Want to write up a misunderstanding I’d been carrying about nurture, in case others have had the same one, and to check if I’ve now got it right.
Until recently, I thought nurture wasn’t really my thing. I figured my life ran mostly on fear, aggression, and desire. The tender-feeling side just wasn’t something I experienced much (or so I thought), so I wasn’t applying any comprehensive actualism investigation to it.
Part of how this was hiding from me, I think, has to do with the ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ feelings split. By habit I’ve focused on the ‘bad’ feelings, the obviously painful ones (fear, resentment, sorrow), and largely neglected the ‘good’ ones. Desire is the obvious ‘good’ passion that I’d already been looking at. Nurture has been the non-obvious ‘good’ one. Its fulfilment-affect (love) feels pleasant, so it slips past the what’s-bothering-me filter (diminishment) that catches the ‘bad’ ones.
Turns out I’d been misunderstanding what nurture actually covers, and once I saw what it produces, it’s clear it’s been running in me all along, just not in the forms I was looking for.
Richard writes about this clearly across his correspondences, I think, but it only really sank in for me recently, in a way that enabled me to have more success with the actualism method.
Here’s the structure I now see.
The nurture instinct produces a whole family of affects depending on whether what I call the “bonding-want” is met, frustrated, or threatened:
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love, when the bond forms (or feels like it does)
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sorrow, when it doesn’t, or is lost, or the bonding-want goes unrequited
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devotion / limerence, when bonding strongly to a person or a cause
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pity / compassion, the tender response to another’s suffering
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jealousy, when the bond’s threatened by a third
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plus possessiveness, fear-of-loss, attachment, loyalty, belonging, missing-someone, all the tender stuff
All of these come out of the same instinctual circuit. Love and sorrow aren’t opposites; they’re nurture fulfilled vs frustrated.
You can’t keep the love and dispose of the rest. Love is the affective half of a single survival package. The same instinct that produces love produces malice when love is thwarted, sorrow when love is lost, fear when the loved one is threatened, jealousy when threatened by a third. It’s one package, and asking for “more love” or “purer love” is asking for the same circuit to run more strongly. So the painful side of it (the sorrow, the jealousy, the fear-of-loss) runs stronger too, when (inevitably) things don’t go that way.
I can now see why Richard rejects “love” so firmly, and how actualism is more uncompromising than I’d realized. Spirituality retains love as the highest value, just replacing personal love with universal / unconditional / divine love. But those are still nurture operations in cosmic clothing. Nurture keeps running, only its target changes. Here, we are talking about dismantling nurture itself.
Some of the non-obvious forms nurture had been hiding in for me, in case any of these match for others too:
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bonding-want disguised inside intellectual / competence / status pursuits
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low-grade emptiness, in place of the bare sorrow that the unfulfilled bonding-want would otherwise produce
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attachment rerouted through abstract objects (a cause, a discipline, a community)
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belonging hiding inside identifications (subcultures, ideologies, “we who get it”)
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longing-to-be-known showing up as a wanting-to-explain-myself, or a particular online-presence-attention
One thing is worth calling out specifically, because it hides both nurture and desire at the same time, and partly because it explains why it ends up so futile: romance. The romance story wraps a sexual want (desire) and a bonding-want (nurture) into a single ‘special’ narrative, which is what makes it so compelling. But underneath, two separate instincts keep doing what they do, with their respective frustration-affects intact, no matter how good the narrative tries to make it all seem.
What I’m realizing and actualizing out of all this:
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Sorrow sits at the base of everything I’ve been investigating. The other affective operations (hope, performance, self-worth, warmth, seduction, resentment, idealization/ fantasy, specialness/ superiority, busy-ness/ distraction, ‘caring’-for-others, platonic-friendship cover, ‘grace’s scale practice’ and so on) are running to keep it out of direct contact.
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When I meet the sorrow for what it is, with no other psychic structures added on top anymore, it dissipates. And when it does, enjoying and appreciating being alive is effortless, and so is contemplating the actual world, because I’m affectively very close to it, with the passions (and their dreams) no longer in the way. It also seems like PCEs are more likely to happen, if at all, than when the passions are running strongly (with the social identity structures atop), and this is where it all gets more interesting in regards intent (whereupon all these passions can, finally, be effortlessly chanelled).
One last note on method. All of this clarification has come out of one simple first principle: Richard’s “investigate within half-an-hour of getting back to feeling-good, while memory is fresh, even if it costs you the feeling-good temporarily to look”. I’d been doing a sloppy job of this for 20 years, getting back to feeling-good but not actually looking at what had taken me out, so the same affects kept cropping up. The simple act of looking, soon, while the memory’s still alive, lets the grand details of the psyche become understandable over time, without needing to armchair-philosophise about them. The investigation does itself, basically. You just have to not sweep things under the carpet when feeling-good returns.
Curious to hear if this matches your own understanding of nurture, or if you see it differently. Especially curious to hear from anyone who’s been through a similar misunderstanding about it.