Insulated, but Isolated: Part II

Now I want to transition to thinking about what this self-contained person looks like in the context of others (because we really don’t exist in a vacuum!). Let’s continue with our vignette from the previous post...

Now imagine you get home and your partner or roommate wants to know about your day. You feel inclined to offer something and nothing else is standing out, so you start describing the dilemma over a raise. While you may feel like you’re doing a courtesy by sharing, you may not actually be available for relating (which is what this other person is really after!). By this time, you’ve already had a day’s worth of spin cycling possibilities so you’re convinced no one else can help in any way/fix anything/add any further information. AND YOU’RE RIGHT! No one else in 5 minutes is going to be able to analyze your situation further than you already have. But not because they’re inadequate (even though both of you might be thinking so at this point), but because you have left no feeling or thought for them to uncover with you. You’re bringing an issue to someone AFTER you’ve completely dissected it.

What are you going through?
You are probably frustrated. You have already found some peace with the situation and so now having to simply catch someone else up feels like a chore. There is no clear incentive for you and as this becomes increasingly apparent to you, you become increasingly irritated. Irritated at the work of explaining, irritated at yourself/the other person for putting you in this position, and irritated at the rawness of their emotions when you’ve already contained yours. This situation is probably reminding you of how much easier it is to just keep things to yourself. You instinctively did this for them but they are not even satisfied. You care about this person, but you’ve been shutting down all their suggestions (and their empathy) and now you are feeling like a jerk as they are looking shut down.

What are they going through?
They went into this conversation with a positive assumption - that is, with an assumption that you actually want to talk about the thing you are volunteering to talk about. Little do they know that you have no outstanding needs around the situation and were seemingly doing them a favor. But they haven’t asked for favors. They’re interested in connection and were expecting to be helpful. They have been offering genuine empathetic responses and racked their brains to try to come up with useful suggestions for you. But you have a swift way of denying all of it, and as it becomes clear that something’s not working out, they begin feeling frustrated with you or dejected about themselves. In their bodies they may be feeling inadequate, and in their heads they might be wondering, “Am I not smart enough?” “Am I bad at communicating?” “Maybe I’m not showing I love them enough...” “Maybe I’m not good at supporting people...”

From this example, we can see that this setup is not fulfilling for either person. It probably would have worked out better if you could have refrained from acting “as if” (i.e. as if you needed to talk about your raise) and flat out stated you needed nothing when you needed nothing, or reached out when you authentically did need something. The goal is for us to be this congruent, but the reality is that we as humans are very complicated. Why were you so immediately pulled into obeying social rules before respecting your internal truth? What were you assuming they needed? Why did that matter more than what you needed? Why were you so compelled to reject their empathy? Why were they so quick to assume they were the problem? How did that affect the outcome? What makes you so much more comfortable with pure logical analysis anyway? 

Wrapping ourselves up in reasoning may make us feel safe, but while we are wrapped up, we are also unavailable to others. It is important to be aware that we are actually exploiting our minds (and secondarily our bodies via picking, pulling, and biting) as a means of bypassing vulnerability. In this prizing of our mental selves and this process of self-containing, we pass vulnerability off onto reasoning, which takes over and stamps out emotions, and then concludes that connecting with the external world is unnecessary. We remain isolated with a distorted rationalization that the world can offer us nothing more than we can offer ourselves. We may feel that our minds contain us, but too often, we become tragically contained by them.

Insulated, but Isolated: Part I

One of my primary interests is in “self-containment.” I’ve never attempted to discretely define this before as I understand it in a more felt than articulated way. My interpretation of it has to do with how you feel held. Our skin is one of the first that comes to mind as one of our first - and perhaps most foundational - containers to our existence. It holds us together and sets the limits of our physical boundedness. We then evolve to understand and appreciate not just the physical container of our house, but also the containing functions of our social units (e.g. family, church). The laws and norms of our institutions, generation, and culture provide us with a reassuring feeling of structure, or containment.

Containers are designed to keep the desired in and the undesired out. They, by design, INSULATE, which, by nature, can ISOLATE. This is the potential problem. There is a high amount of emphasis in this society on self-sufficiency and independence. There is also a high belief in this society about logic (“neat and contained”) > feelings (“messy and uncontained”). Both of these can put significant (even if unconscious) pressure on us to self-contain.

What does that even mean or look like?

Imagine that you are wanting a raise at work. You’ve been at this company for just over a year and you have a new car that you need to make payments on. You think you’ve been doing a good job but are also aware that a year is not a short time, but also not a long time. Is this enough time to warrant a raise? You dropped a hint to your boss last week but she seemed to ignore it. Say something again? Making payments on your car is a real stressor for you, but is this a good enough reason? You know that your co-workers also have their own stressors too. You even know that some of them have been there longer than you and are also doing good work and you’re pretty sure they haven’t gotten a raise. What makes you so special? Why should they make exceptions for you? Especially when they talked about budget in the last meeting and it doesn’t seem like there are extra funds to go around. Guilt sets in. Doubt sets in. And you realize sometime in this train of thought your hand moved up to your head and five hairs are now lying on the desk before you.

This vignette captures the common way we can get stuck in our heads. The problem is when this becomes our default and regular mode of being. We stop looking beyond ourselves for answers or comfort, and become invested in this process of figuring it out ourselves. We have stopped engaging others in our thinking, enlisting our friends or teachers in compassion, seeking out places to discharge energy, or trusting in others' ability to validate and accept us. We have interrupted feeling and diverted all our energy instead into thinking. Our preoccupation with our minds also keeps us out of our bodies (which is different than enacting on our bodies). We fail to develop trust in ourselves to be able to bear the uncertainty of what will happen. We switch to neurotic analyses to predict outcomes like the one above under the false (but desperate) belief that we can know (and thus control) everything… if only we think about it thoroughly enough. However, there will never be a degree to which our thinking can substitute for simply approaching our boss with our needs and concerns. There is no way our private analyses can make up for the bond that can be created between people having a lived conversation. And there is no way internal predictions can produce anything more reliable-feeling than actual conclusions. When we self-contain, we never end up as satisfied or as soothed as we do when experiences are shared with others and lived out beyond our own heads.

.. Stay tuned for Part II! ...