Showcasing Dreams, Desires, Vision, Whimsy, Illusion, and Anxious Uncertainty: Understanding Aspects of Perseverance and Determination Towards Doctoral Capstone Successes

Background

Yet, what is perseverance and determination? The basic concept of perseverance and determination is a personality characteristic of people, wherein one can derive a level of psychological pleasure from different forms of psychological receipt of pain. By the term pain, one suggests the masochist received a level of pleasure from the self-infliction or infliction from others of some form of mistreatment by others; this mistreatment may suggest a level of humiliation, suffering psychological-emotional pain or physical pain on some level of personalized understanding. As suggested by Solomon’s (1980) work, “… endorphins are secreted in response to certain environmental stresses and play a role in the opponent process” (Van der Kolk, 1989, p. 10). Meaning, when a person who has become psychologically normalized to the introduction of stressful situations, a learned response associated with endorphin release within the physiological realm actually shifts the stress, the pain, into an association with endorphin-induced pleasure. The connection between pleasure and pain is then more clearly realized within a person’s physio-psychological response to traumatic environmental factors, resulting in levels of perseverance and determination tendency that derives pleasure from environmental or socio-cultural levels of stress or of pain. This style of impulse urge towards the repetition of trauma or traumatic events, may also result in an intriguing understanding around the unconscious connection between pleasure and pain: