Love and relationships

Meaning Crisis, or Meaning of X, or .... I spoke to a friend this past weekend who recently took the package from a federal agency, and is likely going to have trouble finding new employment. This raised a question, he is a dear friend who has shaped my thinking deeply, but he offered aloud: "I had such high expectations of myself in getting something accomplished in my life, but I'm basically a run-of-the-mill human, not really contributing that much.

What has me pause about this is the orientation that we in the US have toward exceptionalism as a goal or norm.

With AI booming, you are a lot more likely to hear something like, "What is a human to do if a machine can do EVERYTHING better than any of us can?"

I can feel the pull of anxiety in this question as well, but I pause and reflect. When I pick up the guitar, do I aspire to be the best gosh-darned guitar player of all time? Do I stop playing as soon as I realize that I'll never be Eddie Van Halen or Segovia?

Being the best in the world, or changing the world doesn't make sense as a bar of "is something worthwhile or not?"

I look at the squirrels in my yard, and watch them climbing the trees and clucking at each other between vigorous chases. Does any of them think: "Shoot, I'm just no good as I squirrel, I haven't added anything of note to squirrel-kind."

Jordan's recent SubStack post about 'Meaning Revolution' as an alternative phrasing to 'Meaning Crisis' had me thinking about this question more deeply (as did Sara Ness's post regarding whether having children is selfish). This ability to apply a linguistic label that also acts as a valence filter to everything we do is kind of messed up. The internet, social media, influencers, and AI are amplifying this leverage of language a bunch in a very short period of time.

I have an unusually high setpoint for belonging and worthiness compared to most people that I know. It took me a while to realize this, because I just assumed that everyone is fundamentally okay. Even so, I have my moments and situations where I get very self-conscious or insecure about my capabilities. Through Relateful and other relational practices I've realized that a lot of other folks are conscious of insecurity a lot more than me in general. But lately, I'm starting to feel this pressure to be more, do more, influence more than I ever did previously.

It feels like a kind of existential panic. We frogs (or canaries) are starting to look around nervously, "Is it me, or is this water warmer (or is the air a little staler) than it was five minutes ago?"

Is it me, or did the meaning straight-jacket get tightened one more notch.

Speaking of Meaning, all this has me recalling Victor Frankl and "Man's Search for Meaning." A key takeaway for me is not to pin "hope" on something random I don't have any control over (if I can just wait until the next election...). I remind myself to pay attention to the things I can change, and to change my perspective to look inward, feel my breath, enjoy a hug, etc.

Not all tightenings are the result of pathology. Try to empathize with you as a nearly full term embryo starting to notice that heels, knees, elbows and fists don't have as much wiggle room as they used to. If that pre-born had our language skills, it might think: "This is unsustainable, I'm going to have to significantly change my habits, it's clear that I'm stressing the momma and that can't be good for her either."

The more I contemplate these alternate narratives, the more I realize that modern civilized human beings have been living with the ever-stricter constraints of the consequences of separate-sense-of-self.

Amazingly, evolution has solved problems like these and many others even harder. Winner take all is a philosophy with an past-due expiration date. Drinking from that stream will only give curdled milk. We have no idea what deep co-sensing on a full planet scale will be like when we collectively let go of being steward-as-dictator, and return to just another species climbing the tree and clucking at one another.

Meaning Revolution? I don't know, that still sound like some could take it as an invitation to civil unrest.

How about polyvolutional harmonization?

I know, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but the meaning of these words: twisting and turning in lots of new and different directions, maybe we can start to trust some of that junk DNA that we've been ignoring, even more than our left-hemisphere's obsession with zero-sum balance sheets.

Who is up for a new kind of game? The stakes can still be high, but I wanna find the others who are excited to play.

May it be so.

Emotional Processing is NOT a Healthy Relationship Practice. You may know that I am not about verbal emotional processing.

I define this as “speaking about the issues between us while they’re happening.” It can also apply to clearing old resentments or revealing withheld hurt.

There are lots of teachers teaching this skill, and it has plenty of value, it's simply not a practice I bring into my close relationships, and I help other people take it out of relationships to become closer. The skill itself is incredibly valuable if we each do it within ourselves or with someone we don’t believe it’s about. It’s trouble when we do it with someone we think it’s about.

Processing-between is allegedly designed to bring us closer, but it's working on assumptions so flawed that it ends up driving us apart.

The first flawed assumption is all over relationships and relationship advice, our entire emotional economy runs on this assumption, and it's why we have depletion, disconnection, and overwhelm in almost every relationship as a default setting.

The assumption is "I should tell you about the worst things I'm feeling. The most important thing is the worst feeling or event that has transpired between us lately. It’s natural that that will be the center of my attention. It's important for you to hear my feelings and thoughts about it to repair. I won’t be able to move past it until I speak to you about it." This is also, paradoxically, something which keeps us in “bad” situations longer. If I am willing to do cycles of hurt and repair, I am willing to remain in and return to conditions which reliably hurt me.

Of course, this has the real assumption underneath it which is “people who are really loving me will give me good experiences, and if I am having an experience I don’t like, I’m not being loved well.” This is the beginning of the end of intimacy. It is natural that we pursue our preferences, but it is suffering to be at war with what is not according to our preferences. It is natural to walk ourselves to what we like—it is suffering to demand something we like from a place reliably offering us something we don’t like.

I once told a woman that I advocate for couples to drop emotional processing techniques out of their relationship, and she said that she'd recently decided to do so. She immediately noticed more closeness and more accountability with her boyfriend.

She said that where she used to jump in and say something about a small slight or a rude tone, she had begun to reserve her words and feel the experience. She noticed that he was correcting himself and returning to kindness and respect more quickly than when she addressed everything she found hurtful.

That was exactly my experience as well. Good people want to treat the people in their lives well. When we give them a moment to see how their behavior is landing, they’re likely to make any necessary realignment with their intention.

Emotional processing with someone close to you either stifles the internal process of a good person or keeps you relating with a person whose internal process is not enough to get them into love again.

Emotional processing with someone close to you is a way of staying in a relationship you can’t reliably enjoy without help. This is how it keeps us in “bad” situations—we are willing to talk it out time and time again with someone who doesn’t see how we feel, or sees us hurting and doesn’t find it inspiring of any adjustment. We have conversations to create understanding with someone we are not willing or able to understand, or someone who doesn’t reliably understand us.

Because this is the other assumption this practice runs on—the assumption that resolution comes from a conversation, when resolution is the most natural thing in the world. Resolution is perfectly natural between anyone who knows how to allow it, wants to be in love, and is in compatible connection.

Respect is natural. Forgiveness is natural. Adjustment is natural. Amends are natural. Acknowledgement is natural. It’s also natural to simply let a hurtful moment pass and keep no record of it, to know even in the moment that it’s not personal and it’s none of my business.

My advocacy that couples do other things with their time than process “bad” emotions they've had “about each other” with each other is based on my knowledge that love will flow if it's there unless it's obstructed by the idea that it can't be there.

Love is not in a land beyond repair and amends. In any moment we can release the record of wrongs and resentments with anyone truly worthy of our time, and be in love right now. Forgiveness is here and now. Love is here and now. #deeptakes

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