Insults, Challenges, and Insults

On surviving an air raid and why fingers don't grow back like gecko tails.

EDITORS’ NOTE: This post marks the one year anniversary of The Living Fossils. Thank you, loyal readers, for your ongoing support.

The air raid siren sounded at about 12:30am. It was our first night in the barracks at the Israel Defense Force naval base in Eilat. Only hours earlier we had been told what to do if the alarm sounded, so the instructions were fresh in our minds. We had thirty seconds to go from our beds to the shelter, a 30-foot long reinforced concrete pipe, with thick barriers at either end, making the structure into a capital letter I. The few moments after the siren and the sprint to the shelter are a blur, but most of us made it there within a minute or so. Perhaps 35 people—mostly soldiers, but also the twelve of us volunteering with an organization called Sar-El—crowded in the tube, seated or hunched over because the pipe was only about 5 feet at the highest point.

A minute or so passed as nervous chatter filled the tube, and then the report of a sizable boom hit us, followed shortly by the thunder of military jets flying overhead. It would turn out that the explosion was a drone that got through the defenses, hitting the side of building at the dock—missing the naval ships tied up there—causing modest damage to one wall.¹

Seconds after the explosion, a young soldier—she could not have been more than 22 or 23—began screaming—“lo, lo, lo!” (no, no no)—alternately crying and hyperventilating. We would later learn that Hamas killed her cousin on October 7^th. After the all-clear was given, an ambulance came and she was taken for additional care.           

My squad at Eilat. Aqaba is in the distance on the right side.

This post is about the question of when psychological challenges are unpleasant but ultimately useful. It’s also about the questions of when and why psychological challenges become insults and when insults are so great they become trauma.

Challenges & Insults - Physical

In the prior post on insults and challenges, I argued that humans have systems designed to respond to damage. We feel pain when fire burns our hand and pull it away. Because of our evolutionary history, not only can we detect when something is damaging us, but we also have mechanisms for repair, designed to restore function. Skin heals, bones mend, lungs clear.

In addition, I suggested that humans have systems that respond to certain kinds of challenges leading to improved function. These improvements, by and large, have to do with the tradeoffs the body makes. You endure the hardship of lifting heavy weights, your body responds by building up those muscles, making you stronger (but also increasing your need for calories.) You grip barbells repeatedly, abrading the bases of your fingers, and your body responds by creating calluses, protecting those areas (but diminishing sensation.) It’s as if your body is “learning” what you do repeatedly and modifying your parts appropriately.

Insults can teach both the mind and the body. Touch a soldering iron and there are two adaptive consequences. As a physical matter, the apparatus for healing is deployed, dealing with the insult. In addition, you can use the information from sustaining the injury to make changes in the psychology department: the next time you see a soldering iron, you will exercise more caution. Getting burned, then, recruits two sorts of adaptive systems, both the physical (tissue repair) and the mental (precaution).

To return to the prior post, at the end of that discussion, I asked why some insults “lead to changing tradeoffs instead of simply damage?” The answer, I suggested, was that:

…the human body has evolved to make use of certain kinds of information about what tradeoffs are best given the present environment.

If you’re constantly gripping stuff, it makes sense to reinforce the parts that contact the tools you’re using. Yes, you lose some sensitivity, but it’s worth it for the protection. We should expect a tradeoff system of this sort to evolve in cases in which 1) the problem being solved was present sufficiently often during humans’ evolutionary history and 2) there’s no “fixed” solution to the problem and the best tradeoff depends on the details of the environment one is in.

Challenges & Insults - Psychological

How can we apply this reasoning to psychology?

Well, it’s complicated.

So, let’s retreat to my old standby, science fiction and fantasy. Let’s take two examples.

Consider HG Wells’ book, “The Time Machine,” in which there are two races, the surface-living Eloi and the cave-dwelling Morlocks. In the 1960 movie adaptation, the Morlocks have bred the Eloi to enter a trance-like state and walk into their cave when they sound an air-raid siren; the Eloi return to their regular state when another signal – the “all clear” – is sounded. [BIG SPOILER] The Morlock bred this in because they are cannibals, and use this technique to, well, sound the dinner bell.

Let’s take a second example, this time from Frank Herbert’s book, Dune.² One of the characters, Feyd-Rautha, is going to fight a duel. He wants to be sure he’ll win the duel without observers knowing that he has stacked the deck. So, through the power of science-fiction magic, the person he’s fighting has been programmed so that if he hears a certain word – “scum,” in this case – he is temporarily rendered immobile.³ At a critical moment in the fight, Feyd-Rautha whispers this word in his opponent’s ear and, well, that’s that.

These two fictional examples illustrate a non-fictional principle. Ultimately, what we see and hear is just information. The brain can be designed to respond to information in a limitless number of ways. In these stories, these brains have been manipulated, and respond to information—an air raid siren, a word—in a way that is bad for the person.

But, of course, the way that brains respond to information in the real world is because of how natural selection acted. This is why, by and large, we respond to information in adaptive ways. When you get the promotion you have been seeking, maybe you walk a little taller and order a Tesla. When they laugh at your joke, maybe you try another one.

Now, just because we respond adaptively to information doesn’t mean it’s always going to be fun. You discover your partner has been having an affair, you might respond adaptively—e.g., by terminating the relationship and eventually searching for a new mate—but you won’t be pleased about it. Both of these responses to new information make sense and illustrate that, by and large, new information might hurt but, ultimately, it’s just information. It’s not like a physical burn: no neurons were destroyed by discovering the infidelity. The sadness you feel is “built in” by evolution, designed to motivate you to take appropriate action. Along similar lines, learning information by rote or practicing skills such as playing the guitar often comes with an unpleasant feeling of effort. The end result, however, is a rearrangement of your neurons that is, ultimately, beneficial.

By and large, this is how we should expect humans to respond to new information. It won’t always be pleasant, but it should be just like responding to challenges. It should lead to adaptive changes, guiding you toward good outcomes.

I would go one step further. Our evolved psychological systems should be expected to be designed to guide us toward adaptive behavior for the range of information our ancestors would have encountered. Most of our ancestors had the unpleasant experience of learning about the death of a loved one, or hearing insults from enemies, or being accused of crimes such as witchcraft or apostasy. All of these are just information, and there is no reason they should damage the mind. They should be expected to rearrange it.

A relative died? Change your social world to build new and stronger relationships with those who survived. Insulted? Challenge the rival or build a coalition to oppose them. Accused of a crime you didn’t commit? Rally your allies to defend you. In each case, your response involved changing your priorities, your attention, your behavior, and so forth. But in each case, you’re trying to improve your situation, given the circumstances.

What, then, are we to make of information that results in loss of function?⁴

Before continuing, I want to come clean and say I don’t know. Here is one way to look at it.

When you cut the top of your finger, it heals and more or less you eventually have your whole finger back. However, if enough of the top of your finger is lopped off, it’s not like a lizard tail: you never regrow the finger all the way. The remedy for the insult has limits. Evolution didn’t lead to a system that can restore full function for all possible insults. Only those within some range.⁵

Consider, in contrast, species of gecko or iguana which have a tail designed with a weak point so that it will break when pulled by a predator, such as a raptor. Because of the history of predation—being caught by the tail—these species are designed to sacrifice their tail and then heal, regenerating the tail. The frequency of the insult and the relevant costs and benefits determine the details of the adaptations for coping.

Can this general line of reasoning be applied to psychological systems?

When we are verbally attacked, sure, it doesn’t feel great, but it’s not debilitating. Words really aren’t sticks or stones. They are information, not things. When someone insults you one way or another, you can reduce your motivation to be near that person, build other relationships, increase your motivation to harm that person, and so forth. Our ancestors no doubt faced insults and it’s not surprising many people respond to them adaptively.⁶

Given all of this, shouldn’t we expect that people will respond similarly to psychological challenges as we do to the sorts of physical challenges our ancestors faced? Let’s take the case of the soldier in my account, above. I’m not a clinician, but it seemed to me that she was suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. She herself wasn’t injured, but she had to deal with news of loss, loud noises, and all the stresses of being a soldier at war. Is it possible to think of this in the same way that we might think of injuries to the body? That we are evolved to deal, adaptively, with a certain amount of very unpleasant information, but there is a point that goes beyond that and we can’t grow the finger back?

This framework provides a way to answer the questions posed above. When does a psychological insult become more than a challenge, and turn into trauma, which here—taking liberties with the definition—I mean responding in a way that doesn’t seem adaptive.

I like the way Abigail Schrier talks about this sort of issue in Bad Therapy, though she uses the term “adversity.” She writes (her italics):

Poverty, the struggle to gain employment, the stress of working several jobs at once, of never fully understanding the society you inhabit; the unresolved longing for your home culture, mother, tongue, and family of origin—they are adversity. The pain of never fitting in at school, wearing the wrong clothes, bearing the burden of your family’s high expectations; the guilt of how much they’ve struggled so that you can live in America; that’s adversity. And none of it accumulates to produce poor long-term outcomes. (There is good reason to believe that it may even produce better outcomes for children.)

Schrier’s remarks resonate with the perspective I’ve offered here. All the challenges she names are circumstances that, more or less, our ancestors would repeatedly have had to deal with. In that sense, they are like physical challenges, allowing us to change our attention, motivations, and behavior, to deal with them adaptively. That helps to explain why they don’t result in bad outcomes over time: we have adaptations on board to use the information embedded in our challenges and respond adaptively.

Importantly, this perspective reinforces the view taken by some that shielding young people—or adults—from challenges they are equipped to deal with does them no favors. Doing so undermines adaptive responding, which sets the individual up for growth and improvement.

And this, finally, gives us a way to think about trauma. If the analogy with fingers—approximate as it might be—is right, then we should think of trauma as insults that go beyond, in kind and/or magnitude, the sorts of situations our ancestors faced, leaving us vulnerable to their effects. Maybe some things are just too big for our evolved psychology to handle, and the system can’t respond adaptively. Like losing too much finger. Maybe some things are just too different, like bombs, videos of the deaths of loved ones, or repeated posts of your ex with a new partner on social media.

By the same token, this also sheds light on what we should not consider to be trauma. Anything below this line—challenges of the type and size that our ancestors routinely faced—should not be expected to cause trauma. We should expect that people are equipped to deal with these psychological insults adaptively. We would do them a service to hold them to that expectation. (Symmetrically, in the long run we do them a disservice by coddling them.) Setting reasonably high expectations for people to deal with psychological insult doesn’t mean abandoning them, but it does mean believing in their ability to overcome it.

This idea helps to redeem the word “trauma,” which, some have argued, has been cheapened to cover nearly anything. As Freddie de Boer has pointed out, for example, claiming mental illness now carries social currency in some circles, animating his concern that “mental illness will become in time just another status marker,… a vector for competition in the great post-collegiate race.”

I share this worry, and I have others besides. First, humans come equipped, for better or worse, with empathy. People tend to want to help those in need. Claims of trauma can be used to take advantage of this impulse, generating support and aid in various forms.

Second, and potentially more importantly, claims of trauma might be a form of aggression. If it’s true, as I suggested in the post on moral grammar, that claims of harm are often moral attacks—someone has harmed me and should be punished for it—then claims that one has been traumatized are calls to mobilize the moralistic mob.

Taken together, these possibilities highlight that there might be multiple motives behind the impulse to claim trauma when one is faced with what would better be termed a “challenge,” which is often an opportunity for learning and growth. In such cases, when it seems very unlikely that someone has truly suffered a trauma, taking them at their word does them no favors. It might be best to reframe matters as a challenge, and invite them to respond adaptively, rather than plaintively.

Like all signals, as the term trauma loses its value, debased by over-use, people will stop accepting claims of trauma at face value. On this perspective, to claim that a unkind word, an idea one disagrees with, or an abundance of parental attention is trauma is, in at least some sense, an insult to those who have encountered genuine insults.

1. This was on Sunday, March 31^st, well before the subsequent large direct strike by Iran. All of the information here is public knowledge. Indeed, you can see the drone damage from the public beach in the resort town of Eilat. Nothing in this narrative discloses confidential information.

2. If you recently saw Dune II, note that this idea isn’t included in the scene in question.

3. See p. 322.

4. One tantalizing clue comes from a finding from a large study of people who had been maltreated during childhood. The risk of psychopathology was better predicted by how the person felt about their mistreatment—their subjective experience—than the objective measures of the maltreatment itself. In the words of the authors (my italics): “We found that, even for severe cases of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports. In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked to subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports were consistent with objective measures.” Danese, A., Widom, C.S. Objective and subjective experiences of child maltreatment and their relationships with psychopathology. Nat Hum Behav 4, 811–818 (2020).

5. There are always constraints and tradeoffs. It might not be possible, given the other engineering constraints on human hands, to build a hand that can do all that hands need to do and, in addition, regrow itself. Hand loss might have been sufficiently rare than there wasn’t a sufficiently great selection pressure. A more robust repair system might have come at too great a cost to other systems. There are always constraints, limitations, tradeoffs, etc.

6. Not everyone and not all the time, obviously. Some of this might be mismatch.