The Instinctual Cycle

The biological instinctual drives are the mechanisms motivating us to secure needed resources, but their interaction creates what we refer to as an “instinctual stacking.” While there’s much to unpack about the function of these stackings, a vital part of learning how to identify someone’s instinctual stacking is by noticing the point of view it necessitates, shaping their attention and language.

David Gray* was the first to share his thoughts on these two differing forms of instinctual stacking, referring to three of the stackings as “synflow” and the other three as “contraflow.” His ideas suggested that the synflow stackings (sx/sp, sp/so, and so/sx) had a more intuitive, participatory relationship with the world, whereas the contraflow stackings (sx/so, so/sp, and sp/sx) had a separate, nonparticipatory relationship with the world. These concepts certainly had validity when we found consistent linguistic patterns in our data analysis between those of the same instinctual “flow.”

While Gray’s concepts seemed to be real, we wanted to explore more of why they were showing up in our research, so we began to excavate hypothetical explanations for what we found. The most significant discovery we had was a distinct and consistent difference in point of view between the two camps of stackings. The synflow stackings would speak from their own, lived perspective, but the contraflow stackings would speak from a zoomed-out perspective, their language abstracting from their own experience in a depersonalized manner.

Through exploring these ideas of “flow,” we found our own imagery that made sense of what we found in the data. Gray’s “synflow” stackings had a bottom-up perspective, viewing the world from their own situated place, but his “contraflow” stackings saw life from a top-down perspective, taking an aerial view of whatever had their attention.

The parallels between the instincts and the four classical elements* positioned the Self-Preservation instinct as earth, the Social instinct as air, but the Sexual instinct as both fire and water. In our research, we began to notice some important patterns with the Sexual instinct – with its polarizing effect meant to allure, the Sexual instinct was appearing as the meeting place of many opposing forces.

The Sexual instinct is both:

• The masculine and the feminine

• Domination and submission

• Destruction and creation

• Hunter and prey

• Taker and giver

• The life instinct and the death instinct

Considering the instinctual parallels to the elements and the necessity of either a bottom-up or top-down point of view that was linguistically evident in our data, we tried creating a visualization that reflected the vertical nature we were finding was natural to the instincts’ perspectives. Pictured at the top of this page, with Self-Preservation as yellow, Social as blue, and Sexual as red, we based our visual on Gray’s associations. While Social’s air intuitively belonged above Self-Preservation’s earth, placing Sexual’s fire and water was complicated and confusing. Did it belong above, below, or between them?

It wasn’t until the Sexual instinct’s dual nature became so blatant, continually returning to our attention, that we realized it belonged both above and below, sandwiching the other two instincts. The Sexual instinct was both the planet’s fiery core churning beneath the soil and the burning celestial bodies spinning above the sky. It was the deepest point of Marianas Trench far below the land of the living, as well as the cirrus clouds far higher than the birds could reach. The Sexual instinct simply had to be represented at two opposite ends of a given spectrum, because polarity is the center of its function.

From this abstract (but logically cohesive) conclusion with the Sexual instinct functioning as two poles, we began to understand that this image was a map of the life cycle, with the synflow stackings showing birth and growth, and the contraflow stackings showing deterioration and death. Our image showed not two separate flows (with one turning clockwise and the other turning counterclockwise, as Gray suggested in his concept), but two distinct directional movements of one larger flow, with one set of stackings moving upward and the other set moving downward. Gray’s original insights were significant and interesting – but because of the intuitive imagery we feel fits better as one cycle rather than two, we at Not My Type have come to refer to the stackings Gray labeled “synflow” as instead “waxing” (for their developing, growing, and building nature) and the “contraflow” stackings as “waning” (for their narrowing, shrinking, and deconstructing nature).

Our new image, though highly conceptual, began to give us a reasonable understanding as to why we kept finding a bottom-up style of communication in the waxing stackings (sx/sp, sp/so, and so/sx) that was so very distinct from the top-down style of the waning stackings (sx/so, so/sp, and sp/sx). Most notably, people with waning stackings continually introduced phraseology that seemed overly philosophical and broad, conversationally jumping up for a bird’s-eye view at whatever topic they were discussing. Those with waxing stackings, by contrast, seemed to answer questions from a perspective that was always their own.

We found this pattern was mappable to every cycle we could think of – the waxing portion was necessarily generative and constructive, whereas the waning portion was filtering, diminishing, closing down. Take a human life, for example: the waxing stackings represent the maturation of a child into their sexual peak of young adulthood, whereas the waning stackings represent the slow deconstruction from lively, impulsive young adult into weathered and wise elder. Similarly, the waxing stackings abstractly represent the drafting and initial writing of a novel, and the waning stackings the consequent revision and proofreading.

Because the waxing stackings originate the primary portion of this narrative cycle, their psyches look upward and forward, building upon what they establish. The waning stackings, by contrast, refine and break down what exists. Compare the innocent, inexperienced, but exploratory nature of children and adolescents with the reflective, critical, and seasoned perspective of adults and elders. Such is the root of the differing language patterns between the waxing stackings and the waning stackings.