Brave New Kitty

Being present for other people can be scary. If you’re like me, you probably fret about if you’re any good at it. You might secretly believe you don’t much to offer, don’t have anything profound or even helpful to say, or aren’t very good at being comforting and supportive. Sometimes, you may even get annoyed thinking about the other things you could be doing. Put it all together, and you might decide it’s easier to just keep yourself out of intimate entanglements. But while it may be easier, it is infinitely less rewarding.

It’s true there is a responsibility involved in personal relationships. That responsibility involves being vulnerable, and that vulnerability causes anxiety. The anxiety is what makes connecting in a meaningful way— sharing intimate pieces of ourselves and listening to others share theirs—a burden.

From the outside, it might look like other people don’t get anxious, but they do. Extroverts are often people who’ve learned that if they’re the life of the party, they won’t be expected to have any heart-to-heart type conversations. They’ve created a camouflage that makes them appear as if they’ve mastered connecting, but if you observe them carefully, what you will probably see is that they have lots of acquaintances, but few, if any, close friends. Sometimes even their most intimate relationship, their marriage, is not a terribly deep connection. By keeping themselves always talking and always interacting, they cleverly avoid anxiety-provoking intimacy.

The introverts among us also often look more poised and self-assured about their relationships than they really are. Since introverts tend to be reserved, it can be difficult to know what they’re really thinking or feeling. Sometimes this is because they’re careful who they share themselves with, but often it’s because they don’t share themselves with anybody. Their cool facade hides quaking insides that they would never dare to reveal. They, too, might have primarily superficial connections, and for the same reasons as the boisterous extrovert.

The truth is, everybody has anxiety around connecting. The reason is simple: connections are vital to a satisfying life. The higher the quality of your connections, the richer, happier, and more fulfilling your time on this planet will be. No one is exempt from this desire. Real connections are what we all want. We want to be seen and heard and understood for who we really are, and we want to experience the joy of validating another person in the same way. So it would make sense that there’s a lot at stake, and that we would have anxiety about it.

It’s actually about more than relationships, though. Connection is the main component of spirituality. Most often spirituality is characterized by having a relationship with a higher power of some sort, but it’s really just about understanding the connected nature of everybody and everything in the Universe. Knowing that we’re part of something greater than ourselves is essential to our sense of well-being. We yearn for it and move toward it instinctively, or feel there’s something terribly wrong with us if we don’t.

Thus, feeling connected is one of the most basic components of humanity, consciousness, and existence.

Why then, can it be so difficult to connect? Why is it so scary? Why can it feel like such a burden? The reasons are many and varied, from disappointment to a profound sense of inferiority, but they mostly have to do with anxiety, or more accurately, avoiding anxiety. And once again, our childhoods come into play. If you had a loving, supportive family, then your anxiety level around connecting is probably manageable. But if you grew up in an invalidating environment—one in which you weren’t appreciated for who you were, in whatever form that took, from disinterest to overt abuse—then your anxiety level around connecting is probably pretty high. The degree of anxiety is strongly related to the degree of invalidation you endured as a child. It’s only logical: if you felt valued as a child then you would feel confident about connecting, and if you felt un-valued as a child, then you would feel un-confident.

Your degree of anxiety may also have something to do with modeling. If the early relationships modeled to you were not very loving or contained an unequal balance of power, then of course you would have a default negative view of what connection means and what it demands of you. This is particularly true for females, who, in invalidating families, tend to be on the bottom end of power struggles and not learn effective ways to set boundaries and take care of themselves.

If you aren’t happy with the quality of the relationships and connections in your life, you have to ask yourself what’s going on. It might be as simple as being so busy in your own life that you don’t have time to devote to relationships, but that’s far more likely to be an excuse. You have to dig deeper than that. Are you afraid of people not living up to your expectations? (They never do, by the way.) Afraid you don’t know how to “be there” for someone? Afraid of exposure, of looking vulnerable or weak? Afraid of being swallowed up and losing yourself? Or is your sense of inferiority so big it holds you back from making the effort?

Whatever your issues, you should try to work through them, because living in an isolated but safe little box is not living at all. The work is not as difficult as you might think. The challenge is to put yourself out there, outcomes be damned. Accept that sometimes you will get hurt, laughed at, rejected, scorned, spurned, teased, tossed aside, tossed over, and used. Accept these as an inevitable part of life. You aren’t perfect, and neither is anybody else. The best we can do is move towards what we love and hope to meet some fellow travelers along the way. Sometimes these connections develop into something great, deep and lasting.

Usually, however, they don’t. Part of the wisdom we must strive to develop is about having low expectations. A wise woman once told me that a person could count herself lucky if she has one really close friend in a whole lifetime. And if you have more than one, then you are fortunate indeed. If you think you’re doing something wrong because you’re not surrounded by adoring, beautiful people as depicted on television, I have news for you: you’re not. Nor should that be the goal.

What is the goal then? Well, I think the goal is to be present with everyone to the best of our ability. Really listen to what a person is saying; really make an effort to understand how a person is feeling. This doesn’t mean we’ll always form satisfying long-term connections, but it does mean we’ve done our part so that it could happen.

So whether you are the boisterous extrovert or the reserved introvert, always remember your innate desire to connect and try to act accordingly; you’ll never be perfect at it as no one is, but in this case, it’s the effort that matters. Whatever your given nature, use it to build bridges, not walls. Start by learning to tolerate your own vulnerability. When you are able to risk throwing pieces of yourself out into the world, outcomes be damned, you will find the burden of connecting one you can carry with lightness and gratitude.

Anxiety is kind of a dirty word. No one likes to feel it. Anxiety is so unpleasant, in fact, that thousands of products and medications exist to alleviate it, with new ones going on the market daily. Books, bubble baths, scented candles, drugs, and therapy techniques are just a few of the weapons available in our war against anxiety. And don’t forget the self-medication market: alcohol, marijuana, and the rest. Anxiety alleviation is a huge industry.

But anxiety isn’t necessarily something you ought automatically shy away from or go to war with. If you learn to understand and even embrace it, anxiety can be hugely beneficial to your personal growth. There is nothing like anxiety to jar us out of complacency and shove us in a new direction. If we can dictate what that direction will be, it can be very positive indeed.

I use a simple technique I call increasing your tolerance for anxiety. Basically, the more able you are to be present with your anxiety, the less power it has to control your behavior. That’s about all there is to it. The hardest part is probably changing your mindset about feeling anxious.

You must first get past the belief that anxiety is a disease that can be cured. Anxiety is part of life, from the fear of making friends in grade school to the inevitability of dealing with our own mortality. Everything in-between. “Curing” anxiety doesn’t work and will never work because one, it’s not a disease, and two, there’s a reason it’s there, and that reason can be ignored only to your own detriment.

Sometimes that’s obvious. If you’re anxious about a specific thing you’ve been putting off, doing the thing will alleviate the anxiety. Or if you’ve lost your job, gotten a divorce, or are going through any of the other standard life stressors, your anxiety is there for a sound, clear, logical reason. Of course you’re anxious. Anyone would be. You have one or two more drinks than you otherwise would, you vent to your friends, or you take a long weekend or two. You work through the feelings (mostly because there’s nothing else you can do) and you figure out how to move on.

Other times, though, the reasons are not so obvious. When anxiety of the generalized, existential type takes hold, the results can be hellish. Such anxiety can take many forms: phobias, compulsions, depression, avoidance, acting out; a rich broth of human behavior. This is the anxiety that sends you running for the prescription meds and therapy sessions, or abundant self-medication (and then the prescription meds and therapy). This anxiety has you thinking there’s something terribly wrong with you, and that medical science must have a cure for it. Nobody has to feel bad in this modern age, right?

I suppose technically that’s true, but not feeling bad typically involves an emotion-numbing drug that also prevents you from feeling good. Whether self-prescribed or physician-prescribed, such a drug merely postpones the conversation you must eventually have with your anxiety if you are to move past it. Because, existential or otherwise, your anxiety is trying to tell you something, and you would be wise to listen.

If you accept the premise that anxiety is part of life and that it might actually have a purpose, then you’re ready to start dealing with it. Start slowly, with a minor anxiety, and work your way up. When it strikes, instead of avoiding it, acknowledge it. Say “hello,” embrace it, and be still. Don’t worry about your external reaction; you’re not trying to do anything differently except notice. Notice the feelings and physical sensations that arise. You can even ask your anxiety what it wants and listen for an answer. (Whether you get one or not doesn’t really matter at this point; you’ll get one eventually.) Afterward, you may want to journal about the experience. How it felt, what you noticed, what you learned. The more you’re able to remember, and the more objective you’re able to be, the better.

After doing this for a while, you will discover something vitally important: that you have a choice. Your response to anxiety is not a foregone conclusion. You can acknowledge your anxiety and decide to react differently than you have in the past. This is a tremendous paradigm shift.

Once you know you have a choice, decide how you want to react. How do you want your behavior to change? Visualize it. Write it down if you want to. Then try to live it the next time you’re in that particular anxiety-producing situation. Even if you don’t succeed, give yourself a pat on the back, because it’s hard, and it might take awhile to get it right. But if you keep trying, you will.

After practicing this technique, I think you will learn, as I did, something very important: that increasing your tolerance for anxiety is a critical element of personal growth. The more able you are to stay present in situations that make you anxious, the more situations you are able to be in despite your anxiety. This means that you will have fewer and fewer self-imposed limitations. You have essentially taught yourself how to manage fear. Once you know how to do this, you can apply it to any situation. There is no wall.

Anxiety is such big business because it never goes away. As soon as you get past some of it, more will always crop up to take its place. It’s a chronic symptom of a condition called “life.” Learn to see anxiety as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, and life will become infinitely more adventurous.

Control isn’t always a bad thing. Some things you need to have control over: your finances, your health, your schedule, your career; in general, the rational and pragmatic aspects of your life. But when control extends to personal relationships and your own growth, problems can occur. This is not to say you are powerless over these areas. Certainly, you have the power to choose how you behave, with whom you develop relationships, what areas of growth to focus on, etc. However, if you try to force outcomes with relationships and personal growth, you are destined for disappointment. Doing so can only have negative results.

Personal growth, which includes romantic relationships, means to become more than you currently are, and trying to control that process with an ego that doesn’t understand it is akin to killing it. The ego wants to protect us, to control dangerous situations, to keep us from harm’s way. But it doesn’t understand what’s beyond it, so we must learn to discern what we need to protect ourselves from and what we don’t, and to override, when necessary, the ego’s natural tendency toward controlling unknown situations.

We all know the expression “taking the plunge.” It means, essentially, to embrace the unknown; to leap into adventure, to surrender yourself to forces beyond your control. Usually, it’s spoken of with exhilaration and excitement. When you plunge into a new adventure, whether it is a romantic relationship, undertaking a skill you’ve always wanted to learn, therapy, or anything else that stretches and redefines your identity, you are acting out of courage, in the spirit of growth, with willingness to let go of results and simply make yourself available to the universe for change to occur. It’s a brave thing to do.

Control is the opposite of taking the plunge. When you stay within the confines of what you can control, you make adventure impossible. With no adventure comes no growth. With no growth, life is safe, but it is also flat, empty, and dull. Control in this sense is the opposite of brave; it’s cowardly.

This is especially true for personal relationships. If you try to force people to do as you want them to, the outcome is disastrous. All the wonderful rewards of a loving relationship—caring, tenderness, respect, spontaneity—are impossible to achieve in a controlled environment. Your loved ones might do what you want, but what do you gain? There is an impenetrable wall there, a wall of expectations and obligations, that can come down only by relaxing your grip and letting people do as they please. The corny old cliché “If you love something set it free” is really true. Not only is it true, it’s essential, if you really want love to blossom into its full potential.

Wanting to control the outcome of scary adventures is understandable. Nobody enjoys feeling vulnerable and afraid, at least not outside of movies theaters, amusement parks and the like. But the more we let fear guide and control our lives, the more we are shutting ourselves off from opportunities to reach our highest potential. It is not possible to approach adventures without fear. The goal is not to eradicate fear from our lives, or to wait for it to pass. Rather, the goal is to accept the fear, embrace it and honor it, listen to it and love it, and do what we want anyway. An amazing thing starts to happen when we stay present with our fear and do what we want anyway: we become confident. And this happens whether or not we get the outcome we wanted, because we learn that, even more amazingly, the outcome is not important; it’s going through the process that matters. And this is true no matter how badly you want something to work out a certain way. Getting what you want is not transformative; staying with the process is.

You must be willing to be scared in order to grow; you must be willing to accept any outcome if you want to achieve your higher potential, and you must understand that trying to control your fear of the unknown is only going to hinder your ability to move past it. Armed with this knowledge, and the willingness to act on it, there is very little you can’t achieve.