The Hijacked Animal

I have credentials. Psychology degree, years working with data, AI and human behavior. By most definitions, I could call myself an expert in several things.

I won't.

Not because I'm being modest.

Because in the domain this essay is about—your own felt experience—no credential from outside can make you an expert. Only you have access.

Here's what I've come to suspect: many of us are not thinking. We're executing. Running patterns that feel like thought but update from nothing, respond to nothing. While underneath, the body keeps signaling and gets ignored. Or worse: harvested.

But there's a flicker that happens sometimes.

A half-second where something feels off and the words coming out of your mouth don't quite match what’s underneath. Most people override it instantly. Their framework provides the next sentence and the moment passes. This essay is about that flicker.

I can't give you answers about your own experience—only you have access to that. But I might be able to offer a frame that helps you notice what was already there.

Before describing what capture looks like, I need to name what makes it possible.

CARE and PANIC/GRIEF are ancient mammalian systems. We need connection to survive. Not metaphorically, literally. Infants die without touch. Adults deteriorate in isolation.

A person with secure attachment has a buffer. They can tolerate uncertainty, hold beliefs lightly, risk disagreement, because their belonging isn't at stake in every conversation.

A person with relational trauma is in a different situation. They're operating in chronic panic about belonging. The question "am I in or out?" never settles.

Into this vacuum, ideology offers something irresistible: unconditional belonging, as long as you believe. Community, identity, purpose. Bundled. The price is your independent evaluation.

For someone already in PANIC, that's not a hard sell. The ideology doesn't need to be particularly convincing. It just needs to offer tribe.

This is the entry point. Everything else follows.

Consider a person captured by ideology. Not someone who holds political opinions (that's normal). I mean someone whose relationship to reality is mediated by a system that tells them what things mean, what to feel, how to interpret their own experience.

You've seen it. Someone mentions a word: "capitalism," "therapy," "patriarchy,” and you watch it happen. Their eyes shift and something reorganizes behind their face. They're no longer in conversation and you can see them running a script instead. The words come out fluent, maybe passionate. But nobody's home.

While it’s obvious from outside, from inside it feels like relief and the tension of not-knowing dissolving, as the framework takes over. Suddenly everything seems clear:

Who's right, who's wrong. What this means. What to do.

That clarity feels like truth, but it's not. It's the feeling of a load being lifted, while the load was the weight of having to figure things out yourself.

There are systems in the mammalian brain that evaluate the world before cognition arrives. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp mapped them—circuits like FEAR, RAGE, CARE—present across species. Not metaphors, but hardware, that’s there to process and evaluate information. FEAR says: "bad, move away." These evaluations feel like something.

In the captured person, these systems still run. They're biological; you can't uninstall them. But a linguistic layer now intercepts the signals and reinterprets them.

You feel exhaustion → "I'm being lazy, push through."
You feel something's wrong in your relationship → "I'm just being needy."
You feel grief → "I should be over this by now."

Notice: none of these even require a cult.

No guru, no manifesto. Just a story that gives you permission not to listen.

Productivity culture can do this. Therapy-speak can do this. Spirituality, politics, stoicism, self-optimization, and any moralistic framework. Things turn ideological the moment they remove the burden of ownership regarding your inner movements. Ideologies are quick to tell you what feelings really mean before you've even had the chance to sit, experience and discover yourself.

The capture doesn't announce itself. It dictates the next thought and may feel smooth as common sense.

There's something worse than suppression.

Sometimes ideology doesn't override affect but channels it. RAGE arises, and instead of being reinterpreted away, it's validated: "Yes, hate them. They are the enemy. Your anger is righteous."

This feels like aliveness. Finally, a framework that lets me feel! But look closer.

The affect is never allowed to be information about you. It's never a signal to examine your own boundaries, your own needs. It's fuel. The ideology harvests your emotional energy for its own propagation.

A feeling that serves growth eventually resolves something. It moves you, changes you, completes a cycle. A feeling that serves ideology just keeps burning. Intense, real-seeming, but it never leads anywhere except more of the same.

This is worse than suppression because it mimics authenticity. You're not numb. You're feeling! But you're being milked.

The suppressed person shows symptoms: anxiety, somatization, exhaustion, eventual breakdown. The body keeps sending signals that get overridden, and this has costs.

The instrumentalized person may show none of this. Just a life spent in reactive intensity that never builds toward anything. A fire that warms no one, least of all them.

Most captured people experience both modes (suppression for some affects, instrumentalization for others). The ideology decides which feelings serve it and which threaten it.

To understand how this 'not listening' becomes a permanent state, we have to look at the architecture of how systems (biological and artificial) actually learn.

To see what's happening in the hijacked human, it helps to look at how machines learn (and stop learning).

AI systems have two modes.

During training: error signals drive change. The model gets something wrong, adjusts, gets it less wrong.

During inference: frozen. It executes what it learned but no longer updates. No signal says "that was wrong." It just outputs.

Biological systems don't work this way. Touch a hot stove: FEAR activates, pain right now, new associations form, behavior shifts. Evaluation and learning happen together, continuously. There is no "inference mode" where the animal executes without feeling and learning.

The ideologically captured human is a strange third thing.

The biological evaluation still runs (it has to, it's hardware). But a linguistic system intercepts the signals, reinterprets them, prevents them from driving change.

Ideology functions like a model stuck in inference. Given any input, it produces an output. Internally consistent. But not learning from error, just applying its patterns, while actively defending them when challenged.

The result: a living animal acting like it's running inference, while underneath the body screams, or gets harvested for fuel.

Everything so far might suggest: get out of your head, into your body. Feel what's there.

But it's not that simple.

There's a difference between sensation (raw data arriving now) and somatic reaction (stored patterns firing in response to triggers), even though both feel like "the body." One is information about the present; the other is the past replaying.

Relational trauma—the kind that forms early, sometimes before language—is experienced in the body. Someone who learned that closeness means danger doesn't just think this.

They feel it.

Their nervous system fires alarm at intimacy. And the head helps maintain it, producing stories that justify the somatic alarm.

"People can't be trusted."
"I'm better off alone."

However, it can also manifest in a compulsive care-taking pattern with different narratives:

“They can’t survive without my support.”
“I need to save them.“

The linguistic and somatic layers reinforce each other in a loop that can run for decades without anyone noticing it's there.

This is the belonging wound from Part I, in a perpetual holding pattern.

Relational trauma doesn't just make capture possible. It is capture's prototype. The first frozen pattern that propagates itself, and serves as template for all the others.

So "just drop into the body" can be naive. If the body carries frozen relational patterns, the compass itself is bent. The signals you're following might be the wound talking.

And getting support doesn't automatically help. The wrong support just gives you a new stage to re-enact the old pattern. Years of talk therapy with someone who isn't trauma-informed. You may keep circling and nothing shifts. And eventually (because the wound is about belonging) you start telling them it's helping. Not because it is, but because disappointing them feels like death.

That's the pattern, still running. Now wearing the mask of healing.

How do we switch the system back from inference to training?

The body is already sending error signals (that's what symptoms are). But the system can't update while in survival mode. An animal in panic doesn't integrate.

What's needed is relationship safe enough to let the evaluation and learning systems do the natural work. The felt sense that deep intimacy won't be fatal and vulnerability won't be punished.

I could give you criteria for "safe enough." But I won't. That would be the head trying to solve a problem that is purely experience. And the whole difficulty is that the wound distorts the instrument you'd use to evaluate safety.

What I can say: this usually requires contact with someone specifically skilled in relational trauma. Not advice, not frameworks, not talk therapy that circles the wound without touching it. Someone who can catch the pattern when it tries to run—including when it runs on them.

The essay you're reading can't provide that. Neither can any book, any solo practice, any retreat into self-sufficiency. The wound is about belonging and you can't fix it alone.

I tried.

It's just the wound talking.

I should say what makes me think I can see any of this.

For some time I've practiced Ehrliches Mitteilen (Honest Sharing) from the work of German trauma therapist Gopal Norbert Klein. At its core: sit with trusted others and share what's actually happening in experience, beneath interpretation.

Not: "I'm angry because you did X."

Rather: "I feel anger. I sense heat in my chest. My head thinks that I want to clench my fists."

First-person felt reality, before meaning.

I'm not offering this as The Solution. It's where I've had experiences that sensitized me to these dynamics. After enough practice (and my own share of relational trauma therapy), I started noticing how quickly sensation becomes story. How automatically language colonizes feeling.

And I notice the gap. The space between something arising in the body and the mind claiming it with a concept. That gap is where capture happens. It's also where freedom lives.

There are many ways to open this gap. Sitting practices, movement, therapy, certain conversations. The method matters less than the territory it opens. Though I'll note: many of these communities are themselves pervaded with ideology, sometimes used to mask relational trauma even by facilitators. The container can become another capture.

I'm not saying conceptual thought is bad. Or that ideology is always wrong in content. Or that we should become mute animals following impulse.

The linguistic system is powerful and necessary. It lets us coordinate, plan, build civilizations, write essays like this one. But it can decouple from the evaluative ground that should inform it. When that happens, it spins freely—confident, coherent, disconnected from reality.

The check is not better arguments or more correct ideology. It's the body, still feeling, still evaluating, still signaling. And if the body carries old wounds: relationship safe enough to let the old patterns finally move.

I don't know why biology produces felt experience and silicon probably doesn't. I don't know if these analogies are deep truths or loose metaphors that happen to illuminate.

What I trust is the feeling of aliveness when I drop below interpretation into direct experience (and start treating it as “data” that’s okay to share within the bounds of safe relationships).

That feels different from executing a pattern.

Whether this difference is ontologically fundamental or just how it seems from inside—I can't say.

But the difference matters for how I live. To me, that's enough.

You're the only expert on your experience.