1. Pain and Pleasure
For purposes of this article, we focus on building blocks of human psychology — pain and pleasure. This is what motivates change in our culture and evolution of our species.
Pain can only occur when there is a deprivation of one or more of the needs Abraham Maslow identified in his motivational Theory of the Hierarchy of Needs.
For example, if someone batters you, the security of body is violated. Similarly, health issues can cause a deprivation of security of the body. If someone speaks poorly of you, this can be a violation of the need for regard. Pleasure results when any of Maslow’s needs are fulfilled.
2. Fear
Pain tends to be transitory and benign. Once it stops, it is over. Fear replaces pain once the pain is gone. Fear acts as a deterrent from engaging in the behavior which one believes led to the pain in the first place so that it does not reoccur. Fear feels the same whether it is reasonable or unreasonable.
3. Reasonable Fear
Reasonable fear means the underlying message about the cause of the fear is accurate. For example, if you touch a hot burner and experience pain, a normal person would conclude that the burner caused the pain and so be afraid of it.
Reasonable fears cannot be extinguished. Each person determines for themselves what is reasonable and what is not based on their experience.
4. Unreasonable Fear
Sometimes the interpretation of the pain or the message associated with a particular trigger turns out to be unreasonable. That means the message is incorrect in describing the cause.
Believing that homosexuality causes the deprivation of an inherent need is an unreasonable fear as human needs do not inherently conflict with each other. For example, a gay youth who is bullied may come to believe that he was bullied because he is gay. In fact, he was bullied because of the prejudice and fear of others. There is nothing about homosexuality that necessarily cause pain.
Unreasonable fears can be extinguished.
5. Defense Mechanisms
Once a fear is established, the human mind deploys defense mechanisms to avoid those things that trigger the fear.
Examples of defense mechanisms are:
- Obsessive compulsive behavior
- denial
- procrastination
- depression and anxiety
- and a whole lot more
They are designed to avoid confronting the fear because in our evolution fear protects us from further harm. Defense mechanism tend to break down over time, ultimately leaving the fear exposed.
To extinguish unreasonable fears, it is first necessary to shut down every last defense mechanisms—confront the naked fear.
When fear is confronted and one of the defense mechanisms is broken down, the fear will jump to another defense mechanism and then to another one and so on until the array of defense mechanisms is exhausted. This can be a very time-consuming process. On the other hand, defense mechanisms, given enough time, will break down on their own. If this happens, the fear is exposed and, depending on your understanding at the time, may be extinguished.
6. Anger and Hate
Anger and hate are types of defense mechanism. The unique characteristic about anger is that it can lead to beneficial outcomes or to destructive ones. Emotions are neither good nor bad. It is what a person does with his emotions which determines the effects of the emotions. A person angry at his parents for not accepting his homosexuality can lash out at them or talk to them about the situation. Hate is an extreme form of anger and usually destructive in nature.
7. Extinguishing Fear
Once the defense mechanisms are gone, fear is exposed. It can be extremely powerful. A person must contemplate the fear neither running from it or at it. Once this is done, the person can figure out what underlying message is associated with the fear. Once confronted, fear will reexamine the message adopted to explain the fear. If the mind still believes that the message is accurate, the fear will not go away. If, on the other hand, a person has gained some valuable life experience and thereby discovers the inaccuracies of his beliefs the unreasonable fears are subject to extinguishing. This process usually involves reinterpreting the original experience giving rise to the fear.
As for fearing homosexuality, the best life experiences to extinguish homophobia is learning as much as possible about the science of sexual orientation from credible sources.
8. Conditioning
Conditioning is the process of associating pain and/or pleasure with certain triggers. Conditioning can be either positive or negative. We are conditioned in life all the time. Negative conditioning occurs when someone experiences pain. Positive conditioning results from a pleasurable experience. The fear which results from pain deters certain conduct while pleasure draws us to certain behaviors.
The negative or positive experience does not have to happen to the individual being conditioned. The subject can simply observe the conditioning process in others and adopt the disabling attitudes. (When you see on the news terrorists throwing gay people off of the top of buildings, you intuitively say to yourself, “They want to do that to me, too.”)
Conditioning tends to extinguish itself if it is not reinforced. This reinforcement can be internal as well as external. A gay person will experience the pleasure of his gay feelings internally, which will reinforce the desire to experience the gay feelings more.
9. Expectations
Often, negative and positive conditioning can be combined and can be appropriate or inappropriate.
Setting expectations is a form of conditioning. They have both a negative component and a positive component. The negative component tends to be some form of disapproval or alienation (e.g. you don’t want to disappoint your mother or father for fear of losing their love), the positive component tends to involve approval or some other reward.
Parents often set expectations for kids to be straight. They do this by praising the child for engaging in heterosexual behavior and expressing displeasure at any homosexual behavior. The solution in this situation is to acknowledge that heterosexual behavior is normal for some people and that the parents have fears about homosexuality.
10. Anchoring
Anchoring is simply pain followed by pleasure. Anchoring makes conditioning less susceptible to being extinguished.
The difference between anchoring and setting expectations is the proximity of the pain to the pleasure. Anchoring requires close proximity of the two.
11. Anxiety
Anxiety is huge in the world of psychology. First of all, clinical anxiety can be extremely painful. Often, when a person is suffering from psychological pain but does not know why, it is anxiety taking root. Anxiety can cause the suppression but not the elimination of feelings such as gay feelings or anger. The suppression results in negative consequences. Anxiety feeds psychosis in schizophrenia, can paralyze a person’s functionality and impair the ability to empathize with others.
Anxiety occurs when a person comes to believe that the fulfillment of one need outlined by Maslow necessarily involves the denial of another need.
For example, if a person believes that his homosexuality inevitably results in rejection, they will become anxious. The person erroneously believes that his need for sex and sexual intimacy (levels one and three needs under Maslow’s theory) precludes the opportunity to belong (a level three need). The way out of this dilemma is to reinterpret the situation. In reality, internal needs never conflict. Anxiety is usually an indication of a maladaptive attitude. If the person comes to believe that it is society’s prejudice and not the individual’s sexual orientation which is the problem, he will realize that his needs do not conflict.
Anxiety can occur in the face of uncertainty. A strategy for dealing with uncertainty would reduce the fear from the uncertainty.
12. Frustration
In the above example, after a person reinterprets a situation, he will likely become frustrated and perhaps angry when confronted with rejection but he will not become anxious.
Frustration occurs when one is deprived of a need but does not see it has their fault.