Hardwired for Connection

“Atlas Of the Heart” By Brene Brown

My heart anchors itself in the pit of my stomach tonight, drawing my shoulders to hunch and my body craving to collapse into itself.  To pull my knees to my chest and my arms around tight and apply pressure to every last bit of pain that bleeds from my soul.  And I can’t even do that, my knee isn’t healed enough.

Why are people so careless with the ones they love?

We are all guilty of it, surely.  None of us are exempt from selfish actions or ignorant behavior.  It’s all an original sin.  But today, as world’s collided in my life, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelming sadness for the disconnections bred from stubbornness and pride.

It’s no secret I am obsessed with human emotion.  I’m the loudest advocate for human connection you’ll find.  This craving of learning and understanding more of course has led me to the brilliant Brene Brown.  In her book “Atlas of the Heart”, she describes how as an adult she realized how much she had always thought about emotions her whole life and wondered why they were so important to her.  I felt seen.  I chalked up my own relationship with emotions to just being intrigued by the science – maybe I should have been a clinical psychologist.  However, I never considered that anyone else was as “weird” about it as me.  Here was Ms. Brown, taking childhood experiences, parental and sibling relationships, and interpersonal dynamics and dissecting them for understanding from a very young age.  So it wasn’t just me?

Growing up I was called an old soul or always trying to act older than I was.  I don’t believe I was either, but I was constantly absorbing everyone around me.  I have always enjoyed people’s stories.  All of them, good ones, sad ones, triumphs and failures.  It’s never enough to learn what kind of person someone is, I long greatly to understand why someone is who they are.  I want to dive deep and meet you where you are.

Here’s an embarrassing story of my own.  Back in middle school, maybe early high school, when chat pages on the world wide web were thriving, there was a teen bulletin page where kids would post questions or chat conversations for others to respond to.  You likely can see what direction this is going.  We can all think back to what life felt like in your early teens.  I learned very quickly I had a knack for engaging and I could easily articulate emotions and insecurities - and by some unknown reason, I made people feel safe.  My secret alias on the site became so popular and so many people began reaching out to me to talk that I actually created physical file folders I kept at my computer desk, which I would print correspondence for, so I could keep everyone a priority.  Now looking back as an adult, remembering the awful, painful admissions that were told to me in confidence - that was some seriously risky business to enter into as a teen myself.  Except even back then, I knew, they just wanted human connection.  They needed it.

I have words.  A lot of words.  I’m betting most people close to me would say too many words.  I can be exhausting this way, I am acutely aware of that.  Family members have had a hard time understanding the way I would write long, very personal Facebook posts for the world to see.  My brain never stops though.  Always investigating my emotions, always open to outside viewers to observe.  We all have sorrow, struggle, fear, pain, elation, apprehension, confusion, anger and frustration.  We all experience feelings of powerlessness that lead us to make decisions based upon hurt or worry.  And we all hold ourselves to impossible standards of doing what is right and keeping control of our circumstances.  We will get it wrong, we will lose control.

In sharing over the years as an adult, I’ve come to learn I can still be a safe place for people, and I still love to try and mentor people to look deep inside themselves to discover self-understanding and self-love.  People will still reach out to me and they could not begin to understand the brimming gratitude I have for them in doing so.  It fills my cup.  There’s this meme going around right now that describes two different people: those who go through something and so expect you to go through it too, and those who go through something and do whatever they can to save you from going through it yourself.  I disagree greatly.  There are those of us that have gone through things and learned things and are eager to take our own experiences and knowledge and walk through yours alongside you in your life.

I feel like I can say I have been mostly successful here.  However, there is another side.  This is usually where my words can become too much.  If I love you and see a struggle, I’ll over share what I observe and I’ll reach out to help you see things you may not even be ready to see yourself.  My brain is already 8 steps ahead of yours.  When I share my words in a community, I’m praised for wisdom.  When I share my words personally to someone I love, often times in an argument, I’m plagued as being a know-it-all. When I’m desperate to form a human connection to ease a struggle, I can end up making the other person feel alienated or just plain dumb.  It’s something I struggle greatly with and constantly try to improve upon. 

As I began, today, worlds collided in my life and I was left tonight feeling hopeless about something so very important to me: human connection.  I attended a beautiful funeral filled with both sadness and intense fondness and pride for a remarkable woman lost.  I looked around at who was there, I pondered various relationships I have observed over the past week and my heart broke thinking about it all: connection, family, arguments, disconnection, people, and death.  It really made me miss my Grandpa, someone I felt a strong connection with and was honored to have loved. It made me think of the time I don’t get to spend with my Dad. It broke me to pieces thinking about relationships I wanted to survive.

I spent the afternoon with my aunt I hadn’t seen in years.  When my parents divorced, I began receiving less communication or invitations from her.  Likely she felt I was taking sides in the divorce, or maybe she didn’t know how to relate to me comfortably anymore, but I felt ex-communicated.  I saw her today and thought of none of it.  I saw her.  That was all!   And I was excited to show her she was valued.  Nothing else truly mattered.  This week, there was another family member as well, sharing her pain, not knowing what to even do with it.  The rest of us felt helpless, or that it wasn’t even our place.  Quietly though, my heart broke.  What was her story?  I don’t care that there are two sides to every story, what was HER story?  Something was pinging her brain to feel this emotion and it was strong enough for her to share it with us.  Why?  Fear? Loneliness?  Powerlessness? Struggle?  Solving problems or mistakes is only a fraction of a circumstance.  Identifying the reasons and understanding the why makes us grow and become stronger, more forgiving, more generous and more resilient. 

In a world where we are now being taught that only you can do what’s best for you, you can only rely on yourself, if you want something, you have to do it for yourself: we are fostering disconnection.  In “Atlas of the Heart”, Ms. Brown quotes another researcher as saying, “To grow into an adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend.  Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.”  This is why human connection and service to others is so important for a happy heart and fulfilled spirit.  We want to matter to other people.  Some of us fear this and push others away.  Some of us cling so tight to it that it alienates the ones we love.  We need to feel wanted, belonging, needed, and important to other people.  And in a world where we are being taught, only we can trust in and save ourselves, we miss the opportunity to connect and grow.  Then we get stuck on stubbornness, pride and fear in an effort to protect ourselves and our desires.  Often times from the people closest to us.

Do not be careless with the people you love.

We all need human connection.  We all need to be valued and appreciated, despite the mistakes we make.  Be kind.  The world is cruel enough.  You never know why someone feels or behaves the way they do.  Be there for them when they need to feel that human connection.  Be honest about the shear reality that we all feel a wide range of emotions.  And the timing of them is not always convenient.  But name them, share them anyway, allow yourself to not be alone with them.  Someone else likely feels the same.  Please please, do not take the human connections you have with people lightly or for granted.  They entrusted you with their world and they feed off of the connection they have with you.  You are important to them, make sure they know you think they are important too.  They may just be gone tomorrow.