I began a 4 part series working through Irvin Yalom’s existential givens, or the universal human anxieties that drive our more daily anxieties a few months ago. Between speaking at a conference, wrangling a 5 month old, and general life stuff, I got sidetracked. Providentially, it’s now, during the COVID-19 outbreak that I pick back up with Yalom’s third existential anxiety: isolation. And while many of us are quarantined and intimately acquainted with isolation, this may prove a very timely discussion for us.
Created for connection
It’s in our hardwiring that we’re made to be in community and relationships. Our nervous systems, which govern our threat responses like fight, flight, and freeze, become more resilient in community (or less so in its absence). I’ve written before on community being medicine and from our resilience in the face of stress and trauma, to anxiety and depression, it’s not a stretch to say that healthy connection with others is vital for our wellbeing.
And yet, we live so much of our lives without genuine connection. We replace intimacy with information and presence with the delusion of omnipresence through a barrage of social media. Perhaps now during the COVID-19 outbreak, while we live in quarantine, we can sense just how essential that connection really is to us.
Isolation from others
There are really two ways that we experience isolation, and the first is more obvious on the face of things but I would say that it’s more pervasive than we may think.
The philosopher Martin Buber once characterized genuineness in relationship as the I-Thou encounter. He described the I-Thou relationship as one marked by people who see one another and allow space for them as they are. He contrasts it with the I-It relationship in which people relate to each other as objects.
In an I-Thou relationship, a person is loved and valued for who they are. In an I-It relationship, a person is valued for what they can do for the person who ‘loves’ them or calls them friend. Many of the relationships common to our culture really are I-It relationships.
Isolation from self
The second kind of isolation is isolation from ourselves, or parts of ourselves. It’s what happens when we don’t allow ourselves to inhabit our full spectrum of being. That could be something like spiritual bypass (or any other form of bypass) because of trauma, polarization like I’ve written about previously, or simply because it is too psychologically uncomfortable for us to really engage those parts of ourselves.
One example of this might be the person who grew up always following the rules, doing what was expected, and comparing themselves in an unhealthy way to others, building their sense of self-worth off of that comparison. Perhaps at some juncture in their lives, they disappoint themselves and find themselves overwrought with self-criticism, anxiety, and self-contempt. Being shut off from the flawed and imperfect facets of themselves set them up for severe anxiety later on.
Another way that we encounter isolation from self is in the ways we socialize boys to ‘not be emotional’ or reenforce the narrative that men are naturally stoic, unspiritual, unemotional, and do not possess the gentler virtues such as nurturing.
Recovering resilience
To become resilient in this area, is to connect. Connecting is scary. It requires being known as well as discovery. That might mean that I discover that I am not who I thought I was or that the person I love or call friend is not who I would most like them to be. But then, no form of bravery has ever been possible without vulnerability and life is to be done bravely if it is to be lived genuinely and fully.
I’ve written about the cultivation of awe before and I’ll be writing about meaning in my next post. Awe and meaning together with humility and curiosity are the magic ingredients for a truly connected life, both to ourselves and one another.
