MIND MOVES:Modern society dislocates people from traditional sources of support, writes TONY BATES.
WHEN PEIG Sayers – that Irish icon who held the patent for “living through hard times” – was asked how she survived so well and for so long, she said:
“I had good neighbours. We helped each other and lived in the shelter of each other. Everything that was coming dark upon us, we would disclose it to each other, and that would give us consolation of mind. Friendship was the fastest root in our hearts.”
It’s fair to say that our values have changed since Peig’s time, even if the human heart has not. Because of the many opportunities for material progress in the past 50 years, we have encouraged and rewarded independence and achievement over community living.
While the recognition of our potential as individuals can be liberating and empowering, taken too far it can blind us to how fundamentally we depend on each other for survival.
And it can leave us with an exaggerated sense of what we can achieve on our own. If this mindset takes hold, it’s easy to become alienated from one another, to lose touch with the openness and friendship that Peig described.
Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander argues that a person’s experience of belonging, of being accepted and understood, is what makes life bearable, even joyful. Modern society, he proposes, systematically promotes the opposite and “dislocates” people from traditional sources of psychological and spiritual support.
We are all prone to losing touch with one another. One of the warning lights we should watch for is a nagging feeling that something is missing. A feeling of being deprived in some way that we can’t shake off. We may seek relief in any number of addictive behaviours to try to fill this void inside. But this only doubles our trouble.
Of course, there are many exceptions to this modern trend to prize individualism to an unhealthy degree. There are small and large groups who share friendship and a common purpose and experience on a daily basis the “consolation of mind” that Peig described. But, unfortunately, I know from inquiries I receive from all over this country, there are many people who have become isolated in their personal lives to a destructive degree.
They feel so lonely and cut off from others that they have little idea how to ask for and receive support.
When the thread of our life-giving connections with others is broken, we find it hard to go on. The illusion that we should be able to go it alone inevitably collapses and we experience a crushing loneliness.
It can take a painful falling apart inside to realise how much we need others. Sometimes it takes being lost for us to remember how sweet it is to share both our most simple and most profound experiences with another.
To begin to reclaim your sense of belonging in the world, you have to speak out, no matter how broken or uncertain your words may be. To allow someone to know what you need and to allow yourself to receive what many people may be able and willing to give. When we take the courageous step to speak honestly to another, we find that what we hold in common is far greater than what is uniquely personal.
In sharing the stories of our lives we experience a sense of belonging in this world, however difficult it may be; when we withdraw from others, in the name of privacy, we wrap ourselves into a cold and brittle silence that can become a very lonely prison.
Before I leave you, let me share some feedback I received on my last column, where I opened a conversation on how we are to survive the tough times ahead.
One of you suggested that I might have missed something fundamental. In framing the future as “problematic” a reader felt that I was reinforcing a pessimistic mindset.
For him, it wasn’t helpful to frame life as “good” or “bad”; life is simply what it is. The choice that each of us has to make is whether to be open to new and challenging experiences and learn from them, or whether to shrink away from them.
His perspective is valid and I am grateful to him for challenging me on this. If we see our fate as dependent on how events beyond our control unfold, we place ourselves in a very vulnerable position. The danger in constant doom-mongering is that we make our fears a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If, on the other hand, we bring the focus back to our capacity to grow in the face of every kind of experience, we remind ourselves of our inherent freedom and strength to live life, wherever it takes us.
- Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie)
