Implicit Memory, Attachment Trauma, and the “Overreaction” That Isn’t

Sometimes a small piece of news hits your nervous system like a freight train. An unexpected post. A colleague changes plans. A friend forgets to respond. A partner sounds distracted. Suddenly your stomach knots, your breath shortens, your throat tightens, and tears hover. A part of you knows the situation doesn’t warrant this level of distress — but it still arrives in full force.

This isn’t irrationality or emotional fragility. For many people in Kansas City seeking therapy for relational patterns, it’s often implicit memory and attachment trauma showing up in the nervous system.

Implicit Memory and Attachment Trauma in Adulthood

Implicit memory is a body-based memory system that develops before language (Schore, 2003). It stores early attachment experiences as sensations, emotions, and autonomic states rather than stories. When early needs were unseen or inconsistently met, the nervous system learned to predict disconnection and prepare for loss.

In adult relationships, small signals can activate these predictions quickly. Shame often arrives in the body before the mind can explain it. Shame’s physical signatures — collapse, tightness, downward gaze, heat in the face, inhibited breath — are part of a freeze/appease response aimed at preserving connection (Porges, 2011; Gilbert, 2007).

Internal Working Models and Insecure Attachment

John Bowlby called the mental templates formed through early patterns Internal Working Models. These models guide expectations such as:

• Are people available when I need them?

• Am I safe in relationships?

• Am I worthy of care and belonging?

For people with insecure attachment, minor relational cues today can activate the working models of yesterday. What looks like an “overreaction” is often a proportionate response to an old threat stored in the nervous system.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn in Kansas City Therapy Clients

The nervous system organizes survival responses through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (Levine, 2010). A snub may evoke fight (“How could you?”), flight (“I should just leave”), freeze (“I don’t know what to say”), or fawn (“I’ll fix it so they don’t get upset”). These strategies once protected attachment bonds.

Recognizing Implicit Memory in Real Time

A helpful marker is mismatch: your internal reaction feels much bigger (or smaller) than the situation. That’s often implicit memory activating.

Many Kansas City trauma-informed therapists use bottom-up approaches to help the nervous system update old attachment predictions, including Somatic Experiencing, nervous system tracking, and shame awareness work.

These approaches involve:

• orienting to the environment

• tracking body sensation

• allowing affect (tears, yawns, trembling)

• completing autonomic cycles

This helps the body metabolize what once had no support (Levine, 2010; Siegel, 2020).

The goal isn’t to erase early models, but to update them. When implicit memory becomes explicit — when one can say, “my body thinks I’m alone again” — new relational options emerge.

For Kansas City Readers

If you grew up with emotional neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or insecure attachment dynamics, these patterns are common and treatable. Trauma-informed counseling in Kansas City, Overland Park, and Johnson County can help update attachment predictions, reduce shame-driven responses, and build secure relational capacity.

Click here to schedule a free consult or your first appointment today.

References

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss.
Gilbert, P. (2007). The Compassionate Mind.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory.
Schore, A. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self.
Siegel, D. (2020). The Developing Mind.

Not Every Hard Moment Is Trauma — And That’s Actually Good News

A Kansas City Perspective on Stress, Trauma, and the Nervous System

If you spend enough time on social media or listening to mental-health podcasts, it can start to feel like every difficult experience is trauma.
A stressful job in the Kansas City metro? Trauma.
A painful breakup? Trauma.
An awkward childhood moment that still makes you cringe years later? Definitely trauma.

It’s understandable why this language has become so common. For many people, learning about trauma has been clarifying and deeply relieving. It gives shape to suffering that was once invisible, dismissed, or misunderstood. And for those who truly live with the lasting effects of trauma, accurate language matters a great deal.

But here’s the good news that often gets lost:

Not every hard moment is trauma — and that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.

Hard Experiences Are Not the Same as Trauma

Human nervous systems are designed to respond to challenge. Disappointment, grief, conflict, fear, and stress are not design flaws — they are part of being alive and attached to other people.

Feeling overwhelmed during a hard season does not automatically mean something is wrong with you.

As Peter Levine helps us understand, trauma in a clinical sense is not defined by whether an experience was painful. Trauma occurs when an experience overwhelms the nervous system’s capacity to respond and leaves the body stuck in survival mode afterward. Trauma lingers. It reshapes perception, memory, and bodily response. Long after the danger has passed, the body continues to act as if it hasn’t.

Most difficult life experiences don’t do that.

They may hurt deeply. They may stretch us or temporarily knock us off balance. And then — often slowly and imperfectly — the nervous system settles and recovers.

That recovery matters.

Why Over-Labeling Trauma Can Backfire

When everything is labeled as trauma, two unintended consequences tend to follow.

First, real trauma becomes harder to see clearly. The word loses its precision, and people who genuinely need trauma-specific therapy may struggle to recognize themselves in the noise.

Second, people begin to experience themselves as more fragile than they actually are. If every painful experience is framed as injury, the nervous system learns to expect collapse rather than adaptation. Over time, we lose trust in our capacity to endure, grieve, and change.

Paradoxically, this often makes people feel worse — not safer.

A More Grounded Way to Understand Emotional Pain

Some experiences truly call for trauma-informed therapy. Others call for time, support, reflection, or simply being allowed to hurt without rushing to diagnose the pain.

Iain McGilchrist writes about how modern culture tends to break experience into isolated problems to be fixed rather than understood as part of a larger, living whole. When suffering is reduced solely to pathology, we lose something deeply human: the ability to metabolize difficulty through relationship, meaning-making, and growth. He links this cultural tendency and the consequences to an over focus on left brain thinking.

Bessel van der Kolk helped bring attention to how trauma lives in the body. And Bonnie Badenoch reminds us that healing happens in connection — not just correction. This is true whether we’re working with trauma or with ordinary human pain.

The Reassuring Truth

You can have:

• A painful childhood without being traumatized

• A stressful season without being broken

• Strong emotional reactions without having something “wrong” with you

And if you are dealing with trauma, naming it accurately can be profoundly freeing and stabilizing.

The point isn’t to minimize suffering.
It’s to locate it properly.

Not every hard moment is trauma — and that’s actually good news. It means your nervous system is doing what it was designed to do: respond, learn, recover, and keep going.

Sometimes the work isn’t healing an injury.
Sometimes it’s trusting your capacity to be human.

Why Couples Get Stuck (And How Therapy Helps You Move Again)

Many couples come to counseling because they feel stuck in the same arguments, shut-downs, or misunderstandings. Most don’t know why it keeps happening, especially when both partners say they love each other and want things to improve. It can feel confusing and discouraging.

Couples counseling can help, not by assigning blame, but by helping you understand the patterns underneath the conflict.

Patterns Are Like Loops

Most couples don’t just have “fights.” They have loops—the same dance repeated with new content. One partner reaches out, the other pulls away. One pushes for clarity, the other protects by shutting down. One gets louder, one gets quiet. The topic changes, but the loop stays the same.

These loops form because each partner is trying to protect something important—usually a longing or a vulnerability they stopped showing a long time ago.

It’s Not Just Communication. It’s What Communication Is Protecting

Communication skills matter, but skills alone often don’t solve the deeper issue. Many couples already know how to communicate—they just don’t know how to stay connected when they feel misunderstood, criticized, or afraid.

That requires understanding what’s happening inside the relationship space between partners. Therapists call this the intersubjective field, but practically it means:

“What is it like to be me with you, and what is it like to be you with me, especially when we are stressed?”

That space between partners is where relationships actually get repaired.

Improvisation: The Opposite of Keeping Score

When conflict loops form, couples often start keeping score: who apologized last, who’s trying more, who should change first. Scorekeeping feels organized, but it makes relationships rigid.

In couples counseling, we help partners learn something closer to improvisation. Instead of sticking to defensive scripts (“here we go again,” “I already know how this ends”), partners learn how to stay responsive and curious in the moment.

Improvisation creates openings. Openings create repair. Repair builds real trust.

Why This Approach Works

This style of couples therapy focuses on:

• recognizing your shared pattern
• understanding how each of you protects yourselves
• identifying the longings underneath conflict
• creating space for new emotional experiences
• practicing repair in real time

When couples experience successful repair—not perfection, but repair—their nervous systems begin to trust each other again. Arguments become less about survival and more about connection.

You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck

If you and your partner feel trapped in a loop, it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. It means the two of you are due for a new way of relating—one that allows both partners to feel seen, understood, and safe enough to show what they actually feel.

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help couples across the Kansas City metro learn how to repair, reconnect, and build new relational patterns. In-person and telehealth options are available.

FAQ: Couples Counseling

Why do couples get stuck in the same arguments?
Most couples repeat patterns because each partner is protecting a deeper longing or vulnerability. Therapy helps reveal and repair the loop.

Is couples counseling just communication skills?
Communication skills help, but lasting change comes from understanding the emotional patterns underneath conflict—not just the words.

How long does couples counseling take?
Most couples attend between a couple of months to a year or two of weekly sessions depending on goals, pace, and level of conflict.

Is it too late for counseling if we’re considering separation?
Not necessarily. Many couples wait until things feel urgent before seeking help, and repair is still possible.

Do you offer in-person or telehealth sessions?
Yes. We serve the Kansas City metro through in-person sessions in Overland Park and secure telehealth for Missouri and Kansas residents.

Is This Trauma or Just Stress? How to Tell the Difference.

Many people in Kansas City come to therapy unsure whether what they’re feeling is stress, burnout, or trauma. With trauma being talked about on podcasts and social media, it can feel like everything counts as trauma now. Commentators like Scott Galloway even argue that therapy tries to “explain everything with trauma” on The Prof G Podcast (Galloway, 2025).

There’s a real point here: when clinical words leave the therapy room, they often get stretched and lose their meaning. Trauma is one of those words.

A Simple Way to Compare Stress and Trauma

Here’s a helpful way to picture the difference. Think of reactions like money:

• A $10 reaction to a $10 problem → normal stress

• A $10 reaction to a $1 problem → a bad day

• A $100 reaction to a $10 problem → old experiences may be involved

• A $100 reaction to a $1 problem → often trauma residue

Not all distress is trauma, and not all trauma looks like the size of the situation you’re in.

So What Actually Counts as Trauma?

Clinically, trauma is not defined by the event.
It’s defined by what happens after the event.

Somatic researcher Peter Levine describes trauma as what happens when the nervous system can’t complete its stress response and return to normal (Levine, 1997; 2010).

In plain language:

Trauma is not what happened. Trauma is what stayed in the body afterward.

Two people can go through the same experience and have different outcomes:

• one returns to baseline → stress

• one stays stuck → trauma

This difference is about physiology and survival, not personal weakness.

Stress Is About Now. Trauma Is About Then.

A simple way to tell the difference:

Stress

• has a clear cause

• matches the size of the problem

• fades when life calms down

Trauma patterns

• show up in different situations

• feel too big for the moment

• don’t automatically go away even when life improves

Stress is your nervous system responding to today.
Trauma is your nervous system responding to back then.

How Trauma Shows Up (Even If You Don’t Call It Trauma)

Unfinished stress responses can look like:

• shutting down during conflict

• panic around feedback

• feeling “on alert” in relationships

• expecting the worst in small situations

• people-pleasing to feel safe

Affective neuroscience shows these reactions begin in deeper emotional circuits (Panksepp, 1998; Solms, 2021), which is why you can’t simply “think your way out” of them.

Trauma Therapy in Kansas City

If you’re asking “Is this trauma or just stress?” a more useful question might be:

Am I spending today’s money — or yesterday’s?

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help clients from across Kansas City complete unfinished stress responses and return to regulation. We use trauma-informed approaches including Somatic Experiencing, psychodynamic therapy, and neurobiological models.

We see clients from:

• Overland Park

• Kansas City, MO

• Leawood

• Olathe

• Prairie Village

• Lenexa

• North Kansas City, MO

• Lawrence

• Gardner

• And more!

A Note on Worthiness

You don’t have to wait for things to “get bad enough.”
Trauma therapy is about helping your nervous system settle and feel safe again — not proving that something happened.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). DSM-5-TR.
Galloway, S. (2025). The Prof G Podcast.
Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience.
Schore, A. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy.
Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.

The Seven Core Emotions: How Your Brain Helps You Understand What You Feel

If you’ve ever wondered why emotions can feel so big—or why they sometimes take over before you have time to think—you’re in good company. Emotions are biological. They come from deep, ancient parts of the brain, and they exist to help us survive, connect, and navigate life.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven basic emotion systems that all mammals, including humans, share. Each one creates a unique emotional experience and shows up in the body in its own way. When you understand these systems, identifying your feelings becomes easier and more intuitive—an important first step in managing them.

Here’s a simple guide to each emotion system and the typical body signs associated with it:

1. SEEKING – Curiosity and Motivation

This system gets you moving toward goals.
Body Signs: alert eyes, energized posture, slight increase in heart rate, interest, leaning forward.

2. FEAR – Anxiety and Threat Response

Helps you detect danger and stay safe.
Body Signs: fast heartbeat, tense muscles, shallow breathing, freezing or wanting to escape, wide eyes.

3. RAGE – Anger and Frustration

Activates when something blocks your path.
Body Signs: heat in the face, clenched jaw or fists, raised voice, tight shoulders, narrowed focus.

4. LUST – Sexual Desire

Supports bonding and intimacy.
Body Signs: warmth, arousal responses, focused attention, physiological sexual readiness.

5. CARE – Warmth and Affection

Supports closeness, empathy, and nurturing.
Body Signs: softening facial muscles, relaxed breathing, warm tone of voice, desire to comfort.

6. PANIC/GRIEF – Sadness and Separation Distress

Activates when connection feels lost.
Body Signs: tightness in the throat or chest, tears, heaviness, low energy, slumped posture.

7. PLAY – Joy and Social Connection

Encourages bonding through fun and laughter.
Body Signs: smiling, laughter, loose movement, lightness in the body, bright eyes.

Why This Matters for Managing Emotions

The first step in emotional regulation is identification—being able to notice and name what you’re feeling (as psychiatrist, Dan Siegel says, “name it to tame it”). When you recognize the body cues, you can understand what your system is trying to communicate. From there, you can use specific tools to regulate, soothe, or support the emotion in a healthy way.

Learning these seven systems gives you a map:
not just what you feel, but why you feel it—and what your body is asking for next.

References

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt.

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. Viking.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.

Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind. Delacorte Press.

Solms, M. (2019). The neurobiological underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 1–13.

The Pendulum of Truth: What Postmodernism Taught Me About Mental Health

In college, I signed up for a course on postmodern culture and philosophy—thinking I’d spend a semester reading dense texts and debating abstract ideas. What I didn’t expect was to find myself in the pages of the textbook.

At the time, I was volunteering for a nonprofit organization. Coincidentally, the director of that very organization had been invited to adjunctly teach the postmodernism course. One day, as we worked through a chapter describing institutions that embodied a rigid, modernist mindset—unable or unwilling to adapt to cultural shifts—I saw a familiar name. There it was: the nonprofit I volunteered for, listed as an example of a modernist holdout.

It was ironic. It was awkward. And it was a perfect window into how theory meets real life.

Postmodernism and the Pendulum of Truth

One of the central themes of postmodern thought is the loosening of our reliance on external sources of truth—institutions like churches, governments, or other authority structures. The deconstruction of these systems often creates space for individual thought, personal conviction, and deeply subjective experience.

There is a real gift in that shift. People who once felt silenced by institutional “truth” suddenly have permission to listen inward, speak freely, and trust their own lived experience.

But pendulums tend to swing hard.

In many circles today, subjective experience has been elevated to a new unquestionable authority. If I feel it, think it, or experience it, the logic goes, then it is true.

This is simply the mirror opposite of what modernist institutions once imposed: truth dictated from the outside, regardless of inner conflict. Now it is truth dictated from the inside, regardless of external reality, community wisdom, or historical perspective.

Neither extreme is stable. Neither honors the full complexity of being human.

Holding the Tension: A Healthier Approach to Truth

Historically—and psychologically—the most resilient way of understanding truth is to hold tension rather than collapse it. A mature sense of truth weaves together:

• Inner truth: What I feel, think, and experience

• Relational truth: How others experience me and the world

• Historical and communal truth: What generations before us have learned, named, and passed down

When one of these is ignored, the system breaks down.

And this brings us to mental health.

What Is Mental Health, Really?

Mental health is often defined clinically, but at its core it is something simple and profoundly human:

Mental health is the ability to think, feel, and act with flexibility—while holding both our own viewpoint and the viewpoints of others.

In other words, it is the capacity to be rooted and responsive. To know what we know, while remaining open to how others see it differently. To inhabit our inner world without losing sight of the outer one.

This requires humility. Curiosity. And an ability to tolerate discomfort without either collapsing or hardening.

If reading this definition feels offensive, destabilizing, or irritating in any way, that may actually be a meaningful invitation. What part of you feels threatened by holding multiple truths at once? What inner or outer authority feels at risk of losing its position? What do you fear might happen if truth becomes something shared rather than owned?

These are not questions with quick answers. But they are the very questions that open the door to growth.

Why This Matters

We are living in a cultural moment shaped by both deconstruction and hyper-individualization. Understanding how we arrived here—and how these forces shape our inner lives—can help us find a more grounded, resilient path forward. This is not to repeat a sense of outward knowledge being dominate. It is to voice a song that might be worth hearing in the midst of the moment.

Mental health does not live at either end of the pendulum. It lives in the tension between inner wisdom and communal wisdom, between personal truth and shared truth. Without such a tension debate and growth can’t exist.

And holding that tension well is one of the most important skills we can cultivate.

What Is EMDR Therapy? | Analog Counseling Clinician Michael Wieberg Explains

What Makes Therapy Work | Michael Wieberg of Analog Counseling Shares His Approach

Analog Counseling, Michael Wieberg, therapy kansas city, counseling overland park, somatic therapy, trauma informed therapy, mind body therapy, psychoanalytic therapy, relational therapy, somatic experiencing, trauma healing, mental health kansas city, therapist near me, psychotherapy overland park, healing journey, body based healing, #AnalogCounseling, #TherapyKansasCity, #SomaticTherapy, #TraumaHealing,

It’s Giving Lost in Translation: How the Internet (and Our Brains) Shape the Way We Talk

Ever notice how you sometimes can’t quite find the right words? Or how you end up using a meme, a GIF, or a slightly silly phrase to say something that’s actually kind of serious?

You’re not alone — and it’s not just about personality or style. The way we speak is shaped by bigger forces than we might realize: our brains, our culture, and yes, even the algorithms running our favorite social media platforms.

When the Internet Rewrites the Rules

On apps like TikTok or Instagram, people sometimes bend their language to avoid getting their posts taken down or buried by the platform. Instead of saying “suicide,” for example, someone might say “unalive.” Instead of writing out a “controversial” word, they might replace letters with symbols.

Linguist Adam Aleksic calls this algospeak — language that’s been reshaped to play by the algorithm’s rules. Over time, these workarounds can become part of how people talk even offline.

Why Our Words Are Always Chasing Meaning

Here’s the thing: language has always been a bit slippery. Words are like little containers for meaning, but they’re limiting and they’re leaky — they can’t hold everything we feel or experience.

Philosophers like Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan pointed out that words don’t give us pure, fixed meanings. They point to other words, which point to more words, and so on — raw meaning is always moving.

Neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist adds a brain-based twist:

• Our right brain lives in the richness of real, lived experience.

• Our left brain translates that into symbols and categories (like words).

This means every time we speak, we’re re-presenting an experience — not giving it in its raw form. And sometimes, a simple curse word or a meme can point back to the original feeling more directly than a carefully chosen “polite” term.

Meme Language: The New Emotional Shortcuts

Meme phrases like “it’s giving…”, “big yikes”, or “this is fine” can pack a surprising amount of meaning into just a few words. They carry a whole emotional tone, a cultural reference, and sometimes even a shared joke.

That’s why you might notice yourself — or your friends — slipping into meme language when talking about something real. It can:

• Soften vulnerability (“I’m low-key freaking out” instead of “I’m really anxious”)

• Make a connection (shared cultural references feel bonding)

• Say a lot quickly (a meme phrase can sum up a whole situation in seconds)

But meme language can also act like a mask, giving a safe, humorous cover for feelings that might be hard to express directly.

The Quiet Frustration We All Feel

Whether it’s algospeak, meme talk, or just struggling to find the right word, there’s a shared, subtle frustration in being human: what we feel inside never lands exactly the same way when we put it into words.

That gap can feel a little lonely. And while social media didn’t create this gap, it does make it more obvious — especially when we bend our language to dodge filters or fit into online trends.

Why This Matters for Your Relationships (and Your Mental Health)

The words we choose aren’t just about communication — they’re clues. If you notice yourself switching words, joking instead of naming a feeling, or defaulting to a meme, it can be worth asking:

• Am I protecting myself from something?

• Am I trying to connect without being too vulnerable?

• Is there something I want to say more directly, but don’t know how?

Therapists often listen for these shifts in language because they can point toward deeper feelings, hidden fears, or important parts of your story.

A Takeaway

The next time you hear yourself using a workaround word, a meme, or an online code phrase, pause for a second. That little twist in language might be doing more than you think — it might be carrying emotion, hiding it, or wrapping it in a form that feels safer to share.

Either way, it’s giving… human.

The Temptation of Judgment and the Ethics of the Other: A Reflection Through Levinas (and Beyond)

People want so desperately to control. Whether it’s a situation, an outcome, or another person’s reaction, we long for the comfort of predictability. But underneath this striving lies something more tender: a deep desire to feel safe, gratified, or simply at ease. Control is often less about dominance and more about protection.

When someone offends us—leaves us confused, angry, or hurt—it’s common to skip over the truth of our own emotional experience and reach instead for judgment: “What’s wrong with them?” “They always do this.” “That was manipulative.” In that moment, rather than saying, “I felt hurt, confused, and disoriented,” we flip the lens outward. It’s quicker. It feels cleaner. And it gives us a fleeting sense of authority over what is, in truth, a vulnerable internal state.

But what’s important to recognize is that these judgments aren’t just conscious strategies—they’re often defenses, and by definition, defenses are unconscious. They arise automatically, like emotional reflexes. We don’t choose them; they choose us. They operate beneath awareness to protect us from the discomfort of disrupted, dysregulated emotional states.

And yet, we can become aware of them. Awareness is possible—but it requires slowing down, and it requires courage. Because stepping away from a defense doesn’t mean we return to peace; it means we step into the very vulnerability the defense was shielding us from. We open ourselves to feeling raw, uncertain, exposed.

This is where the philosophy of Immanuel Levinas can guide us. Levinas teaches that the face of the Other is not merely a surface to interpret or explain—it is a site of ethical demand. The Other is not for us to define, control, or consume with judgment. The Other is sacred. And to encounter the Other ethically means to resist the impulse to reduce them into categories we can manage.

To define the other person—“they’re just selfish,” “they’re emotionally immature,” “they always do this”—is, in Levinas’ view, a subtle act of violence. We substitute our interpretation for their humanity. We replace their infinite otherness with a version of them we can control. And in doing so, we fail the ethical call their presence places on us.

But this work—the work of stepping out of defense and into presence—is not always equally available to everyone. This becomes exponentially more difficult within unjust power dynamics.

Jessica Benjamin, in her psychoanalytic and feminist work, reminds us that mutual recognition is not just a psychological achievement; it is a relational and political act too. Where there are asymmetries of power—based on gender, race, age, class, or role—the ability to “see and be seen” is compromised. The one with more power may unconsciously negate the subjectivity of the other—a process Benjamin names as a failure of recognition.

In relationships shaped by trauma, hierarchy, or systemic injustice, both the more powerful and the less powerful parties may engage in defensive acts that negate the other’s subjectivity. Benjamin calls this a doer or done to configuration. Which is basically a combat situation, someone is winning and someone is losing and the both people are wrestling for domination. This often takes the form of unconscious denial—a way to protect against our own vulnerability. This negation isn’t always overt; it can appear as withdrawal, silence, or avoidance. In response to the other person may also negate as a way to preserve their sense of self in the face of ongoing dysregulation and a lack of safety in reaction to feeling negated.

In this context, stepping out of defense is more than just difficult—it can feel existentially threatening. When someone has learned that expressing pain leads to punishment, dismissal, or rupture, moving toward emotional truth requires more than personal bravery. It demands relational scaffolding: trust, attunement, and often a supportive community that can help hold the weight of that risk. Only in such environments can enough safety and shared wisdom emerge to support true adaptation and mutual recognition. Which, for Benjamin, is healthy relating, each person offering a recognition and validation of the other person’s perspective without losing a sense of their own.

So what do we do?

We start where we can. We practice awareness, we build capacity to sit with our own disrupted states, and we work to notice when we are defining others too quickly or too harshly. We strive to live, as Levinas suggests, not from the ego’s desire to master, but from the soul’s openness to the face of the Other.

And we hold ourselves accountable—not just to our feelings, but to the structures of power we inhabit. The call to love, to see, to stay open is not just personal—it’s profoundly ethical. Especially when we hold more power, the work is to risk meeting the Other without collapsing them into our judgments.

Reflection Prompt:

Next time you find yourself mentally diagnosing or dismissing someone’s behavior, pause. Ask yourself:

• What am I feeling underneath this judgment?

• What defense might be at play here?

• Am I unconsciously negating their subjectivity to protect myself?

• What power dynamics are shaping this moment?

You don’t have to answer perfectly. But asking opens the door to something sacred: an encounter marked not by control, but by care.