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Communication
(By Alberto Bonizzato – Behavioral Coach)
In this chapter, we begin to analyze the area that is, from all perspectives, the true, unique, and absolute track of the purpose and functional operations of our mind. While on one hand, within the structure of the Emotional Model, primary functionalities evolved for the sole purpose of survival and adaptation, for the human being these conditions have undergone a profound mutation. While in animals adaptive capacities developed primarily to serve immediate biological functions, the human being has gone far beyond this natural biological utility.
By sharpening capacities that are not solely and directly adaptive, man executes his own evolution (cognitive, behavioral, and cultural) without it being necessarily subordinated to the principle of self-preservation. Provocatively, we can assert that almost no other species implements mechanisms and dynamics of self-sabotage and self-destruction in the way man is capable of doing.
In fact, we can observe that in humans, all operational functionalities have converged and developed into the function of relationality—meaning, into communication. Long before birth, the human parent begins to focus expectations and define, in some way, a future for the unborn child. Therefore, relational functions are already activated in the communicative direction of intentions and behaviors. Because these functions are implicit and stereotyped, they profoundly alter the dynamics of the transgenerational transfer of the Emotional Model: mutating it from an elementary-primary-adaptive system, as it would be in nature, into a structured-communicative-representative system.
The Emotional Model anchors its roots in a vast evolutionary process, structured with the primary objective of guaranteeing the individual’s environmental adaptation. In a condition of biological equilibrium (homeostasis), this system operates like an integrated circuit: a continuous flow wherein sensory information produces experiences which, in turn, shape identity through a constant dialectic between perception, action, and processing. At this stage, reality with its empirical feedback is the sole metric of verification.
In the modern human being, however, we witness a functional rupture of this flow. Sensoriality, once the compass of adaptation, is partially decommissioned, losing its function of objective validation. Perception ceases to be an interaction with raw data and becomes abstract and projective.
Consequently, identity no longer rests upon a verified foundation, but upon a presumed structure: the individual stops "being" as a function of reality and begins to perceive themselves within a chain of symbols, behaviors, and representations that simulate the value of the self without ever coinciding with it. This mutation transforms the representation of the self into an obstacle to the adaptive process. Instead of integrating and evolving reality through experiences, modern man activates projective dynamics engineered to avoid them, operating systematically to modify reality itself to conform it to his own mental models. This dysfunction shifts the organism's metabolic energy from the plane of adaptation to that of communication: the human being becomes a permanent emitter of communicative streams, deployed as desperate attempts to manage their own symbolic rank in the world.
Within this mechanics, communication articulates itself across three distinct levels that reflect the structural fragmentation of the individual:
・ The Verbal Level (Cognitive Conscious): This is the domain of the explicit and representative stream. Here, communication is enriched by conscious intentions, structuring itself as a communiqué that responds to a shared rational logic.
・ The Verbal Level (Cognitive Non-Conscious): This is the domain of the explicit and representative stream when driven by inhibitions and operational blockages. Here, communication is fueled by non-conscious intentions, structuring itself as a parallel communiqué to the conscious one, responding to a non-rational, ideological logic of social representation.
・ The Non-Verbal Level (Meta-communication): This is the channel of the implicit and the non-conscious. This stream carries parallel and distinct intentions, frequently in stark contradiction with the verbal plane. It represents the mechanical truth of the mind which, unfiltered by conscious awareness, emerges as an involuntary track of the organism's true intention.
This schism between explicit and implicit intention is merely the reflection of the loss of adherence to sensory data, transforming human communication from a means of informative exchange into a complex theater of mental projections.
Explicit and Implicit Communication
As established in the section detailing the dual layer of intentionality, human communication is highly convoluted. On the verbal level, the individual executes recognizable and apparently objective forms of conscious content. This content emerges and is communicated according to the breadth of the individual's cultural horizon.
In turn, the breadth of the individual's cultural horizon is influenced and determined by their Emotional Model and the resulting experiential archive (identity). When a specific lacuna is present within an Emotional Model, the individual will be conditioned across all levels of their development, constructing a distinct emotional, behavioral, somatic, cultural, and communicative landscape around that deficit.
Within this framework, the person executes verbal communication as the final output of an identity, from which they focalize thoughts and generate words. We can therefore deduce that the correct sequence of explicit communication is: perception of the situation ── formulation of a thought/intention ── formulation of verbal content.
It is fascinating to observe that every active intention (even when co-present) produces an immense quantity of communicative factors. The underlying intention is the least directly communicable part, as it is frequently the absolute synthesis and core purpose of the person's conscious landscape.
Why is it so difficult to make the intention explicit? First, it is often the byproduct of an automated process that is poorly identified on a cognitive level. In many other scenarios, the intention is a fragile, blatant piece of data that simply cannot be expressed in its direct synthesis, as it is strictly subject to environmental parameters such as credibility, competition, power, authority, hierarchy, and suffering. We can state that within explicit communication, intention is the track that guides the person's communicative postures.
Example 1: The "Self-Worth Deficit" Model and Power
・ Context: A project manager must communicate a project delay to their superior.
・ The Lacuna: The individual carries an Emotional Model predicated on the necessity of constant approval to validate their identity (self-worth deficit).
・ Perception of the Situation: The delay is registered not as a technical data point, but as an immediate threat to their credibility, personal value, and professional role.
・ Intention (The Track): To safeguard their self-image and maintain their hierarchical position (an automated and fragile intention).
・ Verbal Communication: "We are currently optimizing specific processes to guarantee superior quality, which will mandate an additional supplement of analysis over the next few days."
・ POMM Analysis: The verbal content is a symbolic representation. The intention to "avoid appearing as a failure" drives the choice of words like optimization instead of error, because the emotional lacuna renders the unvarnished truth unsustainable on the plane of power.
Example 2: The "Victimistic" Model and the Governance of Suffering
・ Context: An individual receives an invitation to a social event they have zero desire to attend.
・ The Lacuna: The individual has internalized a family model where the direct assertion of one's own needs triggers conflict or abandonment.
・ Perception of the Situation: The external invitation is experienced as an overwhelming environmental pressure.
・ Intention (The Track): To decline the invitation without assuming the structural responsibility of the choice, thereby avoiding external judgment (conflict avoidance).
・ Verbal Communication: "I would absolutely love to come, but unfortunately this week I am completely overwhelmed by unforeseen commitments and I feel utterly exhausted, I'm really not sure I can make it."
・ POMM Analysis: The perception-thought-word sequence is distorted by the fragility of the intention. The person does not make the core objective explicit (not attending); instead, they communicate a "landscape of suffering" (exhaustion) as a protective shield to appear credible and unassailable.
Example 3: The "Conflictual" Model and Competition
・ Context: During a technical briefing, a colleague proposes an idea superior to one's own.
・ The Lacuna: The individual's identity is constructed upon competitive emulation: "I exist only if I outshine the other."
・ Perception of the Situation: The other's idea is registered not as a collaborative contribution to the workflow, but as a direct loss of personal authority and rank.
・ Intention (The Track): To neutralize the "competitor" to restore one's own spatial centrality (an automated process).
・ Verbal Communication: "The approach is interesting in theory, but within the real-world context, it presents critical flaws that perhaps you haven't fully evaluated. We should stick to more verified standards."
・ POMM Analysis: The individual's cultural horizon constricts around the lacuna. The intention of "territorial defense" drives the communicative posture toward doubt and devaluation, converting the verbal content into an instrument of power rather than an exchange of information.
Synthesis of the Mechanics in the Examples
In all three scenarios, the true intention remains the least communicable component because:
1. It is automated: The subject is frequently oblivious to the fact that they are actively shielding their internal model deficit.
2. It is subject to social parameters: Making the true file explicit—such as "I am terrified that you will no longer respect me" (Example 1) or "I need to devalue you to feel superior" (Example 3)—would instantly obliterate the person's credibility and authority. These are things that socially cannot be said.
Dynamics of Emotional Alteration: Evolutionary Curiosity vs. Fear
The alteration of the ordinary emotional state determines a sharp bifurcation in the modality through which the individual perceives reality and, consequently, communicates. This shift away from equilibrium activates two polar biological conditions: the escalation of Evolutionary Curiosity (attraction/exploration) or the exasperation of Fear (defense/conservation).
1. The Setup of Evolutionary Curiosity: Assertiveness and Coherence
When the individual elevates their level of interest toward the environment, a severe enhancement of attention and proactive processes occurs. In this state, the communicative stream becomes authentically assertive: the explicit and implicit levels maintain flawless structural coherence.
The individual, even when displaying an intensity that may cross into functional aggressiveness, preserves relational flexibility and self-mastery, remaining fully capable of modulating behavior based on real-world feedback. Here, the mind remains open to learning, and the emotional dynamics are bound to the external reality in a continuous adaptive loop.
2. The Setup of Fear: Incoherence and Defensive Conflict
Conversely, when the autonomic arousal is dominated by Fear, communication diverges into defensive or overtly conflictual modalities. The perception of being under attack generates a fracture between the two communicative levels: while the Limbic System instigates flight or defensive attack, social conventions and relational obligations mandate physical presence.
The intention thus decomposes into an insoluble conflict between the desire for withdrawal and the obligation of attendance, feeding a metabolic tension that remains confined within the domain of the non-conscious.
In this condition, apparent assertiveness is betrayed by a constant hunt for external validation (external Locus of Control). The individual triggers conflicts—either extroverted into authority or introverted into victimhood—that preclude all operational flexibility, over-structuring destructive moral proejections and consolidating a self-representation as a helpless victim.
The Mechanics of Guilt and the Depletion of Efficacy
The dominance of Fear produces a profound communicative paradox: while on the explicit level the subject asserts their arguments, on the implicit level they declare themselves structurally ineffective. The activation of this specific alarm arousal generates a generic, persistent sense of guilt that acts by systematically eroding the individual's objective credibility and authentic authority.
It is within the implicit communication that the most convoluted layers of the Familial Emotional Model emerge: a dense tangle of defense mechanisms, moral legitimations, and compensatory strategies that condemn the subject to a sterile, repetitive communicative redundancy.
Emotional Contagion and the Authoritarian Spiral
This operational divergence assumes critical relevance within therapeutic and educational contexts. Fear tends to transfer between interlocutors through a system of "mirrors": an individual executing a fear arousal unconsciously induces the exact same metabolic state in the other, uniforming the implicit content of the relationship.
A perfect example is observed within the family environment, where parental apprehension translates into a rigid, normative inflexibility designed solely to soothe the parent's own anxiety of inefficacy. The child, registering this apprehension as entirely unjustified by the raw facts of reality, reacts by rejecting the rule, completely independent of its objective merit.
A closed circuit is thus established: the drive toward authoritarian models, deployed as a shield against internal insecurity, distorts environmental feedback and binds the interlocutor to subordinate responses. This "fictitious stability" does nothing but validate the foundational fear, blocking any real adaptive verification and consolidating a permanent sense of impotence.
Functional Interaction: Communication and Behavior as an Indissoluble Unit
Within contemporary relational dialectics, a mistaken tendency exists to separate communication from behavior, categorizing the former as an exchange phenomenon between subjects and the latter as an individual act restricted to the isolated actor. This dichotomy rests exclusively upon the superficial system of explicit/cognitive communication, completely ignoring the absolute weight of meta-communication and indirect streams.
In objective reality, the mere coexistence of two individuals within a shared perceptual space obliterates any possibility of non-relation: even in the total absence of verbal exchanges, the subjects find themselves in a state of relational preview (anteprima relazionale) wherein mutual consideration is mathematically unavoidable.
[ENVIRONMENTAL STIMOLO]
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[RESONANCE WITH THE MODEL]
(Limbic System / Amygdala Activation)
│
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[PRE-COMMUNICATIVE POSTURE]
(Immediate Revelation of Dominant Arousal)
│
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[MUTUAL TRACK CONDITIONING]
(Collision of Two Self-Referential Projective Systems)
The individual enters an active communicative condition the exact millisecond they perceive an environmental stimulus that resonates with their internal system. This activation recruits the dynamics of the limbic Emotional Model, pre-disposing the organism to pre-determined postures and setups.
These dynamisms, which ignite the moment a relational encounter profiles itself—even if purely hypothetical or anticipatory—are configured according to the past schemas of the identity Self. It is in this phase that the pre-communicative attitude is determined: an anticipatory state that immediately reveals which emotional configuration is dominant and, reflexively, what type of reactivity the interlocutor will manifest in the imminent interaction.
Thus, a mechanics of mutual conditioning emerges: the expressiveness assumed by the first subject operates as a non-conscious track, directing the reactive states of the other. This process moves along the linear axis of perception-emotion-behavior—which is the foundational platform of projective activity. On this plane, the two interlocutors do not interact with raw reality; they interpret one another through the overlapping of their respective projections.
In this scenario, the primary Emotional Dynamics operate as a strict selective filter: the individual registers only a fraction of the signals emitted by the other—specifically those that resonate with their own internal model. The inevitable output is an interpretative misunderstanding: the subject tends to attribute objective value and deliberate intentionality to signals they believe are directed toward them, even when those signals are mere automated expressions of the interlocutor's internal mechanics. The relationship, therefore, configures itself not as a dialogue, but as a blind collision between two self-referential projective systems.
Symbolic Communication: Strategies of Control and Feedback Prediction
The phenomenology of human communication reveals itself as a vast, stratified ecosystem whose determining vectors reside predominantly within the non-conscious domain. Within this landscape, symbolic communication emerges as a fundamental device, engineered to carry functional intentions through the deployment of behavioral representations and stereotypes aimed at activating specific relational dynamics.
These dynamics do not answer exclusively to a search for "positive" gratification; they are frequently calibrated to replicate learned family schemas of suffering. Viewed through this perspective, the deep deficits of the individual manifest through the exhibition of symbolic behaviors which, acting as direct stimuli, force specific emotional postures and reactions upon the interlocutor.
Individual identity possesses highly refined predictive maps: action-reaction schemas consolidated by repetitive experience that allow the subject to target non-conscious objectives with mathematical precision. This "adaptive implicit communication" guarantees the subject absolute control over the relational outcome, locking the interaction within pre-determined tracks.
Relational Control via Symbolized Content
The symbol acts simultaneously as a defensive barrier and an instrument of dominance. If an individual shifts the plane of discourse toward highly codified themes—such as the intellectual rhetoric surrounding art or rigid alignment with absolute ideologies—they are not merely exchanging information; they are framing the relationship within social platitudes.
Through this mechanic, the subject secures absolute control: an interlocutor wishing to deviate from this rigid frame would find it structurally impossible to be understood or accepted, forced into the metabolic exhaustion of defending non-symbolic positions against contents perceived by the other as "absolute truths."
Glarirng examples of this mechanic are observed in figures like the fanatical sports ultra or a military officer within official protocols. In both scenarios, the individual executes attitudes of absolute conviction over matters that are, by their very nature, relative. This "absoluteness" is the exact symbolized content required to neutralize relational anomalies and safeguard a self-referential stability.
Mimicry and Sign Automation
The vectors of implicit communication are frequently camouflaged within micro-gestures and stereotyped intentions that completely elude superficial observation. These are automated dynamisms, seamlessly integrated into the expressive form, operating safely below the threshold of conscious awareness.
In summary, the posture and kinetics of non-conscious communication respond to a dynamic of a purely symbolic nature: they are calibrated to induce a controlled emotional state in the other, ensuring the communicator extracts the exact feedback mandated by their Emotional Model. Symbolic communication thus configures itself as a guarantee of result—a security protocol designed to protect the individual from the dangerous uncertainty of authentic, unscripted exchange.
The Cultural Limits of Explicit Communication: The Delay of Thought
It is a verified axiom within the Perspective of Observation of Mind Mechanics (POMM) that the cognitive knowledge of a pathology or suffering does not imply, ipso facto, its operational resolution. This discrepancy resides within the functional hierarchy of the organism: the cognitive and rational sphere activates exclusively as an epifenomenon of a specific emotional posture.
In other words, the processing of thought is chronologically and functionally subsequent to the primary emotional activation.
[LIMBIC ARPOSAL ACTIVATION (EMOTIONAL MODEL)]
│
▼
[UNCONSCIOUS STREAM]
(Automated Communication)
│
▼
[COGNITIVE THOUGHT]
(Terminal Epifenomenon / Too Late)
This sequence, which defines projective activity, establishes a strict separation between the emergence of arousal within the Limbic System (the primary Emotional Model) and the activity of thought. The latter configures itself as the subordinate terminal output of a chain of non-conscious emotional and communicative phenomena.
Consequently, thought, intervening at the very end of the process, cannot exert any preventive control over the emotional dynamic, as its intervention is structurally and chronologically too late. The widespread cultural notion that "knowing and understanding" constitutes the first step toward resolution reveals itself as a mere social stereotype: a platitude that has systematically failed to deliver functional resolution.
The Cultural Superstructure as an Evolutionary Barrier
Paradoxically, the very definition of a problem can transform into the absolute barrier that blocks the comprehension of the processes generating it. The evolution and update of a condition of suffering demand emotionally transformative real-world experiences, not mere cognitive deepenings.
Cultural enrichment does not produce a reconciliation between the representation of the Self and the emotional identity of the Model; on the contrary, it frequently contributes to over-structuring defense behaviors that entrench the suffering.
In the act of hunting for cultural tools to "understand themselves," the individual frequently ends up implementing an adaptation to their own suffering, conforming tightly to the social and cognitive representation that culture offers of that specific distress. As observed by Erich Fromm in Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, subjects tend to adapt to the social roles dictated by the prejudices of the community.
This phenomenon is a derivation of the plasticity of the Emotional Model which, in its desperate attempt to stabilize its identity, molds itself under the percussive pressure of its culture of belonging.
Identification with the Representation
Although the modern individual is less exposed to the raw, direct environmental pressures of the past, the mechanisms of identity development have simply migrated onto new social and media vectors. The underlying function remains entirely unaltered: the mind weaponizes culture to generate adaptations, never to produce freedom.
Psychological sufferings map themselves precisely within this automation, fueled by the subject's identification with theoretical explanations which, far from resolving the internal conflict, offer nothing more than a codified and, therefore, static representation of it.
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