The childhood home — one room where I grew up, and then the other room, once my brother’s, where I stayed with my own children for a time after my divorce.
Two kinds of shame: one as a child, and one as an adult. The shame of the adult takes an even tighter hold on the constraints of your manhood when it is shared with your own children. That differs from the shame you carry as a child yourself, growing up in the house of pain.
How you deal with the shame you feel depends a great deal on the audience around you.
Note
The trauma: CEN or childhood emotional neglect: CPTSD 
The father: authoritarian narcissistic
The mother: codependent, and lived in fear, but also looked away and did not protect
The ex-wife: also authoritarian with a need for control
In one room, you are the child
And in another room, you have your children who see 
Two rooms in the same bewilderment
The common denominator: me
The activities of a child versus 
The activities of a man
The comparison is poignant
But the shame still stands
I now understand my trauma
Unhealed wounds must be processed through connection
In silence, they fester unseen
So with this testimony, I raise my objection 
One shame is learned
One is self created
The burdens of inequity
When you point the finger at yourself – it’s related
The lessons of accountability
And the politics of shame
It’s extremely hard to point the finger
When the finger is pointed at your name
Oh how we justify
The economy of quid pro quo
Just what do we testify?
Sometimes, I don’t rightly know
Like sitting in your own church
Like sitting in your own pew
Just what will we receive?
Just what will we do? 
In childhood I learned to overthink
In adulthood, I did the same
I now try to integrate emotion 
The man, the boy, and the claim 
Over 50 years with living in silence
The reflection from the polished mirror, I am now me 
Why do I walk the mesa late at night, beneath the bell tower’s arch of sun-bleached stone? Why does the old campus glow so bright for one who walked away from it alone? I left my home at seventeen, so young, and paid my way with every dollar earned. Who heard the quiet hope upon my tongue each night I studied while the lamp still burned? Why is there always one more class to find, a room I cannot reach, a door that’s locked? Why does the schedule blur inside my mind while minutes slip away upon the clock? Psychology, philosophy, two roads I traveled far but never saw them end. Three classes short. Who measures all the loads a working heart must carry, lift, and tend? I married, and I worked for forty-one long years, and gave the best of what I had. So why, when all those working days are done, does one unfinished piece still make me sad? Is this the reason that the dream returns? Does painful truth play hide-and-seek at night, and wait behind the library till it learns I’m strong enough to face it in the light? And if I face it, what else might I find? That no diploma measures who I’ve grown? That every lesson life has left behind has taught me more than any class I’ve known? The past is history, so let it be. The future is a mystery, still unknown. But now, this very moment, sets me free, a gift we call the present, all our own. So if a dream keeps calling you by name, what hallway, what closed door, waits there for you? Perhaps it doesn’t come to bring you shame, but just to walk you home, whole, and new.
…
DCG
“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.”
— unknown 
This was the dream. I woke up on the San Diego State University campus, wearing a very plush San Diego State letterman jacket, which I have owned in the past. I was surrounded by people, many of whom were from where I worked. The people I had my career with showed up throughout the dream, even though many of them did not attend San Diego State. We were sectioned off, almost as if we had been told to serve the campus community for some unknown reason. We were grouped together in square formations, almost like attendance lineups, or even in classrooms. I walked around and saw people from my job. I didn’t know why they were there too, because many of them did not go to the same school I did.
This dream, in some form, keeps coming back: me on the campus of San Diego State University.
Transcription “Here is the twist. I was three classes shy of getting my degrees at San Diego State University. One in psychology and one in philosophy.” Annotation: the two degrees would have been a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. A Revelation I left home at 17 and paid my own way through San Diego State University. I studied toward a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy while working full-time. I always meant to finish. But marriage and work took priority, and I spent 41 years with my employer. I ended up three classes short of both degrees, and not finishing those classes is my biggest regret. My education has always mattered deeply to me. That may be why the same dreams keep coming back. I think they may be my mind returning to the one important thing I never finished the way I wanted to. This isn’t a failure. It shows how much I still value what I worked so hard for.
We think that we argue with logic and light, But the war in the room is invisible — inside. You’re not fighting a fact when you’re fighting tonight, You are fighting the person who lives in their pride. A belief isn’t held like a book on a shelf, It is worn like a skin, like a name, like a scar. To challenge the idea is to challenge the self, And the self will defend itself, near or far. So the harder you push, the more deeply they dig, The more certain they feel as you prove them all wrong. The argument planted a doubt that grew big, So they held to their story, they made it more strong. We were not born with these views fully made, We were broken by something we never could say. A wound that we carried became the crusade, An old pain became armor we carry today. The emotion came first — long before the belief, Before the philosophy, before the firm stand. An experience seeking its narrative relief, A trembling heart reaching for somewhere to land. And reason arrived like a lawyer retained, To argue a case that was already won. The verdict was settled, the jury was trained, The mind was the courtroom — and so it was done. No study was needed, no figure, no chart, The judgment was carved in the marrow and bone. You cannot reach someone by way of their mind When the road that you need runs directly through heart. So if you would reach them, don’t carry a sword, Don’t marshall your data, don’t build up your case. Sit still for a moment, and pull up a chair, And ask them the question that opens a space. Not “why are you wrong?” but “where did this start? What part of your living convinced you of this?” For that is the doorway — not proof and not art, But the quiet of wondering what you might miss. The mind will change only when something in it Grows curious enough to consider the cost. Not when it’s beaten, not when it’s been hit, But when it decides that it’s willing to cross. We don’t change our minds when we lose in the fight, We change when we’re curious enough to explore. Not when we’re shamed in the merciless light, But when we feel safe enough to open the door. So speak to the wound that first seeded the thought, Speak to the human behind what they claim. The battle of argument cannot be fought
When the person defending is fighting their name.
…
DCG
Screenshot
Analysis of the Core Statements This argument rests on five interlocking ideas:
Belief is identity — People do not hold beliefs the way they hold opinions about pizza. They fuse beliefs with who they are.
Arguments feel like attacks — When you challenge the belief, the person experiences it as a personal assault on the self, triggering defensive entrenchment.
Emotion precedes reason — Beliefs are not constructed from facts up. They are built from emotional experiences first, and reason is recruited afterward to justify them.
Emotional pain seeds belief — Prior wounds, fears, and lived pain create fertile ground for specific beliefs to take hold — the belief soothes or explains the pain.
5. Curiosity, not argument, changes minds — When people do shift their views, it is not because they were defeated in debate. It is because genuine curiosity about why you believe what you believe created an opening.
Scientific Support — The Research is Robust Jonathan Haidt — The Elephant and the Rider Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model is the cornerstone study here. Haidt’s decades of research, summarized in The Righteous Mind (2012), demonstrated that moral and political beliefs are driven primarily by gut-level intuition — the emotional “elephant” — while conscious reasoning functions as a press secretary for the elephant, constructing post-hoc justifications. According to his Moral Foundations Theory, people are “morally dumbfounded” — they know something feels wrong but cannot explain why, which proves the emotion came first. Dan Kahan — Identity-Protective Cognition Dan Kahan of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project coined the term “identity-protective cognition” — the unconscious tendency to process evidence in ways that shield one’s group identity rather than reach accurate conclusions. Critically, his research shows that higher intelligence and science literacy actually amplify this effect. Smarter people are better at motivated reasoning — they construct more sophisticated defenses of beliefs they were never willing to change. Claude Steele — Self-Affirmation Theory Steele’s landmark 1988 work at Stanford established that the self-system is constantly engaged in maintaining a sense of moral and adaptive adequacy. When beliefs tied to identity are threatened, the entire self feels threatened, not just the idea. The self mobilizes defensively. Sherman and Cohen’s extensions of this work confirmed that reducing this self-threat — through affirmation — is one of the only reliable ways to open a person to reconsidering a belief. Leon Festinger — Cognitive Dissonance Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory (1957) laid the groundwork: people experience genuine psychological discomfort when new information conflicts with held beliefs, and they work to eliminate that discomfort — most often by rejecting the new information rather than changing the belief. Nyhan & Reifler — The Backfire Effect Nyhan and Reifler (2010) documented the “backfire effect” — corrections to political misinformation sometimes caused people to believe the false claim more strongly. While later meta-analyses by Wood and Porter (2019) found the effect is less universal than originally claimed, the core dynamic — resistance to correction under conditions of identity threat — is thoroughly supported. NIH Neuroscience — Belief as Self-Referential Processing A 2024 NIH neuroimaging study found that challenges to political beliefs activate the brain’s Default Mode Network — specifically the regions governing self-referential processing and introspection. The brain literally treats a political argument the same way it treats a threat to the self. APA — Curiosity as a Change Agent
APA research on curiosity and practical communication analysis confirm your final point: curiosity — not argument — is the lever of genuine persuasion. A conversation that induces curiosity about why you believe what you believe creates the only real opening for change.
The Concise Argument
We do not argue about facts. We argue about who we are. Beliefs are not ideas we carry — they are identities we inhabit. When someone challenges your belief, your nervous system does not register it as a debate. It registers it as a threat to the self. You don’t think your way to a belief; you feel your way there first, often through pain, loss, or fear that needed an explanation. Reason arrives after the fact to build the case. This is why more facts, better arguments, and louder voices almost never change minds — they only harden them. The only documented pathway to genuine belief change is curiosity: a person’s own willingness to wonder why someone else sees the world differently. You cannot argue someone out of a position they did not argue themselves into.
Metacognition is the brain’s ability to monitor and evaluate its own mental processes (like perceptions, memories, and decisions) and use that self‑knowledge to guide behavior.[parisbraininstitute +3] Brief summary of metacognition In neuroscience, metacognition is often defined as “thinking about your thinking” or “cognition about cognition.” It involves monitoring how well you are perceiving, remembering, or deciding, and generating signals like confidence or doubt about your own performance. These metacognitive signals support skills such as noticing errors, adjusting strategies, controlling attention, and regulating emotions. Neuroimaging work links metacognition especially to frontal and prefrontal brain circuits, which are part of the broader executive control system and our sense of self‑awareness.[ac +7] What the amygdala does in cognition The amygdala is an almond‑shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe that is part of the limbic system. It is crucial for assigning emotional significance (especially threat, fear, and reward value) to stimuli and events, and for triggering appropriate physiological and behavioral responses. The amygdala contributes to several cognitive functions by acting as a salience detector: it influences attention, perception, learning, and memory, particularly for emotionally charged or motivationally relevant information. It also supports implicit emotional learning (like fear conditioning) and modulates how strongly emotional experiences are encoded and consolidated into memory.[nih +4] Direct comparison You can think of metacognition as a monitor of cognition: the anterior prefrontal cortex , whereas the amygdala is more of a tagger and driver of emotional salience in cognition.
One way to put it: metacognition watches and evaluates your thoughts, while the amygdala helps decide what in the environment “matters” emotionally and should capture your cognitive resources.[neurosciencenews +8]
The evidence shows that the amygdala functions much faster than the anterior prefrontal cortex processes
Es un mundo misterioso
Las cosas simples que a veces no puedo controlar
Mis sentimientos por ti se vuelven claros
Puedo sentir tu corazón
Arriésgate conmigo
Vamos a descubrirlos juntos
Quiero lo que te hace feliz
Trabajaré todos los días para traer esto vivo
Tu magia ya me ha funcionado
Compartamos nuestras fortunas
Compartamos este sentimiento
Hazme un hombre feliz
Comparte conmigo lo mejor de ti
Sé que puedes
El mundo se ha vuelto más hermoso
Solo estar cerca de ti lo hace bien
Podrías pensar que soy un tonto tonto
Pero siento que sientes esto como yo
El motivo está justo en frente de nosotros
Esta atracción está creciendo
Me gustaría que supieras
Puedo sentir tu corazón
...
DCG
It's a mysterious world
The simple things I sometimes can't control
My feelings for you are becoming clear
I can feel your heart
Take a chance with me
Lets discover them together
I want what makes you happy
I'll work everyday to bring this alive
Your magic has already worked itself on me
Let's share our fortunes
Let's share this feeling
Make me a happy man
Share with me the best of you
I know you can
The world has become more beautiful
Just being near you makes it right
You might think I'm a silly fool
But I sense you feel this like me
The reason is right in front of us
This attraction is growing
I'd like for you to know
I can feel your heart
...
DCG
What triggers the soul to hunger? Is it when our appetite becomes awakened by some defining experience we align ourselves with? Do we control this mechanism or is it something innate and inborn within us? Is it serendipity that connects us at the right place and the right time to events we become attracted to and enthused by?
Where do our deepest desires originate? How do they germinate and then suddenly spark when some experience in our lives brings them to life? Some creative passion born into possibility or some inspiring moment that changes us forever after that day forward has challenged many psychological, religious, and philosophical theorists for answers. It is not that we choose these moments, but rather that these moments seem to choose us. These moments influence something within our being and awakens us to a new possibility, a new experience that taps into something very deep within us. We cannot explain it precisely even after many years of reflection, but it is something that transpires within us along the course of our lives. It was not something we expected to engage us, and we certainly did not plan it. Clearly one can see countless examples of this influential dynamic in our lives. Weaving its imprint on those at the wake of discovery within the advancements of science can be demonstrated by Issac Newton’s quote …”If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. The case for how artistic expression stimulates and perpetuates newer forms can be demonstrated by Bob Dylan’s influence on a generation. He was influenced by Woodie Guthrie, and Dylan in turn influenced everyone from The Beatles to Jimi Hendrix. The same principle applies to the many other pursuits within the conduct of human expression.
Why there is so much diversity in the world, why there are so many different perspectives gives us some sign that we all form different types of connections to these defining moments that we want to align ourselves with. The emotional connection to these events that forever changes our lives can lead us to completely different outcomes. On one hand they can transform our lives into something that we will build upon and cherish for years to come, (a relationship with someone, a passion for a creative pursuit, a pleasurable pastime we enjoy, or another bonding relationship we can experience such as devotion and religion). On the other hand it can lead us into a very dark realm of existence such as an emotional, and physical connection to some addiction, cult, or false prophet.
Some of my strongest connections originate from these awakened passions and desires. Something resonated deep inside of me and I wanted to be part of these newly discovered feelings or ideas. Either inspired by something or someone, I used whatever was in my power to get from point A to point B even if I didn’t know really where to start or how to get there. Even when it meant that I was unsure of just where point A and point B really were in the first place, I effectuated this connection with determination! It may be that the awakening that is experienced is very subtle or its occurrence may be very intense depending on the circumstances met. It may slowly transform us over time, or it may suddenly come into focus defining itself through a series of experiences that we progressively clutch and embrace. However this mechanism manifests or however this animating principle becomes active, it seems clear that our belief systems, and our emotional attachments are crucial in their actualization. The emotional connectivity to the animating forces behind our enthusiasm may truly be the glue that binds us to these desires.
I can certainly say that this was not the case for many occasional interests because I simply failed to follow through on them and develop them. We can stifle many interests if we limit ourselves, if our insecurities creep in, or if others do not give us needed support or encouragement at times when maybe if that consolation was given at the right time, it could have changed the course of events within us. I think that children have tremendous amounts of opportunities since their minds are not biased, since they have not yet learned the defeating attitudes we as adults often struggle with, and with proper encouragement they could become extraordinary people with cultivated dynamic skills if directed o do so at the right age.
Understanding the relationship of this phenomenon allows me to use this learning to better clarify worthy pursuits. What leads me to ask these questions, I can only surmise. These questions direct me to explore my fascination with my wish to better appreciate the world as I experience it. I am my own person but influenced by many. The pragmatist within me speaks to make the unknown rational. The mystic within me seeks to make the unknown tangible. The philosopher within me solicits the perplexity of the unknown; hence making the esoteric….exoteric!
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