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.

If you want to learn new things, you can’t be afraid to feel awkward and look stupid. In fact, if you want to grow in any direction, field, or discipline, you have to embrace awkwardness and celebrate ignorance. You have to understand the beauty of stupidity.

I have a friend who is brilliant at being stupid. That is, he loves to learn and isn’t afraid to admit he doesn’t know something. When he gets interested in something, he seeks out the most knowledgeable, talented people he can find and learns all he can from them. One of his favorite sayings is, “I love being the stupidest person in the room. That’s how I learn.”

My friend has accomplished something great with his attitude alone, because this is much more easily said than done. People confuse lack of knowledge with lack of intelligence and feel sheepish or embarrassed when they don’t know something. They fear others will judge them as stupid or ignorant or somehow inferior, so they keep their mouths shut and go home no more enlightened than when they left. How sad! And how utterly unnecessary! We should all try to be more like my friend, and revel in our lack of knowledge.

We’ve all had teachers who assured us “there are no stupid questions.” But we knew there were stupid questions. We heard people ask them, and we may even have snickered at them for it; we may even have been the one getting snickered at. And it’s true: there are stupid questions. The teachers who told us there weren’t were taking the wrong approach. They should have said, “Who cares what other people think of your question? It doesn’t matter in the slightest. Ask away. I’m delighted that your curiosity took precedence over your self-consciousness, because that attitude will take you far in life.” I wish I’d had a teacher who said that. As it was, the “no stupid questions” speech had no credibility at all.

But I didn’t have a teacher like that, or parents like that. My parents were people who confused lack of knowledge with lack of intelligence, so if I didn’t know something, I learned to keep quiet about it or risk ridicule. To this day, I struggle with feeling awkward, self-conscious, and stupid when I’m learning new things. But I’ve learned to do it anyway, and that’s the important thing. Feeling the anxiety and proceeding in spite of it is, I believe, one of the most powerful lessons to learn in life, whatever the particular issue might be. I wrote about this in Embrace Your Anxiety. It applies to no situation more potently than it does to learning new things.

Learning new things is awkward. If people don’t understand this fact, awkwardness, and the negative emotions that result—anxiety, fear, shame, embarrassment—can hold them back from trying new things or cause them to give up when they do. So if you want to grow, it’s imperative to accept awkwardness as part of a fulfilling life. You must learn to see your own stupidity as inevitable if you are challenging yourself, moving in new directions, and exploring uncharted territory.

So there is beauty in stupidity. Not in the kind of stupidity that is uninterested in learning, but in the kind of stupidity that freely admits “I don’t know” and seeks knowledge. In this kind of stupidity, you find freedom and spaciousness and a release of tension. You don’t have to pretend you know something you don’t. You don’t have to deny shortcomings. You can admit mistakes. You can admit ignorance. In this kind of stupidity, you are free to learn, and in so doing, you allow other people the same dignity. In this stupidity lie grace, courage, and enthusiasm for growth. In this stupidity respect, understanding, and empathy can flourish. In this stupidity, we find our whole selves. We also create a more tolerant world.

Ignorance is not a sin, but the unwillingness to eradicate it is. So revel in your stupidity! Embrace it as the sign of courage it is, courage to put yourself out there in the world and seek all it has to offer you. Abandon yourself to wonder and curiosity. Be excited to be the stupidest person in the room. Admit your stupidity, and you have found the beginning of wisdom.

If we come from an invalidating background, we are often in the position of having to choose between ourselves and our families. Unless we really sit down and analyze what’s going on, we usually don’t see it that way, but that’s the way it is.

In an invalidating family (meaning one in which our individual specialness is not valued, understood, or encouraged, however that looks), children are constantly put in win/lose situations, and they are invariably on the losing end of that equation. In my family, for example, my father’s drinking had priority over everything else. We all had to tolerate it, live with the consequences of it, and worst of all, pretend it wasn’t a problem.

When I was a junior in high school, I won an essay contest that was a pretty big deal. Competition was across several schools, and I was the first student from my school to even place in more than ten years. There was an award ceremony at one of the fanciest hotels in the area which me, my parents, my English teacher, my principal, and the school superintendent, along with their spouses, attended. My father was proud of me and asked me what I wanted for winning. “Anything you want,” he said to me. I asked for him to stay sober at the award ceremony. He laughed at me. And not only did he not stay sober, he was so drunk, he couldn’t eat. In the middle of the dinner, after making a mess of his plate, he just got up and disappeared. After awhile, the superintendent went after him, fetched him from the bar, and sat him back down at the table.

My point is that even at sixteen, I wasn’t able to choose myself over my family. I could have forbidden him to come if he was drinking and gotten a ride from my teacher, or left the ceremony myself when he started misbehaving, but I didn’t do either of those things. It never even occurred to me that I had any such options. I felt completely powerless and at his mercy. And because I wasn’t aware of this, I carried those feelings of helplessness into my adult life and spent many years choosing my family dynamic over my own well-being.

If you grew up with a family dynamic like this, you’re likely to make all sorts of bad decisions until you learn to choose yourself first. It’s a learned helplessness that is difficult, if not impossible, to overcome without an awareness about what’s going on. Examples of choosing your family over yourself include disconnected relationships, unsatisfying job situations, addictions, poor self care, chronic drama and chaos, and not going after what you want in general.

You may not see these things in terms of “choosing your family,” but they usually are. They are all manifestations of a lack of self-love, which is what we learn when we grow up in an invalidating environment.

It makes sense if you think about it. When a child learns early in life that her needs take a back seat to her parents’ needs, she will accept that belief as normal and natural. She doesn’t have the tools or knowledge to do anything else. Furthermore, doing anything else would feel threatening to her own sense of survival, as a young child will die without an adult to take care of her. Thus, choosing family first becomes a very ingrained belief, so much a part of her that she is unable to confront it without a lot of awareness and, almost always, external help. Millions and millions and millions of people are walking around the planet in this state. Broken, stuck, depressed, disconnected, addicted, and with no clue why or what to do about it. Is it any wonder that use of medication, both self-applied and prescription, has grown to such epidemic proportions in the industrialized world?

“But my parents didn’t beat me,” you might say. “They weren’t alcoholics, they weren’t cruel, and there was no abuse of any kind.” But it isn’t always about overt abuse. Often, parents are simply not emotionally available to their kids due to their own unresolved issues, youth, or mental immaturity, and that is enough to create an invalidating environment. I’m not saying these are bad people by any means; they probably grew up in similar circumstances. The truth is that few people who undertake parenthood are psychologically and emotionally mature enough to stand up to the task. Very few people become parents because they have a desire to nurture a small life to fruition to the best of their ability. Nor do they understand the sacrifices and effort involved in undertaking such a monumental task. Again, this does not make them bad people. It just creates a situation heavy with potential for a child’s emotional needs to go largely unmet.

And that is an invalidating environment.

And when a child grows up in such an environment, she learns that her needs aren’t important. She learns to not take care of herself in order to survive.

Sure, the degrees of invalidation vary, and abuse in any form is going to be harder on a small psyche than unavailability. But the end result for the child is always going to be some form of self-denial. If you struggle with any issues of self-denial, your job is to figure out where it came from: what form the invalidation took and how it plays out in your adult life. How do you choose your family dynamic over yourself, and how can you stop doing it?

It’s not as simple as getting a divorce, changing jobs, or going to 12 Step meetings. These may be moves in the right direction, but if you really want to change, you have to figure out more than how you’re unkind to yourself; you have to figure out why. How does your particular form of self-denial fit into your family dynamic? For example, it isn’t enough to know you tend to have emotionally distant relationships. You need to understand the type of emotional distance you engage in. Do you choose people who are cold and unappreciative? Do you choose addicts? Do you choose people you feel superior to or who give you all the power in the relationship? Most importantly, how does your pattern mirror your childhood? Figure these things out, and you’ll begin to see how choosing your family has gotten in the way of your happiness.

Another thing we often have to work on is the belief that taking care of ourselves is somehow selfish and therefore bad. It is neither of those things, but these beliefs are often foisted on us in invalidating environments, and they can be very hard to shake. The truth is, you have to take care of yourself before you can even think of taking care of anybody else. Otherwise, caring comes from a place of neediness, and it’s more about you filling your own emotional void than it is about the other person. (And yes, it’s repeating the pattern of invalidation.) I once attended a talk by a Buddhist lama who said, “The best thing we can do for another person is to become a whole person ourselves.” Only from a place of wholeness—that is, self love—are we equipped to deal with life and to fully love other people. Self love is not selfish or bad or wrong. It is healthy and good and right. But if we grew up in a family that didn’t value it, we may have a lot of work to do in this area.

It’s sad to be in the situation of having to choose yourself or your family. It’s a win/lose choice when family, of all the things in this world, should be win/win for all of its members. But it happens a lot, and you need to be aware of this pattern if it’s playing out in your life. When you start seeing your life in these terms, you’ll be able to make sense of things that have puzzled and confused you since you were small. You’ll take better care of yourself, even if it sometimes means distancing yourself from the people who raised you. And, as you learn to get your emotional needs met elsewhere, you might step away from the lifelong power struggle you’ve been in with them, and even find some compassion for them along the way. Choose yourself, you see, and it’s win/win for all concerned.

Have you ever received a well-deserved apology but for some reason felt worse afterwards? Maybe like you did something wrong or were undeserving of it in the first place? If you feel this way after an apology, then it’s likely you got a blanket apology, which is as meaningless as no apology at all, made worse by the fact that by all social contracts, we’re supposed to accept any apology simply because it is offered, no matter how crummy it feels.

A blanket apology is one in which a person says they’re sorry, but doesn’t really own their wrongdoing, so the sorry doesn’t feel sincere. Often, the sorry feels more like “I’m sorry you’re so oversensitive” or “I’m sorry I ever got hooked up with you,” and you end up feeling at fault or second-guessing yourself for wanting an apology in the first place. If an apology is of the blanket variety, you’ll feel more distant, not closer, to the person afterward; this is, of course, the exact opposite of what an apology is supposed to accomplish.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, there was a great example of a blanket apology from John McCain to David Letterman. McCain cancelled an appearance on Letterman’s show at the last minute, saying he had to rush back to Washington for an emergency session of Congress to deal with the financial crisis. Letterman later found out that McCain didn’t rush back to Washington at all; instead, he did an interview with another journalist, went to dinner, and stayed overnight in New York before leaving for Washington in the morning. Essentially, he ditched Letterman for what he thought was a better gig.

Letterman was incensed. For weeks, he attacked McCain on his show, building the drama and tension in that way he does so well. Finally, just a few days before the election, McCain came on the show to talk about what happened and presumably to apologize. His apology? “I screwed up.”

He said it laughingly, shrugging like a naughty little boy who didn’t take the whole thing very seriously. I thought it was disrespectful, and I was disappointed that Letterman seemed to accept it in stride and not challenge McCain for a deeper, more meaningful account of what had happened and why. But after Obama won the election, Letterman brought the incident up again briefly, saying, “That’s what happens when you mess with me” or something to that effect. Which I’d like to believe was his way of saying McCain’s offer of “I screwed up” wasn’t good enough and didn’t begin to address his bad behavior or how it affected the person on the other end of it.

Most often, blanket apologies come from family members or other people we’re close to. I’ve had this experience numerous times with my siblings, and once or twice with my parents, and it took me a long time to figure out why I felt so empty when I got what I’d wanted for so long. I just assumed there was something wrong with me. Was I still too resentful, or too distrusting, or too unwilling to believe this person was sincere?

I was none of those things. The truth was, the person wasn’t sincere, and the apology offered was a cursory one, with very little awareness about where I fit in to the picture or what the true purpose of the apology was. Usually these apologies came after I forced them into a corner, defending myself against attacks in a way they didn’t expect and weren’t used to dealing with (after a lot of personal development work on my part). If I hadn’t defended myself, the apologies would probably have never come at all, so I suppose it makes sense that they were given grudgingly, and without sincerity.

But that isn’t always the case. In another instance, a sober friend made an amends to me while doing her 9th Step that went as follows: She invited me to lunch and said, “I need to make an amends to you.” This came as a shock. I said, “What for?” She said, “I’ve judged you, and I’m sorry.” I said, “Judged me about what?” And she replied, “My sponsor said I don’t have to tell you that. Just that I’m sorry.” I tried a few more times to get her to tell me what she was talking about, but she refused. I left the lunch feeling empty and hurt, and it was the beginning of the end of our relationship; I found I just didn’t want to be around her anymore.

This time, the apologizer was acting on her own authority, but the apology was nevertheless empty and meaningless to the person she’d hurt (in fact, there was no hurt until the amends). I’ve often wondered since that day if the apology was actually meant to create distance between us, since she could not have devised a more effective way to do that. Once again, at the time I thought I’d done something wrong to expect an explanation, but I know now that without the willingness to discuss the issues involved, such an apology (or amends) isn’t going to serve the relationship’s well being whatsoever.

In all of these cases is the defining trait of the blanket apology: the apology was more for the apologizer than the apologizee. They were either forced by circumstances into giving an apology or did so without understanding the underlying purpose of an apology (or an amends), which is, essentially, to let the person know that they’re important and that you sincerely desire to have a good relationship with them. Usually, a person’s narcissism is behind a self-serving apology. They see themselves as a person big enough to apologize, but really aren’t, and this comes through loud and clear. We need only pay attention to it and decide accordingly how we want to deal with it.

If you get a blanket apology from someone, one that doesn’t really address the significant issue in a way meaningful to you, it doesn’t really count, and you don’t have to accept it. You can ask for more. You don’t have to be confrontational about it. You can politely say you want to understand clearly what the person is saying and ask for more information or details. If they’re sincere, they’ll take another run at it; sometimes people just aren’t good at these things. But if they’re not, they’ll get annoyed, blaming you or acting appalled at your lack of graciousness. Either way, you’ve taken care of yourself, and you’ve gotten a much more focused picture of what your relationship with the person is, and what direction it’s moving in.

When you apologize or make amends for some wrongdoing, it’s important to be specific and sincere. Own your part clearly and be as detailed as possible. Let the person know that your intentions are to improve your relationship and become closer. And if these aren’t your intentions, then don’t apologize. You haven’t worked through your feelings yet, and the apology won’t be sincere.

If you want to have good relationships with people, it’s important to have good apology skills. Don’t take the John McCain route. Give people your respect, and they’ll respond in kind.

I don’t mean to be a doomsayer or to shock or scare you into action, but time is running out.

I say this as a simple statement of fact. We have a limited amount of time, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Most of us get seventy-some years (although that’s nothing to count on), and that might sound like a lot. But of that time, we spend a quarter of it growing up, another third of it sleeping, and yet another third of it making money so we can eat and sleep in some semblance of comfort. Unless we’re fortunate enough to have a job that we love, that leaves about a fourth of our total time to do what we want to do.

It’s important to think about how you use that time. Whether you want to think about it or not, you’re going to die someday.

Contrary to our beliefs—or more accurately, our wishful thinking—there is not plenty of time to get done what we want to get done. We have a limited time to create the life we want. We will all die with unfinished lists.

And yet, how do most of us use our most precious commodity? Shopping. Playing video games. Watching sports, movies, and reality television. We spend so much time distracting ourselves from the things that really matter, we’ve largely forgotten what those things are.

I was at a friend’s house a couple of Sundays ago. They had a small football party, something I’m only casually interested in. When “their” team fumbled a pass, one of the other guests stomped out of the room and I heard him punching something—I think a wall—in another part of the house. A door slammed hard, shaking the whole house, then it was awkwardly quiet.

“Gosh,” I said. “Did he have money on the game or something?”

“Oh no,” answered the hostess. “We just take our football very seriously.”

As utterly infantile as I found this, I also found it terribly sad. Here’s a person who’s not only distracting himself, but has picked exactly the wrong thing to feel strongly about.

I don’t mean to sound judgmental. I certainly have my own version of distractions that I spend way more time on than is probably good for me. But this football incident really got me thinking about how distractions have become the main events for so many of us, and that when this is the case, we completely miss the deeper meaning of our lives, often running out of time before we figure that out.

I’m not saying that we should never have fun or entertain ourselves. Of course we should, and we should do that in any way we find enjoyable (as long as it isn’t self-destructive or harmful to others). But if entertainment takes too big a place in our lives, we cease to grow, to learn, to become more sophisticated, more whole beings. If entertainment takes too big a place, we’ll end up looking back when we’re old (if we’re fortunate enough to get there) and regretting all the things we never did.

I’m also not saying that everybody should spend all their free time on personal growth, reading self-help books and meditating, striving for a continuous state of self-improvement. That could take all the playfulness out of life, and it could also indicate a sort of self-rejection, a sense that you aren’t good enough the way you are, which is not the point of personal development. (See here for a discussion about this.)

What I am saying is that we should do what we want, but that we have to be honest with ourselves about what that is. This can be hard to do, though, for two reasons. The first is that our culture places a high value on distractions. I love Eric Hoffer’s quote, “We can never have enough of that which we really do not want.” Take one quick look at popular culture, with its shopping malls full of cheaply manufactured crap and its new religion of celebrity, and you can see what he meant. Distractions are everywhere. They line the interstates, bark at us from television, blink at us from our computer screens. Everywhere we go, temptations to ignore our inner voice cry out to us. And the more we give in to them, the less time we have to go inward and find out what that voice is really saying.

And that is the second reason it’s hard to be honest with ourselves: doing so means we’ll have some unpleasant tasks ahead of us: facing the truth, confronting demons, overcoming fears. Yikes. Who wants to do that stuff? By the state of our culture, I’d say not so many. Introspection has almost become a dirty word. Yet without it, we never get anything we truly want; how could we possibly, if we haven’t taken the time to figure out what that is?

None of us, not on any meaningful level, really give a damn about the outcome of a ball game or TV show. If these distractions were removed from our awareness, our lives would change very, very little. And when we’re old, looking back on our lives, nobody’s going to say, “I wish I’d spent more time watching football.” They may wish they’d spent less time at the office (the original version of this quote), but only if they had a job they hated. Certainly nobody is going to say, “I wish I’d spent less time pursuing my life’s dream,” even if that dream is a lot of work. Because our life’s dream is the one thing we really do give a damn about, whether we have the courage to own up to it or not.

We all have desires, dreams, and goals. Even if we haven’t taken the time to figure out what they are yet, they’re there. So when you’re old and you look back on your life, these are the things that will feel good to see. Even if you try something and fail, you will have a sense of satisfaction at the memory of the effort. But if you never try, you will feel only regret. Play is important, but our dreams and desires infinitely more so. I would submit, in fact, that pursuing our dreams is play. Play of the highest form. Play that leaves us feeling full rather than empty.

So enjoy yourself, but remember that time is running out. Before it’s gone, you may want to give some serious thought to separating the distractions from the dreams, and take action accordingly.