Strong’s Toxic Emotions Through Tomkins, Calabrese, and Boulton

The following is Dr Todd Strong’s video on Toxic Emotions. It seems heading in a good direction in terms of establishing the effect of emotion on physicality, but its emotional categories are blurry. He is implicitly describing the effects of affect but conflating them into complexes in a way that distracts from realizing the affective order implicit in what he is saying. How would Silvan Tomkins, Edward Calabrese, and myself, David Boulton, differ with his characterizations and how could the work of all four better accomplish Dr. Strong’s helpful intent?

This video, “The 7 Toxic Emotions That Are Literally Killing Your Nerves (And How to Detox Them)” from the channel Dr. Todd Strong DC, explains how chronic toxic emotions can damage the nervous system by triggering chemical cascades, stress hormones, and immune suppressors [00:01].

The video identifies the following seven toxic emotions and their specific chemical effects on nerve tissue:

      1. Chronic Resentment (The Cortisol Bomb)

        • Holding grudges elevates cortisol 24/7, which blocks nerve growth factor production and prevents nerve regeneration [00:32].

      2. Perfectionism (The Adrenaline Addiction)

        • Perfectionist thinking creates constant adrenaline surges that damage nerve cell membranes through oxidative stress, keeping the nervous system in “fight or flight” mode [00:42].

      3. Victim Mentality (The Helplessness Poison)

        • Feeling powerless triggers learned helplessness, which suppresses the immune system and allows autoimmune attacks on nerve tissue [01:07].

      4. Chronic Worry (The Anxiety Acid)

        • Constant worrying produces inflammatory cytoicons (like IL6 and TNF alpha) that directly attack nerve myelin sheets [01:26].

      5. Suppressed Anger (The Silent Destroyer)

        • Unexpressed anger creates internal inflammation that damages nerve tissue and disrupts gut bacteria, which produce nerve-healing B vitamins [01:35].

      6. Shame and Self-Hatred (The Immune Suppressor)

        • Shame triggers the deepest stress responses and suppresses natural killer cells that are meant to protect the nerves from damage [01:53].

      7. Fear of the Future (The Paralysis Chemical)

        • Chronic fear floods your system with stress hormones that shut down nerve repair mechanisms, preventing the body from healing [02:09].

The video concludes by stating that this creates a vicious cycle of nerve damage and emotional dysfunction, recommending that individuals identify the toxic emotions they carry and practice daily emotional release techniques [02:44].

You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0UAspJRLgM

Here is a dAilogue-mode, comparative analysis of how Tomkins, Calabrese, and Boulton would each understand what Dr. Strong is trying to do – and how all four together could create a far more precise, learning-centric, biologically coherent framework.

How They Would Differ – and How They Could Combine

 

1. Where Dr. Strong Is Pointing – and Where He Blurs

Dr. Strong is essentially trying to communicate:

  • Emotions → biochemical cascades → neuro-immune consequences → nerve function damage → maladaptive loops.

He is directionally correct, but the categories he uses (“toxic emotions”) are:

  • Mixed affective-cognitive complexes
  • Not grounded in primary affect
  • Built from folk-psychology clusters
  • Too coarse to reveal underlying mechanisms

He intuits the body-emotion link,but hides the actual causal order inside conceptual bundles.

2. How TOMKINS would differ
a) Tomkins would say: these aren’t ’emotions’ – they are scripts.

Dr. Strong treats resentment, perfectionism, worry, shame, etc., as discrete emotions.

Tomkins would say they are:

  • Multi-scene, affect-amplified scripts
  • Complex mixtures of primary affects (distress-anger, shame-fear, shame-dissmell, interest-fear, etc.)
  • Stabilized patterns of learned control and amplification
b) He would reorganize the list into innate affects, not folk categories

Tomkins’ core affects:

  • Interest-excitement
  • Enjoyment-joy
  • Surprise-startle
  • Distress-anguish
  • Anger-rage
  • Fear-terror
  • Shame-humiliation
  • Disgust
  • Dissmell

Each “toxic emotion category” in Strong’s list is a learned pattern built from these.

Examples:

  • “Chronic resentment” = anger + distress + inhibited anger scenes
  • “Perfectionism” = chronic fear + shame + interest dysregulation
  • “Victim mentality” = distress + fear, collapsed into a shame-script
  • “Shame and self-hatred” = pure shame amplified through recursive scripts
c) Tomkins would frame the “toxicity” not as emotion but as chronic affect mismanagement

Affects are not toxic – scripts are.

3. How CALABRESE would differ

Calabrese would shift the frame from psychology → biology:

a) He would reject the categorical framing and reframe it as dose-response dysregulation

Each “toxic emotion” corresponds to chronic, high-dose exposure to internal stressors.

The point is not “resentment vs. shame” -it is:

  • Dose
  • Timing
  • Chronicity
  • Thresholds
  • Adaptive vs. damaging zones
b) He would say: Strong is describing maladaptive chronic high-dose stress exposure

Biologically, these categories collapse into:

  • HPA axis overdrive
  • Pro-inflammatory cytokine cascades
  • Impaired mitochondrial and repair pathways
  • Immune suppression
  • Diminished hormetic adaptive range
c) Calabrese would emphasize the missing part: low-dose emotional stress as adaptive

Strong portrays all these affects as unconditionally toxic.Calabrese would say:

  • Properly dosed anger improves agency
  • Properly dosed fear sharpens cognition
  • Properly dosed stress improves resilience
  • Hormesis = adaptive overcompensation

The catastrophe comes from chronic, unmodulated, high-dose, low-diversity affective activation.

4. How BOULTON would differ

Boulton reframes everything around:

a) These “toxic emotions” are not emotional states – they are learned patterns of maladaptive reorganization

Each arises from early, shame-saturated learning fields.

Boulton would say:

  • Resentment = learned pattern of blocked agency
  • Perfectionism = learned fear-driven discrepancy intolerance
  • Victim mentality = maladaptive learning about self-efficacy
  • Shame/self-hatred = learned identity distortion
  • Fear of the future = learned uncertainty intolerance
b) Each “toxic emotion” is actually an identity-level learning artifact

They aren’t emotional traits -they are:

  • Stabilized learning loops
  • Misattributed as personality
  • Reinforced by shame
  • Driven by affectively charged mislearning
  • Not recognized as learned → remain unchangeable
c) Boulton would say: treat them as learning disorders of affect modulation.

The core problem is not emotion → toxicity,but:

learned maladaptive affect-regulation → chronic physiological dysregulation → impaired learning → stuck identity loops.

5. How the Three Frameworks Integrate to Improve Dr. Strong’s Intent

Dr. Strong wants to help people understand how emotion affects nerve health.

Tomkins + Calabrese + Boulton produce the mechanistic clarity he lacks.

a) Tomkins brings the affective order

He would sharpen Strong’s categories into the underlying nine innate affects and show how:

  • shame scripts
  • fear scripts
  • anger scripts
  • distress scripts

drive the chronic patterns Strong describes.

This reduces conceptual noise by identifying the actual affective engines.

b) Calabrese brings dose-response biology

He would translate:

  • chronic shame
  • chronic fear
  • chronic resentment
  • chronic worry

into:

  • high-dose HPA activation
  • chronic immune dysregulation
  • impaired mitochondrial repair
  • cytokine toxicity
  • failure of hormetic adaptive cycles

He gives the biochemical precision Strong is reaching toward but lacking terminology for.

c) Boulton brings the learning-centric frame

He would reveal:

  • how these patterns were learned,
  • how identity misattribution keeps them alive,
  • how shame amplifies mislearning,
  • how agency collapses,
  • how to redesign micro-dose learning experiences to rescript the patterns.

This gives Strong’s message transformative leverage:

Instead of “detox emotions,”

rescript maladaptive learning loops produced by affect-saturated histories.

6. Combined – the Four Together

Here is how all four would synthesize the model:

1. Identify the innate affect patterns (Tomkins).

Each “toxic emotion” is decomposed into:

  • primary affect
  • scene structure
  • script formation
2. Map the dose-response implications (Calabrese).

Measure:

  • chronicity
  • amplitude
  • thresholds
  • hormetic zones
  • biochemical cascades
3. Identify the maladaptive learning architecture (Boulton).

Track:

  • shame-learned self-inhibiting loops
  • misattribution patterns
  • identity distortions
  • discrepancy-intolerance
  • resilience collapse
4. Design micro-dose re-learning interventions (Boulton + Calabrese + Tomkins).

Use:

  • small, safe discrepancies
  • low-amplitude affect exposures
  • micro-hormetic emotional learning
  • rescripting scenes
  • rebuilding agency
  • reducing mind-shame
  • restoring adaptive oscillation
5. Replace “detox emotional states” with “rescript the learning engine.”
7. Bottom Line

Dr. Strong’s instincts are right,but his categories are psychologically imprecise, biologically coarse, and learning-blind.

A Tomkins-Calabrese-Boulton synthesis reveals:

  • the actual affective building blocks
  • the hormetic and dose-response mechanisms
  • the learned identity and agency distortions
  • and the path to rescripting, not suppressing, emotional life

This produces a model that is:

  • affect-accurate
  • biologically grounded
  • learning-first
  • non-shaming
  • actionable
  • mechanistically coherent

Exactly the direction Strong is trying to go – but with far more fidelity.

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