Attraction & Connectivity
They say when we answer a question it poses two more. That when old mysteries are exposed, revealing new and powerful information, this process eventually uncovers even more awesome unanswered questions. Such is the case with what we’ve discovered in the name of science, best exemplified by the patterns of attraction and connectivity between very tiny, atom, as well as very large, planet, objects, which mathematics helps us explain so well that we are constantly inventing new technological gadgets based upon this new information.
So what are the new questions being exposed? The answer is we’re not paying much attention even to what they are-all of which have at least something to do with our personal emotional experience. If science can explain the behavior of physical objects, can it unravel the spiritual and emotional aspects of being human?
For the most part we prefer to leave personal issues in the hands of lovers, priests and mothers, etc., as sacred events that must not be contaminated by the impersonal-big picture-perspective of science. When we do pay closer attention to human issues scientifically, specifically human nature, what we produce is a very highly over simplified application of reason. All that layman and professionals have in the name of psychology after 100 years of study are various half-assed notions of what’s normal, and what’s abnormal in human function-in other words “pathology”.
How in hell can a perspective based almost entirely upon a negative assumption help us build a positive model of ourselves? Indeed does anybody have a big picture view of what people are really all about? The answer is hardly anyone, though more likely probably no one.
And yet a closer examination of our personal lives reveals, curiously, that in human emotional experience, attraction and connectivity is the most powerful and influential aspect of who we are, and how we understand ourselves. We spend more time doing, fantasizing, moping, regretting, dreaming and hoping for a successful satisfying connectivity experience 10 times more often than we address any other human issue. Some people behave as if doing it meant binging upon nature’s sexual invitation; while others regard it as love, community and/or caring for each other. But all of these descriptions leave what is going on as mysteriously unexplained, in a big picture sense, as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc. were for the longest time in human history, thought to be acts of an angry god.
As 30 years of psychotherapy practice reveals, attraction and connectivity IS the most powerful influence upon human experience. But this doesn’t mean it’s the way things are supposed to be. If we take human intimacy out of all the tiny boxes we try and confine it within-religious marriages, fairy-book fantasies, sexual orgies, etc.-the most obvious thing we discover is that this overwhelming emphasis upon connectivity has been put there not entirely by good influences, but also, perhaps even primarily, by bad ones.
For a child attraction & connection are naturally the principle issues of survival, for the very simple reason that they can’t care for themselves, and need others to do it. The ability to cling successfully to others is essential for them to identify with and incorporate the strengths they need to cope with and understand the challenges of life-thus that irresistible baby-faced smile nature gives them.
But for those human issues to be the dominant force throughout life reveals to what extent we all still, at least to some extent, fail each other as caretakers, or we wouldn’t be so obsessed with connection. There’s only one reasonable conclusion. To a greater or lesser extent we have all had our hearts broken, and it happened originally before we reached age 16. For every failed adult intimacy, with children involved, there is a traumatized child. Divorce, endemic in western culture, is anathema to children. It fractures their lives, and, like humpty dumpty, there is no way to fix it.
Yet for adults it’s necessary to get in and out of relationships in order to find out how better to do them. We’ve never had much of a chance for such exploration before we’ve been so tied up in the knots of tradition and culture. The solution is probably to be found in doing family, in some ways, very differently than we’re used to doing it. Perhaps we need to rearrange the parts and the emphasis.
To mention just one of the many things we have to acknowledge and deal with in a real study of human nature is the following: the principle problem in the traditional family is that children and adults seek gratification at the same emotional trough. Clearly adults will always win that competition; they’re bigger and smarter. Whatever happens to their children will be both unacknowledged and buried for a shrink to dig up later when ambitious people try and figure out what happened for themselves. We pretend we see everything that’s going on between us, and our children; but obviously we don’t.
So what’s the conclusion? That our major emotional preoccupation with attraction and connectivity is both a sign of human virtue; yet is equally an indication of human ignorance, and the mistakes it produces-which hurt just as much no matter how unintentionally they may have been inflicted. As adults we are far too insecure in our connectivity, revealed by how much we’re willing to give up in order to have more and more of it.
The evidence is very simple: we make society and tradition-our connectivity places-more powerful politically than the individual human. Indeed we basically mistrust the individual human-the why our democracy has never matured beyond the writing of the Constitution; and its mistrustful attitude toward a direct vote by the people for all decision-making. So plurality doesn’t win elections or make decisions; politicians and electoral colleges, and their political machinations, do. Indeed it is most likely that my reader is horrified at the prospect of individuals running the world. What a disaster, they imagine, it would be to turn life over to us one at a time.
It’s not that we’re ready to do it now. But why aren’t we working toward that outcome? Clearly the individual human is much better off than they used to be. But in many ways we aren’t, or we would have erased homelessness and generic economic anxiety for most of us a long time ago. Why must the world run on an economy of scarcity when it is perfectly capable of running on an economy of abundance … if we only use our resources wisely instead of profitably?
Returning the discussion to psychology, what’s our preoccupation with connection sound like? The answer is addiction. We are addicted to being too safely connected to each other, far more unwilling than we care to admit to being differentiated from each other, afraid of the conflicts that will ensue with recognition of necessary difference as a normal part of the bearing forces of the universe.
Obviously the answer is for us, as individuals, to grow much stronger and wiser about ourselves, to become capable of handling much more difficulty and responsibility than we presently expect of ourselves. That is if we want, as individual voters, to run the world with all of its problems and complexity, instead of leaving it for others to manage-and then complain about how badly they do it. In order to accomplish that we need also to develop and provide a much higher quality to how we raise our children. Why do we keep insisting that what we do naturally is okay … when it’s not? Are we so fragile we can’t face the truth?
My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com