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! ...
