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The Rescuing Hug

This is a picture from an article called "The Rescuing Hug". The article details the first week of life of a set of twins. Apparently, each were in their respective incubators, and one was not expected to live. A hospital nurse fought against the hospital rules and placed the babies in one incubator. When they were placed together, the healthier of the two threw an arm over her sister in an endearing embrace. The smaller baby's heart rate stabilized and her temperature rose to normal.

They both survived, and are thriving, in fact, the two girls went home to share a crib, and still snuggle. The twins are happy kindergartners now. The hospital changed their policy after they saw the effect of putting the two girls together, and now they bed multiples together.

I use this to illustrate that one of our most basic human needs is for relationship --to love and be loved. And sex has nothing to do with it!

Here is a report on scientific research which corroborates this observation:

Hardwired to connect
George Will

WASHINGTON -- Science is reshaping the argument about whether nature or nurture is decisive in determining human destinies, and about what the answer means for social policy. Consider a fascinating new report arguing the scientific evidence for the importance of ``authoritative communities'' -- groups, religious or secular, devoted to transmitting a model of the moral life.

The report is from the 33 research scientists, children's doctors and mental health and youth services professionals comprising a commission jointly sponsored by the Dartmouth Medical School, the Institute for American Values and the YMCA of the USA. The report's conclusion is in its title: human beings are ``Hardwired to Connect.''

In an era of increasing prosperity, the evidence of children's failures to thrive -- depression, anxiety, substance abuse, conduct disorders -- is also increasing. Pharmacological and psychotherapeutic responses to such deteriorating mental and social health are necessary but insufficient. Also needed is recognition of how environmental conditions -- the social environment -- contribute to childhood suffering.

The problem is a deficit of connectedness. The deficit is the difference between what the biological makeup of human beings demands and what many children's social situations supply in the way of connections to other people, and to institutions that satisfy the natural need for moral and spiritual meaning.

The need expresses itself in religious cravings -- the search for moral meaning and an openness to the possibility of a transcendent reality. The need is natural in that it arises from ``our basic biology and how our brains develop.'' The report draws upon the science of infant attachment, and of brain development, particularly during adolescence, when the brain changes significantly.

The report argues that our understanding of children's difficulties is thwarted by the assumption that each child's problems are exclusively personal and individual, thereby ignoring social and communal factors. In fact the report argues that we are ``biologically primed'' for finding meaning through attachments to others.

The need for meaning is increasingly discernible in the basic structure of the brain. ``The idea,'' says Allan N. Schore of the UCLA School of Medicine, ``is that we are born to form attachments, that our brains are physically wired to develop in tandem with another's, through emotional communication, beginning before words are spoken.''

Furthermore, the report says, social environments that meet -- or defeat -- this need ``affect gene transcription and the development of brain circuitry.'' And ``a social environment can change the relationship between a specific gene and the behavior associated with that gene.'' A child's ``relational context,'' says Schore, ``imprints into the developing right brain either a resilience against or a vulnerability to later forming psychiatric disorders.''

``The biochemistry of connection'' will seem too, well, deflating for some people's comfort. The report cites, for example, another study that says oxytocin, a hormone, enters a woman's bloodstream during sexual intercourse, childbirth and lactation, promoting, the report says, ``emotional intimacy and bonding (also sometimes known as `love').'' In men, marriage -- sexual and emotional intimacy with a spouse -- seems to lower testosterone levels, thereby lowering the ``biological basis for violent male behavior and male sexual promiscuity.''

So biology, it seems, buttresses important moral conventions. And they may have evolved in conformity to biological facts.

The scientific fact, if such it is, that religious expression is natural to personhood, does not vindicate any religion's truth claims. A naturalistic hypothesis is that the emotions of religious experience have neurobiological origins: The brain evolved [or was designed] that way to serve individual and group survival.

In any case, the social utility of religion remains. And there may be a biological basis for religious affiliation reducing the risk of certain pathologies, and even enhancing immune systems.

The most basic authoritative community, the family, is the most crucial. Its decline weakens the other institutions of civil society. The result is a thinness of social connectedness, and what Tocqueville warned was a risk of American individualism -- each person confined ``entirely within the solitude of his own heart.''

``Hardwired to Connect'' suggests that there is no simple ``versus'' in ``nature versus nurture.'' There is a complex interaction, which means, among many other important things, that IQ is not a simple genetic inheritance, it is a function of that inheritance and the influence on it of a context of connections.

The implication for governance is that social policies should foster the health of authoritative communities, especially given the fact that the yearning for such communities among adolescents often takes the form of gang membership. And evidently the Bush administration's belief in the wisdom of delivering social services through faith-based institutions is not just a matter of faith.

---So what can we say. The evidence is overwhelming that homosexuality is psychogenic rather than biogenic. Verifiable facts support this understanding, and honest science confirms it. Also, it is quite evident that homosexual orientation is much harder to exit than it is to avoid, not unlike any serious addiction. Let’s examine how this comes about.

Few, if any, have pointed out that acquiring a homosexual orientation is a response to a greater problem –an individual’s solution, if you will, to a serious problem he or she faces regarding relationships --as opposed to other “solutions” such as gross violence: like school shootings, heavy drug use, or some other anti-social behavior. My suspicion is that school shootings, for instance, are a drastic response to a drastic personal situation which is perpetrated by some individuals for whom homosexuality is not considered to be a viable option. In other words, the root problem is the same; the response is different. But the gross problem is the psycho-social environment within which the individual is struggling to establish an identity.

By way of illustration, here is a letter of response to a young man who claims that his homosexuality seems fine to him –and he accepts it as normal and natural:

Hi Jim! Thanks for coming out with open honesty about your being gay. I'd say you're absolutely right to state "I can't choose my nature, but I can choose my behavior." We all share a human nature, which includes the fact that we are sexual beings, with all the blessings and pitfalls that go with it. Practically all of our life's experiences impact on what we do with our sexuality, just as these experiences influence what we do with the rest of our life's parameters.

In fact, our earliest experiences deeply influence how we feel about things --an emotional element: our likes and dislikes, our desires and our abhorrances, our acceptances and our rejections, our decisions and our dismissals, our affirmations and our disregards. They even elicit physiological responses, which if reinforced or encouraged with some sort of reward, will return even stronger the next time. But if ignored, their return is weaker each time. Most of us go through this during adolescence.

Stronger than sexual drive, however, and more basic --and enduring --is our need for relationship. Primary relationship is just that: attachment to someone who cares and whom you care about, one whom you can trust and by whom you are trusted, one with whom you can share affection; a relationship in which you can love and be loved with unfeigned mutuality. Someone who will be there for you, and you for them.

Within a normally supportive social enviornment --family, friends, school, etc. --this need gravitates toward choosing a mate of the opposite sex, and establishing a happy, enduring marriage relationship. This is the healthiest and most satisfying outcome for all involved --including your own children. And it does happen, more than the media seems to imply.

However, if in our earliest experiences we are hurt, rejected, ignored by someone with whom we ought to have a primary relationship, our whole sense of self-worth, of sure identity, of belonging, can become terribly skewed, and we turn elsewhere for supporting and affirming relationship. If in the midst of this confusion and searching we are drawn or driven toward a homosexual relationship, or convinced of a homosexual identity through extraneous influences (e.g. via a misinformed teacher), we will not only tend in that direction but we will in retrospect assign gay meaning to remembered childhood and growing-up experiences.

So it becomes a matter of conviction that we are and have always been "gay." The gay community reinforces this conviction with their supportive efforts. Eventually there comes the gay peer pressure: "If you don't do this [gay sex], then you're not really one of us." It needn't be so explicit; at gay sex parties you only need to join in. Why risk rejection when you know it hurts so much? And it's a psycho-physiological fact that once you experience homosexual intercourse the experience will be imprinted upon your memory, and every normal and natural sexual urge thereafter will elicit a homosexual interpretation and fantasy. Hereinafter it will be very difficult to reorient your sexual preferences.

--If only you had not been rejected or ostracized during those tender early years! But all is not lost, nor irreversible. Visit the website "Straight Talk In Vermont" and follow the links. Help is available. We do care!

ANALYSIS OUTLINE [TO BE EXPANDED]

-On Choosing One’s Birth Parents
-Pre-Natal
-Infancy
-Early Childhood
-Later Childhood
-Pubescence and Adolescence
-Teenage
-Older Teens
-Young Adults
-Adulthood