We are animals!!! Well, I don’t believe that’s completely true. But it is the fact that we are animals, who are also spiritual beings, that I believe makes psychology an interesting subject. I will not go too far into the spiritual aspect of things from a religious perspective, but instead, let’s look at our nature as human beings from a point of view that attempts to understand that we are in balance between self and community. By "community" I mean everyone (our family members, our neighbors, our fellow citizens) who is not you. Although I will not talk about religious matters here, generally speaking our spiritual nature is expressed most clearly through the way we commune with others. We commune with others more or less adequately or fulfillingly based on our ability to balance our animal nature with our spiritual nature.
Human beings have three equally important motivators that are akin to animal needs. We have a need for self-protection that, in its extremes, makes us either aggressive or fearful. We have a need for sustenance that, in its extremes, we experience as either a starved feeling or a voracious, consumptive feeling. And we have a need for relatedness that, in its extremes, we experience as either loneliness or a sort of fragmentation of responsibility (for the needs of others). The more unbalanced these needs of the self, the more uncomfortable they are, and thus the more motivating they are.
When we experience any of these extremes, we are very likely to overcompensate by behaving in the opposite direction. The very frightened often become very violent. The very hungry often become rapaciously voracious and controlling. The overly responsible often avoid others so as to avoid more responsibility. When we are out of balance within ourselves, we make use of our relational environment in a desperate way to bring ourselves back into balance. That desperation results in so much pain and sorrow as we hurt the one's we love, either by hurting ourselves (anything from not treating ourselves well to actual self-injury) or directly violating our relationships with them in some way (being mean or taking advantage, etc...).
As you might have started to notice, the animal needs of self-protection and sustenance have emotional and relational aspects. We experience our emotions in a way that is quite similar to actual animal drives. In fact, long after we can be confident that we are physically safe and have enough food, we continue to fear the judgment or loss of others, and we continue to become angry about the loss or judgment of others. We also continue to pine away for others and make many mistakes in our own judgment based on the experience of extreme hunger for relationship.
In fact, only when we are able to balance the relational and emotional aspects of our animal nature can we start to balance our loneliness and responsibility fragmentation through relatedness. That is, we sometimes try to hold down our unbalanced animal nature by taking too much responsibility for others due to guilt about the harmful nature of those animal tendencies. We also sometimes avoid that unbalanced animal nature by remaining distant from others so they won’t know that it exists (due to shame about its harmful nature).
But when we balance our animal needs through relational contacts, when we communicate our needs, weaknesses, and hurts to others, and demonstrate our willingness to help them and accept their needs, weaknesses, and hurts, we then become able to balance our loneliness with responsibility and vice versa. When we are balanced in our relational contacts, with our community, our spiritual nature starts to flow in a give and take with our community and the world.
It is also important to understand how we can help to develop these tendencies in ourselves and others. By treating yourself in a kind way, by recognizing your animal tendencies and allowing them to be acceptable, you will start to accept yourself. You do not have to act on your animal tendencies, but denying them makes it more likely that you will act on them in uncontrolled ways that are more shameful to you than mere thoughts. If you accept yourself, then you are more likely to accept others, which helps them become accepting, balanced people themselves. By expressing your own needs, weaknesses, and desires, you also keep those near you in check, since those who love you will take the responsibility they should take when they hurt you or have something you need.
When you stop to think about it, our communal nature is actually part of our animal nature. Once upon a time, and I believe it is still this way, our connection to each other was as important for survival as self-protection or sustenance. In fact, self-protection and sustenance were much more likely in a group setting, which is the Darwinistic reason for our developing such heightened awareness of responsibility and a need for others. When we accept and understand our animal tendencies, including our biological need for connectedness, we become one with our communities.
We are always simultaneously alone and in a community, whether we are sequestered and thus defined as separate from others, or incessantly surrounded by throngs and thus defined as though we're in a crowd. Although within ourselves we remain alone, our development and our thoughts more often than not involve our relations with others. Thus within ourselves, although we might be alone, we are also forever in a crowd. With others actually present, by expresssing our true nature through communication of our emotions, we take our place in our community. That is, we connect our isolated self to the world all around. To the extent that we are able to spontaneously and genuinely express our animal nature without our developing fear of reprisal from others or developing fear of damaging others, an ability that can only come from having our most powerful needs calmed and accepted well enough within the social/emotional context, we express our true self. Our animal and spiritual natures thus coalesce in a healthy, animal/spiritual balance, resulting in a healthy influence in the direction of animal/spiritual balance on all who surround us. In effect, balancing our animal and spiritual nature amounts to living authentically and spontaneously with ourselves and within our community. In essence, the eventual result of an animal and spiritual balance in us all would bring about a wholistic, wholesome, healthy and wholeheartedley synergistic society. Now that would be a spiritual world!!!
