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One theme of recent posts has been around expressing desire, and personal agency. Today i want to explore the human mind's tendency to react as opposed to proact or enact.

I confess that this is inspired by a pair of emails i received in response to one of my initiatives. My story is that these emails both contained an element of protest, but this would be an unjust over-simplification, and there is much else to explore by looking closer at the matter.

First of all, this brings back a memory i have from my second decade of life when a friend shared that the word responsibly is a literal joining of the words response and ability. The ability to respond. When life gives you soggy bread you make bread and butter pudding. I forget the metaphor exactly.

So, this speaks to this idea, that a) responding or reacting is a valid part of our capacity for living this life, and that b) the capacity i have to react with skill and integrity matters. For that latter piece the project has thematically been practicing feedback and difficult conversations. Those are about HOW we can still make a tasty omelette from a bunch of cracked eggs that fell on the floor. That seems well covered and we don't need to say much more here.

My focus here seems like it wants to be on the actual presence of a reaction, apparently, in place of, or in the vacuum of proaction. If i am tapping into my desire and my agency, then the result, logically ought to be proaction. Might i bounce off someone else's desire to shape my own? Sure. But lets park that thread for a second to see what react is trying to say.

The nature of protest

I will start by naming my assumptions, that negative responses to others proaction have the following characteristics:

- an element of challenge

- the presence of implicit disagreement or criticism

- rhetorical questions, unowned frustration

- sympathetic / posture archetypes

- soft dissent ie dressed up in diplomatic language

Implicit criticism has as its subtext: this initiative/decision/proposal doesn't make sense. The human mind seems to have a inexhaustible number of ways of disguising the expression of what we don't want:

"Isn't that..."

"I feel that it..."

"I don't understand why..."

"This is confusing to me"

"I wonder if it can not become..."

Reactions on reactions

Before i get too deep into my grizzle about this, i confess that my first reaction to receiving these reactions was to react myself, by hastily crafting email replies that defended or justified my reasoning. Despite me knowing well enough, that there are more useful ways to engage protest. So my own reaction here is as much a teacher as the initial reactions. Why does the mind react this way? Why cant we all just say what we want?

My reactive first drafts ultimately benefited from a couple of tempering edits, but nothing approaching a truly skillful response.

Part of my reaction is a nervous system conflation of protest as disagreement and protest as criticism. There is a difference in intent verse reception. The protester may simply disagree, but my sensitivity to criticism mis-infers and hears criticism. That's a bigger topic for another day.

In my defence nowhere in either email appeared "thanks for attending to this. No one else including me thought to." That tells me that my bs detector is working just fine.

Why humans react Instead of enact

The mind appears, to my crude understanding, to be a machine that first associates ideas, and then uses that pre-training to estimate the most probable outcome for any given situation it encounters. Our inter-neuron connections link one idea to another idea and fire either strongly or weakly. This is a probabilistic prediction or inference engine. Worryingly, that seems to make us reactive by design.

In contrast, proaction hints at invention, as inspiration. However the physiological capacity of the brain to actually invent seems very very limited. There are some early theories involving random synaptic firing, but i get the sense that the minds primary capacity to give birth to truly novel things, is something like being hit by a random particle of cosmic radiation and flipping some stored byte of information. Of course its 50/50 as to whether this produces a useful mutation or not, but some of the time this brings something new and useful into existence.

All other new ideas are just new combinations of old ideas. Its a process called emergence. If you heard the term this is what it means, the more people involved the more 'new' ideas there will be.

If our neuroception and cognition evolved primarily to detect threat based on previously encountered threats, then our prediction machine is at its core a reaction or response generator.

That the mind is primarily reactive also makes sense from a metabolic point of view. It would take so much more brain horsepower to try to precompute every possible scenario and proact in service of each one, compared to just wait til there is a problem then deal with it. Bouncing off the initiative of others and simply adding my 2c.

Now if this is all the case, that we are biologically predisposed to react, and then we go ahead and add some nervous system retuning in the form of say a legacy narrative where i was told that my needs don't matter, then we have a brain that reacts plus a psychology that protests. The combination being this murky form of criticism. Implicit or explicit. Attempted to be sanitised or just spat out.

A more transparent kind of reaction

Of course we could react more transparently by simply saying

"I disagree with this". But that risks being wrong, or having to defend more visibly my position. And knowing what i actually want. It also hints at a more confrontational interaction. Perhaps it is the desire to dial down perceived aggression, or a fear of conflict, that wraps our protest in softer, ahem, more diplomatic sounding language.

And that it is the sympathetic posturer archetype that is typically our protester, of course it makes all the sense in the world. Protest is their language, unlike a dorsal collapser that protests using silence. They are both protests.

I want to say that transparency is less confusing to the nervous system. Because any disagreement is clearly present in the tone if not the words. And the tone v word mismatch is unsettling.

There is also something about indirect protest that seems to particularly promote a defensive counter response. The confusion about the substance of the reaction is that it is a challenge that looks like a question. So the counter response is to clarify the question, and not address the underlying implicit disagreement.

Scope to alter course

Even people who value relational awareness can protest, respond defensively, and react before reflecting. Slowing down might well be called for, but reaction is fast and subconscious. This all seems like a hardware limitation, that we probably only can shift slowly through practice, at a rate that is dictated by biological and evolutionary forces. When all else fails we get to lean on our repair practices.

I want to briefly look at more productive ways to respond to protest.

First our practice asks us to go down the feelings stack aka pyramid. To excavate more vulnerable emotion. Second our practice asks us to remember 5:1 ratio, to reflect, and acknowledge their input. To find something to appreciate. These things are all easier on email because we get to edit.

But there's a fuller more complete path. If i do all of that, but still go on to still justify, explain and defend, i have missed an opportunity to get better are responding to protest. Instead of protesting the protest, to start to break the cycle.

In this case, simple might just be best: "Thanks for your thoughts." Then express my desire. Or a more vulnerable course might be: "I notice something in this email that finds me wobble. I am noticing a desire to also hear something about my value in trying to... I would love to hear that i am someone who is being proactive in this matter. Right now it feels like i could really use a moment of reassurance."

Anyway, the beauty is that the two emails i received have offered me a chance to practice. And my incremental improvements, were that i got to edit some 5:1 into my responses. And even though i wasn't able to avoid my counter protest, i did manage to both slow down, and to express desire. Both are key, and something to be celebrated.

A nervous system angle

It also occurs to me that the incoming reactions being bereft of co-regulation, left me in a very familiar position of being overly attuned to or occupied with my self-regulation. My learned response is to not seek co-regulation but to reflexively look to self regulation. I hadn't really considered this way of looking at it until now.

My explain-y counter responses in this light can been reframed as me trying to regulate. Should the world in that moment not be telling me that "I'm safe, I belong, my initiative and desires matter" then i have to do it myself. Ok its maladaptive, but it is adaptive nonetheless, and at the nervous system level, makes coherent sense, and is also is worth celebrating.

Of course in that frame i can now also celebrate the incoming protests in the exact same light. The other parties nervous systems read or misread some threat to their regulation, and their protest was an attempt to sooth and self-regulate and restore their own balance.

Recently on a podcast interview with a therapist i had not encountered before, they used this phrase "That's why DIY is such a huge industry today". Big box hardware stores side, the implication is that attachment wounds tend to make a person more self contained, and less likely to seek help.

So to give effect to that, i can share my desire for some co-regulation here. I would love a moment of acknowledgement that initiative comes at a cost to me, aka the risk of criticism. And given that criticism is a personal sensitivity, any act of initiative is an act of courage.

I can also share my desire for protest to be balanced with initiative. For us as a culture leaning into initiative and away from protest.

Well, that's it for today. It seems like not my most coherent piece of writing, but perhaps, god willing, in time i or you or we might make some better sense of this matter of reaction verses proaction.

Mean time i think we can give ourselves a break for being somewhat reactive.