Facets of Displacement

We have probably all heard criticisms of people who quit alcohol or other drugs, only to become “fitness freaks.” Now they channel their mental energies into physical manifestation with tough fitness regimens and customized diets and so forth. Sometimes, such people are disparaged by remarks like, “Big deal, he just traded in his alcohol addiction for a workout addiction.”

First of all, any person who never fought addiction might not have the credentials to voice an opinion about it. And second, is there really anything so wrong about swapping a harmful, destructive lifestyle for a productive, health-giving lifestyle, even if on the surface it looks like just a new addiction?

A thought experiment

A case could be made that anyone who devotes her or his life to serving humanity must be some species of an addict. Consider, for instance, a doctor who leaves a lucrative Hollywood-based reconstructive surgery practice and goes to some remote foreign location with no electricity, to repair the faces of babies born with cleft lips and palates.

That behavior could certainly be branded by concerned others as out of context, and even self-destructive. The successful specialist foregoes a huge chunk of income, and abandons kith and kin, to go far away and risk being caught in the middle of a war or catching some tropical disease. Wouldn’t any reasonable person categorize that as damaging behavior? Perhaps even as self-destructive as being a junkie!

Factually speaking, that doctor is losing money, leaving his spouse and children, and endangering himself. These are classic red flags of addiction. Would his mother-in-law be justified in organizing an intervention, and recruiting other relatives and friends to try and stop such unacceptable behavior?

Variety in facets

It seems like some human situations involve a lot of fuzzy edges, not to mention eliciting strong convictions that can seem like judgment in disguise. Dr. Pretlow has written that displacement mechanisms,

[…] if excessively expressed by the animal, from recurring untenable situations […] may go rogue and become destructive.

Which is exactly what some people believe has happened when a relative or friend decides to follow their heart. They’ve gone rogue and need to be set straight. Take creative individuals, for example. Many artists and musicians are looked at askance by other people in their lives. These fools give up potentially lucrative careers, and ruin their own chances to go on fancy vacations, wear designer clothes, have expensive cars, or even start a family — and for what? To paint pictures or fool around with a guitar.

Pursuing a passion can look an awful lot like an addiction, and can certainly have the same negative effects on a practical level. And sadly, quite a few people feel that creative aspirations ought to be squelched as firmly as alcoholism.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Jonas Bengtsson

Displacement Mechanism Has Two Aspects

Every time somebody publishes a paper, it creates fertile ground for thoughts to sprout in other brains, whether those brains are academic, professional, journalistic, etc., or whether they belong to ordinary casual readers. And, as previously suggested, some might have a problem with defining displacement behavior as out of context.

The last post considered a hypothetical situation where a father, who happens to be an addict, quits his job even though his daughter needs corrective eye surgery. Onlookers would say, “How shockingly callous and irresponsible!” and they would be correct. Still, no matter how many labels might be attached to that neglectful parent’s decision, “out of context” probably should not be one of them.

The choice might be out of character, something the dad would never have done before he started messing around with the nose candy. It might cause horrendous negative consequences, along with massive regret. But if it happened at a certain time and location, and in a certain crucial situation, that’s the very definition of context.

They’re like zombies

It may be a non-optimal choice, a wildly destructive folly, and even a disastrous action. It might be one of several events that cause friends and family members to think, “I don’t even know this person anymore.” And yet the behavior is ultimately within context — the context of being an addict. Dr. Pretlow wrote “The displacement mechanism: a new explanation and treatment for obesity,” that it is…

[…] like a switch being pulled in the brain, or a tape playing, and the individual must go along with the tape until it’s done.

Exactly. And no matter how negative, the consequences also are in context, the context of the addict’s life. But enough of that. Let’s move on to the whole other side of displacement behavior — the reparative, healing side, the side illustrated by the post titled “The Profound Healing of Serenity” and its predecessors.

These describe how a large number of people have discovered a displacement behavior that fulfills enough of their needs and occupies enough of their consciousness that it enables them to abandon their substance addictions. In this case, the activity is fly fishing, and perhaps more important, the development of a worldview that includes the importance of helping other people escape their addictions, and even the necessity of saving rivers from ruination.

While animals and humans share many similarities, and much can be learned by observing animal behavior and then extrapolating that knowledge to humans, those comparisons stretch only so far. Humans have additional drives, like the need to make a difference, and the desire to enjoy the approval and esteem of others. Dr. Pretlow has written,

The displacement mechanism is thought to stem from opposing brain drives in equilibrium, such as fight or flight, that build up energy in the brain to commit to one or the other drives, which then overflows and is displaced to another drive, such as the grooming drive or the feeding drive.

And now we see that the energy can be displaced to even more diverse drives, perhaps even drives of a different order, and dare we say a higher order — such as the drive to leave the world in better condition than we found it, and the drive to be a good and positive influence on other humans, rather than a bad and negative one.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

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More Displacement Questions

The most recent post raised a couple of issues about the displacement mechanism. It left off in the midst of pondering the idea that addictive behavior makes no sense to anyone, either the person who does it, or the others who are affected. Addictive behavior definitely seems crazy to people who may not, for instance, understand why you would go on a drinking binge, or an eating binge, just because your boss is mad. After all, for goodness’ sake, you’ve got bills to pay! Why would you risk losing your job by acting so volatile?

But it would be useful to look more carefully at the matter from the addict’s perspective. From that point of view, nothing is more important than acquiring the next fix. And it’s even worse when the addict has some remaining conscience because the situation might inspire her or him to engineer a situation that justifies going on a bender. The desperate addict retains just enough lucidity to realize that walking out for no good reason, in order to start the drinking weekend early, is not a good look. It would probably reap criticism from every direction.

But what if you, the addict, can manage to make just enough of a slip-up to earn a reprimand from the boss, and what’s worse — it’s public! Then you can quit on the spot, and go home and say, “You should have seen that manager! He was disrespecting me 99 different ways, and in front of the whole staff! What was I supposed to do, just stand there and take it?” And then go out and drink.

The home folks

Addicts are also very adept at stage-managing dramatic events between themselves and their significant others. How many times has a husband or a wife, quite consciously and deliberately, set up a situation to trigger a chain reaction that will ultimately let them escape to the bottle or whatever? A clever addict can even sell it as an act of kindness, telling the spouse, “Look. I don’t want to do something I’ll regret. You know I don’t want to hurt you or the kids, so I’m going out for a while to cool off.”

In “The displacement mechanism: a new explanation and treatment for obesity,” Dr. Pretlow gave an example of how…

[…] addictive behavior doesn’t make sense to the person involved nor to others around them. For example, why binge eat or get drunk when the boss yells at you? It is out-of-context behavior; the behavior doesn’t fit with the situation at hand.

It is difficult for some of us to imagine doing anything to upset the boss. And yet, multitudes of employed humans have experienced a “Take this job and shove it” moment, and acted on the impulse. It is a thing that happens, and there is no more appropriate place to get fed up than at the job site itself. And that puts it squarely in-context.

Or, context could be assigned a different meaning, as being appropriate to the person’s life situation, rather than their work situation. If a little daughter needs to get her crossed eyes operated on, this is not the time for a person with a job to spit on the office floor and make a dramatic exit. The child needs the medical bill paid.

And that is exactly the kind of addict behavior that relatives so deeply hate and fear. However, to qualify it as out of context is still a judgment call, made from the perspective of the other affected people; but not necessarily from the addict’s standpoint.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

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Displacement Questions

In a paper titled “The displacement mechanism: a new explanation and treatment for obesity,” Dr. Pretlow described the traditional notion of displacement, which seems to include such concepts as textbook explanations of how displacement behavior can occur in connection with feeding. For instance,

Both male turkeys and cocks when fighting, will suddenly stop and go eat, if food is available, even though they are not hungry, and then go back to fighting again.

One can see why a novice might wonder if there is more to this than meets the eye. Hunger is a very subjective sensation. When scientists observe this stop-and-start fighting behavior, how do they know whether a bird is hungry or not? It seems like a large assumption to make.

What seems like another possibly unwarranted assumption, is that fight and flight are the only two “appropriate” responses. Maybe doing nothing at all should be designated as an acceptable reply; as part of nature. Sometimes, a bird does stand still.

But even in that case, the scientists seem to think there are only three correct natural responses when a bird is challenged to fight: either fly away, jump in there and mix it up, or stand frozen. But to eat, or straighten its feathers, or pick at a nearby stalk of grass, these activities are deemed “inappropriate” in what seems like quite an arbitrary and judgmental way.

A missing dimension?

Traditionally, displacement activity is defined as normal behavior that happens out of context and is irrepressible. Again, one might ask, “How do the observers know for sure that the bird is trying hard to repress its urge to pick at a grass stalk, but then does it anyway under an irresistible compulsion?” This too seems like a large assumption. These assumptions turn “context” into a rather fuzzy and inchoate notion.

Dr. Pretlow notes that…

[…] addictive behavior doesn’t make sense to the person involved nor to others around them. For example, why binge eat or get drunk when the boss yells at you? It is out-of-context behavior; the behavior doesn’t fit with the situation at hand.

There might be a footnote to the idea that addictive behavior does not make sense to the person involved. The person might feel differently about it at a later time, like when they’re at a 12-step meeting, confessing how they stole their little sister’s birthday money. But it probably did make ultimate sense when they were doing it, because nothing makes more sense to an addict than getting the next fix — no matter what kind of objectively atrocious behavior that might involve.

Whose job is it to decree whether behavior fits with the situation at hand? If a person in a particular “set and setting” is doing that behavior, then it is in context.

At a fancy church wedding with 200 guests, changing one’s mind at the altar is certainly not deemed to be “in-context” behavior. And yet, human beings have done it. And if saying “no” even at that late moment saved the bride, the groom, and their potential children from lives of misery, it was the right move. To say that behavior does not fit or is out of context — that’s a judgment call.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!
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Training the Treacherous Mouth

In an essay on mindful eating, Cheryl Harris, MPH, R.D., gives detailed instructions on how to experience food with expanded consciousness:

Observe the appearance and texture. Is there an aroma? What kind of changes do you notice in your body as you observe this food? (Answers may include salivation, impatience, anticipation, and nothing.)

Place a small amount of the food in your mouth, and do not chew it. After 30 seconds (wait 1 minute for chocolate), start chewing.

This is the kind of thing that psychedelic adventurers would do. For a baby, it’s like that all the time. Everything hits with seismic impact. It’s no wonder they make faces.

A dangerous proclivity

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned the branch of science devoted to the promotion of eating addiction; a mission accomplished through the manufacture and promotion of junk food. Legions of dedicated scientists perform meticulous research on big topics like flavor and satiety, and more specific traits like mouth feel, dryness, gumminess, and moisture release.

In Overweight: What Kids Say, Dr. Pretlow wrote about general principles and about chocolate, the most craved food, specifically:

Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits […] owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Chocolate may be licked, sucked, or chewed with a great deal of tongue and jaw action, in other words displacement activity, which relieves stress, even more so if crunchy nuts are present. In addition, chocolate is sweet, creamy, and soothing — hence comfort food.

Tame the mouth

Melissa Santos, Clinical Director of the Obesity Center at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, suggests a trick to subdue the mouth’s power in children:

Set up times during the day they go to brush their teeth. Nothing tastes good with a minty fresh mouth. So the best way to not give into snacking is doing something like brushing your teeth often throughout the day.

If the mouth can be tamed, there is still plenty of potential for overeating inspired by other factors: for example, the colonies of tiny organisms that we host. For Scientific American, Claudia Wallis wrote:

Rapid gene-sequencing techniques have revealed that the biggest and most diverse metropolises of “microbiota” reside in the large intestine and mouth, although impressive communities also flourish in the genital tract and on our skin.

Apparently, percentage-wise, they are slightly more populous in the digestive system than in the mouth, with the other named areas having not nearly so many.

The brain is in on it, too. A brain region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), along with some others, exerts inhibitory control — or is supposed to, anyway. But if this brain area is under-active, which it is in many obese people, the inhibitory signaling might be muffled or missing. The result will be more like the brains of our distant ancestors, who directly equated eating with raw, basic survival.

In an article titled, “I Didn’t Sin — It Was My Brain,” Christopher Buzelli and Kat McGowan disclosed that in obese individuals’ brains, “the regions that regulate sensory information from the mouth and tongue are more active, suggesting that they may experience the sensations of eating differently.” The trouble is, while their sensory processing is at a high pitch, research has shown their reward sensitivity to be lower.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID-19 and childhood obesity: When two pandemics collide,” FOX61.com, 02/10/21
Source: “How Gut Bacteria Help Make Us Fat and Thin,” ScientificAmerican.com, 06/01/14
Source: “I Didn’t Sin — It Was My Brain,” DiscoverMagazine.com, 10/05/09
Image by Brewbooks/CC BY-SA 2.0

The Treacherous Mouth, Again

Researchers Adam Drewnowski and Eva Almiron-Roig wrote about the palatability, or hedonic quality of food:

Sensory processes begin with the placement of food in the mouth, the fracturing of the food by the teeth and its dilution with saliva, oral perception of temperature and texture, and the binding of taste and flavor molecules to receptors in the oral and nasal cavities… A particular hedonic synergy is obtained by pairing sugar and fat.

The authors go into great detail about how fat, in particular, is received and perceived by the body. It is the source of the smooth creaminess and moist tenderness that make some comfort foods so irresistible. But fat is multi-talented. A different cooking method can make it crispy, crunchy, and delicious in a whole different way.

There is a point where sweetness becomes too sweet, especially for adults, though children don’t seem to mind. The point where sweetness turns to “yuck” is called the hedonic breakpoint. Fat does not seem to have a hedonic breakpoint, so combining it with sugar promotes overeating very effectively.

Look at yourself

A famous comedic character on Saturday Night Live was a therapist whose advice in every case was, “Look at yourself.” In other words, observe your behavior and your attitudes about it, from an impartial distance. Raise your own consciousness.

It is good to be cognizant of what nourishes us, and to be thankful for it. During holiday gatherings, many religious traditions consist of ritualistic eating. It’s a method of teaching the expected behaviors in society, without singling out any individual for blame. Some recite a food blessing before every meal, every day. The goal is to foster mental and emotional responses to food that will promote a sane and healthy society. There are other mechanisms for it too, that are not spiritually based.

Dr. Josh Axe is a certified doctor of natural medicine and chiropractic, as well as a clinical nutritionist who works with professional athletes, among others. Exodus Health Center, which he started some years ago, “grew to become one of the largest functional medicine clinics in the world.” His advice is, “Observe the way you eat”:

This includes your speed, level of tension, thoughts, and mannerisms. See yourself from a distance, as if watching yourself in a movie. Do you eat very fast and like you’re rushed? Do you feel guilty even while eating a food? Are you picking up one bite while another is still in your mouth?

There are certain “home truths” we need to realize. For instance, the mouth does not have good judgment about when it is done with the current task. It will cheerfully swallow half-chewed food to make room for the next load. If we don’t want to become obese, one of our jobs is to keep an eye on that mouth and make it behave reasonably.

A mixed blessing?

Is it positive or negative to have a keen, impressionable sense of taste? To be capable of savoring flavors may or may not be a good thing. For some people, better-tasting food leads them to keep on eating it whenever possible, so if it’s possible all the time, that could spell trouble.

On the other hand, even with a pile of not-very-tasty food, an optimist will persist in eating their way through it, hoping that they will eventually land on something delicious. Then, we have the special cases, like chemotherapy patients who have no appetite. They really need the nourishment, but hypersensitivity to the smell, taste, or even the thought of food can make everything revolting.

Hooked on foods

Dr. Pretlow speaks of conditions that do not apply to drugs. For instance, judging by the number of people who enjoy sucking on lollipops and popsicles, and later on straws, toothpicks, cigars, and other objects, a lot of people seem to never outgrow the pacifier effect. Aside from sucking, the actions of biting, chewing, and swallowing are also very satisfactory with food, as well as the immediate taste and texture factors experienced in the mouth. Unlike a drug, there is not as much of a central chemical response.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Chapter 11 Human Perceptions and Preferences for Fat-Rich Foods,” NIH.gov, undated
Source: “Mindful Eating — Maintain a Healthy Weight & Appetite,” Draxe.com, undated
Image by DFID/CC BY 2.0

The Treacherous Mouth, Continued

If any single body part is most responsible for obesity, surely it is the mouth. Could an ear or an elbow absorb even a single nutrient? Not likely. Could feeding through a nasogastric tube or an IV make someone morbidly obese? Maybe, but it would be quite a project. Whereas, mouths do it all the time.

The aperture of our face is all too ready to betray us, and Big Food knows it. “Make mouths happy,” they say, and “It’s like a mouth full of joy,” and, of course, the world’s most favorite advertising slogan, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”

The previous post mentioned tastebuds, and as it turns out, other things are in the mouth too. This is Dr. Sarah J. Carnahan Craig, Ph.D., of Penn State University, who took part in a broad study that sought to understand “social/behavioral contributors to childhood obesity, how a responsive parenting intervention can prevent childhood overweight/obesity, and the biological factors that contribute to the disease.” She wrote,

The main finding from this paper is that the oral microbiota (the collection of bacteria that live in the mouth) are significantly related to young child growth patterns. The surprising part of this finding was that we observed this result with the oral microbiota and not the gut microbiota. The oral microbiota (in comparison to the gut microbiota, which has been associated with obesity in many previous studies) are largely understudied, especially in young children.

As Dr. Pretlow has noted, in food or eating addiction there are taste-centered components like flavor, mouth feel, aroma, texture, sliminess, inclusion of particles, temperature, and other traits belonging to the food itself.

Specific foods, like cheese, also are definitely a problem for the vast majority of obese individuals. Nevertheless, bliss point research still may be optimizing just the sensory effect — taste and texture (mouth feel) — rather than food ingredients that act directly on the brain.

The various agreeable sensations and the flavor molecules and all the other factors rarely work alone, but gang up to achieve the greatest possible impact. For instance, to the pleasures of eating, it would be fair to also add contrast. What could be more delightful than a half hour spent savoring the alternate sensations of salty, crunchy potato chips, with swallows of a chilled, fizzy drink? Or switching from cold ice cream to delicious, crumbly bites of cake, over and over again? Or playing off spicy, chewy mouthfuls of fried chicken against swigs of cold beer?

When the mouth likes something, it automatically summons up the tendency to develop other bad habits. So, there will also be the motor addiction factor, which involves physical actions including biting, chewing, sucking, gnawing, crunching, licking, swallowing, and hand-to-mouth motion. These are more involved in the category of “nervous eating.” But beyond that, these ways of acting slide over into the territory of Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors, which are recognized as behavioral addictions.

Dr. Pretlow says, “Any overeaten food represents a mixture of the sensory and behavioral addiction components, although the ratio varies. The combination comprises eating addiction.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Mouth Microbiome Linked to Childhood Obesity,” MedicalResearch.com, 09/19/18
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