Our feelings are a link between the conscious and unconscious content of our mind/brain — they have a representational structure.
from McGovern, K. (2022, January 5). General Psychological “Operating Characteristics.” Cognition and Emotion, Wright Institute.
Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.
No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don’t need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers — but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.
Many traumatized people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them. Some find comfort in groups where they can replay their combat experiences, rape, or torture with others who have similar backgrounds or experiences.
Focusing on a shared history of trauma and victimization alleviates their searing sense of isolation, but usually at the price of having to deny their individual differences: Members can belong only if they conform to the common code.
Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually leads to further isolation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others.
from van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question…
from James, W. (1902, 1982). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Penguin.
Krippner (1972) identified 19 states of consciousness in addition to the everyday, waking state:
– the dreaming state
– the sleeping state
– the hypnogogic state
– the hypnopompic state
– the hyperalert state
– the lethargic state
– states of rapture
– states of hysteria
– states of fragmentation
– regressive states
– meditative states
– trance states
– reverie
– the daydreaming state
– internal scanning
– stupor
– coma
– stored memory
– expanded conscious states (e.g., peak experience, satori (bliss), cosmic consciousness, union, mystical consciousness)
What other alternative states might we add?
– absorbed states
– epileptic aura and absence
– “locked in” states
– minimally conscious state
from McGovern, K. (2022, January 12). Perception, Attention, and Consciousness. Cognition and Emotion – Winter 2022, Wright Institute.
Krippner, S., Hickman, J., Auerhahn, N., & Harris, R. (1972). Clairvoyant perception of target material in three states of consciousness. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 35(2), 439–446.
Matthew M. Sholler, Psy.D. 
