I’m going to start with connection, because by the time you’re a social worker for ten years, you realize that connection is why we’re all here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, or mental health, or abuse and neglect. What we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is neurobiologically, that’s how we’re wired, it’s why we’re here. So I thought you know what? I’m going to start with connection.
And, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome, and one thing that’s “an opportunity for growth”? And ALL you can think about is the opportunity for growth? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.
So very quickly, about six weeks into this research, I ran into this unnamed thing, that absolutely unraveled connection, in a way I didn’t understand and had never seen before. So I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is, and it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection; is there something about me, that if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of their connection? The things I can tell you about it is that it’s universal, we all have it, the only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it and the less you talk about it the more you have it.
What underpinned this shame, this “I’m not good enough.” which, we all know that feeling, I’m not good enough, I’m not [blank] enough, thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, promoted enough, was excruciating vulnerability. This idea, that in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. Really seen. And. You know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability. So I thought: this is my chance, to beat it back with my measuring stick. I’m going in, I’m going to figure this stuff out, I’m going to spend a year to totally deconstruct shame, I’m going to understand how vulnerability works, and I’m going to outsmart it.
So I was ready! I was really excited. As you all know, it didn’t turn out well. […] It was a year long street fight. Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but won my life back. So then I went back into the research, and tried to understand what are we doing with vulnerability. Why do we struggle with it so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No. So this is what I learned:
We numb vulnerability. It was funny, when I sent something out on facebook and on twitter that said “How do you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?” And within an hour and a half I had 150 responses. “Having to ask my husband for help because I’m sick and we’re newly married,” “Initiating sex with my husband,” “Initiating sex with my wife,” “Being turned down,” “Waiting for the doctor to call back,” “Getting laid off,” “Laying off people,” this is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb the vulnerability. And there exists evidence, and I don’t think this is the only reason such evidence exists but it’s a huge cause. We are the most in debt, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in US history.
And the problem is, you cannot selectively numb human emotion. You cannot say, here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment. I don’t want to feel these. I’m gonna have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects and emotions. So when we numb those, we numb genuine joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning. And then we feel vulnerable, and so we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle. And I think we numb in a number of ways, not just through addiction.
Another way we numb is that we make everything that’s uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to a certainty. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more certain we are. This is what politics looks like today. There’s no discourse, there’s no conversation. There’s just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort.
We perfect. If there’s anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me. But it doesn’t work. And most dangerously of all, we try to perfect our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. Children are wired for struggle when they get here. When you hold those perfect little babies in your hands, our job is not to say “Look at her, she’s perfect. My job is to keep her always perfect, and make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and gets into Yale by seventh grade.” That’s not our job. Our job is to look at her and say you know what? You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. That’s our job. Give us a generation of kids raised like that and I think we won’t see a lot of the problems we’re experiencing today.
We pretend. We pretend what we do doesn’t have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives, we do that on a corporate level, whether it’s a bailout, an oil spill, a recall, we pretend like what we’re doing doesn’t have a huge impact on other connected people.
