Burning In: Emotional Regulation for the Twenty-First Century is anchored in what is regarded as natural human experience, how humans behaved in the ancestral environment (AE), the circumstances we evolved to cope with, foraging in small groups on the African savanna.

 

Love was not a hard-to-attain ideal, but part of the day-to-day survival strategy of those groups. They shared goods with one another and had each other's backs. Physically life was a struggle, but it was emotionally very warm. These days most of us in the first world have much less difficulty meeting our physiological needs, but we have more emotional dissatisfaction. In the AE, our forebearers had to contend with predators and exposure to the elements, not to mention the possibility of disease or infection. But they felt safe, because they faced those difficulties as a group.

 

Today, people face other problems, like money and work and residence, but more often do so alone. When people are subject to a chronic sense of danger, they can experience learned helplessness or an acquiescence to the presence of danger, such that when they are away from the danger, they still feel unsafe. This can result in a reduced expectancy to regulate emotions, so they might feel unable to regulate emotion without external means, such as drugs, sex, violence, or gambling; in other words, addiction.

 

The mindset of gambling structures addictive pursuits; like, the addict believes that the next high, the next score, the next relationship, will be the one that sets them up for life. The remedy for that is autotelic behavior, where the doing of the behavior is rewarding in itself, not because of the outcome. It helps if the behavior has benefits for other people, reinforcing that social network.

 

These are some of the arguments in Burning In, but there's a lot more!