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As I move forward in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life out of his chapter on smiles into his chapter on laughter, I find I am using his information like a powerful laser flashlight, beaming a pinpoint of illumination back through the years of my childhood as I search my memory for genuine smiles, laughter or humor of any kind.
I find myself thinking about the important book, Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger as I realize that the absence of happiness in our abusive infant-childhoods paralleled the presence of unsafely, insecurity, unpredictability and violence. Genuine smiles and riotous laughter do not occur in the middle of trauma.
What can I learn about the development of my body-brain-mind-self if I think about myself as having been a monkey in my mother’s monkey house? Certainly my mother’s sovereign nation lacked any equality between members. There was no ‘flattened hierarchy’. My mother had all of the power, and everyone knew it. There was no true cooperation. And certainly in my case there was no affiliation. These conditions did not contribute to any sense of safety or security, and in these conditions true happiness, laughter and humor did not exist. Their absence is incredibly telling.
From my previous studies I already know that good humor is one of the powerful ‘reproductive fitness indicators’ of our species, right up there with good physical health and beauty, intelligence, good memory, and creative thought. Any species fitness indicators provide direct evidence of the state of ill- or well-being of specie’s members – like does the fitness indicator of a peacock’s tail display.
The research literature is full of information about how the greatest gifts of our species are directly tied to the greatest risks of being distorted through negative influences within a deprived, malevolent, abusive, traumatic early environment.
Reproductive fitness indicators develop in humans through an interactive process of genetics being influenced by conditions within the environment during development. They end up communicating information not only about any single member of a species, but more importantly they communicate information about the condition of the environment that influenced any individual’s development.
The presence or absence of genuine D smiles and laughter is no exception. The lack of safety and security in my childhood was represented by the opposite of joy. My mother’s dysregulated emotions, especially her hatred and rage toward me created suffering, terror, sorrow, despair and alienation within our home. She kept complete power and controlled her family’s environment through terror, threat of violence and violence. Ours was NOT a healthy, happy monkey house.
And of course, because I was my mother’s singled out abuse target, the impact of deprivation and trauma had its most powerful effects on me during my development. My resulting difficulties with happiness are directly tied to having had my mother’s sickness built right into my own body-brain from birth as signals of the lack of well-being and fitness within the environment that formed me. My mother did not give me any “all-purpose signal of cooperative intent.” I received from her the opposite.
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Keltner describes how the smile originated back in the early history of our evolution. A comparison of human patterns with primates’ shows that
“…in more hierarchical macaques, such as the rhesus macaque, there is a narrow use of the silent bared-teeth and relaxed open-mouth display. The silent bared-teeth display – the predecessor to our smile – is used only as an appeasement display. In these status-conscious monkeys, the smile is intertwined with anxiety and defense.
“There are more egalitarian macaque species, however, such as the Tonkean macaque. In these macaques, hierarchies are flatter and power is equally distributed. This social condition more closely resembles the hierarchies observed in our hominid predecessors and contemporary hunter-gathers – power differences are reduced, and equality is more pronounced. In egalitarian primates, food sharing is pervasive, alliances among subordinates are common, and social life consists more of negotiation than assertion of force…. In less stratified macaques, monkeys put the silent bared-teeth display to many new uses: to reassure, to affiliate, and to reconcile, as well as to appease. This is a standard evolutionary principle – that adaptations such as the silent bared-teeth display are put to new uses in a broader array of contexts to respond adaptively to shifting selection pressures. With the rise of primate equality, the silent bared-teeth display became freed from its one-to-one mapping to fear and submissiveness, and extended into new social contexts that promote affectionate cooperation and affiliation. This display became a sign of friendly intent, and the trigger of behavioral processes that allow for close proximity and cooperation – grooming, embraces, hand clasping, and the like. In egalitarian primates, the silent bared-teeth display folded into affiliative, pleasurable exchange.
“The physical signature of human happiness is the D smile. The D smile did not originate in contexts that we today think are fast tracks to happiness…In fact,,.hunter-gatherer hierarchies…systematically downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity.
“In our primate evolution, the D smile was the first vocabulary of friendly intent and affection, in particular between near-equals….the roots of human happiness are found in those moments when individuals moved toward one another toward cooperative and intimate ends. Our ultrascoiality required this, as well as an all-purpose signal of cooperative intent, one that is highly visible and unambiguous, and one that could preempt conflict and spread cooperative relations potently and quickly, faster than a stranger could cock his arm and throw the first punch.” (pages 120-122)
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From here – you guessed it – Keltner continues forward in his next chapter to the topic of laughter. My personal experiences with forbidden laughter were anything but funny.
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I have no memory of my mother ever telling a joke. I have no memory of my father ever telling one, either. I asked my sister and she can’t remember either of our parents ever telling a joke.
I do remember watching the Beverly Hillbillies on TV while we lived in the Government Hill apartments the year I was in 4th grade. I made the mistake of actually considering something on the show funny, and I actually laughed out loud.
My mother jumped all over me verbally, berating me for my gullibility and stupidity in thinking anything about the show was funny. I was stupid, just as the show was stupid. She told me nobody was supposed to think it was funny, or to laugh at it. Was I so stupid that I didn’t know that they used ‘canned laughter’ – totally fake audible laughter – as a part of the show?
She made it sound like my inability to detect the stupidity of the show and the fakeness of the canned laughter meant I had failed some important and significant test that ANYBODY else would have passed. I had to be the dumbest, stupidest person in the whole WORLD!
I’ve have never forgotten this experience. It too was added on a more minor line of my mother’s abuse litany than were my major crimes, as proof of how gullible I was. It was part of the proof that I was a chameleon, had no mind of my own, and would follow anyone to do anything, even over a cliff if they told me to. It proved I could not think on my own for myself (well, that was pretty much true – she never allowed me to think).
How sad it was not to be able to even laugh safely. I never laughed out loud in front of her again. I had to watch myself to be sure I didn’t, monitor my reactions even to humor, make sure no sign of it accidentally slipped out or gave me away. In essence, I knew it was simply bad and unacceptable for me to ever think anything was ever funny.
In fact, by the time I was in 8th grade my mother very creatively forced me to watch black and white film footage on TV of the WWII bombing of Poland as she informed me that I should have been there because that is what I deserved to happen to me – brutal annihilation.
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Keltner describes the evolutionary origins of human laughter as this ability followed a different trajectory from primates’ beginning four million years ago. Smiles and laughter evolved as signals of communication long, long before humans achieved our verbal abilities.
“Most striking is how human laugher differs from that of our primate relatives – gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. In the most rudimentary sense, the laughter of the great apes resembles our own. Their relaxed open-mouth displays and panting vocalizations look and sound quite familiar. They emit these displays in similar contexts as we do – when being tickled and during rough-and-tumble play. As with humans, chimps and apes are most likely to show open-mouthed play faces in developmental periods (adolescence) and times of day (leading up to feeding) where play can defuse conflict. Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns that that of humans. As a result, it is emitted as short, repetitive, single-breath pants, and has little acoustic variety.
“Human laughter, by contrast, is stunning in its diversity and complexity. It is a language unto its own.” (pages 124-125)
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The presence, absence and quality of laughter both influences the physiological state of the human body and is an expression of the state of the body. Safe and secure early infant attachment to caregivers includes smiles and laughter. Unsafe and insecure early infant attachments do not communicate safety and security through the presence of these signals. These degrees of variation in interaction with the environment are built right into an infant-child’s developing body-brain, including the regulation of the nervous system.
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Keltner states about the physiology of laughter:
“And perhaps most subtly, laughter is intertwined with our breathing…. With the exception of certain pathological laughs…almost all laughter occurs as people exhale. This simple laughter fact may seem incidental to our understanding of laughter, but in fact it is fundamental. Here’s why.
“Respiration and heart rate are two of the body’s most essential rhythms. These two rhythms play off each other like the voices of singers in an a cappella group. When you breath in, your heart rate rises. When you breathe out, your heart rate drops, as does your blood pressure, and you move toward a state of relaxation.
“This lung-heart dynamic has made its way into….the thousand-year-old breathing exercises of yoga practices. Exhalation reduces fight/flight physiology, especially heart rate, calming the body down.” (page 128)
Studies of the acoustical qualities of laughter show that different kinds of laughs correspond to different brain region patterns just as varying smiles do. The sound and pattern of laughter is affected by degrees of intimacy and is different among groups of friends than it is between groups of strangers. Studies have shown that women laugh more than men do, and that men “are much more likely to snort and grunt than women.” (page 130)
Keltner presents more information about laughter:
“…voiced laughs, which have tone to them and involve vibrations of the vocal folds (chords), and unvoiced laughs, which do not. Voiced laughs sound like songs, rising and falling as they move through space. Other people perceive these laughs as invitations to friendship and camaraderie. Unvoiced laughs – hisses, snorts, grunts – are not perceived as such. Much as the language of smiles is divided into Duchene [D] and non-Duchene [non D] smiles, there are voiced laughs of pleasure and unvoiced laughs not involving pleasure…. Both are vital to the social contract.” (pages 130-131)
“Here is a remarkable discovery: Laughs occupy a part of acoustic space that is different from vowel sounds like “ahhh” and “eee.” We may describe laughs in the written word as “ha, ha, ha” or “hee, hee, hee,” but in fact the acoustic structure of laughter is distinct from that of the vowels we use to represent this mysterious category of behavior. Certain regions of the human vocal apparatus produce the vowels and consonants that make up human speech, in which so much of human social life transpires. But there is another register of the human vocal apparatus, another form of output – laughter – with different origins and functions than human speech.” (page 131)
“When people laugh, subcortical, limbic regions of the brain and brain stem – most notably a region known as the pons, which is involved in sleep and breathing – are activated. These regions are much older evolutionarily than the cortical regions involved in language, suggesting that the deeper meaning of laughter is intertwined with breathing.” (page 132.
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From my point of view, learning here that laughter is connected in our body-brain to our most basic fundamental experiences like breathing and sleep is amazing, though not surprising. When I write about how interactive early infant-caregiver interactions influence the growth, development and formation of who we are in the world for the rest of our lives, it is on these fundamental levels that we are helped or harmed in our ability to experience life from a state of either well- or ill-being.
Although infants can obviously cry from the instant they are born just as they can breath, their capacity for smiles and for laughter very soon follows. If an infant is born into an environment of neglect, abuse, maltreatment and trauma, even its first experiences of sending signals out into its caregiving environment and receiving them back will be influenced in development. In cases such as mine was, my environment never improved. The trajectories of all of my abilities were changed during my development, not the least of which is my ability to be happy, to express happiness, and to understand other people’s experience and expression of happiness.
My infant-childhood experiences with ‘joy’ happened in dissociated patterns according to my mother’s orchestration of my life. As a result there is little natural ebb and flow or unconstrained ability to participate with others in states of safe and secure joy. Anxiety was tied in my body to every experience I ever had as an infant-child as I developed, as was dissociation. It is a rare, rare moment when I can even now experience pure joy. My sense of derealization and depersonalization mostly requires that a distance between me and others has to first be bridged.
Because expressions of happiness, including spontaneous laughter, are designed to happen instantaneously and automatically as forms of nonverbal communication, they happen in extremely fast-action displays. I did not get the same circuitry build into my body-nervous system-brain that most other people did so that I operate much more slowly in all social interactions. It helps me to know that there are reasons for how and why I experience social interactions differently than most people do, including the funny, happy ones.
When I talk about the tragedy of life long changes that happen during early developmental stages of abused, traumatized and maltreated infant-children, it is on these profoundly fundamental most basic levels of the human experience that we must accept that these changes take place. These changes often rob a survivor of the experience of being something other than completely alone in an unsafe and insecure world.
Laughter as the form of emotional regulation and social interaction that it is, is missing in most severely abusive families. These deprivation conditions are built into our social-emotional brain, into our entire nervous system and body. At the same time that the signs of happiness, social connectedness and well-being are visible, attempting to access this information with our changed body-brain-self can take an invisible super-Herculean effort.
Those of us who were so seriously deprived and maltreated as infant-children require patience and compassion for ourselves and from others in our efforts to find ways to heal these near mortal wounds that were inflicted on our being and built into our body-brain from the time we were tiny. This isn’t a job for cowards. It is a job for those of us who are willing to fight to our death for what should have been our birthright – the right to experience the fullness of joy within ourselves and with other members of our species.
It helps me to begin to understand how deeply and profoundly the absence of joy influenced my body-brain development right along with the presence of severe violence and abuse. While I can take an umbrella out to keep the rain off of my head I cannot stop it from raining. I will never have the opportunity to return to a happy infant-childhood so I can take a different pathway that would allow joy-filled wiring to be built into me from the start. I have to be realistic as I work with who and how I am as a consequence of what was done to me throughout my formative stages.
It helps me to learn more about why improved well-being, including the experience of happiness, takes effort for me that most non-early abused and traumatized people might never be able to understand. They benefited from advantages in an advantaged early environment that most of these people take for granted because it is all built right into them. It is as if they climbed Mt. Everest by being dropped off near the top. Severe early trauma survivors have to make the struggle from sea level on up.
But facts are facts and we best get on with our climbing, even if that means that the last person to the top had to work hardest to get there.
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Stop the Storm 
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