Balmain Boys Don't Cry

I never used to cry.

In fact, I wondered about it when I was younger: have I embedded an invisible emotional fortress? Neville Wran once attracted headlines in Australia when, as Premier of NSW, he declared of his birth suburb:

“Balmain boys don’t cry.”

That got me thinking – is this a gender thing? Am I ‘normal’ or am I protecting the formative elements of my identity – dark secrets protected by my terror of revelation…

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Alexscovery teachers are often surprised when students suddenly burst into tears - and they don’t know why. Neuroscientist Candace Pert – in her 1999 book “Molecules of Emotion” –laid down the hypothetical idea that emotions can be identified materially by the presence of primordial peptides – chains of amino acids that strung together form neurotransmitters, proteins, hormones and, well, emotions. Also known as neurohormones.

Her hypothesis supports the notion put forward by Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio: that emotion is distinct from feeling; because the former is chemical, while the latter is cognitive. 

Whenever a student remarked: “I feel nervous,” my precious teacher Marjorie Barstow’s standard rejoinder was: “I don’t know what that is.” Was Marj telling her student that “nerves” was a fictional, fabricated feeling causing their dysfunctional behaviour?

So how are feelings and emotions distinct?

A person about to take a rollercoaster ride at Disneyland feels “excitement”; whereas the person about to give a first performance feels “nervous”. The underlying chemistry is the same, but the feelings are radically different. We seek one and avoid the other – although they are identical emotionally.

We see this same mechanism when feeling pain. You first register a chemical change via microscopic nerve endings known as nociceptors. This is the equivalent of Pert’s molecule of emotion. The chemical reaction is then relayed to your brain where it is interpreted as pain. Pain is what you feel. Research has overwhelmingly supported the idea that pain can be perpetuated long after the originating chemical cause has ceased.

Pain can be perpetuated merely as a mental construct in your brain. Norman Doidge – who spoke at the 2018 Chicago Congress – gave some fascinating examples of this in his book “The Brain that Changes Itself.” e.g. chronic pain cured by solving abstract math problems, thereby distracting that area of the brain that had perpetuated chronic pain and…

Voila! Long-time chronic pain vanished.

As another of my teachers – Katie Byron – loves to say:

“It is never too late to change the past.”

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I spent yesterday sobbing on my green couch in Tokyo. I was finishing a book I picked up the night before at the airport in Sydney: “Honeybee” by Craig Silvey. It’s about a 14 year old Australian boy who knows he’s a girl. I never worried about that, but I was confused by my sexual orientation…

And Silvey’s book unlocked my emotions to a degree that astonished me.

Now I cry. A lot. Revelations to follow…