions of reality. Over time this repeated invalidation erodes the coherence of the self.

Across the eleven case studies in the book, Laing found that whatever the child experienced in themself was interpreted, not as a real emotional response, but as a sign of illness; wherever they attempted to assert their own perspective, they were met with denial, coercion, or even hostility. In this relational context, abandoning one’s own sensory evidence in favour of an externally imposed ‘reality’ became not just understandable but necessary for survival within the family system. Psychosis, in other words, is rarely expected to appear without psychiatric history. It’s journey begins early in development. Which is why the case of the gentleman in Gaza is troubling: there was, it seems, no warning at all.

And yet, if we follow the logic of Laing’s observations, the absence of a personal psychiatric history does not necessarily mean the absence of the psychological conditions that produce breakdown. Laing’s case studies show that what fractures the mind is not simply biology or private neurosis but a sustained contradiction between lived experience and the reality that powerful others insist must be affirmed. The child sees one thing, feels another, and yet is told that neither perception nor feeling is real. Something structurally similar occurs in conditions of occupation and colonial domination, though on a vastly larger scale.

In The Settler Keeps Alive in the Native an Anger Which he Deprives of Outlet, I detail Fanon’s explanation for how colonialism produces, not only economic dispossession and political subjugation, but profound distortions in psychic life. The colonised subject, the gentleman for example, experiences humiliation, dehumanisation, loss, surveillance, violence, and restriction as daily facts of life. Anger, in such circumstances, is not pathological, it is the biologically coherent response to inflicted injury. It mobilises defence and signals that a boundary has been violated. It is healthy. But colonial powers, like the state of Israel today, do something unusual with this emotion. They provoke it repeatedly and then systematically block every legitimate means through which it might be expressed or resolved.

The result is a state of permanent psychological contradiction. Nowhere is this dynamic more visible today than in Gaza and for our gentleman. He is attacked and violated yet told that his anger is irrational. The authoritative voice insists that these experiences are either exaggerated, justified, or a symptom of his own disease. His attempts at resistance are criminalised and then used as proof of his supposed barbarity. The coloniser produces the stimulus for rage while monopolising all means of acting upon it. Anger is allowed to exist only as affect, never as force.

For many colonised subjects the conflict extends even deeper, into identity itself. When a society associates your cultural identity, language, and native features with backwardness or danger, it becomes a survival strategy and a necessity to disassociate & distance yourself from it (read Colonisation is as Much a Psychological Project as it is a Political One). The colonised individual may adopt masks, suppress parts of the self, or yield and internalise the dominant narrative in order to navigate a hostile world.

Therefore, the absence of psychiatric history in the case of the gentleman in Gaza becomes less inexplicable. It does not mean that nothing preceded the rupture. Rather, it may indicate that the forces shaping the psyche were not confined to the interior life of the individual but embedded in the structure of the environment itself. Laing showed how a family could destabilise a child’s perception of reality through contradiction and denial. Fanon demonstrated how an entire colonial system could do something similar to a population. When experience is repeatedly invalidated, when anger is justified yet forbidden, when defence is necessary yet impossible, the psyche eventually seeks another way to resolve the contradiction.

Sometimes that resolution takes the form of breakdown, of abandoning coherence altogether.

References

• Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)

• Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)

• Laing, R. D., & Esterson, A. (1964). Sanity, madness and the family: Families of schizophrenics. Tavistock Publications.

• Read, J., Bentall, R. P., & Fosse, R. (2009). Time to abandon the bio-bio-bio model of psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 35(3), 448–463.

• van Os, J., Kenis, G., & Rutten, B. P. (2010). The environment and schizophrenia. Nature, 468, 203–212.

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Perhaps I was told too often of His wrath and too little of His grace. Humans limited to the language of mortals, attempted to describe the ineffable to me, and left me grasping at shadows. Thus, it seems, I lent God my habits. Him keeping count, learning my patterns, growing tired of my pathetic apologies. I assume He recoils the way I do, that He withdraws affection the way I do, that disappointment hardens Him as it hardens me. I give Him my pettiness, my suspicion, my fatigue with being wronged. I teach Him to remember the way I remember, to grow cold the way I grow cold. In making Him human enough to understand Him, I make Him too human to forgive.

I have made Him intelligible to me, which is to say: small. I don’t doubt His existence; I doubt His endurance. I remake Him in my image, and then wonder why He seems so flawed.

Then, in the most agonising moments of my confusion, He offers me this:

He seems so tender, so sweet. In the posture of a lover waiting by the phone for His beloved to call. He “waits” for me, He “longs” for me, and I have done nothing but misread Him. I have measured His patience by my own, assumed His justice must mirror my judgment, and imagined His mercy is bound by the limits of my own forgiveness. I have made Him accountable to the very weaknesses that plague me. I have humanised Him because all I have ever known is human. I have loved and betrayed only creatures of flesh and fault. Between me and the divine lie thousands of suspended layers of fabric, stacked threads and linens woven from my deficiencies, my limitations, my blindness. I am left only to peel back layer by layer until perhaps I catch a glimpse of what is not human in Him. And begin to understand mercy beyond measure.

Modern culture has canonised independence as the ultimate marker of maturity, health, and self-worth. Wellness influencers, therapists on glossy podcasts, and self-help literature insist that ‘happiness must come from within.’ We are told to ‘protect our peace’, to cut off anyone who ‘disturbs’ it, to build a fortress of emotional autonomy where our well-being is untouched by others. Dependency is cast as weakness. To need another is to fail at selfhood. You are assumed deficient in some capacity and must work on yourself to develop a “greater sense of self.” And yet, the cultural outcome has been unprecedented levels of reported loneliness and disconnection. Rates of depression and anxiety surging. We are more isolated than ever and encouraged to see it as a strength.

We are to self-soothe, self-care, self-medicate, self-manage, and ‘self-regulate’, as if stability were something one ought to manufacture alone. But regulation, in its most literal sense, implies something external doing the regulating (a regulator), and something being regulated, and then a causal steadying relationship between them. ‘Self-regulation’ is fundamentally oxymoronic: you cannot regulate a system from within the system. Think of a thermostat. The temperature of the room rises or falls, and the thermostat responds by turning the heating off or on, keeping the system within bounds. The room does not regulate itself and the thermostat simply corrects deviations. That is regulation in its most literal form. Much of what gets called ‘self-regulation’ is better understood as the subtle, ongoing co-regulation of life with others, so familiar and so continuous that it disappears from view, leaving us to mistakenly credit an inner mechanism for what is, in fact, a shared human achievement (read My Problem With ‘Self-Regulation’ for more on this).

The reality is that we are dependent beings. We enter our material existence as infants, completely helpless and entirely dependent on our parents. We rely on them for food, water, health maintenance, hygiene maintenance, language development, etc. We then evolve into more competent social beings and develop our own romantic relationships in which we become interdependent. Couples will depend on each other emotionally, financially, logistically, etc. Even in instances where we can end up leaving the nest alone, we are dependent on friendships for companionship and communities for support. Finally, in the last stretches of our material existence on earth, we then often become dependent on our children. A beautiful full circle reality. We enter life dependent on others and conclude life dependent on others and our biology and physiology tell a coherent story.

We are not Solitary Systems

Human beings are not closed circuits of self-sufficient energy. We are open systems, designed from birth to live within webs of physiological and psychological co-regulation. An infant does not merely want their mother; their survival depends on her body. The mother’s heartbeat entrains the infant’s, her voice tones regulate the baby’s stress hormones, and her presence stabilises their tiny, fragile nervous system. This is not poetry but measurable biology.

And here is the crucial point: that interdependence does not vanish in adulthood. Research in psychophysiology shows that romantic partners, over time, become biological extensions of each other. Studies by psychologists such as James Coan, Beate Ditzen, and others have repeatedly shown that couples literally synchronise at the level of the body:

• Heart rate & blood pressure: Long-term partners exhibit cardiovascular synchrony. Couples' heart rates synchronise when sitting together, even when they cannot touch; a phenomenon that disappeared when they paired individuals who weren’t romantically involved. When one partner’s heart rate spiked under stress, the other’s mirrored it, even if they were sat silent in the same room. Even thinking about a romantic partner as a source of support lowers blood pressure reactivity to stress just as effectively as having them physically present.

• Hormones: Oxytocin levels are significantly higher in new lovers compared to singles, and affectionate touch increases oxytocin while decreasing cortisol driven anxiety and stress. Even viewing images of romantic partners activates dopamine-rich reward regions in the brain, creating cascades of neurochemistry that can stabilise mood and motivate continued bonding.

• Breath & brain waves: Using simultaneous brain-to-brain scans of two people, researchers have discovered that romantic partners' neural patterns synchronise during interaction in ways that strangers' do not. EEG studies reveal gamma rhythm synchronisation in temporal-parietal brain regions when two people engage in conversation or shared silence. Similarly, partners' breathing rhythms align when they're within just a few feet of each other, even without physical contact or speech, a phenomenon that intensifies with relationship satisfaction and occurs spontaneously during shared presence.

It borders on the miraculous. Our nervous systems are not independent engines. They are linked circuits, constantly exchanging signals, shaping one another’s health. To be in love, to be in close friendship, to even be in close proximity to another is to enter into a kind of physiological duet.

The Costs of Hyper-Individualism

The wellness narrative, ‘fix yourself alone, from within’, misunderstands suffering as an exclusively private failure of chemistry or willpower. Trauma, inequality, poverty, and isolation are erased. The remedy becomes endless but vapid self-improvement: more mindfulness apps, more supplements, more grit. But this ignores what biologists and psychologists alike have demonstrated: healing requires others.

Touch can down-regulate pain almost as effectively as opioids. Being ‘in-love’ alters not only subjective well-being but also immune functioning. Loneliness, meanwhile, is as physiologically toxic as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. To deny dependence is not resilience; it is to wage war against human design.

However, co-regulation extends beyond the intimate sphere. Human beings are tribal animals. We entrain not only with lovers but with groups, aligning our identities, our emotions, even our risk-taking behaviours with collective rhythms. Protesters marching shoulder-to-shoulder, sports fans chanting in unison, congregations praying together, each creates neurobiological synchrony. Belonging is not just symbolic; it is embodied (read Ibn Khaldun’s Theory of Crowd Psychology: ‘Asabiyah for more on this). Even destructive tribalism, political polarisation, and violent fandoms reveal the same root: the longing to fuse with others, to dissolve the illusion of separateness. The need is not pathological in itself; it is deeply human. What matters is where we place it.

Perhaps a philosophical step further is to consider that maybe my life is not about me. Maybe the purpose of my life transcends me. Perhaps the potential of what I can achieve is far greater than ‘I’. Altruism has become so distant it’s as if the word itself is not a word in the English language, but part of some other foreign dialect. I would even go so far as to say the concept is treated with social contempt. It is as if it is ridiculous, naïve, and worthy of mocking to put another person’s needs entirely above your own. I can recall multiple instances, for example, of witnessing a person give loose change to homeless individuals and being scoffed at. Why do eyes roll at the unconditional service of others?

Here lies the challenge: in a culture that mocks altruism as naivety and reliance as weakness, how do we reclaim dependence without collapsing into dysfunction? To be entirely dependent, fusing with another so completely that one’s boundaries dissolve (Codependency), is undoubtedly harmful. Yet to deny dependence is equally disfiguring.

Interdependence

Interdependence is a dynamic interpersonal system in which individuals maintain integrity but remain permeable to one another. Interdependence means recognising that my nervous system is not sealed off from yours. That my calm regulates your stress, and your touch stabilises my heart. That my life may not, in fact, be about me, but about the circuits of care I build with others. Those moments you recalled at the beginning, when two people meet and something irreversible begins, are not failures of boundaries. They are proof of our fundamental nature. We were never meant to be noble gases, complete and unreactive. We bond because we must. We alter and are altered because that is what living systems do when they encounter the right conditions, the right catalyst, the right other.

Independence has become the secular gospel of the wellness age. But we are porous beings, built for reciprocity. To thrive is not to be untouched but to be touched well. To regulate others and be regulated in turn. To recognise that autonomy and connection are not opposites but interlocking rhythms.

Perhaps a little less self-help and a little more help-others is due.

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I’m a fan of re-reading certain authors. I find that in the first encounter, I’m often so overwhelmed with the themes and novel ideas that I miss the smaller, more subtle nuggets of wisdom I pick up on return. Nietzsche is absolutely an author who merits a re-reading or two. And sure enough: “One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.” I took this seriously for a moment and found I had some thoughts.

To our detriment, we idealise the people we’re with. We even idealise how they mentally represent us (how we imagine they perceive us). Based on what we know, what we observe, and then, fatally, what we desire, we create imperfect fantastical psychic representations of who they are. And they do the same. Often, when we come into conflict with our ‘person’, we are not really even in direct conflict with their authentic being (with them); we are interpreting and responding to our representations of them, and they, in turn, are responding to their representations of us. We are rarely reacting from an objective perception of the objective reality in front of us. Even in more or less healthy relationships, we begin to confuse our fantasies and representations of the individual’s being with what their actual internal reality is.

When I buy a new outfit, I look forward to showing my husband, and I prematurely relish in his awe at my exquisite taste before I ever consider that he, in fact, has eyes and a mind of his own capable of evaluating aesthetic taste for himself. I don’t consider for a moment the possibility that he may not like my outfit because the fantastic version of him I have mentally developed loves it without question. Therefore, when I wear the outfit and detect a flicker of disapproval in the arching of an eyebrow, I am devastated and betrayed. ‘He is not who I thought he was’ (literally). In reality, he did not betray me; he simply did not precisely conform to my mental representation of him. Disappointment is the cost of faulty expectations.

We cannot encounter another person directly in their interiority. That is the fundamental problem. We encounter them through inference, memory, projection, and hope. What feels even more dangerous is that the representation of the other can become entwined with the representation of the self (this is common in individuals with an anxious attachment style). How we imagine we are seen by them (desired, interesting, attractive, admired) can stabilise our identity and self-perception. The partner functions as a psychic mirror that we have partially designed ourselves. When that mirror reflects back something unflattering or unfamiliar, it is not only the image of them that falters, but something of the sense of self that relied on it does too. The partner’s independent perception is experienced as an act of aggression, even when no harm was intended. Their autonomy feels like abandonment.

There is something so unromantic about it, and yet it is the condition under which love becomes real. Not the elimination of fantasy, but maybe the mourning of it, and at the very least an awareness of it. Loving my husband means to consent, again and again and again, to the rude awakenings that come with his otherness. It’s jarring to allow him his private interior world, his tastes, his moods, his perceptions that do not reliably orbit my needs. But if I manage it, I make room for a stranger who is much more complex, less compliant, and infinitely more alive.

We observe that emotionally mature people don’t spiral into a breakdown every time life is disappointing the way a toddler does, and then we add: because they can ‘self-regulate’. This can look like an explanation. But it’s only a relabelling: “They don’t spiral because they have the ability not to spiral.” It has the air of an explanation. But very often it is only a relabelling, saying, in effect, that they don’t spiral because they have the capacity not to spiral.

A separate but noteworthy frustration I have with the term is that it emphasises the self as the regulator, when much of what keeps us steady is never fully self-generated. Human beings are social organisms, and our nervous systems (and much of our other physiological systems) are continually shaped, steadied, or destabilised by the people around us. Conversation, shared attention, being understood, being corrected, being held in mind: these are not optional extras but ordinary conditions of psychological equilibrium. Yet our culture’s individualistic ethos, uncomfortable with dependence, has a marked tendency to translate these relational processes into private duties. We are urged to self-soothe, self-care, self-medicate, self-manage, and self-regulate, as if stability were something one ought to manufacture alone. But regulation, in its most literal sense, implies an external regulator distinct from what is regulated. Much of what gets called self-regulation is better understood as the subtle, ongoing co-regulation of life with others, so familiar and so continuous that it disappears from view, leaving us to mistakenly credit an inner mechanism for what is, in fact, a shared human achievement.

Nevertheless, the particular peculiar process that is so often mistaken for ‘self-regulation’ does deserve closer analysis.

Actual Regulation

The genuine concept of regulation suggests two things:

1. something doing the regulating (a regulator), and

2. something being regulated, and then a causal relationship between them (often a dampening relationship, a “steadying” one).

A classic example is a thermostat. The temperature of the room rises or falls, and the thermostat responds by turning the heating off or on, keeping the system within bounds. It does not interpret the room or understand comfort; it merely corrects deviations. That is regulation in its most literal form.

Now, the brain is full of similar mechanisms, negative feedback loops, bodily controls, and homeostatic systems. I’m not disputing any of that. What I’m unsure about is the usefulness of the regulation idea when we stay at the psychological level, where we’re talking about feelings, meanings, relationships, understanding, where you can’t point to a thermostat.

There are cases where ‘regulation’ is plainly the right word. For example, a toddler gets overwhelmed. She screams, panics, rages. Her mother picks her up, speaks softly, rocks her, and makes the world feel safer again. The toddler calms. Perspective returns. In this situation, there really are two distinct things, mother and child, in relation, and you can sensibly say: the mother regulates the child’s affect. That is real other-regulation. And over time, something changes in the child. She gradually becomes able to tolerate hunger, disappointment, waiting, missing toys, and being told ‘no.’ She stops melting down so often. She becomes, in the ordinary phrase, ‘more regulated.’

So far, so good.

But there’s a philosophical temptation I don’t think psychology always resists. We see an ability, say, the ability to not breakdown, and we immediately ask: how is that ability exercised? What are the inner mechanics? What is the mental mechanism doing the steadying? And then we feel we must answer. We start telling little stories: perhaps the person can now “bring thought to bear on feeling,” or perhaps they use self-soothing techniques, breathing, calming self-talk, distraction, or grounding. Or perhaps they ‘internalise’ the mother’s soothing voice and now repeat it inwardly.

Sometimes that is exactly right. You get angry with your partner, and suddenly you hear your therapist’s voice in your head: “What part of this belongs to him? And what part actually belongs to you?” You pause. The anger doesn’t escalate. A thought, linked with a remembered tone of voice, interrupts the spiral. That is a real phenomenon; anyone who has done genuine psychotherapy recognises it.

But my objection is this: it’s a mistake to treat that kind of story as the general explanation of why emotionally mature people often don’t ‘break down’. Because a lot of the time, the best explanation is not that ‘they regulate themselves,’ but rather: they no longer have the same crude reactions in the first place.

Not Damping, But Refinement

Here’s another way emotional development can work, and I think it’s closer to the reality of things. The toddler do start out with blunt, dramatic, black and white responses to disappointment. Distress floods the whole system. And because they’re flooded, they can’t learn properly from experience: everything feels catastrophic, which makes everything seem catastrophic.

Then the caregiver intervenes, not merely by ‘calming,’ but by helping the child perceive differently. She supplies finer distinctions: this isn’t danger, it’s frustration; this isn’t abandonment, it’s a delay; this feeling will pass; the world is still here. Through repeated experiences like this, the child’s emotional repertoire becomes more nuanced. She learns how situations actually tend to go. She develops discrimination. And then, later, when she faces the old trigger, solitude, hunger, disappointment, she responds differently from the start. Not because she is actively damping herself down, but because the situation no longer activates the same internal alarm system.

That’s important. Because it changes what the “how?” question even means.

If you ask, “How are you able to read this essay?” it sounds odd. You can answer in terms of biology or development, sure: you learned to read, your brain adapted, you practised. But if you take the question as asking for a psychological method that you are now deploying each time you read, it starts to feel like a misunderstanding. You’re not typically doing a special inner technique called ‘reading.’ You just read.

Likewise, a lot of emotionally mature responding is not a special inner technique deployed called ‘self-regulation.’ It is simply: this is how I now respond.

You might tell a developmental story: your childhood improved, therapy helped, your nervous system changed, you learned new ways of seeing people. But you may not be ‘doing’ anything at the moment of calmness besides being the person you’ve become. Self-regulation talk can become a way of making a basic capacity sound like a hidden method.

Part of the confusion, I think, comes from mixing together three different things that resemble each other on the surface.

1. Neurological regulation: There may be real negative-feedback processes in the brain that dampen emotional escalation. (I’m not endorsing any specific model; I’m just saying it’s plausible that something like this exists.)

2. External psychological regulation: caregivers and therapists can, in a very real sense, regulate a distressed person from the outside.

3. Occasional self-soothing: adults sometimes do actively talk themselves down, breathe, reframe, distract.

Because these three things exist, we’re tempted to assume that ordinary adult emotional steadiness must generally be produced by this ongoing internal self-regulation. But that inference is too quick. It ignores the possibility that what changed is not your ability to dampen a reaction, but the fact that the reaction doesn’t ignite in the same way anymore.

In other words, therapy and emotional development may have moved you into a life where your emotional system is no longer constantly producing escalating states that require regulation. The ‘regulator’ story then becomes redundant. This isn’t just about feelings. The language of self-regulation shows up in philosophy of language, too, especially in accounts of how we learn to use words correctly.

Wittgenstein, for example, describes language learning as a shift from being regulated by a teacher of language to becoming an ‘autonomous practitioner of language’ whose behaviour is regulated by ‘norms.’ Effectively, the teacher brings normative structure; over time, the learner internalises it, and, eventually, the learner regulates themselves within the practice.

Language is ‘normative’ in a basic sense: uses are intelligibly described as correct or incorrect in context. A child says ‘watch’ when they mean ‘clock’ and a teacher corrects them, and so they learn. But to say that language is normative is a conceptual point: it’s part of what it is to use words that there are standards of correctness. That doesn’t yet tell us anything causal about what produces correct speech. And the word ‘regulation’ quietly pushes us toward a causal picture: it suggests that norms are controlling behaviour the way a mechanism controls water level. That is where a slip can happen: a slide from ‘this is what counts as correct’ to ‘this is what makes correctness happen.’

A similar slip appears when we start implying that proper language use involves the ability to self-correct. Sometimes it does. But often it doesn’t need to. After you’ve learned the word, you typically just use it. You don’t hover over your speech, policing it with inner feedback loops. You can self-correct when you stumble, sure, especially when tired. But fluent competence is usually not a constant inner audit. It’s just competence.

Just because we learn via other people’s feedback, it doesn’t follow that our mature practice is maintained by us providing ourselves with ongoing internal feedback.

There’s an older philosophical worry behind all this, and it applies both to language and emotion.

In language: it’s tempting to think that the normativity of speaking comes from internalised rules, rules we ‘have’ and then apply. But it may be the other way around. The practice is already norm-governed in its living use, and the ‘rules’ we formulate are attempts to describe it. The practice is primary and the rule formulation comes later. The rules are correct or incorrect depending on whether they capture the practice and not the other way round.

And something similar seems true for affect (emotion).

It’s tempting to think: I’m calmer now because I regulate myself. But often the calmer response is simply what my, now refined, emotional understanding produces. The improved response comes first; the self-regulation story is grafted on afterwards as an appealing “mechanism.”

Self-soothing can be real, just as self-correction in speech can be real. My point is that both are often irrelevant to the ordinary possession of the capacity.

A Concession

I’m not interesting in banning the term. I want to rescue it from a misleading grammar.

Consider the old ideal of ‘know thyself,’ or the psychoanalytic idea of self-knowledge. Often, it isn’t the discovery of new facts about yourself. It’s the removal of obstacles: defences, distortions, avoidances, that stop you from seeing and expressing what is already there. Self-knowledge is not so much the gaining of something as the removing of something within.

Perhaps ‘self-regulation’ can be understood similarly. Not as an inner regulator damping an inner regulated thing, but as the absence of certain runaway spirals. Therefore, to become self-regulating is not necessarily to start doing a mental technique. It is to no longer be caught in self-intensifying loops, negative thoughts feeding negative feelings feeding negative behaviours feeding more negative thoughts, until perception itself is warped.

To ‘self-regulate,’ then, could mean simply: you are no longer thrown around by those spirals, or you no longer need other-regulation in the way you once did. That is a perfectly respectable idea. You grew. You learned. Your emotional discriminations became more refined. The world ceased to strike you in the same catastrophic way. So the problem that used to require regulation no longer arises in the same form. And in that case, ‘self-regulation’ is not wrong so much as theatrically unhelpful. It names a result, then pretends it has identified the engine.

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Useful References:

• Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Blackwell Publishing.

• Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

• Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. W. W. Norton & Company.

• Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

• Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating, and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud(Vol. 12, pp. 145–156). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914)

• Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin.

• Gipps, R. (2019, May 2). Self-regulation [Blog post]. Philosophical Perspectives in Clinical Psychology. https://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2019/05/self-regulation.html

• McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Harvard University Press.

• Ogden, T. H. (1997). Reverie and interpretation: Sensing something human. Jason Aronson.

• Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. Hutchinson.

• Sroufe, L. A. (1996). Emotional development: The organization of emotional life in the early years. Cambridge University Press.

• Sterling, P. (2012). Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation. Physiology & Behavior, 106(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.06.004

• Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.

• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Blackwell. (Original work published 1953)

For a marriage to mature in a way that allows for this dual function, the environment must be somewhat guarded (at the very least for the first few years). With each new exposure, with each new vulnerability, the couple tentatively extends its perimeter. Trust is not something we grant all at once, it is tested in increments. Too much exposure too soon collapses what has not yet learned how to successfully bear strain; too much isolation, on the other hand, starves the marriage of air. This process is enlivening but deeply intimate. A marriage cannot pass through the checks and balances to become a true safe haven if external influences, especially those with historical emotional charge, interfere (consciously or unconsciously) with the couple’s ability to establish their own relational ecosystem.

In a lot of relationships, particularly in South and West Asian communities, the very first step a married couple is expected to take is to move in with (typically the wife’s) in-laws. I have seen time and time again how taking this step early on fundamentally disrupts the marital process. Not always, but often enough to merit generalisation. It makes it incredibly hard for a couple to experience both the intimacy that leads to growth and the security that leads to peace.

The Need for Space

A marriage is a sort of relational mirror. It reflects back to us our insecurities, our deficits, our unresolved childhood wounds, and the habitual patterns we unknowingly act out. This is precisely what makes marriage so transformative, it confronts us with the parts of ourselves that we would otherwise never encounter, and it provides a space in which these parts can be investigated and overcome (read From Half to Whole: Why Marriage has to be a Challenge for more on this).

This kind of self-confrontation is a deeply uncomfortable process. It requires an honesty and courage that cannot take place without an uninterrupted back-and-forth engagement between spouses. The problem is observed, then named, then put to the problem bearer, the problem-bearer then must muster the courage to acknowledge and own it, then theorise its origins to understand it and resolve it. It is draining and demands incredible humility. When in-laws are present in the home, in the next room, this process is inherently compromised. Couples will feel the need to either postpone or censor and suppress difficult conversations. Conflict is avoided, or approached in ways that appease the presence of an external audience.

For example, a wife who is trying to express her needs in a marriage may hesitate to do so fully if she feels observed, directly or indirectly, by her husband’s family. A husband who is learning to be emotionally present for his wife may, in moments of difficulty, unconsciously revert to old patterns of withdrawing instead. These are not signs of individual immaturity, rather they are the result of deeply ingrained defences that are difficult to override when a person remains within the psychological sphere of their family of origin. If marriage is to truly function as a space of transformation, a couple must have the space to engage each other directly, without the interference, however subtle or polite, of outside influences (particularly familial). Parents, grand parents, and siblings are the inherited scripts (about love, power, gender, loyalty, and survival) that shaped the very reflexes the couple is now attempting to unlearn and redefine. The couple must be allowed to trigger and be triggered, to hurt and to heal, to rupture and repair, without the weight of parental expectations or familial opinions.

The Need for Emotional Safety

Beyond being a space for growth, marriage is also meant to be a sanctuary. A place of tranquility, emotional safety, and deep rest. The outside world is gruelling. The responsibilities and frustrations of work, finances, and social obligations are fatiguing and a matured marriage offers refuge from those pressures. Living with in-laws, makes it difficult for this sanctuary to fully take shape. The ‘home’ shifts from being an intimate space into a shared one where expectations, obligations, and social dynamics require constant navigation. A simple evening of unwinding after a long day can turn into an experience of being on guard, monitoring behaviour, anticipating comments, and bearing the weight of unspoken expectations. There is an invisible but persistent emotional tension. When a couple faces a challenge, their ability to navigate these moments with genuine vulnerability is hindered.

Conflict within a marriage is natural and necessary, but it requires a contained, private space in which both partners feel safe enough to express their rawest emotions without fear of external judgment or interference. The presence of in-laws can distort this dynamic, leading to avoidance, repression, or the seeking of external validation rather than mutual resolution.

Distorted Loyalties

Something you tend to see in strong marriage is the mutual, unwavering prioritisation of the relationship itself. Each spouse is the other’s primary emotional anchor, the person they immediately seek in times of need. However, this prioritisation is complicated when in-laws are present in the home.

A man who continues to live under the same roof as his parents may struggle, often unconsciously, to fully transition into his role as a partner, friend, and husband first and as a son second. He may find himself caught between the unspoken expectations of his family and the needs of his wife, leading to subtle but persistent relational tensions. A woman who lives with her husband’s parents may feel the weight of expectations regarding how she should behave, how she should contribute to the household, or how she should engage with her in-laws. It is a constant negotiation of roles and introjected expectations rather than an organic and authentic development of her relational identity.

Marriage demands a clear and intentional shift in relational hierarchy. While honouring and respecting parents is undoubtedly important, the marital relationship take precedence. The couple must operate as an attuned unified front, making decisions based primarily on what strengthens their bond rather than what satisfies external expectations. This is exponentially harder to achieve when parents are physically present in the home, as the emotional and psychological pull of historical familial roles can unconsciously override the couple’s ability to establish a new, independent foundation.

Marriage is both a challenge and a refuge, a mirror and a sanctuary. For these dual functions to be fulfilled in an organic manner, the marriage must be allowed a protected space. However, I also recognise the limits of any single perspective. Life is complex and sometimes requires individual and relational sacrifices. This is an undoubtedly a contentious matter in many households.Nevertheless, I have written this as an introductory critical evaluation that will hopefully provoke curiosity in those that are willing to suspend their reflexive judgment.

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First I must stress that anger is not, in and of itself, an ethical failure or an emotional excess. When stripped down to its evolutionary psychological function, anger is simply a coordinated mobilisation of an organism. It is as fundamental as fear or attachment. The expression of anger emerges when boundaries are violated; when the integrity of the body, the individual, the family, or the community is threatened. It mobilises defence. It sharpens perception. It sends an unmistakable message: a boundary has been crossed, and further intrusion will be met with force. In this sense, anger, in and of itself, is not necessarily opposed to reason; it is one of reason’s oldest instruments. A population incapable of anger in the face of dispossession would not be peaceful, it would be extinguished.

Under colonialism, anger is neither resolved or allowed expression; it exists in a state of chronic suspension. Interestingly, the coloniser often does not even attempt to eliminate anger in the colonised. In fact, the colonised person’s anger becomes narratively useful to the settler. Its distorted expressions are captured as confirmation of the settler’s own mythology: that the native is irrational, savage, barbaric and in need of discipline, correction, or eradication. What colonial domination first produces, it then points to as justification. It cultivates the rage while ensuring it cannot fulfil its defensive role. The native is humiliated, expropriated, surveilled, beaten, and insulted, but any attempt to respond is labelled criminal. It is astonishing to me how plainly the early European colonisers of Palestine, for example, acknowledged this as a matter of fact.

The settler produces the stimulus for anger while monopolising all legitimate means of acting upon it. Strikes and assemblies are banned; legal redress is blocked through military courts and administrative detention; peaceful marches are banned with military force; and then, when resistance turns violent after every civil avenue has been sealed, that violence is invoked as proof that repression was necessary all along. Negotiation with these people is obviously futile because they are born and raised ‘terrorists’ and ‘fanatics’. It is a methodological and refined cruelty. Anger is allowed to exist only as affect, never as force.

For a moment, consider with seriousness what it means to be born in Gaza. You enter the world already enclosed by fences, walls, and a naval blockade you did nothing to earn and cannot escape. Your future is not discovered gradually; it is pre-emptively narrowed. Movement is restricted long before ambition can take shape. Travel is not a right but a rare and revocable permission. Education offers knowledge without corresponding opportunity. Unemployment is not a personal failure but a statistical likelihood. Food insecurity is chronic rather than exceptional. Electricity arrives intermittently, clean water sporadically, and medicine conditionally. The sky itself is a source of anxiety, not weather. Then, strikes take out your apartment block, often in the early hours of the morning, when families are asleep, reducing your home to rubble in seconds. There is little warning, sometimes none at all. You run if you can, carrying children half asleep, unsure whether the next explosion will land where you are standing. By daylight, the dead are counted: neighbours, parents, your children, your siblings. Those who survive sift through debris for documents, clothing, bodies. Rescue is improvised, delayed, or impossible.

What kind of human response would we call sane if not anger? If not blinding rage?

Psychotherapeutically, if a mother mentions the molestation of her daughter, the violent death of her son, the burglary of her home, the infidelity of her husband, anger is not a symptom to be managed away. Anger is something I would expect and would want to see emerge in the room as evidence that reality has been registered correctly, that the ego is healthy and functioning. It is a sign of sanity. The absence of anger in such moments would be far more clinically concerning; a sign of dissociation, collapse, or injury to the self. Anger at our own injustice is intelligible and grounded in reality. It arises from a moment of clear injury and seeks acknowledgment, protection, or justice. The colonised native is suspended perpetually at the point of injury, of humiliation, of pain, denied the human dignity of release. Fanon describes this chronic state of mobilisation in bodily terms as muscular tension, nervous agitation, stammers, shaking, and explosive dreams. The individual is prepared for defence, yet forbidden to defend themselves. Over time, this contradiction becomes a psychological pathology. Anger, deprived of its natural trajectory outward toward the source of injury, turns inward or laterally.

Fanon’s clinical observations during his time in Algeria are pretty brutal and unfortunately closely consistent with my recent encounters with mental health patients from Gaza. Fanon describes how the anger deprived of outlet erupts in domestic conflict, inter-communal rivalry, ritualised aggression, and self-destructive behaviour. The colonised man beats his wife and resents himself for it, not because he is inherently brutal, but because the structure of power has made the true enemy unreachable. Anger becomes destructive when it is denied its rightful object. The body still demands discharge, the psyche still seeks equilibrium. When political action is foreclosed, pathology becomes the substitute.

This is why Fanon rejects moralising interpretations of colonial violence. To condemn the colonised for misdirected aggression without examining the system that blocked its proper outlet is, in Fanon’s view, another form of colonial mystification. The settler benefits twice: first by provoking anger, and second by pointing to its distorted expressions as proof of native inferiority. Rage is elicited, sabotaged, and then cited as evidence.

Fanon’s Clinical Cases

In the closing chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon abandons abstraction and writes as a clinician. What he writes is not illustrative or symbolic, it is diagnostic. The case studies are Fanon’s final argument. They demonstrate, with a horrible clinical sobriety, what sustained colonial violence does to the psyche when injury is repetitive, intimate, and structurally unanswerable.

The first case Fanon describes is regarding the sudden and persisting impotence in an Algerian man following the violent rape of his wife by French colonial soldiers. Crucially, there was no prior history of sexual dysfunction; the symptom appeared directly after the assault and resisted all conventional treatment.

Fanon’s interpretation was not psychosexual in the narrow Freudian sense. The impotence is not guilt, repression, or latent neurosis. It was a complete collapse of symbolic and bodily authority produced by total powerlessness. The patient had been forced to witness the absolute violation of his family, of those explicitly under his care and provision, without any possibility of defence, retaliation, or justice. He was rendered incapable of fulfilling even the most basic social role, protector, not because of personal inadequacy, but because the colonial structure made protection impossible.

His body registered this impossibility before language did. Sexual function, which presupposes agency, desire, and continuity, became untenable. Impotence here was not a private pathology; it was the somatic inscription of political humiliation.

Across multiple clinical cases, Fanon describes treating patients suffering from chronic insomnia, panic attacks, tremors, and chronic bodily pain with no organic cause. These patients lived in a state of constant anticipation, waiting for arrest, interrogation, disappearance, or bombardment. Their nervous systems were locked in a state of permanent alert. Fanon is explicit: these are not ‘war neuroses’ in the conventional sense. Unlike soldiers who can act, retreat, or discharge aggression outward, the colonised civilian is entirely immobilised. Fear and anger are chronically activated but never resolved. The result is what we would now recognise as severe trauma compounded by helplessness, an organism perpetually mobilised with nowhere to go.

Fanon also documented cases of acute psychosis; hallucinations, paranoid delusions, dissociation, even emerging in civilians with no prior psychiatric history. These breakdowns often followed episodes of extreme violence or prolonged exposure to terror without relief. In another heart-wrenchingly memorable case, Fanon treated a young man who was seized by recurrent, obsessive fantasies of homicide after surviving a brutal mass execution of his village. Twenty-nine Algerian men were shot in the head and chest at point-blank range by French colonial forces in front of him, and then he was shot twice in the arm and leg. He laid for hours among the dead bodies of his neighbours. Brutal complex, compound trauma. Below are Fanon’s chosen extracts from his statement that highlight the patient’s acute paranoid psychosis.

What is remarkable to me is Fanon’s refusal to see these cases as individual abnormalities or pathologies. He situates each and every one within the colonial structure itself. He insisted that they were rational responses to an irrational environment. When reality itself became unpredictable, lawless, and lethal, the mind fractured not because it is weak, but because coherence had been made impossible. Insanity in an insane environment is the only sane response.

Colonialism produces mental illness. Not metaphorically, not indirectly, but clinically. Symptoms emerge precisely where agency is destroyed, where anger is justified but forbidden, where defence is necessary but impossible. These patients were not failing to adapt. They were adapting exactly as a human nervous system does when trapped in sustained violation without outlet or escape.

Decolonisation, in Fanon’s account, is therefore not only political and social restructuring. It is the reorientation of anger back toward its legitimate target. This is why he insists that decolonisation is experienced as a ‘psychic rupture’. For the first time, the colonised subject’s anger ceases to be diffuse, shameful, or self-lacerating. It has direction. Whatever one may make of Fanon’s controversial endorsement of violence, it cannot be understood apart from this claim: that psychic health requires the possibility of effective defence. An anger that can act is no longer pathological; it becomes organising. An anger that recognises its source threatens the entire colonial architecture.

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Think about that for a moment because belief is transferable. If a child accepts the existence of Santa Claus on parental authority alone, they are equally prepared to accept the quieter, simpler, more damaging stories: that they are lazy, annoying, in the way, too loud, too slow, too much. These judgments, delivered by the same trusted voice, settle just as easily into the architecture of the child’s reality, where they will likely persist long after the magical myths have dissolved. Children do not wake up one day with a new epistemology. They shed fantasies gradually, unevenly, and often without revisiting the premises that made those fantasies possible in the first place.

Even after what might be called the social birth of the individual; when the child leaves the closed epistemic world of the home and enters school, peers, institutions, and other authorities, the architecture doesn’t necessarily reset. It is tested, but not objectively. New information arrives, in droves in fact, but it is not received neutrally. Experience is filtered through what has already been internalised. A glance becomes a judgment, a correction becomes confirmation, exclusion becomes proof. Even ambiguous or unrelated events may be read as evidence in support of an existing self-concept. The child doesn’t ask, Is this true? but rather, How does this fit what I already know about myself? The world appears to agree with them, not because it actually does, but because perception has learned where to look and what to ignore.

This is how harm survives innocence. Harm is not always dramatic, sometimes it is casual; folded into jokes, sighs, eye rolls, labels, tones of impatience. A child is told who they are long before they are capable of arguing otherwise. By the time they acquire the tools for skepticism, the claims have often already hardened into identity. They do not feel like beliefs anymore; they feel like facts.

I think adults like to imagine that children are resilient, that words bounce off them, that love compensates for carelessness. But love doesn’t neutralise authority. If anything, it strengthens it. The more a child depends on you, the more weight your words carry. To speak is to inscribe.

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Only later did I realise that this family folklore had a scientific counterpart: a field of research suggesting that saffron (Crocus sativus L.) may influence the brain and nervous system in remarkably clinical ways.

Mood Disorder

The most established and remarkable research concerns depression and anxiety. Across several randomised controlled trials, saffron has shown antidepressant effects that are superior to placebo and comparable or superior to standard SSRI medications such as fluoxetine and citalopram. A thorough meta-analysis drawing from multiple trials confirmed that saffron taken in doses around 30 mg/day reduced depressive symptoms to a degree statistically indistinguishable from these pharmaceuticals, but with fewer adverse side-effects.

Recent analyses deepen this picture. A 2022–2024 systematic review examining saffron’s effects on both depression and anxiety concluded that improvements were consistent across different populations and were accompanied by a relatively benign side-effect profile. Similarly, a 12-week randomised trial in adults with subclinical depressive symptoms found that saffron supplementation produced modest but real and significant improvements in depressive mood and sleep quality - not dramatic, but noticeable enough to matter in daily life.

So how does saffron do this?

Mechanistically, researchers have proposed several explanations. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry highlighted saffron’s modulation of monoamine neurotransmitters, especially serotonin and dopamine, alongside its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. This kind of modulation aligns with current medical understandings of depression as a condition shaped not only by neurotransmitter imbalance but also by chronic inflammation and oxidative stress.

Incredible.

Therefore, while saffron shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for clinical treatment in moderate or severe depression, there is a coherent and repeatable body of evidence suggesting benefit for people with mild to moderate symptoms or those seeking an adjunctive accessible option.

Cognitive Function and Neuroprotection

Saffron’s role in cognitive health is less well-known but perhaps even more fascinating. Several small but carefully conducted trials have examined its effects in mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease. In these studies, saffron improved cognitive test scores, such as ADAS-Cog and CDR-SB, and in some cases performed as well as standard medications traditionally prescribed for Alzheimer’s symptoms.

There is a basic understanding for why this might be happening. A recent investigation explored how compounds derived from saffron, in particular crocin and crocetin, might protect neurons under stress. The authors highlight evidence that these molecules can reduce oxidative stress, suppress inflammatory signalling, and mitigate neuronal damage triggered by harmful stimuli. These findings make sense when you look at the contemporary models for neurodegenerative diseases, in which chronic oxidative damage and neuroinflammation contribute to gradual neuronal loss and cognitive decline. Hence, saffron (or its active constituents) emerges not just as a mood-modulating spice but as an actual candidate for neuroprotective support, at least at the cellular and preclinical level.

It’s important to keep emphasising that this research remains in its infancy, but the direction is noteworthy: saffron appears not only to affect mood but also to exert subtler, longer-term effects on brain health itself.

ADHD and Behavioural Regulation

Among younger populations, saffron has shown promise in the treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A clinical trial comparing saffron capsules to methylphenidate (Ritalin) found near-equivalent improvements in overall symptoms. Interestingly, the two treatments (saffron and methylphenidate) appeared to diverge in their strengths: saffron performed better on hyperactivity measures, while methylphenidate retained advantage on inattention.

Researchers have only begun to sketch why saffron might influence attentional and behavioural regulation, but several hypotheses recur. The most frequently cited once again involves monoaminergic modulation: compounds such as crocin and safranal appear to influence the availability or signalling of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, the very neurotransmitters central to ADHD pharmacology. Unlike the synthetic methylphenidate, which sharply increases synaptic dopamine and norepinephrine by blocking their reuptake, the natural saffron’s action here seems more subtle and regulatory, nudging these systems rather than forcing them upward.

This line of research is, again, still in its early-days, but it gestures toward a broader exciting potential.

Sexual Function & PMS

Saffron’s effects on sexual health and premenstrual symptoms form another, somewhat less discussed, area of evidence.

In a study of men who developed sexual dysfunction as a side effect of treatment with the antidepressant fluoxetine, saffron supplementation over a period of time restored aspects of libido and erectile function compared to placebo. Interestingly, while subjective and functional measures of sexual health improved, objective measures of semen quality (such as sperm count or motility) remained unchanged. This implies that saffron’s benefits in this context related more to desire, performance, and possibly psychological readiness, rather than to changes in sperm parameters.

There are some early stage studies suggesting similar results for women experiencing SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction with participants reporting significant improvements in sexual desire, arousal, vaginal lubrication, and overall sexual satisfaction compared to those receiving placebo.

Meanwhile, a study exposing women to saffron aroma for twenty minutes found reductions in salivary cortisol and anxiety, as well as reported reductions in premenstrual syndrome (PMS) symptoms compared to placebo across multiple measures, including emotional symptoms (like irritability and depression), physical complaints, and overall premenstrual discomfort. The authors concluded that saffron, likely via its bioactive constituents (crocin, crocetin, safranal, etc.), may help alleviate PMS symptoms, offering a safe, natural alternative to conventional treatments, at least for some women.

Saffron occupies a rare position in the world of natural compounds. It has profound cultural depth in the Middle East, particularly historic Persia. And although the data is still imperfect, it is undoubtedly a remarkable and indispensable product of the natural world. Those few crimson threads steeped in evening tea were more than comfort. They won’t replace antidepressants, halt dementia, or resolve complex disorders on their own. But they are not to be ignored.

Sometimes the simplest practices, steeped in tradition, hold truths that science can only stumble upon and begin to illuminate after the fact.

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References

• Akhondzadeh, S., Fallah-Pour, H., Afkham, K., Jamshidi, A. H., & Khalighi-Cigaroudi, F. (2005). Comparison of Crocus sativus L. and fluoxetine in the treatment of mild to moderate depression: A randomized, double-blind pilot trial. Journal of Affective Disorders, 89(2–3), 163–169. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15718057/

• Akhondzadeh, S., et al. (2010). Saffron in the treatment of premenstrual syndrome: A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Phytomedicine, 17(2), 130–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phymed.2010.11.013

• Ayati, Z., Yang, G., Ayati, M. H., Emami, S. A., & Chang, D. (2020). Saffron for mild cognitive impairment and dementia: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 20(1), 333. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-020-03102-3

• Bahari, H., Shahraki Jazinaki, M., Aghakhani, L., Amini, M. R., Noushzadeh, Z., Khodashahi, R., & Malekahmadi, M. (2025). Crocin supplementation on inflammation and oxidative stress: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Phytotherapy Research, 39(1), 465–479. https://doi.org/10.1002/ptr.8380

• Blasco-Fontecilla, H., Moyano-Ramírez, E., Méndez-González, O., Rodrigo-Yanguas, M., Martin-Moratinos, M., & Bella-Fernández, M. (2022). Effectivity of saffron extract (Saffr’Activ) on treatment for children and adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A clinical effectivity study. Nutrients, 14(19), 4046. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14194046

• Boskabady, M. H., et al. (2018). Crocus sativus in the treatment of ADHD: A pilot randomized trial. Phytotherapy Research, 32(12), 2447–2454. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30154813/

• Fukui, H., Toyoshima, K., & Komaki, R. (2011). Psychological and neuroendocrinological effects of odor of saffron (Crocus sativus). Phytomedicine, 18(8–9), 726–730. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phymed.2010.11.013

• Hausenblas, H. A., Saha, D., Dubyak, P. J., & Anton, S. D. (2013). Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) and major depressive disorder: A meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. Journal of Integrative Medicine, 11(6), 377–383. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24553745/

• Kianbakht, S., & Mozaffari, S. (2009). Clinical evaluation of Crocus sativus L. (saffron) on sexual dysfunction in men: A double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Phytomedicine, 16(12), 1025–1029. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22552758/

• Levantin, A., et al. (2011). The effect of Crocus sativus L. on sexual dysfunction in women: A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Human Psychopharmacology, 26(6), 428–432. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21242071/

• Lopresti, A. L., Smith, S. J., Marx, W., Díez-Municio, M., & Morán-Valero, M. I. (2025). An examination into the effects of a saffron extract (Affron) on mood and general wellbeing in adults experiencing low mood: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. The Journal of Nutrition, 155(7), 2300–2311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.024

• Modabbernia, A., Sohrabi, H., Nasehi, M., et al. (2012). Efficacy and safety of Crocus sativus L. in the treatment of mild to moderate depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 148(2–3), 127–134. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22552758/

• Modabbernia, A., Sohrabi, H., Nasehi, A. A., Raisi, F., Saroukhani, S., Jamshidi, A., Tabrizi, M., Ashrafi, M., & Akhondzadeh, S. (2012). Effect of saffron on fluoxetine-induced sexual impairment in men: Randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Psychopharmacology, 223(4), 381–388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-012-2729-6

• Picheta, N., Piekarz, J., Daniłowska, K., Mazur, K., Piecewicz-Szczęsna, H., & Smoleń, A. (2024). Phytochemicals in the treatment of patients with depression: A systemic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1509109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1509109

• Rafieian-Kopaei, M., et al. (2019). Saffron in cognitive function and Alzheimer’s disease: Preclinical and clinical evidence. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 231, 154–167. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31451956/

• Shafiee, A., Jafarabady, K., Seighali, N., Mohammadi, I., Rajai Firouz Abadi, S., Abhari, F. S., & Bakhtiyari, M. (2025). Effect of saffron versus selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in treatment of depression and anxiety: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Nutrition Reviews, 83(3), e751–e761. https://doi.org/10.1093/nutrit/nuae076

• Toshkani, F., et al. (2023). Neuroprotective mechanisms of Crocus sativus L. in cognitive disorders: A systematic review. Phytotherapy Research, 37(8), 3850–3864. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39632602/

• Yang, X., Chen, X., Fu, Y., Luo, Q., Du, L., Qiu, H., Qiu, T., Zhang, L., & Meng, H. (2018). Comparative efficacy and safety of Crocus sativus L. for treating mild to moderate major depressive disorder in adults: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 14, 1297–1305. https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S157550

Terrifying.

In this episode I take a hard look at the uneasy space where artificial intelligence and human attachment intersect. Drawing on clinical research, design incentives, and several troubling real-world cases, I explore how large language models can echo the rhythms of i…

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This diffusion, that tends to be casually called “soft porn”, is neither soft nor peripheral.

Meta Preys on the Young

My younger brother recently joined Instagram for the first time. He’d been looking forward to it for months, finally able to join the digital conversations his friends had been having without him, to swap reels and jokes, to share the latest Real Madrid clips. I watched him pick out a username and then, out of nowhere, I felt a flicker of curiosity. I wonder what instagram, before knowing anything about my brother and his preferences, would suggest to him? What would his explore page look like? What would it expose him to given that all it knew at that point was his age (15) and his sex (male)? Well, I suppose you can guess. It was an endless stream of half naked women as far as you could scroll. I was stunned.

Reports have shown that my brother was not an anomaly. What many parents have intuited is, in fact, the case: social media platforms, particularly those designed for the young, have begun to serve minors content far more sexualised than the companies publicly acknowledge. Journalists who created accounts posing as children found themselves fed “overtly sexual adult videos,” ads for dating apps, promotions for AI-driven sexual chatbots, and in some cases content sitting disturbingly close to children’s brands. The lines separating childhood from adult erotic economies have thinned to the point of translucence.

At its core, this disturbing psychological targeting is simply the business model of social media laid bare. These platforms are free to download not because they are benevolent public goods, but because you are never the customer, you are the commodity. Advertisers are the customers, and we, or more specifically our attention, are the product. And attention, in the digital marketplace, is worth far more than any subscription fee.

Without charging users directly, companies like Meta and TikTok generate extraordinary profits through targeted advertising. Their revenue scales with one metric above all others: how long your eyeballs stay fixed to their interface. Every additional minute is another data point, another ad impression, another sliver of profit. It is therefore in their financial interest, not incidentally, but fundamentally, for you to spend as much of your waking life on their platforms as possible.

And the algorithms have learned, with unnerving precision, how to exploit the hormonal volatility, the curiosity, and the behavioural patterns of fifteen year old boys. Instagram appears to have determined exactly which kinds of content keep adolescent users transfixed, and it feeds them whatever will hold their gaze the longest, even if what holds it is sexualised, addictive, inappropriate, or psychologically harmful. The result is an economic logic that places children’s developmental vulnerabilities in direct tension with corporate profit.

The pornification of the neutral is not limited to porn sites, or even to explicitly sexual accounts. It is woven through TikTok dances engineered for virality; through fitness channels that quietly escalate their content’s erotic charge; through beauty influencers who unintentionally, or perhaps very intentionally, train millions of adolescents in the aesthetics of self-objectification. Soft porn is the new visual atmosphere. Children now breathe it before they know what air is.

I cannot emphasise enough why these everyday explore/for you page appearances matter. The human mind, especially the adolescent mind, is shaped less by occasional shocks than by persistent drips.

Parents often imagine the internet as a space where their children “might stumble” upon something inappropriate. That no longer holds. Algorithms are not passive landscapes; they are very hyperactive brokers of attention. They learn a user’s vulnerabilities with greater speed than any human observer could. They note what video you click, how many milliseconds you watch it for, who you then send it to, who you don’t send it to, how many times you return to it. And once an algorithm detects that sexualised content keeps a user on the platform longer, the acceleration begins.

The testimonies emerging from young adults who grew up online suggest not merely exposure but induction. Many report that their first encounters with sexual content came long before they understood it, and that the normalisation of pornography, through memes, jokes, micro-trends, influencers, created a culture in which intimacy itself arrived pre-distorted.

Take a moment to appreciate the cultural irony: platforms that sell themselves as creativity & connection hubs or community-building tools have quietly become pipelines delivering minors to predators, advertisers, and erotic economies previously confined to adult-only spaces. The predators themselves have not changed; what has changed is their access. And access, in human behaviour, is often a catalytic factor.

Teenage Self-Pornification

While boys and young men receive one kind of distortion, an early erotic curriculum shaped by performance and spectacle, girls face another. The cultural pressure on adolescent girls to sexualise themselves online is now so ambient, so normalised, that I don’t think most even experience it as pressure at all. It feels like gravity.

A twelve year old raised in this atmosphere is not merely comparing herself to peers; she is comparing herself to hyper-designed, algorithmically boosted avatars of femininity, some edited by professionals, others by filters that morph a child’s body into something uncannily adult. The result is a generation attempting to mature into their own digitally enhanced sexualised projections. And they are brilliantly rewarded for it.

The platforms reward the very behaviours that make these girls the most vulnerable. They go viral: the likes are immeasurable, the views translate to personal revenue, the comments are irresistible. The ‘validation economy’ encourages self-exposure long before the brain’s executive functions develop the capacity to assess long term consequences. Girls too young to drive are coached, sometimes very explicitly, other times ambiently, to perform sexuality as content. And when some slide from soft porn into commercialised self-sexualisation, society has the gall to oscillate between celebration and moral condemnation, depending on political allegiance.

Both reactions fail to grasp the real dynamic: a commercial machine is shaping children into erotic commodities, and then leaving them to face the fallout alone.

Part of the difficulty in addressing all this is the ideological incoherence surrounding it. Certain progressives dismiss the pornification of girlhood as prudish panic, failing to consider how unfettered sexual “liberation” can be co-opted by predators and corporations faster than it can ever empower anyone. Meanwhile, certain conservatives focus their outrage almost exclusively on the girls themselves, ridiculing, shaming, or blaming, instead of the ecosystem that conditioned them.

Both stances misdiagnose the problem. The crisis at hand is neither a morality tale nor a partisan weapon. It is a developmental, psychological, and structural disaster that cuts across demographics.

And it is unfolding and mutating in real time.

What distinguishes today’s adolescents from those who came before them is not the content they encounter but the context. They reach adolescence with less real world experience, more anxiety, and weaker support structures. Yet they face more aggressive digital environments, where predators are algorithmically assisted, where identity is curated for an invisible audience, where self worth is tied to metrics, where sexualised performance is the cost of visibility. The tragedy is not that young people sometimes imitate the cultural scripts around them. The tragedy is that the scripts were written for profit, not for human flourishing.

The Public Health Crisis Continues

If pornography proper qualifies as a public health crisis because it rewires neural reward pathways, destabilises relationships, and distorts intimacy, then soft porn qualifies because it does all these things diffusely, silently, at scale, and at ages when the self is still unformed.

Soft porn does not overwhelm the brain through shock; it reshapes it through ubiquity. It constructs expectations before desire even has the opportunity to take shape. It primes young people for compulsive attention cycles long before they encounter explicit material. It nudges them toward self-surveillance, self-display, and self-doubt. And it prepares them, emotionally, cognitively, socially, for an adult sexual marketplace they are not yet equipped to understand, let alone navigate.

In this sense, soft porn is not the prelude to the crisis. It also is the crisis.

Children did not design these platforms. They did not write the algorithms. They did not conceive the cultural incentives that reward sexualised performance. Nor did they create the ideological haze that makes honest conversation about these issues so strained. Expecting adolescents to withstand forces that entire industries could not withstand is a profound misreading of human development.

The only meaningful intervention begins with adults: parents, educators, policymakers, and cultural leaders willing to acknowledge the scale of the harm. No public health challenge has ever been solved by telling children to bootstrap their way out of systems engineered to overpower them. We cannot give twelve year olds digital worlds built on sexualised attention economies and then feign surprise when they internalise the logic of those worlds.

Soft porn is not soft. It is structural and profoundly formative. If we do not confront it with seriousness equal to its influence, the next generation will inherit harms they did not choose, and did not understand until it was too late.

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Centuries before modern psychology began to map this phenomenon, the 14th-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun identified and articulated this binding force as ‘Asabiyah’ (group feeling/social solidarity) in his seminal work, ‘The Muqaddimah’. The etymology of the word is fascinating. Asabiyah stems from the Arabic root ‘asaba, meaning to bind, to twist, or to wrap around. It implies a sort of tension; the way a turban is wound tight around the head or a ligament holds bone. This same root gives us the Arabic word for ‘nerve’ (‘asab). Khaldun’s concept, therefore, was never only about social agreement; it was about physiological connection. It describes the nervous system of the tribe, a shared circuitry where a signal transmitted by one is received by the whole, bypassing the individual mind entirely.

Moving between the cohesion of the Bedouin tribes and the corruption of royal courts, Ibn Khaldun observed ‘crowd psychology’ centuries before we had the language to map it. He saw that the seduction of belonging is the engine of history: it is, and has been, the force that can bind a people into a weapon capable of building a dynasty, and the loss of which inevitably guarantees its collapse. Asabiyah, to him, was the fundamental glue of human civilisation. The thread that binds individuals into a coherent unit, making them more resilient than the sum of their parts. But I believe it is even more invasive than than. Asabiyah is not only a sociological glue; it is a psychological solvent.

Human beings are profoundly social animals. Our nervous systems are optimised to synchronise: heart rates match, blood pressures regulate each other, emotional states converge, behaviour aligns with the group long before we consciously choose to conform. This has always been the case. What we call a ‘crowd’ is simply a larger, more volatile version of the ordinary social field in which the brain has always existed.

The philosopher Ortega y Gasset once described the ‘mass’ as “the sum of all the solitary zeros.” I suspect he meant it as an insult, but psychologically, he was not far off. In a crowd, the self doesn’t quite disappear; it simply becomes negotiable. The individual ego cedes space to a shared emotional current.

Social Surrender

Crowds have been interesting to philosophers like Ibn Khaldun and modern psychologists alike because of how they undermine the ordinary checks and balances of the brain. Under conditions of collective arousal; protest, celebration, mourning, panic, the individual amygdala becomes a hyper-sensitive signal receiver, scanning for social cues to respond to. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for moral reasoning and individual restraint, quiets. The social brain takes precedence.

You can see this shift in something as ordinary as a football match. A single person, sitting alone, perhaps would never hurl a bottle or scream threats at a stranger. But place that same person in a stadium where thousands around him are roaring, vibrating with adrenaline, and the neural chemistry tilts. The amygdala registers collective excitement as a cue for action; the prefrontal cortex, normally the voice of restraint, fades beneath the noise. What felt unthinkable in solitude becomes almost effortless in the crowd’s emotional slipstream.

Even joyous crowds can trigger this shift. At a concert, when the music swells and thousands of bodies move in synchrony, people leap barriers, shove forward, or faint from sheer arousal. The brain interprets the crowd’s energy as a signal to join, merge, accelerate. The social circuitry takes over, and the reflective self recedes.

Some call it ‘mob mentality’ in the moralising sense; but it is the consequence of neural prioritisation. The brain does not care about your individuality when it detects collective threat or collective opportunity. The brain cares about survival above all else, and for most of human history survival depended on merging with the group.

To refuse the crowd’s direction felt dangerous. And in many periods of time, it was.

The Seduction of Belonging

If the surrender to Asabiyah was simply a loss of autonomy, we would resist it. But is is also incredibly seductive.

There is a relief in handing over one’s private burdens; doubt, hesitation, self-scrutiny, to the collective. The crowd simplifies moral complexity, sometimes to our detriment. It offers clarity without thought, emotion without vulnerability, action without accountability. It lifts the self out of its lonely interior space and places it inside a kind of shared organism.

This is why movements rely not on persuasion alone, but on the orchestrated production of crowd states: rallies, chants, rhythms, symbols, uniforms, slogans. These are technologies of synchronisation designed to artificially stimulate Asabiyah. They soothe individual fear by dissolving it into a unified emotional field.

It feels like connection. It sometimes becomes coercion.

Once a person is absorbed into a crowd, ordinary moral thresholds shift. Most people commit acts they might never attempt in solitude; violence, destruction, humiliation, not because they have become worse in a sense, but because the internal feedback mechanisms that ordinarily regulate behaviour have been overridden. Responsibility disperses. Fear disperses. Shame disperses. The self becomes thin.

This is why crowds can generate both revolutions and atrocities with equal efficiency. They magnify whatever emotional charge they contain. A crowd built from righteous sorrow can shake a regime; a crowd built from resentment can tear through a city like a storm. The psychological mechanism is the same.

إن العصبية بها تكون الحماية والمدافعة والمطالبة، وكل أمر يُجْتَمع عليه

“It is through Asabiyyah that protection and security are realised, political authority is asserted, and all shared interests are achieved.”

— Ibn Khaldun, The Muqadimmah

If abandoning oneself in a crowd is a biological tendency, the challenge is to remain conscious and self-determining within it. To cultivate an inner keel that does not vanish when submerged in collective emotion.

That requires a close and trained awareness of our own physiological shifts: the quickened pulse, the tightening chest, the seductive feeling of being carried by something larger. It also requires a capacity to hold onto personal moral reasoning even as the crowd dissolves nuance. It requires the willingness and, frankly, courage to step out of formation when the emotional current begins to tilt toward cruelty. And perhaps most importantly, it requires acknowledging the uncomfortable truth: none of us are immune to the crowd. Not you. Not me. Not the people we consider thoughtful or principled. The vulnerability is universal.

The work is awareness and discipline. Because a society that cannot understand its own Asabiyah is a society that will be governed by it.

• Ibn Khaldun (1967) The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by F. Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Ortega y Gasset, J. (1930) The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton.

• Turner, J.C. and Oakes, P.J. (1986) ‘The significance of the social identity concept for social psychology’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 25(3), pp. 237–252.

• Reicher, S.D. (1984) ‘The St. Pauls’ riot: An explanation of the limits of crowd action in terms of a social identity model’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 14(1), pp. 1–21.

• Le Bon, G. (1895) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

• Cacioppo, J.T. and Patrick, W. (2008) Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: W.W. Norton

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In moments of contact, we project selective versions of ourselves that we consider both appropriate and strategically suited to the social demands of the moment. This is not hypocrisy, duplicity, two-facedness or psychological fracture; it is the normal, adaptive work of navigating a social life. The self we bring to a workplace meeting is not the same one we present at a family gathering nor is it the same one we meet complete strangers with. As a result, much of our interpersonal life remains in the shallows, far from the vulnerability and unpredictability of genuine relational depth.

Nonetheless, it is a mistake to assume that, because these projected selves are shallow, they are entirely superficial and not reflecting anything real. Each and every version of ourselves expresses something authentic and a comprehensive understanding of who we are must include our full range of masks and projected identities as well as whatever underlies them.

Masking as Social Intelligence

The ability to deploy a mask actually represents skilful and healthy human social Functioning. Social exchanges depend on complex but relatively predictable patterns; tone, context, language, culture, conversational norms. These patterns and our ability to predict and respond to them are what make social life manageable. In fact, many traditional descriptions of mental health ‘disorders’ are symptomised in terms of a failure to function adequately at the surface level of social encounter, in other words, to select and maintain an appropriate mask. Psychotic behaviour and manic episodes, for example, represent a disruption in this adaptive capacity: the person’s expressions, reactions, and social signals no longer align with shared expectations, making ordinary relational rhythms difficult to sustain.

It is a skill I often undervalue in my own life, until I pause long enough to notice just how frequently I rely on it. Surface-level contact allows us to form quick rapport with strangers, seek directions, keep our place in the queue, collaborate with colleagues we barely know, and preserve long-term connection with partners or close friends. Even in marriages or enduring committed partnerships, the majority of daily interaction; perhaps 90% of it, remains at this surface layer. Couples exchange routine check-ins about how the day went, negotiate household tasks, make small observations, and keep the predictable patterns that make shared life coherent. These familiar exchanges aren’t trivial; they create reliability, promote mutual predictability, reduce friction, and reinforce a sense of mutual stability, which reduces anxiety.

Because so much of ordinary relational life depends on these patterned, surface-level rituals, moments when the mask is set aside take on extraordinary weight and have striking impact. When partners temporarily move beyond the familiar scripts; expressing a deeper worry, admitting a private hope, or revealing an emotional truth they typically protect, the shift feels significant precisely because it breaks through the usual structure. The surface-level provides safety; the deeper disclosure provides meaning.

Imagine a world in which everyone behaved with complete, unfiltered transparency. Set aside the cliché examples of oversharing and consider instead a small, mundane, ordinary moment: You are walking down the street when you unexpectedly make eye contact with someone you knew at university. You were never fond of them, you are in a hurry, and you simply do not have the energy for a polite exchange. Yet they recognise you and start walking over with a friendly wave.

If you had no social mask; no ability to shape your responses to the situation and operate on a surface level interaction, you might respond with blunt honesty: “I don’t want to talk right now. I have somewhere to be.” While that may be factually accurate, the impact is harsh. The other person would likely feel dismissed or rejected, and you would appear rude, aloof, and self-absorbed. No relational contact, even on the surface level, is made. Repeated moments like this would quickly lead you to social isolation, not because honesty is inherently problematic, but because unbuffered honesty is often insensitive to context, timing, and the emotional needs of others.

Now imagine the same scenario with the ordinary social mask that most of us use instinctively. You pause, offer a brief, albeit forced, smile, exchange a courteous greeting, say something light; “Good to see you; I’m rushing between things at the moment but catch you later”, and continue on your way. You protect your own time, but you also protect the other person’s dignity and some form of relational contact is made. No deep emotional labour is required; you simply operate within the familiar surface level that keeps social life intact. You have not betrayed yourself, you have exercised a basic social competence that allows relationships, even fleeting ones, to remain functional rather than abrasive.

Flirting With Relational Depth

In these less intimate social encounters, say with a colleague, it is also not unusual for a person to flirt, however subtle, with the possibility of a deeper engagement. They may offer both disguises and clues. “I get a bit down about it sometimes” can actually mean “I am in complete despair”. Beneath the vague statement is often a tentative bridge toward more vulnerable territory. The accompanying behaviour; unusually direct or evasive eye contact, a shift in tone, can indicate that the speaker has momentarily dipped below their usual level of emotional control. These signals often emerge when someone is internally debating whether they want to be more fully understood by us. If we throw one of these tests into the relational plane and the other person can meet us there; “I noticed. It seems like you’re going through a really tough time recently“, there is a likely chance of relational depth occurring. To acknowledge the discrepancy between the words and the emotional tone, is to create space for deeper expression.

Such moments differ sharply from ordinary social contact. They move beyond rehearsed roles and predictable exchanges and toward the areas of the self that are more spontaneous, less organised, and often more consequential. But if this does not occur and they do not respond to our clues, then we can still hide behind the relative superficiality of the statement (“I get a bit down about it sometimes”).

This ambivalence is central to deeper relational contact. Individuals often desire meaningful acknowledgment but simultaneously fear what might follow from revealing too much. The fear is not simply emotional exposure; it is the risk that the deeper aspects of the self will be misunderstood, dismissed, or judged. Surface-level disguises help protect against this risk. They allow the individual to test and retreat if the other person seems unprepared or unwilling to engage at a deeper level.

These deeper encounters often activate fundamental questions about identity and meaning. When the influence of social expectations softens, people confront issues that do not typically emerge in everyday conversation: What values genuinely guide my choices? What remains of me when I am not performing for others? What hopes or fears shape my life?

This existential foundation for the self is not abstract. It contains within it values, emotional tendencies, personal aspirations, and the narrative one holds about their life’s significance. It also includes a collection of internalised messages (introjections) and narratives that may have come from parents, teachers, or peers. Some of these messages integrate into the core of the self and feel authentic. Others remain at the surface, exerting influence but lacking genuine personal grounding.

A fascinating feature of therapeutic self-exploration is that many of these surface-level introjections quickly dissolve when scrutinised with surprising ease. A long-standing self-criticism may reveal itself as a remnant of someone else’s judgment rather than a true reflection of one’s abilities or character. People often come to realise that traits they believed were central to their identity; being unreliable, clumsy, incompetent, unlikeable, were written into their life script with handwriting they don’t even recognise. When examined carefully, these inherited messages lose their authority.

Understanding relational life requires recognising both layers: the surface-level patterns that allow daily functioning and the deeper level where questions of meaning, fear, and identity reside. Neither layer is inherently more ‘real’ than the other. Surface-level behaviour is a legitimate part of the self; adaptive, intricate, and essential for social life. The deeper layer, meanwhile, reveals the personal convictions and emotional truths that surface behaviour sometimes disguises or cautiously signals.

I no longer see the self as a stable core separate of its social masks, but as a shifting interplay of the many currents of experience that together form a flexible, living identity. To understand ourselves, or to truly meet another person, we must become aware of the full range of this interplay: the polished performances that help us navigate the world and the more vulnerable material that occasionally rises to the surface when the conditions feel safe enough.

References

• Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.

• Mearns, D. (2002) ‘The relational self in psychotherapy’, Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 1(3), pp. 192–205.

• Mearns, D., Thorne, B. and McLeod, J. (2013) Person-Centred Counselling in Action. 4th edn. London: SAGE.

• Rogers, C.R. (1951) Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

• Rogers, C.R. (1959) ‘A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships’, in Koch, S. (ed.) Psychology: A Study of a Science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 184–256.

• Stern, D.N. (2004) The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

• Solomon, M. and Siegel, D.J. (2017) Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain. New York: W.W. Norton.

• Yalom, I.D. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

Something about the boy caught his eye. His walk seemed hurried, his eyes shifty, his gait awkward, and his voice performatively polite. The man narrowed his gaze. “He took it,” he thought. “He must have.”

That day, everything about the boy confirmed the man’s suspicion. His gestures looked sly, his posture dishonest, his laughter too forced, and even his silence was strange. The more the man observed, the surer he became. Each small detail, perhaps unnoticeable before, now pointed toward guilt.

The next morning, while splitting wood, the man uncovered the axe buried beneath a pile of wood he had stacked days earlier. He stopped cold, staring at it.

Later that afternoon, he saw the neighbor’s son again. However, now the boy’s walk was light, his speech natural, his face open and friendly. The man looked at him and thought, almost with disbelief, “How different he looks today.”

有人亡斧，疑其鄰之子。

視其行步，竊斧也；

其言語，竊斧也；

其容貌，竊斧也。

不久而掘其谷，得其斧。

復視其鄰之子，非竊斧也。

Original Parable (Lieh Tzu, Tang Wen)

So much wisdom in so few words. This parable is one of the clearest demonstrations of what modern psychology calls confirmation bias: the tendency to notice, interpret, remember, and even manufacture information in a way that confirms a person’s pre-existing beliefs.

The man does not simply suspect the boy; he rebuilds the entire perceptual world around him to sustain that suspicion. Once the hypothesis is formed as a thought, “perhaps the boy stole my axe”, every observation is filtered through that thought. The boy’s posture becomes ‘furtive,’ his tone becomes ‘evasive,’ and his very silence is suspicious evidence of guilt. This is not logic; it’s a sort of cognitive immune system at work, rejecting contradictory data to preserve emotional coherence.

Lieh Tzu, who authored this story over two millennia ago, understood something that today’s cognitive scientists still grapple with: oftentimes, belief precedes perception. We don’t always see the world and then form beliefs; we also, and perhaps more often, form beliefs and then see the world accordingly. The mind is not a neutral observer but an active editor, like the woodcutter, constantly rewriting sensory input to fit its internal script.

The story also reveals the intrinsic relationship between affect (emotion) and cognitive appraisal. The man’s suspicion does not arise from objective observation and rational inference but from frustration and agitation. Emotional arousal, whether irritation, loss, or resentment, predisposes the mind to assign cause quickly, often in the direction of moral judgment. In this case, the neighbor’s son becomes a projection surface for the man’s displaced emotion. Once affect produces conviction, perception adjusts to reinforce it. The man begins to see the world through the lens of the very emotion that produced his belief.

For the woodcutter, finding the axe is what breaks the spell. Nothing about the boy has changed; only the man’s internal model of reality has shifted. The boy’s hands, his eyes, his gait; they were always neutral. The change occurs entirely within the observer.

I think the Taoist message here is simple: the world is rarely as we perceive it to be, and the mind is far less reliable than it believes itself to be. We are a species wired less for truth than for coherence. Truth must be sought out.

This story also serves as a critique of moral certainty. Human beings, when sure of their rightness, seem to become blind to alternative explanations. The man’s self-assurance is what prevents him from noticing the much more plausible hypothesis that he simply misplaced the axe and stopped searching for it too soon. His error isn’t intellectual; it’s emotional and egoic.

This mechanism is everywhere: in politics, ideology, relationships, and even science. Once people commit to a narrative, they start gathering evidence for it retroactively. It’s the same pattern that fuels conspiracy theories, prejudice, and interpersonal paranoia. The Taoist solution is not to gather better evidence but to reduce premature judgment. To hold opinions lightly, to wait before deciding, and to recognise that the mind’s first story about reality is usually self-serving.

The woodcutter’s enlightenment is painfully mundane: he found his axe. The world does not change when we discover the truth; only our interpretation of it does.

目之所見，不過形色；耳之所聞，不過聲響；心之所知，不過事理。

“The eye perceives only form and color; the ear hears only sound; the mind knows only the pattern it constructs.” — Lieh Tzu

While there are certainly cases in which those roles are reversed, where the man becomes the leafblower and the woman the leaf, the specific pattern I describe is common enough to merit generalisation. I personally believe that generalisations are not always careless oversimplifications but are actually often useful tools for recognising patterns that hold true more often than they do not. This particular dynamic recurs not because of cultural conditioning alone, but because it reflects differences built deeply into our physiology and emotional architecture. What looks on the surface like a clash of personalities is, in this case, more likely a meeting of two somewhat distinct nervous systems reacting to stress in incompatible ways.

The Male Nervous System

In 85 percent of marriages, the stonewaller (the person who disengages completely to avoid further conflict) is the husband. This is not because of a cultural male deficit; the reason lies more intimately tied to our biological makeup. The male cardiovascular system is much more reactive than that of the female and, importantly, much slower to recover from stress. This particular sex difference appears to have developed from a place of biological benefit.

It’s no secret that our ancestors were restricted to very rigid gender roles, which were necessary to collectively survive a much harsher environment. Females specialised in nurturing children and the relational vulnerabilities within communities, while the males specialised in cooperative hunting, resource finding, and protection. One role requires sustained emotional attunement and the capacity to soothe distress, while the other demands vigilance, endurance, and rapid activation in the face of threat.

Whether you personally regard them as the outcome of evolutionary refinement or the imprint of divine design, these biological differences in stress response persist today. As most mothers will tell you, the amount of milk a mother produces when breastfeeding is largely dependent on how relaxed the mother feels. The calmer and more stable her parasympathetic nervous system, the more the hormone oxytocin is secreted in the brain. Furthermore, during the earliest years of a child’s life, their emotional state is closely attuned to and synchronised with their mother’s, making her capacity for calm a direct regulator of the child’s developing nervous system. So, in more ways than one, it is in a woman’s best interest to be biologically able to quickly soothe herself, quickly activate her parasympathetic nervous system, and quickly calm down after a stressor.

As for men, historically, the opposite response was most advantageous. In an earlier time in human history, a male hunter’s ability to maintain a focused vigilance was a key survival skill. A man whose adrenaline kicked in quicker, whose sympathetic nervous system activated faster, and who did not calm down so quickly was a man more likely to survive. Today, research indicates these differences in stress response and regulation endure and are observable almost everywhere you look.

For instance, when a man and a woman suddenly hear a very loud bang respectively, the man’s heart beats quicker than hers and stays accelerated for longer (Levenson et al., 2005). The same goes for blood pressure. Psychologist Dolf Zillmann found that when male subjects are deliberately treated rudely and abruptly and then told to relax for 20 minutes, their blood pressure initially surges and then remains high long past 20 minutes, seemingly until they are able to retaliate. But when women face the same treatment, they are consistently able to calm down and self-soothe during those 20 minutes. Interestingly, a woman’s blood pressure seems to actually surge again if she is pressured into retaliating.

Marital conflict is a potent and often more emotionally complex stressor than those used in these studies for both men and women. In a relational conflict, a person engages not only the content of the disagreement, but also the tone, the pitch, the expression, the body language, and the implicit threats of rejection, abandonment, or even betrayal. Since stress takes a greater physiological toll on the male, it’s no surprise that men are more likely than women to attempt to avoid it.

This gender difference in stress response also influences what men and women tend to think about when they experience marital conflict. Men have a greater tendency to think negative thoughts that maintain their distress, while women are more likely to think soothing thoughts that help them calm down and be conciliatory. For example, Men often think about how righteous and indignant they feel (”I don’t have to take this”), which tends to lead to contempt or belligerence. Alternatively, they may think about themselves as an innocent victim of their wife’s wrath (”Why is she always blaming me?”), which leads to defensiveness. Because of these differences, most marriages (including healthy ones) follow a pattern of conflict in which the wife, who is inherently better able to handle stress, brings up sensitive issues; to resolve, to repair, to reconnect. The husband, who is not as able to cope with it, will attempt to avoid getting into the subject; to withdraw, to retreat, to isolate.

A Closer Look at The Female Nervous System

The female nervous system, as mentioned, is generally better equipped to recover from emotional arousal and return to a state of relational stability. It is a biological system optimised for connection, cooperation, and care. A woman’s stress response, though certainly intense in the moment, tends to subside more quickly. Her physiology is more adept at re-engaging the parasympathetic nervous system (as opposed to staying activated in a sympathetic nervous system state), allowing her to move from arousal back to communication with relative ease in comparison to her male counterpart.

This faster recovery is often what drives a woman in a relationship to approach and engage with the conflict rather than avoid it. Once the initial emotional wave subsides, her body pushes her back toward resolution. The same oxytocin system that promotes calm during caregiving also motivates repair after rupture. Emotional safety, for her, is achieved not through withdrawal but through re-establishing connection. She cannot fully relax until the social bond feels secure again.

In practice, this often means that after an argument, she is more likely to initiate conversation, to ask, “Can we talk about what just happened?” or to attempt physical closeness as a signal of reconciliation. These efforts are rarely about control, as they are often misunderstood to be; they are about soothing. The problem, of course, is that her partner is often still flooded. While she has already returned to a manageable baseline, his nervous system remains heightened in survival mode. Therefore, when she approaches him in this state, her attempt to connect is misconstrued as provocation. What feels like repair to her, feels like renewed attack to him.

I see this misalignment constantly, in others and in my own marriage. I might send a long text message to my husband after an argument, carefully explaining my feelings and original intentions in an attempt to bring clarity, to foster understanding and empathy. My husband, reading it while still physiologically activated, experiences it as criticism and overload. His further withdrawal or a lack of reply to this message will most likely be understood by me as a lack of the care and empathy my message was intended to produce. I might, as a result, send a second message or a third. I might follow him into his office, wanting to “finish the conversation,” unaware that his body is still in survival mode: his heart rate elevated, his muscles tense, his system still signalling threat. To me, his withdrawal seems cold and punishing; to him, my persistence feels relentless, unmerciful and unsafe. Both of us are acting from genuine motives, guided by biology rather than ill will.

At this point, perhaps you are expecting a cure. I cannot offer one. Every couple’s biological foundation for their specific dynamic is, of course, layered with a set of additional narratives, life scripts, histories, and learned responses. Temperament, attachment history, trauma, culture, and personality all modify how the dance plays out. There is, therefore, no single prescription that fits all. But even without a cure, awareness itself is corrective. To recognise that beneath the conflict are two nervous systems, each striving, in its own way, for safety, is to soften the moral edge of the encounter. Understanding that the other is not an adversary but a body under stress grants the smallest but most essential mercies: empathy, patience, and space. From that recognition, couples can begin to meet each other not in accusation, but in curiosity; less as leaf and leafblower, and more as two people learning the timing of one another’s breath.

References

• Baumeister, R.F. & Leary, M.R., 1995. The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), pp.497–529.

• Gottman, J.M. & Levenson, R.W., 1992. Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), pp.221–233.

• Gottman, J.M., 1999. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. New York: Crown Publishers.

• Levenson, R.W., Carstensen, L.L. & Gottman, J.M., 1993. Long-term marriage: Age, gender, and satisfaction. Psychology and Aging, 8(2), pp.301–313.

• Levenson, R.W., Carstensen, L.L. & Gottman, J.M., 2005. Physiological bases of emotion: Gender, age, and emotion regulation in long-term marriage. Emotion, 5(1), pp.37–52.

• Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung, R.A.R. & Updegraff, J.A., 2000. Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), pp.411–429.

• Zillmann, D., 1988. Mood management through communication choices. American Behavioral Scientist, 31(3), pp.327–340.

• Zillmann, D., 1993. Mental control of angry aggression. In Wegner, D.M. & Pennebaker, J.W. (eds.), Handbook of Mental Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp.370–392.

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In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes swallowing a small pill of mescaline (a psychedelic) and, soon after, watching his sense of self dissolve like salt in water. The ordinary geometry of perception; the categories of “me” and “the world,” “object” and “subject”, fell away. What remained was an overwhelming, incandescent immediacy: the is-ness of things. He reported that light itself seemed alive, charged with intelligence. “Each flower,” he wrote, “was a miracle of luminous existence.” The distinctions between beauty and banality evaporated; everything simply was, and its being was enough. Time lost its linear grip; moments no longer slid forward but hovered, expanded, became vast. The world ceased to be a collection of objects for him and instead appeared as a single, shimmering field of consciousness, alive with meaning and presence. Huxley described this experience, not as a hallucination or fabrication of reality, but as an unveiling. It was as though the mind had stopped editing reality and, for a few precious hours, let the whole flood in.

When Huxley returned to his ordinary state, he deduced something unsettling but logical. If a chemical had dissolved the walls of his mind, then those walls must already exist, and if it took a small dose of a compound to expand his consciousness in the way it did, then something in ordinary life must be restricting it. The brain, he concluded, was this wall. The brain functions not as a generator of consciousness, but as a reducing valve. Its job is to filter the vast field of possible experience down to a manageable trickle, allowing us to survive rather than to transcend. In other words, the brain protects us from the overwhelming fullness of what is. Without those limits, we might be blinded by the radiance of reality itself. To hunt, to plan, to build, to communicate; we need focus, not infinity. The price of coherence is exclusion. The wide field of consciousness is reduced by our neurology to a narrow aperture through which we can handle tools, build societies, and remember to eat. Every sensory filter, every neural inhibition, every linguistic category we inherit from our culture, all of it constructs the small room we call the self.

And yet, moments seem to arise when the walls of that room flicker or thin. Perhaps through art, meditation, love, or psychedelics, we sometimes sense the vastness beyond. These moments do not expand consciousness so much as they reveal how limited our usual mode of being really is. They show us that our everyday mind is a kind of nap; a strategic amnesia designed for survival. The extraordinary, then, is not elsewhere; it is here, perpetually present, simply filtered out.

In the Quran, there is a striking verse where God narrates how he “fashioned him [Adam] and breathed into him of My [God’s] spirit” وَنَفَخْتُ فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِى (15:29). It’s a bold image. God, after shaping Adam from clay, transfers something of Himself into this new creature. Ruh is the word used here; typically translated as spirit/soul/essence of God. But consider for a moment that Ruh is actually consciousness. That God is the totality of all consciousness, that he is in fact consciousness itself, and that he installed a portion of it into the blood, flesh, and bones of our collective ancestor. In other words, what makes us sentient, self-aware beings is not our biology, but the portion of consciousness (God’s essence) that temporarily inhabits it. Our ordinary awareness is not separate from the divine but partitioned from it.

If we ponder for a moment on the Arabic roots of the many words used to define the mind/intellect/consciousness in Islamic literature, an interesting parallel emerges. For instance, ʿAql (عقل) meaning Reason/Intellect. Every word in the Arabic language has a triliteral skeleton. The triliteral lexical root of Aql is ع-ق-ل (ʿ-q-l). The core concrete meaning of this root is to tie or gather, specifically tying a camel's leg to prevent it from straying. Hence, the words of Prophet Muhammad to his outraged companion اعْقِلْهَا وَتَوَكَّلْ (first tie the camel, then entrust it to God). From this comes ʿiqāl, the rope used for this purpose, still in common colloquial use. ʿAql, reason, derives from this concept directly. Reason is restraint. It is the faculty that binds a person from his impulses, as a rope holds an animal. The irrational person is not unlit but unbound. Intellect disciplines perception, curbs excess, selects, and excludes. Without it, there is no coherence, no continuity of self; but with it, there is also a narrowing. To be rational is, quite literally, to be tied.

waʿy (وعي) meaning Awareness / Consciousness is another fascinating parallel here. Its triliteral root is و-ع-ي (w-ʿ-y), meaning to gather, to contain, or to retain in the mind. In more concrete usage, to contain or hold in a vessel. A mind, then, is not an open expanse but a kind of container. It is something that receives, shapes, and limits what it can hold. Awareness is not the total field, but the portion gathered and retained within the bounds of this inner ظرف, this vessel of self. And so the two concepts converge: ʿaql binds, waʿy contains. Together they describe a consciousness that is structured less like a window onto infinity and more like a carefully managed enclosure.

Huxley described a sense of union with all things, an awareness so vast and immediate that his individual identity became irrelevant. It was not quite an escape from reality but an unmediated confrontation with it. His interpretation was that the brain, on its own, functions as a “reducing valve,” constraining the flood of consciousness to a trickle fit for survival. But what if what Huxley felt was a momentary unification with the unbound source of consciousness? What if his psychedelic experience, like the deep transcendent states achieved by monks, mystics/gnostics, or Sufi dervishes, temporarily lifted a material restriction? Perhaps through silence, repetition, or chemical interruption, the mind’s habitual boundaries loosen, and consciousness momentarily returns to something closer to its source; a state of unity that mystics have long described as reunion with the Divine.

A related read:

Belief in God, by contrast, begins with an act of rebellion against this tyranny of the self. It is the humbling, liberating, and psychologically decisive admission that there exists something beyond me. Greater than me. Whatever else one may say about religion or faith, this simple shift of perspective carries immense therapeutic power. It rescues the mind from the exhausting project of self-worship and returns it to the wider stage of reality.

Depression Speaks in the First Person

Most forms of mental suffering speak in the first person. Depression establishes itself with a self-obsessive rumination and murmurs, I am hopeless, I am nothing, I am worthless. Anxiety frets, What will happen to me? What if? Even grief, perhaps our most noble sorrow, is not exempt. When we grieve the dead, we claim to mourn their loss, but I have come to realise what we often mourn is our own. We do not weep for their losses we weep for our own. Our loss of their presence, their care, their contribution to our story. It is our pain we hold a vigil for, not theirs.

This is not a moral judgment by the way, merely an observation. The self is the lens through which we experience everything, but when the lens becomes the subject, reality collapses into distortion. The self, obsessively observed, becomes pathological. And yet, modern life encourages precisely this. It tells us to look inward for truth, for peace, for meaning, never noticing that the more one stares at oneself, the less one seems to see.

Transcendence as the Antidote

To believe in God is to look outward and upward. Not necessarily to a Judeo-Christian bearded patriarch in the clouds, but to the ancient and indispensable idea that there is a reality larger and higher than any individual consciousness. “God” is a short word for the long standing intuition of humankind that life is not confined to our private psychology. It names the transcendent, the numinous, the principle of order and significance that renders our personal tragedies both bearable and, occasionally, beautiful.

The believer, in orienting toward a greater, transcendent reality, performs a profound psychological manoeuvre: he dethrones the self. Now, this dethronement is not a humiliation the way yielding to a tyrant is, but it is the first breath of freedom after one. It breaks the, frankly, claustrophobic loop of self-reference and restores proportion to existence. To believe in God is to step back from the mirror and see that one is not the main character of the cosmos, and that this is good news.

Carl Jung posited that the human psyche is inherently religious. Our consciousness and unconsciousness are imbued with the quest for meaning beyond the material world and beyond ourselves. Although Jung did not advocate for any specific religion or dogma, he believed that no man or woman can lead a truly adequate life relating only to the material world. We need to be in contact with a divine reality that is superior to us. He even wrote that one becomes neurotic if not in touch with that reality.

Relief From ‘I’

The atheist may object that one does not need God to feel awe or humility, and this is perfectly true. But belief gives that humility a language and a structure, a discipline, rather than a passing mood. It trains the mind to acknowledge its limits and to act as though meaning resides not solely in its own appetites. This is why belief, even stripped of superstition and dogma, remains psychologically valuable.

Viktor Frankl, who seemed to see the inside of humanity’s darkest chambers, argued that man’s chief need is not happiness but meaning and that meaning is not generated by introspection; it arrives when we locate ourselves in a story greater than our own. Belief in God, however one conceives Him, Her, or It, provides precisely that context. It says: You are not the measure of all things. You are part of something larger.

And what a relief that is.

The believer’s peace is not that everything makes sense, but that it doesn’t always have to to me. There is a higher intelligence, a greater coherence, a mystery that renders one’s personal failures less final.

Worship, in this sense, is an exercise in proportion. It is the mind reminding itself that it is not itself the summit of being. I personally find that when I pray to God; the bowing, prostrating, supplicating, silently wondering, the iron grip of my ego loosens and a window onto a vastness outside is opened. Therefore, to do this at five incremental times every single day, as the Islamic God prescribes, is a regular inescapable rehearsal of perspective. A daily correction of scale.

Without something greater than the self to serve, the self seems to swell to fill the void, and the results are everywhere: the brittle politics of identity, the performative despair, the disintegration of objective morality, the hunger for validation that networth, number of followers or degress can satisfy.

Nietzsche’s haunting declaration, “God is dead, and we have killed him”, was not a celebration of liberation, as it is so often misread, but an obituary laced with dread. He understood that in killing God, modern humanity had also dismantled the moral and psychological scaffolding that once held the self in proportion to something greater. Nietzsche did not believe in God and yet he knew the value of it. Without a vertical axis of transcendence, the self has nowhere to look but sideways and inward, where it becomes trapped in sterile self-reference. In the void left by the divine, we inflated the ego to divine proportions and called it freedom. But the death of God did not make us gods; it made us orphans; restless, self-fixated, and spiritually malnourished.

Even if one were to regard God as a noble fiction, the fiction is an indispensable one. Even as invention, God performs the essential task of keeping the self from collapsing under the weight of its own reflection. Otherwise we are condemned to orbit endlessly within our own miserable skulls. Wouldn’t you rather, for example, be governed by a person who believes that they answer to something greater than themselves, than by a person who recognises no judgement but their own, even if you’re certain the former’s God is imaginary?

Food for thought.

“I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self, and life is transformed.” — C.G Jung, in a Letter to Laurens van der Post.

References

• Beck, A.T. (1976) Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. New York: International Universities Press.

• Buddha (2007) The Dhammapada. Translated by E. Easwaran. Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press.

• Dostoevsky, F. (2004) The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. London: Vintage.

• Frankl, V.E. (1959) Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

• Hume, D. (1993) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

• Jung, C.G. (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books.

• Jung, C.G. (1973) Letters, Vol. 2: 1951–1961. Edited by G. Adler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Kierkegaard, S. (1989) The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by A. Hannay. London: Penguin Classics.

• Nietzsche, F. (1974) The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.

• Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000) ‘The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(3), pp. 504–511.

• Rowe, D. (1983) Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison. London: Routledge.

• Seligman, M.E.P. (1991) Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf.

• Solzhenitsyn, A. (1972) Nobel Lecture in Literature. Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation.

• Tillich, P. (1957) Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row.