Isaac Asimov once remarked that the most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."

And what could be funnier than the fact that our brains—those magnificent squishy machines—respond to beauty in music with an intricate dance of connectivity, while responding to non-beautiful music with the neural equivalent of a polite shrug?

A recent study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts sought to decode what happens in the brain when we experience musical beauty.

Researchers Ruijiao Dai, Petri Toiviainen, Peter Vuust, Thomas Jacobsen, and Elvira Brattico used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how different regions of the brain communicate when we hear music that moves us.

Their findings suggest that when a piece of music is perceived as beautiful, brain regions responsible for reward and visual processing engage in a unique synchrony, while music perceived as "meh" keeps the brain stuck in more primitive auditory processing loops.

Simone Weil, the philosopher, mystic, and social activist, offers profound insights that, when applied to family therapy, create a value system centered on radical attention, humility, truth, and the sacredness of human relationships.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

Weil’s thought challenges modern notions of power and self-interest, replacing them with a call to self-emptying love (décréation) and an intense, non-possessive regard for others.

What emerges is a family therapy philosophy that prioritizes attention over control, truth over comfort, and suffering as a site of meaning rather than pathology.

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a human tuning fork, a highly sensitive person, highly neurodivergent, vibrating with every sorrow of the world.

She lived like a woman who read the Gospels and said, "Alright, let's see if this works," and then decided to find out the hard way.

Was she a philosopher, a mystic, or a secular saint?

All three. Or maybe none.

Titles didn’t interest her. Only truth did. Simone lived her 34 years with a saintly, almost asinine integrity.

So, it turns out cats have attachment styles. Just like dogs. Just like babies. Just like you. Just like me.

This is unsettling news for a few reasons.

First, it suggests that your cat might actually care about you—or not. Second, it means science has taken another bold step in proving that nothing is special, not even our relationships with our pets.

And third, it means some poor researcher spent their days filming cats to confirm what any cat owner could have told them over a glass of wine: some cats like you, some cats tolerate you, and some cats would burn your house down if they had opposable thumbs.

Love is a drug.

Not in the poetic, “You’re my addiction, baby” way.

In the literal, neurobiological sense.

Your brain, right now, is running on an attachment-based dopamine economy—one that was programmed by your earliest relationships.

• If love was inconsistent, your brain learned to crave the highs and lows.

• If love was unavailable, your brain learned that wanting is safer than having.

• If love was painful, your brain wired itself to expect suffering.

This is not a metaphor.

This is dopaminergic conditioning.

And if you don’t reprogram your brain’s reward system, you will keep chasing the same kind of relationships over and over—no matter how much therapy you do.

So let’s talk about it.

You did it.

You set the boundary. You said no. You left the toxic relationship. You stepped out of the family’s preordained emotional contract.

And now?

Now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your hands are sweating. Your heart is racing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted but wired. Every cell in your body is screaming:

• Go back.

• Fix it.

• Apologize.

• Do whatever it takes to restore balance.

This is not a sign you made the wrong decision.You set the boundary. You said no. You left the toxic relationship. You stepped out of the family’s preordained emotional contract.

And now?

Now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your hands are sweating. Your heart is racing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted but wired. Every cell in your body is screaming:

• Go back.

• Fix it.

• Apologize.

• Do whatever it takes to restore balance.

This is not a sign you made the wrong decision.

This is your nervous system recalibrating after a lifetime of being programmed for survival.

If you want to test your commitment to personal growth, tell your family you’re in therapy.

Watch their faces.

• Your mother may will get defensive, even though you never mentioned her.

• Your father may make a sarcastic joke about "overanalyzing everything."

• Your sibling might say, "But your childhood wasn’t that bad."

And you?

You might start doubting yourself.

• Am I making too big of a deal out of things?

• Maybe I should keep the peace instead of stirring things up.

• Am I the problem?

No, you are not.

But you have violated a sacred rule:

You have disrupted the family’s homeostasis—the invisible force that keeps everyone locked in their roles, no matter how much it hurts them.

And the system?

It will fight to restore order.

Most theories in psychoanalysis focus on what we remember, what we repress, or what we try to forget. But Christopher Bollas took a different approach.

He asked:

• What about the things we know, but have never consciously thought about?

• What about the truths that shape our emotions and behaviors, even though they have never been fully articulated?

• What happens to knowledge that is never hidden—but is also never spoken?

This led him to one of the most influential yet under-discussed ideas in modern psychoanalysis: the unthought known—a concept that helps explain intergenerational trauma, family dynamics, and the silent forces that shape our lives.

To fully grasp the power of this idea, we need to go back through the history of psychoanalysis and understand how Bollas built on, challenged, and expanded the theories of his predecessors.

If most therapy is about careful conversations and polite interventions, Carl Whitaker was the guy who kicked down the door and asked why everyone inside was pretending to be dead.

Family therapy, as he saw it, had become a sterile exercise in analysis, where therapists nodded thoughtfully while families explained—yet again—why they were trapped in the same miserable patterns.

Whitaker thought this was absurd. Families don’t think their way into dysfunction, so why would thinking alone get them out

His Symbolic-Experiential Therapy was a theatrical, absurd, improvisational rebellion against traditional therapy models.

He disrupted families, not because he wanted to humiliate them, but because he knew that only a jarring emotional experience could break the spell of generational dysfunction.

This wasn’t therapy as diagnosis. This was therapy as art, as performance, as psychological guerrilla warfare.

And it worked.

Have you ever felt inexplicably guilty about your own success? Or noticed that, despite your best efforts, you keep repeating your parents’ struggles?

Maybe you find yourself over-functioning for your family—always stepping in as the caretaker, the fixer, or the problem-solver—while your own needs take a backseat.

You’re not alone. This isn’t just a personal quirk or random life pattern. It’s likely the result of invisible loyalties, an unconscious force that binds family members together across generations.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Polyvagal Theory, or at least about vagus nerves, which sound suspiciously like something from a Jules Verne novel.

And yet, here we are, dealing with them every day, in every conversation, in every awkward first date where someone brings up their childhood trauma before the drinks arrive.

Dr. Stephen Porges (2011) introduced Polyvagal Theory, which, in simple terms, explains why your nervous system is either helping you connect with other people—or convincing you that those people are trying to kill you.

And if Porges was right, then civilization itself is just an elaborate mechanism for nervous systems to co-regulate, a grand and ridiculous social experiment where humans keep pretending they aren’t slightly feral animals.

Once upon a time, a baby reached out for its mother, and the mother—distracted by war, economic collapse, or just a really addictive TV show—failed to respond. That’s how it begins. Attachment wounds.

Or maybe it was worse.

Maybe the baby reached out, and the mother responded unpredictably—sometimes with love, sometimes with rage, sometimes not at all. That’s the stuff that rewires a nervous system before a kid can even pronounce "nervous system."

Bessel van der Kolk (2014) laid this all out in The Body Keeps the Score, a book that made countless readers have to put it down every few pages and say, “Oh. Oh, no!”

He argued that our early relationships—particularly the ones where caregivers are supposed to be our safe harbor but instead turn out to be Category 5 hurricanes—create lasting wounds.

And not just metaphorical wounds, but literal, biological changes in the brain.