Connection vs. Isolation, in relationships and the world.
How are we seeing the world? As isolated fragments or as a unified whole? And, what does that mean for us?
'Lone-star mental health. Much of the psychological theory and practice that's dominated the twentieth century supports a paradigm of fragmentation by using ego-separateness as a leading criterion of adult mental health. The more we separate ourselves from a context of connectedness and establish a self-definition independent from it, the more we're judged to be psychologically mature.
The theory has even been applied to cultures. Native cultures were regarded as "primitive" and their members psychologically immature, because they didn't operate on the John Wayne, self-against-society model. Their meaning grew from their connectedness, and when they were taken away from it, they died. They couldn't survive when they were put into European culture and treated like lone anthropological specimens--hence their "psychological backwardness."
Different but connected. Not that it isn't important to stand our ground as individuals. Valuing the unique soul-expression we are, speaking our truth whether we're in agreement with others or not, and being able to distinguish what feels right to us from what's imposed externally are all vitally important abilities if we're to step back, rethink, and change our social systems.
But is a separate ego necessary to do this? Different doesn't have to mean unconnected. Nor does it have to mean at odds or warring. One person expresses many different qualities, for example, but unless we have a severe case of multiple personalities, we don't see these qualities as being separate or in conflict. Because they're all expressions of one person, they're all connected, even if we're in the process of figuring out how. So, too, our egos may differ--and we assume they will--but they don't need to be separate or disconnected for us to value these differences. In fact, it's through our connectedness that we experience our differences as enriching both to us and to our social systems. (Creating connectedness precisely to explore differences is what the Internet is all about.)
Connecting skills: Weakness and moral immaturity? Traditional psychoanalytic theory, though, doesn't grant comparable value to connected behavior. As Carol Gilligan explained in her landmark book In a Different Voice, the sensitivity to connectedness that women are culturally encouraged to develop is judged by male theorists to be morally less advanced than the traditionally masculine talent of standing alone for abstract principles. Valuing connectedness more than separateness is interpreted as moral immaturity.
In other words, [the paradigm's isolationist philosophy] has defined mental health to accentuate ego separateness and to downplay our connectedness. It's healthy to focus on our differences, it tells us, and unhealthy to attune ourselves to our connectedness.
This is more than a question of masculine or feminine styles, though culturally it tends to play itself out that way. Beyond gender differences lie the questions of reality, culture, and the paradigms we use to shape our responses. Are we most alive to our multifaceted reality when we're asserting separateness and independence, or when we're mindful of our connectedness?
Codependence revisited. The problem with codependents, for instance, isn't that they're too aware of their connectedness in relationships, as is often assumed, but that they're not aware enough. They don't realize that they're connecting in mutually destructive ways. Connectedness isn't the problem; connectedness to addictive, self-destructive roles is.
Not all connectedness is equal. If connectedness to soul-denying systems robs us of happiness, the answer isn't to become islands of ego-independence but to restructure how we're connecting.
Because we're never not in systems, we're never truly separate. When we're faced with abusive patterns, ignoring our connectedness by claiming separateness won't help. Given our reality, it's not even possible. The road to freedom lies in redefining ourselves apart from destructive patterns but not apart from any connectedness at all. Instead of downplaying our connectedness, we need to evolve how to respond to it--what we do with it....
Paradigm-inspired responses. "I don't know what I need to know": This defensive response arises from fear. When our paradigm describes reality as competing fragments, disconnectedness becomes our reality. As long as we buy the fragmented model, we're bound to suspect connectedness.
Because philosophies of disconnectedness--atomistic materialism, separate egoism, or dog-eat-dog competition--pervade our culture, closed-system responses are everywhere. They're habitual ways of responding--responses we've come to expect as normal. Whether it's who gets the last word in an argument, who gets control of a market, or who gets away with what, defending separate entities (egos, positions, businesses, religions, or nations) is the challenge, control is the solution, and closed-system responses are the way to get it: "Look out for yourself!" "Intimidate!" "Control their options!" "Assert your authority!" "Show them who's boss!"
Exclusive personal relationships. Closed-system responses also hit home. If we feel insecure in a relationship, the closed-system response is to seal off the relationship, control each other's behavior, and keep each other in positions of neediness. That way, neither party reevaluates the pattern. This is a John D. Rockefeller response to our nearest and dearest.
Friendships and marriages often lapse into closed-system patterns, characterized by possessiveness, jealousy, secretiveness, criticizing those outside the relationship, or polarizing against outsiders. Connectedness with one person means disconnectedness from others.
In fact, the cultural concept of marriage defines it in predominately exclusivist terms. Marriage means you're supposed to love your spouse but not anyone else, and your spouse shouldn't love anyone but you. Each owns the other. Marriage becomes synonymous with exclusivity, inviting all the closed-system responses--possessiveness, suspicion, and the like--as behavior appropriate in a marriage.
The alternate, of course, is not for everyone to fool around randomly with everyone else but to define marriage differently--as an openly committed response to connectiveness. Then, rather than treating spouses and partners as possessions, we may be tempted to treat them as persons.
Valuing connectedness. As we listen to connectedness, we respect the messages that come through. When a connection comes into our circle of awareness, we treat it as a friend and teacher. The closed-system temptation, of course, is to load up every connection with expectations, until the pure connectedness gets lost. We calculate how we can cash in on the connection or make it serve a fixed agenda. If we meet somebody, we wonder, "Is he or she a potential customer? Will he be Mr. Right, or she Ms. Right? Will the person make a good contact, which means we'd better at least smile at any bad jokes?"
Valuing connectedness means valuing the connectedness for its own sake and not for something external to it. Instead of figuring out how to make it serve us, we let the connection be what it is and expand our awareness. Among Native Peoples--what Riane Eiseler calls "partnership" societies--each individual is treated as a gift to the group. While children naturally connect to their families and communities as sources of care and wisdom, community members in turn welcome the special gifts that each child brings. Children don't exist primarily to carry on the family name or family business or to fulfill their parents' expectations of them. They exist to be who they are, on the assumption that this itself is the best gift to society.
Committed to our connectedness. As we value connectedness, we do what strengthens it and don't do what undermines it. We commit to keeping our connectedness healthy.
Committed to ending abuse. Minimally, we don't abuse those we're connected with--whether family members, employees, other nations, or the earth. More, we commit to ending abuse wherever we can. Control responses impose patterns that aren't natural and come at a price. Committed to healthy connecting, we recognize when control responses interject unhealthy patterns, and we don't tolerate them.
Commitment expressed through values. Next, we nurture "the good, the right, and the true" in the connectedness that's evolving among us. To paraphrase Socrates again, we become midwives to a growing awareness of how a connected world works.
Marriage can illustrate an open-system response to connectedness, namely, to creating loving relationships. There's no formula, but their are basic values of commitment. We commit to being soul-connected ourselves, so that there's someone there for our partners to connect with. Together, we commit to mutual respect, mutual growth, health, happiness, creativity, understanding, and, of course, love.
Committing to connectedness through such values doesn't make relationships static. Quite the reverse, it values connectedness as a matrix for mutual development, which is how relationships stay fun and alive.'
A lot to think about, I think. :)
I love you.
Serafina
'Lone-star mental health. Much of the psychological theory and practice that's dominated the twentieth century supports a paradigm of fragmentation by using ego-separateness as a leading criterion of adult mental health. The more we separate ourselves from a context of connectedness and establish a self-definition independent from it, the more we're judged to be psychologically mature.
The theory has even been applied to cultures. Native cultures were regarded as "primitive" and their members psychologically immature, because they didn't operate on the John Wayne, self-against-society model. Their meaning grew from their connectedness, and when they were taken away from it, they died. They couldn't survive when they were put into European culture and treated like lone anthropological specimens--hence their "psychological backwardness."
Different but connected. Not that it isn't important to stand our ground as individuals. Valuing the unique soul-expression we are, speaking our truth whether we're in agreement with others or not, and being able to distinguish what feels right to us from what's imposed externally are all vitally important abilities if we're to step back, rethink, and change our social systems.
But is a separate ego necessary to do this? Different doesn't have to mean unconnected. Nor does it have to mean at odds or warring. One person expresses many different qualities, for example, but unless we have a severe case of multiple personalities, we don't see these qualities as being separate or in conflict. Because they're all expressions of one person, they're all connected, even if we're in the process of figuring out how. So, too, our egos may differ--and we assume they will--but they don't need to be separate or disconnected for us to value these differences. In fact, it's through our connectedness that we experience our differences as enriching both to us and to our social systems. (Creating connectedness precisely to explore differences is what the Internet is all about.)
Connecting skills: Weakness and moral immaturity? Traditional psychoanalytic theory, though, doesn't grant comparable value to connected behavior. As Carol Gilligan explained in her landmark book In a Different Voice, the sensitivity to connectedness that women are culturally encouraged to develop is judged by male theorists to be morally less advanced than the traditionally masculine talent of standing alone for abstract principles. Valuing connectedness more than separateness is interpreted as moral immaturity.
In other words, [the paradigm's isolationist philosophy] has defined mental health to accentuate ego separateness and to downplay our connectedness. It's healthy to focus on our differences, it tells us, and unhealthy to attune ourselves to our connectedness.
This is more than a question of masculine or feminine styles, though culturally it tends to play itself out that way. Beyond gender differences lie the questions of reality, culture, and the paradigms we use to shape our responses. Are we most alive to our multifaceted reality when we're asserting separateness and independence, or when we're mindful of our connectedness?
Codependence revisited. The problem with codependents, for instance, isn't that they're too aware of their connectedness in relationships, as is often assumed, but that they're not aware enough. They don't realize that they're connecting in mutually destructive ways. Connectedness isn't the problem; connectedness to addictive, self-destructive roles is.
Not all connectedness is equal. If connectedness to soul-denying systems robs us of happiness, the answer isn't to become islands of ego-independence but to restructure how we're connecting.
Because we're never not in systems, we're never truly separate. When we're faced with abusive patterns, ignoring our connectedness by claiming separateness won't help. Given our reality, it's not even possible. The road to freedom lies in redefining ourselves apart from destructive patterns but not apart from any connectedness at all. Instead of downplaying our connectedness, we need to evolve how to respond to it--what we do with it....
Paradigm-inspired responses. "I don't know what I need to know": This defensive response arises from fear. When our paradigm describes reality as competing fragments, disconnectedness becomes our reality. As long as we buy the fragmented model, we're bound to suspect connectedness.
Because philosophies of disconnectedness--atomistic materialism, separate egoism, or dog-eat-dog competition--pervade our culture, closed-system responses are everywhere. They're habitual ways of responding--responses we've come to expect as normal. Whether it's who gets the last word in an argument, who gets control of a market, or who gets away with what, defending separate entities (egos, positions, businesses, religions, or nations) is the challenge, control is the solution, and closed-system responses are the way to get it: "Look out for yourself!" "Intimidate!" "Control their options!" "Assert your authority!" "Show them who's boss!"
Exclusive personal relationships. Closed-system responses also hit home. If we feel insecure in a relationship, the closed-system response is to seal off the relationship, control each other's behavior, and keep each other in positions of neediness. That way, neither party reevaluates the pattern. This is a John D. Rockefeller response to our nearest and dearest.
Friendships and marriages often lapse into closed-system patterns, characterized by possessiveness, jealousy, secretiveness, criticizing those outside the relationship, or polarizing against outsiders. Connectedness with one person means disconnectedness from others.
In fact, the cultural concept of marriage defines it in predominately exclusivist terms. Marriage means you're supposed to love your spouse but not anyone else, and your spouse shouldn't love anyone but you. Each owns the other. Marriage becomes synonymous with exclusivity, inviting all the closed-system responses--possessiveness, suspicion, and the like--as behavior appropriate in a marriage.
The alternate, of course, is not for everyone to fool around randomly with everyone else but to define marriage differently--as an openly committed response to connectiveness. Then, rather than treating spouses and partners as possessions, we may be tempted to treat them as persons.
Valuing connectedness. As we listen to connectedness, we respect the messages that come through. When a connection comes into our circle of awareness, we treat it as a friend and teacher. The closed-system temptation, of course, is to load up every connection with expectations, until the pure connectedness gets lost. We calculate how we can cash in on the connection or make it serve a fixed agenda. If we meet somebody, we wonder, "Is he or she a potential customer? Will he be Mr. Right, or she Ms. Right? Will the person make a good contact, which means we'd better at least smile at any bad jokes?"
Valuing connectedness means valuing the connectedness for its own sake and not for something external to it. Instead of figuring out how to make it serve us, we let the connection be what it is and expand our awareness. Among Native Peoples--what Riane Eiseler calls "partnership" societies--each individual is treated as a gift to the group. While children naturally connect to their families and communities as sources of care and wisdom, community members in turn welcome the special gifts that each child brings. Children don't exist primarily to carry on the family name or family business or to fulfill their parents' expectations of them. They exist to be who they are, on the assumption that this itself is the best gift to society.
Committed to our connectedness. As we value connectedness, we do what strengthens it and don't do what undermines it. We commit to keeping our connectedness healthy.
Committed to ending abuse. Minimally, we don't abuse those we're connected with--whether family members, employees, other nations, or the earth. More, we commit to ending abuse wherever we can. Control responses impose patterns that aren't natural and come at a price. Committed to healthy connecting, we recognize when control responses interject unhealthy patterns, and we don't tolerate them.
Commitment expressed through values. Next, we nurture "the good, the right, and the true" in the connectedness that's evolving among us. To paraphrase Socrates again, we become midwives to a growing awareness of how a connected world works.
Marriage can illustrate an open-system response to connectedness, namely, to creating loving relationships. There's no formula, but their are basic values of commitment. We commit to being soul-connected ourselves, so that there's someone there for our partners to connect with. Together, we commit to mutual respect, mutual growth, health, happiness, creativity, understanding, and, of course, love.
Committing to connectedness through such values doesn't make relationships static. Quite the reverse, it values connectedness as a matrix for mutual development, which is how relationships stay fun and alive.'
A lot to think about, I think. :)
I love you.
Serafina