Note: there is a phase in adolescence (each person’s timeline is unique) where the Threat Sentinel aspect of awareness begins to undergo the process of transforming to include complex externalities, including ‘the world’.

No one is capable of bringing even modest communal threats into their personal psyche early in their development. Our cultures and media are ceaselessly pumping this process; constantly emphasizing the ‘necessity’ of seeing all the problems and threats in the worldwide context, which is not only absurd; it’s lethal.

Bear in mind that for nearly all of human history, threat concerns were local to cohorts. It was impossible to even conceive of threats to the entire world. Our minds and psyches are evolved for close and communal relationships and situations, not terrifying abstractions of worldwide threat and disaster.

The failure to negotiate this process well results in a plethora of largely catastrophic syndromes, symptoms, disorders and panic. If we could become aware of this situation, and track it to some degree, we would be able to mediate the often terrible outcomes that happen when it goes undetected, unmediated, and… occurs in a invisible ladder of ever-more damaging developments within us.