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The absence of goodness and of prosocial interactions (like teasing) in my childhood home of origin impacted me equally with the presence of my mother’s abusive badness.  The presence of abuse in infant-childhood tragically turns a little one’s entire universe upside-down, backwards and inside-out from safe, secure and normal.  The more I study about the good side of being human, the more I realize that it isn’t just the presence of abuse that is so damaging.  The absence of goodness astronomically multiplies the impact that the presence of badness has on developing offspring.

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I return again today to the chapter on teasing in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book’s (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).  Non-child abuse survivors can probably read Keltner’s information on teasing without having to first think about verbal abuse.  Infant-child abuse survivors, however, can easily bring memories of verbal attacks into their thinking about teasing.

Keltner’s writings about smiling and laughter didn’t present me with the same challenge as the one I face when he moved on to teasing.  Smiles and laughter are by nature not verbal, although they very often happen within the varied verbal arenas people participate in with one another.  Teasing, from the human perspective, often involves the use of words.  Infant-childhood verbal abuse survivors can well remember how words can slice, dice and shred the innocent into greatly wounded tiny pieces.

Because verbal abuse is so harmful to the developing infant-child, it can make it even more important for survivors to follow Keltner’s descriptions about what teasing is, and what teasing is not.  He begins his chapter on teasing by presenting us with the image of the famous peacock’s tail.  This tail is often referred to scientifically in terms of how it is a ‘reproductive fitness indicator’ because it is a high cost item for the peacock to present.  The healthier the tail, the more resplendent its appearance, the healthier the peacock is – which simply means that this bird has had enough resources available to it within its environment to produce a tail that is closest to the ‘best possible tail’.

If the peacock’s tail is shabby and forlorn, however, that tail indicates that there were not enough resources in the environment for this peacock to create a ‘best possible tail’.  The shabby-tailed peacock could not afford to make a better one.  Allusions to the quality of the peacock tail’s display are often transferred to considerations of ‘mental illnesses’ as those genes exist toward the gifted end of the human continuum of abilities.  The more creative, say, or talented a person is, the more likely they are to be at higher risk for developing negative complications if their earliest environment was malevolent rather than benign.  The continued presence of human giftedness and ‘mental illness’ is thought to relate to ‘reproductive fitness indicators’ because of the high cost that giftedness carries with it to ‘end up right’.

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Although perhaps they might not seem as dramatic as a peacock’s tail in terms of being obvious and visible reproductive fitness indicators, the presence or absence, as well as the quality of humor and happiness ‘displays’ such as genuine smiles, laughter and teasing do reflect to other people both our individual fitness and the fitness of the early environment that builds the circuits and pathways into the brain that allow humor displays to happen in the first place.

Unlike physical prowess or musical and artistic giftedness, the presence of humor-related abilities is directly tied to our prosocial brain.  Ongoing early unsafe and insecure attachment experiences deplete our human prosocial brain abilities.  The continued absence of humor – call it happiness – directly signals humans that unfortunate early circumstances deprived the brain of its ability to establish all the prosocial (safe and secure attachment) regions and circuits a brain needs to process happiness information on both the personal and the social level.

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Keltner tells his reader at the beginning of his chapter on teasing that no matter how well-built and flourishing a peacock’s tail might be, there is another aspect to the tail that is not so often mentioned.  When a male peacock meets a potential mate, the first thing he does is turn his tail’s display away from the female.  This is the teasing interaction in a most basic and simple form.

The male is testing the female’s interest and intention.  If she turns and walks away, obviously no matter how resplendent the male’s tail is, the female is not impressed.  If, however, the female pursues a ‘relationship’ with the male, she will move around toward the head of the peacock and a ‘relationship’ can continue.  As Keltner notes, if the female shows no further interest once the male has teased her by turning away, “he has acquired critical information about her lack of commitment.  He can factor this information into his decision about whom to mate with and whom not.”  (pages 146-147)

Of course humans are far more complicated than peacocks are, yet we also use a wide array of nonverbal signals as cues in our communications with others.  Most simply put, no matter what our original genetic makeup might have been, the conditions of attachment in our earliest body-brain developmental stages moderate and modulate our abilities to both send and receive our species’ signaling cues.  Teasing is one of these cues.

Prosocial actions happen to signal cooperation in an environment of plenty.  Antisocial actions signal competition in an environment of scarcity.  Unsocial actions communicate an absence of social interactional abilities that are most closely tied to an early environment of nothing at all – or isolation.

Keltner states about teasing:

“The importance of provocation and teasing in our social evolution is suggested by how pervasive teasing is in the animal world….  Sexual insults are as reliable an occurrence in human social life as food sharing, greeting gestures, patterns of comfort, flirtation, and the expression of gratitude.”  (page 147)

“The perils of teasing are patently clear.  “Just teasing” is invoked as a last defense by the grammar-school bully and the incorrigible sexual malfeasant at work.  But what they are referring to with the claim “I was just teasing” upon closer inspection is not teasing at all but aggression and coercion, pure and simple.  Bullies steal, punch, kick, spit on, torment, and humiliate.  They don’t really tease.  Sexual predators grope, leer, and made crude, at times threatening, passes.  They’re pretty ineffectual flirts.  In contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke others.  We turn to the playful provocation of teasing to negotiate the ambiguities of social living – establishing hierarchies, testing commitments to social norms, uncovering potential romantic interest, negotiating conflicts over work and resources.”  (page 148)

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As I’ve already described about genuine smiles and laughter, both scarce and nearly missing entirely from my childhood home, so also was teasing missing along with any other safe and secure display of playful behavior.  What was present was my mother’s unremitting bullying actions toward me, and her near complete malevolent control over everyone else in her household.

There was no joking or kidding around in my mother’s monkey house.  We all lived under her malevolent reign of terror.  We were not ‘vaccinated’ as Keltner describes.  We were poisoned.  Our home was not a practice ground for developing prosocial human interactional abilities.  Our home was a practice ground for one thing:  how to survive a childhood with my mother.

Keltner delineates the social nature of teasing:

“The consensus was [in the scientific world] that teasing is “playful aggression.”  Clearly, though, teasing does not equate to all kinds of playful aggression.  Unintended playful aggression – accidentally elbowing a fellow train passenger’s nose while you’re hustling money with your imitation of Harp Marx – is clearly not teasing (at least I hope you don’t think so).  More general references to play are ambiguous.  Many forms of childhood play, such as role playing (children acting as princesses or ninja warriors), roughhousing, highly structured playground games like tag or four square, and the ritualized jokes and conversational games that fill the air of school buses – are not teasing.  The same is true of many forms of adult play:  We tell amusing stories, exchange playful repartee, and josh around in ways that are not teasing.

“…[M]y colleagues…and I defined a tease as an intentional provocation accompanied by playful off-record markers.  We referred to provocation instead of aggression because a tease involves an act that is intended to provoke emotion, to discern another’s commitments.  The provocation is evident in the content of the verbal utterance or some physical act, like a poke in the ribs, the proverbial pinch of the cheek, or a tongue protrusion.  The tease, in a funny way (and I’m not teasing), is like a social vaccine.  Vaccines are weak forms of pathogens (for example, small pox) that, when injected, stimulates the recipient’s immune system – the inflammation response, killer T cells that recognize the dangerous pathogen, bind to it and kill it.  The tease seeks to stimulate the recipient’s emotional system, to reveal the individual’s social commitments.

“The more mysterious element is what is unsaid in the tease.  This family of linguistic acts we called off-record markers.  These are the nonverbal actions that swirl around the hostile provocation and signal that it is not to be taken literally but instead in the spirit of play.”  (pages 150-151)

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I found it fascinating that what Keltner writes about next in his chapter on teasing is directly connected to expert assessments of adult attachment.  Keltner uses the same Grice’s Maxims as rules for sincere communication that adult attachment researchers use to measure safe and secure versus unsafe and insecure attachment patterns.  Keltner presents the four simple rules governing the ability to converse coherently as follows:

“Sincere communication, according to Grice, involves utterances that are to be taken literally.  These statements should adhere as closely as possible to four maxims….  Statements should follow the rule of quantity – avoid the Strunk and White catastrophes of being too wordy or opaquely succinct.  Statements should be relevant and on topic and avoid meandering into digressions, irrelevances, or stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy.  Finally, in honoring the rule of manner, statements should be direct, clear, and to the point….”  (page 151)

Adult attachment researchers have discovered that disintegration in the ability to follow these simple four rules of sincere (coherent) communication is a direct sign of insecure adult attachment.  The more the rules are broken, the more unable an adult is to tell their life story in accordance with these rules, the more certain it is that early relational trauma was present during the adult’s early body-brain developmental stages.  The lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is the number one signal that an adult insecure attachment ‘disorder’ exists.

Keltner is not making this connection in his writings, but from my point of view, if a person cannot follow these rules in the telling of their life story, and therefore have an insecure attachment pattern built into their body-brain, they will not be able TO BREAK THESE RULES APPROPRIATELY in order to participate in appropriate teasing interactions.  The presence, absence and quality of appropriate teasing abilities might well be a very simple way to assess how pro-socially a person’s body-brain was built from the start of their life.  (I, for example, am extremely unskilled and uncomfortable in the teasing arena!)

How can we intentionally break rules that we do not inherently understand in the first place?  The more I examine what Keltner says about teasing, the more I think about the connection between having a discomfort with teasing that parallels a discomfort with ambiguity in general.  A Borderline Personality Disorder brain does not seem to be able to process ambiguous information in anything like an ordinary way.  It seems very probable to me that insecure attachment, lack of the ability to tell one’s life story according to Grices’ Maxims, the inability to regulate emotion, the inability to tolerate ambiguity and the inability to participate in the teasing arena are ALL related disabilities within the Borderline condition, disabilities that are anchored within the Borderline body-nervous system-brain-mind-self.  I know they were for my mother.

One cannot use what one does not possess.  Nor can one give away what they don’t have in the first place.  My mother’s disabilities created the environment within our childhood home that, in turn, robbed my mother’s children (especially me) of being able to obtain healthy prosocial interaction abilities, either. Thus the consequences of unresolved trauma, including insecure attachments to self and others, are built into the body-brain of offspring and tumble down the generations.

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Keltner continues in his explanation of how genuine insincerity is intentionally communicated through teasing:

“When we intentionally violate Grice’s maxims, we signal that alternative interpretations of the utterance are possible.  We say “this” with our words, and “not this” with violations of Grice’s maxims, pointing to other possible meanings of our utterance.  We signal “not this” by resorting to obvious falsehoods or exaggerations of the truth (which violate the rule of quantity).  We can provide too much information, for example in systematic repetition, or too little information, thus violating the rule of quantity.  We can dwell in the irrelevant to violate the rule of relation.  And we can resort to various linguistic acts – idiomatic expressions, metaphors, oblique references – that violate the rule of manner and its requirements of clarity and directness.

“As important as sincere speech is to our social life, so too is this realm of nonliteral communication.  Our brief utterances can take on the opposite meaning of what the words denote (irony, satire).  We can connect disparate concepts in communicative acts that leap beyond narrow literal denotation (metaphor).  We can endow our utterances with multiple layers of unbounded, aesthetically pleasing meaning (poetry).  (page 152)

Keltner’s words make me think about my suspicions that part of what was wrong with my mother’s brain was related to her not having transitioned successfully out of her childhood stage of magical thinking.  That stage is when a child learns  about what is real and what is not, about multiple and varying ways that other people have of experiencing the world, and about negotiating a developing self comfortably and cooperatively in an ever expanding shared social world.  That is what forming an appropriate Theory of Mind is all about, and my mother didn’t get one.

My mother never learned how to negotiate conflict.

I can easily stretch my thinking about what Keltner is saying about the rules of sincere coherent communication and how we break those rules in certain ways for certain reasons to also include what Keltner says next about polite speech as I think about my mother.  Verbal abuse, any verbal abuse, is NOT teasing and it is NOT polite speech.  Never once in the 18 years of my childhood, did my mother treat me politely!  Child abuse is inconsiderate and rude!

Sure, she knew how to practice polite speech as a part of her public persona, but within the confines of her own domain, politeness was not remotely her concern.  As I already described in my post on Keltner’s description of embarrassment, my mother’s lack of this ability was evidently tied back in its roots into her problems with Grice’s maxims related not only to teasing, but also to polite speech.

Keltner writes.

“The relevance of Grice’s maxims to teasing, ironically enough, is revealed in linguists Brown and Levinson’s 1987 classic, Politeness.  Brown and Levinson carefully document how in the world’s languages speakers add a layer of politeness to their utterances when what they say risks embarrassing the listener or themselves.  Politeness is achieved through systematic violations of Grice’s four maxims.

“Consider the simple act of making a request.  If someone asks you for the time, or directions, or to pass the rutabagas, or not to talk so loudly during the previews, that act is fraught with potential conflict.  The recipient of the request is imposed upon and risks being revealed as incompetent, boorish, or disinterested in social conventions.  The requester risks being perceived as intrusive and impolite.  To soften the impact of requests and other potentially impolite acts such as recommendations, or criticism, people violate Grice’s maxims to communicate in more polite fashion….  We break the rules of sincere communication to be polite.  Equipped with this analysis of nonliteral communication, a careful examination of the tease reveals that teasing and politeness are surprisingly close relatives.”  (pages 152-153)

It is not surprising, then, to find that the lack of teasing and the lack of politeness in my mother are connected.  I suspect these abilities to also be distorted or missing in all severely abusive parents.  (I am not talking about the hundreds of ‘social rules’ my Boston-raised mother enforced such as putting our knife down and switching hands every time we cut a piece of meat on our plate, keeping our elbows off of the dinner table, or brushing our hair before we ever showed up at the table in the first place.)

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I have only made it half way through Keltner’s teasing chapter here today.  There is certainly enough information here to provoke some insightful thought about ourselves, those we know, and about the conditions in our childhood home – especially if abuse was present.

I feel like a social anthropologist, carefully brushing away tidbits of clay to reveal patterns in my mother’s antisocial interactions that I’ve never specifically thought about before now.  A human being might be more than the sum of their parts, but taking this close a look at some of the parts my mother was missing helps me to more clearly see more of the whole picture of who she was – in large measure according to what she was missing – a prosocial brain with its matching abilities.

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