Tara Westover’s Developmental Journey and Litmus Tests
In this four-part essay, I give examples of how the four minds of the quadrune mind model of human nature can be observed as they function in various day-to-day circumstances. In the final part, I’ll describe how actors of each mind would perform their parts on the stage of life, as an elaboration on Shakespeare.
Note: The topic headings above are from our earlier evolutionary model of the minds. The examples below represent our later corresponding developmental categories of minds: Reptilian Mind/Infantile Behavioral Mind; Old Mammalian Mind/Childish Emotional Mind; New Mammalian Mind/Adolescent Intellectual (Cognitive) Mind; Human Mind/Grownup Spiritual Mind; and Pre-Human Minds/Immature Minds (all minds and “mind” except the Grownup Spiritual Mind).
Tara Westover
In her memoir, Educated, Tara Westover describes her experience of growing up in her family. Westover’s descriptions of her various mental states inadvertently fit very well within the quadrune mind model.1 An earlier version of this material appeared in our essay profiling Westover’s experiences.2
Fetal/Newborn Somatic (Reflexive) “Mind”
Un-integrated brain. Westover was able to navigate loud, life-threatening machines without fatal distractions during the years she worked for her father. In the book she had previously described the “thunderous” sound of the “Shear,” a three-ton “pair of scissors” used to fracture angle iron in her father’s scrapyard business. Yet, the sounds of BYU’s campus battered her. Whatever the cause of her severe discomfort, it surely was not the decibels involved. What seems relevant to the quadrune mind model is Westover’s report that she “heard every sound individually.”3
The neurons of her brain did not know how to fire in a neurological pattern that her mind could recognize conceptually. The neurons in her brain had not yet learned to “fire together” in order to “wire together” to produce a unified sensory-perceptual gestalt, or a conceptual schema based on pre-experienced knowledge of what a university city was like. The neurons had never been integrated to do so. Consequently, her mind was disturbed by the indecipherable noise. After repeated exposure, and probably because she had an otherwise remarkably healthy brain, it was able to settle into familiar patterns of perception in order to transform the noise into conceptually meaningful sounds.
Dis-integrated brain. Westover’s life had taken her from a “junkyard” in Idaho to Cambridge University in a lightning-quick 10 years. She said it “nearly stopped my breath,” and she wondered if she had “changed toomuch” in that time. Under tremendous stress, she “continued to unravel.”4
Westover suffered signs and symptoms of extreme stress: awakening nearly every night outside, screaming, where she had run to still asleep; days-long headaches; grinding teeth; and skin breaking out, provoking comments by strangers on the street.
Infantile Behavioral Mind
Much of Educated is devoted to Tara Westover’s efforts to survive, and live with, the rituals, rules, and roles of her survivalist father, even after she physically moved out of his home. Survival of the self is the only goal of the infantile mind. For any group, including families, which holds survival as its essential purpose, traditionalized rituals, rules, and roles are instinctively felt to be vital for its continued existence. Everything a person in such a group does, says, or thinks must be done in the service of preserving the group’s homeostasis.
It is important to note that this is not the same “survival of the group” in relation to the childish mind. That’s because individuals in these families are not treated as individuated “selves.” The family unit is the “self” for these infantile families. For example, we see this in families where one person is designated as the “smart one,” another the “pretty one,” another the “screwup.” The smart one must never say anything stupid, the pretty one must never act ugly, and the screwup must never do anything well. Forcing each person to play a unidimensional behavioral role maintains the homeostasis of the family unit as a single individual.
To act contrary to the needs of the group, even in seemingly minor ways, is not tolerated. Depending on the group, dissidents may be labeled, for example, as ingrates, radicals, or heretics. The homeostatic drive of the infantile mind is coopted by the family to preserve the survival of the group, which is experienced in the same way that an infant experiences its own self-survival.
Childish Emotional Mind
Westover describes an ultimatum from her mother: “The bulk of [the message] was a lecture on loyalty: that families forgive, and that if I could not forgive mine, I would regret it for the rest of my life.” Her mother prayed for the day that Westover could come running “through the back door, shouting, ‘I’m home.’”5
Her mother describes Westover’s return as if she were a young girl. The implicit message to Westover was that if you are not loyal to the family, you will be cast out (and die, or at least be dead to us). The herd/tribe/family’s survival is more important than the survival of any individual member. There really is no “individual” as a separate, individuated “self.” This is the state of a family (or nation) dominated by a childish emotional mind. It is the same mind that leads cults or tribes to “shun” disloyal members. “Shunning” is devastating for the still-attached exile. The physical abandonment of a young child is literal death. Westover had the higher level of consciousness of the intellectual mind available to her. She could feel the real emotional pain of estrangement from her family without “dying.”
Adolescent Intellectual (Cognitive) Mind
After completing her Ph.D. and returning home, Westover writes that she came back to her father’s house “as if I were a troublesome calf who’d wandered from her herd.”6
She went to see her grandparents. “God had to be behind such a wondrous success, Grandpa said. My parents must have been called by the Lord to do what they have done, to be great healers, to bring souls to God. I smiled and stood to go. He was the same gentle old man I remembered but I was overwhelmed by the distance between us. I hugged him at the door, and gave him a long look. He was eighty-seven. I doubted whether, in the years he had left, I would be able to prove to him that I was not what my father said I was, that I was not a wicked thing.”7
She wrote her mother that she wanted to see her but was not ready to see her father. Her mother’s response was that she could see her and her father, or Westover would never see her mother again. “She has never recanted.”8
Westover provides vivid descriptions of the emotion-wrenching choices she faced as a person who chooses intellectual freedom over emotional family unity, while understanding that the emotional pain is not death. The confrontations and resulting estrangement between Westover and her family recreates patterns of the sometimes-violent schisms between emotionally-charged family/cultural traditions and the heavily rationalized “modernity” of the West’s “Age of Enlightenment.” This existential conflict between differing levels of consciousness continues in many families, states, and nations to this day.
Grownup Spiritual Mind
The discernment of a spiritual mind cannot be made from reading a memoir. It can best be seen within the context of an ongoing, personal, mutually inspiring relationship. Westover’s testimony of herself is that she is “a changed person, a new self,”9 which is one of the characteristics of the awakened spiritual mind.
Litmus Tests for Friends and Family
Infantile Behavioral Mind
You may have had an experience in which someone had a sudden regressive shift to the reptilian-like, infantile behavioral mind. For example, people seem to be having a good time at a party. The emotional atmosphere is friendly. Suddenly you make an offhand, casual comment (it could be about sex, gender, religion, politics, climate, aliens, or anything else) and someone who was playful a moment before reacts to you with a chilling verbal response or glare. You can almost feel your blood turning cold. Everyone freezes. The comment, which most people may have hardly noticed, was a threat felt viscerally—not intellectually, emotionally, or even physically—to the life of the reactor. Reassuring them that you were just joking (you may have been quite serious), or that you are very sorry for hurting their feelings (even though they are having a visceral, not emotional, reaction), or that you can see their point of view (you can’t, because there isn’t one), will usually be to no avail. Sometimes such a single comment and their reaction to it can end a lifelong friendship or split a family.
You have crossed the line. You have said the “wrong” thing. You have failed their “litmus test;” that is, “a test in which a single factor (such as an attitude, event, or fact) is decisive.”10 You have failed and are no longer a trusted coworker, life-long friend, or beloved son or daughter. You are suddenly “dead” to a person who, moments earlier, may have loved you. They are deeply wounded if you criticize or disagree with them, and they lash back. In psychoanalysis this instantaneous mind regression might be a reaction to a “narcissistic injury.”11
In the quadrune mind, both litmus tests and narcissistic injuries are representative of the infantile behavioral mind. It is only at this level of consciousness that an adult can react to opinions as a threat to their very existence. It is intolerable for them to be in any relationship with a person who challenges the one thing that holds their world together. The content of the mind may be about religion, politics, ethnicity, or other values, but the level of consciousness of all litmus testers is the infantile mind.
The infantile mind can only understand behavior, which is perceived by the adult as either life-sustaining or life-threatening. They cannot reflect upon human emotions or thoughts. This means that emotional bonds with family or friends and logical arguments of open-mindedness will be trumped by a failed litmus test.
Before this split you may have had an inkling that the person you loved, respected, and/or feared had an “issue” that was non-negotiable. They may have expressed an intolerance toward other people who said or did the wrong thing, but you did not believe this hard-heartedness could ever be directed toward you, or that it represented the “real” person you knew. But you were wrong.
In general, this black-or-white dualistic view of life is consistent with the infantile-minded behaviors of autocrats, drug addicts, or hell and brimstone preachers.12 Infants acting like adults appear in myriad places.
Grownup Spiritual Mind
Of course, the Grownup has no litmus tests for anyone to pass to be counted as a human being worthy of compassion.
- For an interesting, in-depth update, see Gibson, D. (2023, January 29). ‘She knows me least’—5 years after ‘Educated,’ Tara Westover’s family yearns for reconciliation. Is it possible? Deseret News. https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2023/1/29/23575258/what-does-educated-tara-westover-family-think-about-reconciliation-book/.
- See Westover, T. (2018). Educated: A memoir. New York: Random House and our essay, QM, Tara Westover, and History’s Age of Reason. https://quadrunemind.com/2020/05/04/qm-tara-westover-and-historys-age-of-enlightenment/.
- Westover, T. (2018). Educated: A memoir. New York: Random House. [Pp. 138, 153-154].
- Westover, T. [P. 312. Emphasis in the original].
- Westover, T. [P. 322].
- Westover, T. [P. 320].
- Westover, T. [P. 321].
- Westover, T. [P. 322].
- Westover, T. [P. 329].
- Definition is from Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/. “Litmus Test Has Scientific Origins. It was in the 14th century that scientists discovered that litmus, a mixture of colored organic compounds obtained from lichen, turns red in acid solutions and blue in alkaline solutions and, thus, can be used as an acid-base indicator. Six centuries later, people began using litmus test figuratively. It can now refer to any single factor that establishes the true character of something or causes it to be assigned to one category or another. Often it refers to something (such as an opinion about a political or moral issue) that can be used to make a judgment about whether someone or something is acceptable or not.”
[I suppose some Americans may find litmus tests’ “red” or “blue” results to be politically fitting. However, “red” and “blue” designations of political parties is a fairly recent development that has been inconsistently applied. Neither did they exist originally for political purposes but were related to the advent of color television for a better visual contrast between states. For a good historical perspective, including the Slate video at the end of the article, see The origins of red and blue states. (n.d.). Taegan Goddard’s Electoral Vote Map. https://electoralvotemap.com/the-origins-of-red-and-blue-states/.
- See McBride, K. (2020, October 25). Understanding narcissistic injury: Narcissists do not forgive or forget. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/202010/understanding-narcissistic-injury. “As long as you are in agreement with the narcissist, revolve around them, do things their way, and have great adoration for them, you will be fine. But if you take a different highway from them, you will then see their disdain and serious ‘get back at you’ tactics.”
- For a Catholic priest’s excellent insights into hellfire preaching, see Longenecker, D. (2020, December 11). Gimme some hellfire and brimstone preachers! https://dwightlongenecker.com/gimme-some-hellfire-and-brimstone-preachers/. “[One of the problems I have] is that I get the feeling the people who like it when I preach a strong sermon against sin are feeling good because I’m giving other people hell. They feel good because I’m getting down on the people they are down on. In other words, my preaching against all ‘the sinners’ boosts their sense of righteousness. ‘I thank you Lord that I am not like that tax collector there!’
“Self righteousness, [sic] is the implicit sin of all religious people. It’s hard to avoid it, and the insidious thing about self righteousness is that when you do preach about it the self righteous people don’t see themselves in what you’re saying. That’s the definition of self righteousness. It’s totally invulnerable. It’s a hard candy coating shell we have in place.”
[From the quadrune mind perspective, this observation by Father Dwight Longenecker is correct because self-righteousness is a symptom of the lack of empathy (ability to take the inner worlds of other people into consideration) by the infantile mind, the same mind that enables bigotry. It must be bigotry to enjoy seeing other people condemned (to hell) as sinners, for example].