Restoring Connection, Vol. II: Connection to Self (part 1)

Vol. II of a nine-part series on restoring connection in our world (split into two posts)

This is the second in a nine-part mini-series about restoring connection in our world and why and how disconnection is at the heart of so many of the grand issues of our time. If you haven’t already, check out the series introduction and table of contents.

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." - Oscar Wilde

Restoring Connection: Connection to Self

In the first post of this series I shared my thoughts about how disconnection lies at the root of all of our current crises and why restoring connection is such vital work, perhaps the most vital work we can and must do (and is also effective and deeply fulfilling).

Over the course of these next 8 posts, I will go deeper into each of what I call the ‘5 Cs of Connection’ (to self, to others, to the natural world, to mystery, and to calling). I’ll share my thoughts on why each is so important to re-establish the connection that is so vital to our way forward as a species (and individually), and how we can begin to do so.

This week and next I want to talk about disconnection from self (and its converse, reconnection to self).

What exactly does it mean to be ‘disconnected from self’?

In the course of my work with Wayfinders - hosting leadership and growth retreats for entrepreneurs in remote places around the world, as well as private one-on-one consulting - I encounter many people who are in the depths of a significant transformation (even if some of them don’t recognize - or want to acknowledge - that they are in a transition, usually because they are resisting it).

Often they’ve become disconnected from their work, or from their partner, a meaningful social circle.

“I’ve lost my motivation for my company,” they might say.

Or “I’m feeling really disconnected from my partner.”

Or “I have no idea what I want anymore.”

At the root of this disconnection and this dissatisfaction is a vague sense that we have no idea who we are or what we want anymore.

How does this happen? How do we get to the point where we’ve lost touch with something so essential?

For most, the roots can be traced back to childhood, a time when we were often forced to choose between attachment and authenticity: attachment being the child’s need to feel secure and taken care of by his or her caregivers and authenticity being the child’s need to express their authentic self.

As renowned psychologist Gabor Mate states in his book The Myth of Normal:

…although both needs are essential, there is a pecking order: in the first phase of life, attachment unfailingly tops the bill. So when the two come into conflict in a child’s life, the outcome is well-nigh predetermined. If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time.

Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.

That ‘bit by bit’ can, over the course of a childhood, add up to a cascade of devastating pressure to abandon our true selves in favour of a version more ‘acceptable’ to those around us.

Nor does the cascade end with our caregivers or with childhood. Over the course of my own recent self-explorations, I’ve come to discover that, among myriad influences, my attitudes toward intimate love were shaped by a consequential school week long ago.

It’s grade 7 at St. Bonaventure Catholic School (my attendance at the school already a threat to my authenticity). The week starts off as any other until a note arrives at my desk, passed through several sets of hands from the other side of the classroom.

I unfurl the note and find within a message from another girl in the class (let’s call her Monica). “I like you,” says the note, and with those 3 words, my heart jumps out of my chest. Monica has been the object of my innocuous desire since the start of the school year. an affection that had bordered on infatuation. I can’t believe this is happening to me, the gods are smiling on me!

Over the course of the next 4 days, more notes are passed. More furtive glances, more giggling and laughter. We exchange a few spoken words, although with my shyness as a limiting factor, the bulk of our communication takes place via the written word, passed from hand to hand in the classroom or through intermediaries. Of course, within a day the whole class knows.

Then…. the crushing hammer blow. That Friday, Monica reveals to me - again via a written note - that her affection had, all along, been a silly game, a pastime to pass the time in our mundane classroom. She had simply chosen me for the lead role of her classroom comedy, a reveal which turned the play for me into a Shakesperean tragedy of tremendous proportions.

I was devastated, not only because the object of my affection had been revealed to be a cruel manipulatrix, but because my unrequited love had been on display for the entire classroom. It seemed to me as if the whole class was in on the joke.

As crushed as I was, I soon moved on and our classroom returned to its banal regularity. Monica and I mostly avoided each other for the rest of that school year and my thoughts returned to normal boyhood fare.

I forgot about the incident for over 30 years until a therapeutic journey - one in which I went deep into self-inquiry about love and my relationship to it - brought this incident back to me with startling and sudden clarity.

I could see, and viscerally feel, how deeply that event had hurt me and how much it had shaped my view of love. That first foray into the battlefield of amour had left me torn apart by emotional mortar fire and shrapnel, forever just a little bit reluctant and tentative to return to the fray.

So here I am now, some 38 years later, still grappling with the scars and aftereffects of Monica’s betrayal.

Unfortunately, this is just one incident in a long lineup of betrayals, traumas and perfidies that have shaped my attitudes toward love and intimate relationships. Similarly, my attitudes toward and beliefs about money, work, friendship, health and other important areas of my life have been shaped by incidents from long ago.

We often misinterpret the word ‘trauma’ as defined only with a capital T: Trauma as childhood abuse, sexual abuse, or outright abandonment. These large-scale traumas undoubtedly shape their recipients, yet everyone - even those who grew up in what they remember as happy homes - has suffered the indignities of some traumas*: insults and indignities to our soul that leave an outsized mark that persists for many years after the events took place.

*trauma being not the event itself, but our internal reaction to the event. This important distinction recognizes that two people can experience the same event, yet have very different reactions to it (one experiencing it as a traumatic event with lingering effects, the other not).

Thus, an offhand ‘Don’t quit your day job’ comment, delivered laughingly by a parent when our 8-year-old self sings a tune, becomes a lifelong aversion to singing - or even hiding our metaphorical ‘voice’ of self-expression.

Understanding and rewiring these deeply-ingrained belief systems is a lifetime’s work; it is challenging, often difficult, and occasionally painful. It is, however, the most important work we can do if we are to live a life of integrity: ‘integrity’ not in its typical interpretation as honesty or adherence to an ethical code, but in its original meaning, which is a return to wholeness (the root of integrity is integrare, meaning ‘to make (something) whole, bring together the parts of’.

This work of ‘connection to self’ is thus a process of bringing together our slivered pieces, the pieces of our identity fragmented by a thousand humdrum traumas.

Restoring Connection To Self: Why Is It Important?

Although restoring one’s integrity and authenticity is personally vital work, I would argue that this work is vital to the world’s healing as well. When one is disconnected from self, the results often play out in violence: against self, against others, and against the world (perhaps not literal physical violence, but emotional and spiritual violence are often the byproduct of the pain that comes from that sense of disconnection).

As I will argue over the course of this series around restoring connection, if we are to solve many of the most significant issues of our time, it will not be - in this writer’s humble opinion - by focusing on the problems themselves, but rather by focusing on their root cause of disconnection.

Take an important and massive issue such as climate change. To date, the conversation around climate change has primarily revolved around technological solutions to climate change, such as transitioning to clean energy, or regulatory solutions such as carbon taxes.

These are indeed important, but if we do not address the root cause of climate change - the profound disconnection that causes us to seek escape from its pain by seeking solace in consumption, escape and the myriad and harmful ways in which we numb ourselves to that disconnection - then technology and regulation will always fail to keep up with our increasing disconnection.

This is not to say that our efforts to tackle big issues such as climate change - through policy, education and other means - is misguided. It is vital and necessary work. If we are to heal as a species and as a planet, however, we must also begin the work of restoring our own integrity.

As we work to restore our own integrity, we work to restore the integrity and wholeness of the world. The personal becomes the political.

So how do we go about restoring connection to self?

Restoring Connection To Self: The First Step

Simply becoming aware and admitting to ourselves that we lack integrity in many aspects of our lives is an important first step in restoring connection to self.

As the writer and renowned therapist Gabor Mate states in his recent book ‘The Myth of Normal’,

“One of the most direct approaches to authenticity is noticing when it isn’t there, then applying some curiosity and gentle skepticism to the limiting self-beliefs that stand in for it, or just stand in its way. 

The lack of authenticity makes itself known through tension or anxiety, irritability or regret, depression or fatigue. When any of these disturbances surface, we can inquire of ourselves: Is there an inner guidance I am defying, resisting, ignoring, or avoiding? Are there truths I’m withholding from expression or even contemplation, out of fear of losing security or belonging? In a recent encounter with others, is there some way I abandoned myself, my needs, my values? What fears, rationalizations, or familiar narratives kept me from being myself? Do I even know what my own values are?”

Thus, when we feel these disturbances - anxiety, irritability, regret, depression, fatigue, etc. - we can, instead of pointing our accusing finger at the world for the source of these disturbances, turn our gaze inward and ask, with compassion and curiosity, ‘how am I being untrue to myself?’

Let’s look at a big theme such as career, for example. If we find ourselves frequently irritable at work we can choose, in one instance, to look at external causes and blame our boss, blame our coworkers (or our employees if we run our own companies), or blame our working conditions. We will likely find ample sources of blame and targets for our anger.

We can also, and instead, choose to look inward and ask if, perhaps, the source of our irritability lies not with others or with external conditions, but with ourselves. Have we chosen work that does not align with our internal values, or passions, or interests? Have we chosen comfort over courage? Have we chosen a vocation meant to placate and please others, such as our parents or societal expectations?

These choices also play out in small, pedestrian ways each day of our lives: we choose a certain outfit to placate a partner or our coworkers; we choose to avoid singing for fear of judgement; we choose to stay silent at times when we should speak up because of a vestigial concern for our psychological safety.

Each of these choices represents a compromise of integrity, a choice to abandon our wholeness in search of acceptance, validation and/or comfort. Added up over a lifetime, these choices begin to erode our sense of, and connection to, our authentic self, often to the point where we no longer even know who we are anymore.

Awareness that this process is occurring is thus a vital step. Awareness of the ways in which we numb ourselves to this pain is also vital.

This can include obvious strategies such as self-medicating with alcohol or drugs whose purpose is to temporarily replace pain with pleasure. Other more acceptable strategies include distraction (our phones, Netflix, mindless entertainment).

The most prevalent and powerful strategy, however, and the most socially acceptable, is workaholism. For many, slowing down long enough to feel - or even notice - the pain that is at the root of our disconnection and authenticity is simply too much to bear, so we distract ourselves by burying our heads in work.

This distraction, particularly in the world of entrepreneurship that I live in, is typically glorified as drive or hustle.

Before I say more on the subject, let me be clear: I have nothing against drive or hustle. It’s when that drive becomes a way to avoid facing our own pain that it becomes a problem. I’ve seen countless entrepreneurs (including myself, in my previous company) use work and scale as a means of avoiding difficult emotions and avoiding the sense of disconnection at our core.

We can only run away from our own disconnection for so long before the universe hands us a cosmic punch in the face and we are forced to confront our own inauthenticities and self-betrayals.

Often this punch in the face comes in the form of external events - a failed relationship, a job dismissal, a cash flow crisis - that rock us to our core. Sometimes this punch in the face comes internally, as a gnawing voice that wants to notify us of our disconnect, of our misalignment. When that voice finds it hard to be heard above the din of our lives, it gets louder and louder until one day, the still small voice becomes a scream telling us something is off. Drowning out the voice becomes impossible and we’re forced to finally turn around and face it.

Awareness, whether we develop it ourselves, or it’s forced on us by external or internal events, is thus the first step of reconnecting to self. Without this awareness, we’ll keep looking externally for solutions to our malaise.

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Next week I’ll go deeper on Connection to Self, sharing some practical tips and tools that have worked for me. Thanks for reading this far and if you enjoyed this post please consider sharing.

Yours,

Mike Brcic,
Founder/Chief Explorer,
Wayfinders

NOTE: This is the 2nd in a mini-series of articles I’m writing about restoring connection, including practical steps you can take to restore connection in your own life. Subscribe for free if you’d like to get notified about the remaining articles in the series and my future writing about restoring connection in our disconnected world.

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p.s. I’m heading back to Uganda in May 2023, where we’ll be exploring the theme of connection on many levels. If restoring connection feels important to you, take a look at the link above.

At Wayfinders events we spend time in deep connection with each other, fostering and nurturing bonds that sustain a rich and ongoing community.

We spend time in silence and stillness and in beautiful places, restoring our connections to ourselves and to the natural world.

We do the work of restoring connection in ourselves and in so doing, we start walking the collective path back toward connection.

If that’s not in the cards, I urge you to take a few small steps this week towards restoring connection: make time for stillness; make time for connecting with friends and loved ones; spend time in wild places; contemplate the mysteries of existence.