Individual Excellence: Part I-B-3: Grouped People

4 May 2024

This blog is one of a chain from an in-process book entitled, Individual Excellence: The 4Ps of a Well-Spirited Life.  What follows is the next passage from Grouped People, the first of four sections.   

PART I-B: Grouped People

Groups Coerce 

If the role above is honoured and met, to a large degree, parents have done well what I deem the most important job adults can do: prepare the next generation as fully and responsibly as possible.  In my experience, this rarely happens.  Instead, leadership is assumed and administered by overly emotional and reactive people unaware of the importance of works they undo with only superficial research.  This is a large part of why the West is now failing: we don’t know how to educate and train ourselves or our children.  We have failed to learn the art of identifying and maintaining our own sustaining values.

If you are raised in an untrained, undisciplined, and inconsistent environment, you begin life knowing only those conditions and reacting to what you perceive.  If you had the tremendous good fortune to have been raised by disciplined, rational, consistent, and compassionate parents, you may still be lacking the necessary cultural education, but you have been what Aristotle called well habituated—you know how to govern yourself through self-control and disciplined practices.  To ask of parents that they deliver all of this—just the two of them—is a big ask.  Which is, presumably why education outside of families came into being.

As you may have noticed, the subtitle of this section is Groups Coerce.  I inherited this notion from my father who, upon the packing of my suitcase full of books, as I headed out west for a summer of work in a lumbermill, handed me a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, with a smirk saying, “You’re going to like this, boy.”  And I did.

The message that runs through that book is the same message delivered to me at home: governments coerce.  Over my three-score and some years I have transposed that message from the larger context of governments to the smaller context of dyads and everything between.  This may well explain why I am so comfortable in the classical psychotherapeutic dyad of two people, facing one another, for open discussion of issues at hand.  When two people come together, voluntarily, to work on issues with good will, training, and mutual respect, great things can happen.  The minute a third person is introduced the relationship forfeits stability and gains dynamism. 

What that means is that allegiance changes issue by issue, moment by moment in triads or, hypothetically, any larger human configuration.  Dyads are magic.  They’re also fundamental to humanity: mother and father, grandma and grandpa, bride and groom, aunt and uncle, mother and son, brother and sister, teacher and student…and when they fail, they leave deep wounds.  If you doubt this, please look back a few pages at the various forms of insecure attachment.

The reason dyadic breakups leave deep wounds is their intimacy.  The more we let another in—lowering boundaries in acts of trust—the more of ourselves we expose.  If a dyadic relationship is reciprocal, the lowered boundaries and increased trust provide greater glimpses into the other.  When such relationships flourish, they become some of the most valued parts of our lives.  When they fail, they can be a source of regret, pain, longing, and absence.  In my experience, that absence or void is directly proportional to the unmet need filled by the absent other.  And in that need is our necessary vector. 

Vectors come from physics.  They’re used in structural calculations for beams, footings, columns etc.  They are quantities possessing direction and magnitude and, as such, they’re lovely metaphors for estimating the direction of human action.  For example, is your life heading upward or downward in relation to your values?  Is it moving quickly, and at a sharp angle, or is it slowing and gently moving toward its destination? 

Let’s return to the vectors within fractured dyads.  The unfulfilled need, felt by a wounded soul, identifies a personal vulnerability.  In the same vein as Ryan Holiday’s (2014) take on Marcus Aurelius (“The impediment to action advances action.  What stands in the way becomes the way” Hays, 2002, Meditations, 5.20, p. 60), the impediment to eudaimonia indicates where vulnerability resides.  Of the currently predominant psychological triad of cognition-affect-action, it is the middle term that is most difficult to integrate and navigate.  Affect is emotion and few of us have been taught what feelings are about or how to use them.  And part of this educational void is, again, cultural.

I was taught to behave in certain ways, more by example than explicit instruction.  I was taught to think in discussions, math courses, English, History, Logic, etc. but I was never taught what my emotions were or why they were.  This is difficult terrain for many people.  We’ll begin with an abbreviated version of Johnson’s (2019) premises for Emotion-Focused Therapy:

1. From the cradle to the grave, human beings are hardwired to seek not just social contact, but also physical and emotional proximity to special others who are deemed irreplaceable.  The longing for a felt sense of connection to key others is primary in terms of the hierarchy of human goals and needs.  Humans are most acutely aware of this innate need for connection at times of threat, risk, pian, or uncertainty…(p. 6). 

If you know a person who has suffered trauma and/or addiction, think about what their avoidance behaviours (sex, shopping, monologuing, drug use, gaming…) does for them.  In my experience, those avoidance behaviours are reachings-out to find connection, sadly, where none exists.  They come from the void or vulnerability discussed a few paragraphs above.  But, most importantly, this is action driven by emotion, not cognition. 

If we knew this, as children, and more importantly, as adolescents and young adults, some of us might have been able to say, I’m wounded because my parent(s) was unavailable.  This need I feel is real, unsatisfied, entirely normal, and not to be ignored.  What, precisely, is this feeling trying to tell me?  And this is my understanding of the role of emotion: it informs and directs our attention away from what hurts and toward social inclusion.  But, and this is a huge but, these feelings are subject to a plethora of interpretations which is why good psychotherapy is helpful: it provides an organic and organized context in which to search for the relationship between what is felt and what is known. 

To be continued next week.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the bcc’d emailing list.

References

Hays, G. (2002). Marcus Aurelius: Meditations: A New Translation with an Introduction by Gregory Hays.  The Modern Library. 

Holiday, R. (2014). The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, Portfolio/Penguin.

Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment Theory in Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Individuals, Couples, and Families.  The Guilford Press.

Rand, A. (1971/1943). The Fountainhead.  A Signet Book, New American Library.