Emotional Lions
I've spent a number of recent entries talking about risk--specifically, how risk-taking has been a necessary and formative step in my personal growth. Most of these anecdotes have discussed the benefit that can come as a result of putting oneself out there--even when the positive effects are not immediately recognized. But what happens when you take a risk and the outcome isn't beneficial? For many of us, the impact feels incredibly profound. For some, it can be a severe enough blow that the world seems to be crashing down around you.
Until recently, my life was a series of 'safe' choices, as I've spent the majority of it avoiding risk out of a fear of failure. This avoidance led to a certain degree of success on paper, racking up higher degrees at school and advancing in my design career, but it was an existence that brought with it a wholly unfulfilled sense of purpose. Nothing in my life has ever fulfilled me the way that connecting with others has, and pursuing my uninspiring career track often felt like a felt like a dull surrogate in comparison. Because I knew inherently that this path would always fall short in igniting my passions, I threw my energies into interpersonal relationships instead. This call for connection has always felt too vital for me to avoid, despite that this act is fraught with the uncontrollable risk of rejection. For me, when I feel connected, all is right with the world; relationships with peers, with partners, have the capacity to ground me in ways I have struggled for years to cultivate on my own. It's the way I'm wired. I'm a "people person". But people are complex. Often, we don't want the same things or share the same expectations, and that can be incredibly painful. I sometimes fathom myself running headlong into a brick wall, over and over, when it comes to interpersonal experiences because for me, they have the capacity to yield the type of of 'failure' that can entirely throw my life off course, and historically they have.
I possess a type of attachment style that, when mixed with my specific brand of personality traits, can make for a difficult road. It even has a name, which I've learned through therapy, but don't yet feel comfortable mentioning here. It's not too incredibly different from the typical human condition--many experience what I do by varying degrees; I'm not unique in that regard. But I do have a heightened sensitivity factor and less stable "sense-of-self". So when I throw myself full force into platonic, and more significantly, non-platonic relationships, as I am apt to do, I can experience a profound sense of joy--euphoria even--through this connection. But when I suffer rejection, I emerge battered and bruised, and the filter of sensitivity I speak of makes the fallout devastating.
It is a rare individual who will escape this life without having suffered hurt based on a relationship with another human. If we really want to distill things down: every meaningful relationship we have will end in either rejection or loss. I know, I know, that's extremely overly-simplistic--not to mention completely depressing--but true in a rudimentary sense, as life itself is fleeting, impermanent, and the relationships we build within it follow suit. So why do we continue to subject ourselves to this inevitable risk of being hurt? Well, we can thank our brains for that. Attachment is an essential part of our humanity. We don't enter this world alone, nor would we survive if we did. And for most of us, the idea of leaving it in isolation is absolutely terrifying. And that's exactly why rejection hurts so damn bad. We are wired to seek our tribe, to find companionship--our survival having been dependent upon it from the time we took our first breath. Our need for connection is primitive. Despite that our culture has evolved in ways that allow for us to survive physically as individuals once we reach adulthood--our psyche just hasn't caught up. While we are no longer reliant on one another for food, shelter, and protection the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, the need for emotional connectivity is deeply embedded within us, and because of this, the experience of a lost connection can be just as profound as if our survival depended on it.
Our culture has evolved in a fashion that reflects the importance of our primitive attachment tendencies, publicly celebrating connection while shaming rejection as personal failure. Evolutionary instinct has been translated into "social survival" skills. Connection has been capitalized on--the 76 billion dollar-a-year wedding industry tells us this (a quick Google search led me to this number; projected for 2019 by ibisworld.com). All the while, loss and rejection have been turned into dark entertainment--as indicated by a trip down the celebrity rag-mag laden checkout lane in the grocery store. Given this landscape, in which social rejection equals failure, and failure equals shame, and social rejection is an inevitable part of life, it's no wonder that many of us struggle to get out of bed in the morning. We are protecting ourselves. On the surface it may look like shielding oneself from public ridicule and judgement in order to save face, but if we dig a little deeper and examine why we have evolved this way, why we as individuals assign so much value to what the perceived "they" think, it boils down to our nature; we are attempting to avoid the hurt caused when there is a threat to our primitive instincts. Physical or social, the body and its emotions do not discriminate when we feel a threat. In 'lion-chasing-you-through-the-savanna' terms, we are fighting for our survival--a survival only made possible by maintaining good standing within our tribe. But...and this is a big but...because connecting with others--with a tribe--is no longer essential to our physical survival as adults, we've been given the luxury of avoiding this rejection-fueled shame. While a seemingly convenient solution, our instinct-driven brains aren't about to let us off the hook so easily, because we will always lose when it comes down to a battle with our biology.
Shame-avoidance surrounding relationships looks different on everyone. For some, it's never seeking relationships with others to begin with. These loners remain insulated from rejection because there is simply no one there to dole it out. Others jump seamlessly from relationship to relationship, forging new interactions when there are threats to the present connection, or when it is perceived that a more beneficial connection with another is possible, often at the emotional expense of their current partner. My own personal brand of safe-guarding from rejection reflects an inherent inability to tolerate ambivalence. While decisiveness can be a beneficial trait, this mentality has not served me well in relationships. In action, it first looks like reassurance-seeking, then ditching and running for the hills when I sense that someone is not as "all in" as I am. If someone is undecided or giving mixed signals laced with even a faint hint of rejection, it is far easier for me to be angry and indignant, feeling victimized and making the other out to be the bad guy in order to decisively end things rather than than hang in and remain open to the possibility of future hurt and rejection. While instinctively this is a protective mechanism, it is a play for control if there ever was one. In primitive terms, if someone can't absolutely guarantee that they are going to keep me from getting eaten by that lion stalking us in the tall grass, I'd rather not hang around to wait and see what happens. Unfortunately for me, there are no guarantees--with lions or with life.
Whatever your flavor of shame-avoidance behavior, everything we do roots back to our instinct to prevent being booted out by the tribe. The lengths we go to as humans to avoid rejection, to avoid hurt, make sense evolutionarily, but are simply not as useful in today's world, and end up hurting us more in the long run. It takes a lot to rewire our primal, rejection-averse brains. I spoke about how the fact that we are no longer dependent on others for survival has given us the liberty to develop all manner of behaviors to avoid or soften the blow of rejection, often stunting the human experience. But what if we were to use this new-found (in evolutionary terms) safety to our advantage, as a way of cashing in on the ability to connect more fully, to love more deeply, in a space where rejection doesn't entail being eaten by a lion? What does this look like?
It looks like a whole hell of a lot of risk. It looks like not playing it safe. It looks like being open and honest with ourselves, with our families, with our partners, with our tribe, while staring rejection and loss--present-day emotional lions--right in the face. And with that, it looks like pain, and some suffering, but it also looks like wholeness. It looks like fully embracing everything that we are capable of embodying as human beings. It looks like living a big, wide-open life full of all types of experiences, rather than one that is small, stunted, and close-minded. It looks like living the full-spectrum of emotions, rather than treading only in the middle or oscillating erratically from one end to the other. I guess what I'm saying is that while our self-protective behaviors give us the perception that we are safeguarding ourselves from rejection, at what cost are we doing this? We end up feeling just as crummy engaging in these actions as we would if we actually were rejected, because these actions don't protect, they isolate us--from one another and from our authentic selves--and isolation goes against our primal instinct for connection.
I've thought a lot about why I am single, why I have failed to find a tribe of my own, despite that I have always been drawn to connect with others. It was only recently that I realized that my aversion to risk and fear of rejection, in my mind synonymous with failure, has played as significant a part in this aspect of my life as it has in others. The regret I feel about this struggle, which I engaged in at the expense of interpersonal connection, is significant. I can't change what is and what has been. But I can say this: from this point forward, I refuse to live a stunted half-life dictated by fear and avoidance. I will try my damndest to live life on life's terms, rather than indulge the illusion of my own control. I will get hurt again, maybe many more times, and every instance will feel hellish, but I know that just as life is impermanent, so is its pain, and these emotional valleys make ascension of its peaks all the more sweet.
Until recently, my life was a series of 'safe' choices, as I've spent the majority of it avoiding risk out of a fear of failure. This avoidance led to a certain degree of success on paper, racking up higher degrees at school and advancing in my design career, but it was an existence that brought with it a wholly unfulfilled sense of purpose. Nothing in my life has ever fulfilled me the way that connecting with others has, and pursuing my uninspiring career track often felt like a felt like a dull surrogate in comparison. Because I knew inherently that this path would always fall short in igniting my passions, I threw my energies into interpersonal relationships instead. This call for connection has always felt too vital for me to avoid, despite that this act is fraught with the uncontrollable risk of rejection. For me, when I feel connected, all is right with the world; relationships with peers, with partners, have the capacity to ground me in ways I have struggled for years to cultivate on my own. It's the way I'm wired. I'm a "people person". But people are complex. Often, we don't want the same things or share the same expectations, and that can be incredibly painful. I sometimes fathom myself running headlong into a brick wall, over and over, when it comes to interpersonal experiences because for me, they have the capacity to yield the type of of 'failure' that can entirely throw my life off course, and historically they have.
I possess a type of attachment style that, when mixed with my specific brand of personality traits, can make for a difficult road. It even has a name, which I've learned through therapy, but don't yet feel comfortable mentioning here. It's not too incredibly different from the typical human condition--many experience what I do by varying degrees; I'm not unique in that regard. But I do have a heightened sensitivity factor and less stable "sense-of-self". So when I throw myself full force into platonic, and more significantly, non-platonic relationships, as I am apt to do, I can experience a profound sense of joy--euphoria even--through this connection. But when I suffer rejection, I emerge battered and bruised, and the filter of sensitivity I speak of makes the fallout devastating.
It is a rare individual who will escape this life without having suffered hurt based on a relationship with another human. If we really want to distill things down: every meaningful relationship we have will end in either rejection or loss. I know, I know, that's extremely overly-simplistic--not to mention completely depressing--but true in a rudimentary sense, as life itself is fleeting, impermanent, and the relationships we build within it follow suit. So why do we continue to subject ourselves to this inevitable risk of being hurt? Well, we can thank our brains for that. Attachment is an essential part of our humanity. We don't enter this world alone, nor would we survive if we did. And for most of us, the idea of leaving it in isolation is absolutely terrifying. And that's exactly why rejection hurts so damn bad. We are wired to seek our tribe, to find companionship--our survival having been dependent upon it from the time we took our first breath. Our need for connection is primitive. Despite that our culture has evolved in ways that allow for us to survive physically as individuals once we reach adulthood--our psyche just hasn't caught up. While we are no longer reliant on one another for food, shelter, and protection the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, the need for emotional connectivity is deeply embedded within us, and because of this, the experience of a lost connection can be just as profound as if our survival depended on it.
Our culture has evolved in a fashion that reflects the importance of our primitive attachment tendencies, publicly celebrating connection while shaming rejection as personal failure. Evolutionary instinct has been translated into "social survival" skills. Connection has been capitalized on--the 76 billion dollar-a-year wedding industry tells us this (a quick Google search led me to this number; projected for 2019 by ibisworld.com). All the while, loss and rejection have been turned into dark entertainment--as indicated by a trip down the celebrity rag-mag laden checkout lane in the grocery store. Given this landscape, in which social rejection equals failure, and failure equals shame, and social rejection is an inevitable part of life, it's no wonder that many of us struggle to get out of bed in the morning. We are protecting ourselves. On the surface it may look like shielding oneself from public ridicule and judgement in order to save face, but if we dig a little deeper and examine why we have evolved this way, why we as individuals assign so much value to what the perceived "they" think, it boils down to our nature; we are attempting to avoid the hurt caused when there is a threat to our primitive instincts. Physical or social, the body and its emotions do not discriminate when we feel a threat. In 'lion-chasing-you-through-the-savanna' terms, we are fighting for our survival--a survival only made possible by maintaining good standing within our tribe. But...and this is a big but...because connecting with others--with a tribe--is no longer essential to our physical survival as adults, we've been given the luxury of avoiding this rejection-fueled shame. While a seemingly convenient solution, our instinct-driven brains aren't about to let us off the hook so easily, because we will always lose when it comes down to a battle with our biology.
Shame-avoidance surrounding relationships looks different on everyone. For some, it's never seeking relationships with others to begin with. These loners remain insulated from rejection because there is simply no one there to dole it out. Others jump seamlessly from relationship to relationship, forging new interactions when there are threats to the present connection, or when it is perceived that a more beneficial connection with another is possible, often at the emotional expense of their current partner. My own personal brand of safe-guarding from rejection reflects an inherent inability to tolerate ambivalence. While decisiveness can be a beneficial trait, this mentality has not served me well in relationships. In action, it first looks like reassurance-seeking, then ditching and running for the hills when I sense that someone is not as "all in" as I am. If someone is undecided or giving mixed signals laced with even a faint hint of rejection, it is far easier for me to be angry and indignant, feeling victimized and making the other out to be the bad guy in order to decisively end things rather than than hang in and remain open to the possibility of future hurt and rejection. While instinctively this is a protective mechanism, it is a play for control if there ever was one. In primitive terms, if someone can't absolutely guarantee that they are going to keep me from getting eaten by that lion stalking us in the tall grass, I'd rather not hang around to wait and see what happens. Unfortunately for me, there are no guarantees--with lions or with life.
Whatever your flavor of shame-avoidance behavior, everything we do roots back to our instinct to prevent being booted out by the tribe. The lengths we go to as humans to avoid rejection, to avoid hurt, make sense evolutionarily, but are simply not as useful in today's world, and end up hurting us more in the long run. It takes a lot to rewire our primal, rejection-averse brains. I spoke about how the fact that we are no longer dependent on others for survival has given us the liberty to develop all manner of behaviors to avoid or soften the blow of rejection, often stunting the human experience. But what if we were to use this new-found (in evolutionary terms) safety to our advantage, as a way of cashing in on the ability to connect more fully, to love more deeply, in a space where rejection doesn't entail being eaten by a lion? What does this look like?
It looks like a whole hell of a lot of risk. It looks like not playing it safe. It looks like being open and honest with ourselves, with our families, with our partners, with our tribe, while staring rejection and loss--present-day emotional lions--right in the face. And with that, it looks like pain, and some suffering, but it also looks like wholeness. It looks like fully embracing everything that we are capable of embodying as human beings. It looks like living a big, wide-open life full of all types of experiences, rather than one that is small, stunted, and close-minded. It looks like living the full-spectrum of emotions, rather than treading only in the middle or oscillating erratically from one end to the other. I guess what I'm saying is that while our self-protective behaviors give us the perception that we are safeguarding ourselves from rejection, at what cost are we doing this? We end up feeling just as crummy engaging in these actions as we would if we actually were rejected, because these actions don't protect, they isolate us--from one another and from our authentic selves--and isolation goes against our primal instinct for connection.
I've thought a lot about why I am single, why I have failed to find a tribe of my own, despite that I have always been drawn to connect with others. It was only recently that I realized that my aversion to risk and fear of rejection, in my mind synonymous with failure, has played as significant a part in this aspect of my life as it has in others. The regret I feel about this struggle, which I engaged in at the expense of interpersonal connection, is significant. I can't change what is and what has been. But I can say this: from this point forward, I refuse to live a stunted half-life dictated by fear and avoidance. I will try my damndest to live life on life's terms, rather than indulge the illusion of my own control. I will get hurt again, maybe many more times, and every instance will feel hellish, but I know that just as life is impermanent, so is its pain, and these emotional valleys make ascension of its peaks all the more sweet.
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| Feeling all the feelings at sunrise on my last day on the summit. Despite having an amazing summer, risk and rejection were still a part of my experience, as they always are when you authentically connect with other people. |
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