How to Create More Connection in Your Life
I’m part of a men’s circle, a regular gathering of six guys who are all now swimming in the riptides of midlife.
During a recent call, we each took a turn answering two questions:
What am I bringing to this circle?
What do I most want from this group?
Unsurprisingly, each man said the same thing. We were all coming with a sense of isolation, and what we most wanted was to feel connected and seen.
Despite having busy, people-filled lives, we all felt alone in some way. As each man opened up, I felt a kind of collective exhale happening and thought, we found each other at just the right time.
The Disconnection Epidemic
For the past few weeks, I thought of how common this sense of disconnection is. I’ve read article after article lately about this Disconnection Epidemic. I’ve seen it firsthand, and also experienced it myself.
Most of the coaching work I do is with successful men who feel cut off from themselves and others despite their achievements, and most of the time because of them.
I’ve found the same to be true among many women, too. Inside, we’re all screaming, “See me. Know me.” And yet, we’re often met with silence. We feel invisible.
How does this happen?
Some point to the pandemic and all of the societal change we’ve experienced over the past few years as the cause. I disagree. None of those things caused our sense of disconnection, they simply exposed what had always been there.
The truth is, our culture doesn’t do connection well, much less deep and true intimacy. It’s rare to meet someone whose family and community has modeled it in healthy ways. Brokenness is the norm.
Despite our technological and economic advances, we’re the most addicted, medicated, depressed, disconnected, lonely of generations to walk the earth. We all know this.
For the first time in human history, you’re more likely to die from obesity than you are starvation. And more people die from suicide than are killed by criminals, terrorists, and war combined. Dig a little deeper in the the cause of these things and you’ll see that loneliness and a lack of connection drives much of our addiction and dysfunction.
You might think these are uniquely American issues, but they aren’t. The same issues have now spread across the globe, particularly in the UK, Europe, China, Japan, and Australia.
Of course, we try to ease the pain of disconnection through our various addictions—work, distraction, eating, entertainment—and when they stop working we then try to sober up as a means to feel better.
However, as psychiatrist Gabor Mate says, those efforts only goes so far because the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection, the very thing that runs against the grain of a modern culture that worships individualism.
None of this is our fault, by the way. We’re born into it.
Born This Way
We’re like fish born into a polluted lake that’s just toxic enough to kill in slow motion. The fish breathes it, exists in it, is surrounded by it. The water is all the fish knows.
In fact, if you were to say to the fish, “Hey fish, this water is poisoning you. You should think about swimming somewhere else,” the fish might respond, “Huh? What’s water?”
We’re so acclimated to the subtle toxicity of the world we were born into that it goes unnoticed until the poisoning reaches a level where forces us to pay attention.
What is the poison exactly? It is the conditioned belief that we are not enough. This is the root of all disconnection, both from ourselves and others.
Put more personally, it is the belief that I am not enough.
Not good enough.
Not talented enough.
Not smart enough.
Not successful enough.
Not lovable enough.
Not attractive enough.
Not tall enough.
Not athletic enough.
Not spiritual enough.
Just… not enough.
I consider this inherited belief our Original Trauma, both individually and collectively, because it can be traced back to the beginning of our lives. It happened to you before you had a say.
This singular conditioned belief is what drives us to hide from ourselves and others. It holds us back from the more true and free expression of life and connection that is possible.
Of course, this is exacerbated by the modern Comparison Game we’re all locked in where the economics of shame drive nearly every choice we’re offered. Marketing is largely founded on this singular message—“you are not enough”—because self-hatred is a reliable way to enable addiction and then motivate people to buy things they hope will make them feel better.
The True Root of Original Trauma
This conditioning, however, runs much deeper than marketing and commerce to the founding stories of humanity. Every culture has a version of the Original Trauma woven into its history, and it’s most easily revealed through its art and spirituality, because those are the most direct reflection of a culture’s collective self.
In the West, particularly in the Christian tradition, it goes by the name Original Sin. In the Eastern traditions, like Buddhism and Taoism, this belief is known simply as Ignorance. From both perspectives, this belief is the root of all disconnection and separation with ourselves and each other.
There is a fundamental difference between East and West, however.
In the East, this original trauma or disconnection isn’t personalized like it is in the West. It’s seen more as a collective, persistent case of mistaken identity. From that perspective, the belief that “I’m not enough” is little more than a misperception to correct.
The process of correcting this misperception and seeing correctly is what many call realization, awakening, or enlightenment. It is the recognition that the essence of our Existence or Being is already, and has always been, enough and fundamentally good. In truth, the only disconnection that exists is what we create ourselves.
In the West, however, this sense of separation is deeply personalized. It’s rooted in shame, which is the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with me. My nature is inherently flawed and hopelessly bad, evil even. Rather than merely being mistaken about my true identity, I believe I myself am a cosmic mistake. This belief is often weaponized through some religious teaching and in most marketing.
In both views, West and East, what is being described is a loss of intimate connection with our True Nature. It’s a felt sense of separation from who we really are. I say felt sense because we cannot actually be separated or disconnected from essential being. It is Who and What we are.
However, like the sun can be obscured by the clouds, so too can our experience of our True Nature. We can find ourselves in darkness, and when we are in darkness it’s very difficult to see others, too. We don’t know each other deeply because we do not know ourselves. We’re at war with each other because we’re at war with ourselves.
As the ancient Hermetic truth says, as within, so without. Our disconnection with others is a reflection of our own inner disconnection.
So how do we begin to experience more connection?
Re-frame What Connection Really Is
I’ve been using the word “connection” throughout this article, but what I’m really pointing to is something deeper: intimacy.
Modern culture has a distorted view of intimacy. We tend to think of it in physical, sexualized terms. Intimacy isn’t sex, but all healthy sexual connection arises from intimacy, and is the result of it.
I’ve started to re-frame intimacy. I now see it as the compound interest of consistent, courageous connection. Ultimately, the secret to intimacy is hidden in the word itself: into me see.
I’m reminded of the Garden of Eden story. After they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve hide from God because they’re ashamed of their nakedness. They don’t want to be seen. Once God finds them, they tell him why they’re hiding. His reply to them: “Wait. Who told you you’re naked?”
Know Your Self
Remember, inside I think we’re all screaming, “See me. Know me.”
This simple shift in understanding, that intimacy is seeing and knowing ourselves and each other, is the first step toward intimacy. And it starts with the willingness to recognize and receive the parts of our lives we are ashamed of receiving and revealing.
You must first be willing to know your self, to see your self, and radically accept all parts of you, especially the ones you hold in shadow. This is a heavy lift for many people because we’re taught that we’re not enough. Most of us don’t fully accept or love ourselves.
Freedom, self-love, and joy are the very nature of your being. But, if you deny these to yourself, you will never be able to fully receive love from others.
Let Your self Be Seen and Known
Once you have begun to see and know your self, you’ll notice a kind of ease. You’ll stop hiding. You won’t be as ashamed anymore of your “nakedness” and those parts you have always hidden from yourself and others. This leads to a natural willingness to be more open, seen, and known by others.
You’ll let the light in more.
In his song, Anthem, Leonard Cohen famously says:
There’s a crack, a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in
The sometimes unbearable weight of existence leaves us all cracked and scarred. Pain is inseparable from life. Even our beginning comes through the pain of childbirth. Everything and everyone is cracked.
We tend to hide our cracks, but this is how the light of divinity and love gets in. It’s through the broken places that the darkness is illuminated so we can see clearly enough to embrace our humanness. Those aspects we have denied then become the very portal of healing and transformation in our lives.
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Become a Seer
Leonard Cohen only told half the story. The light gets in through the cracks, but that is also how the light gets out.
We have a tendency to want the light to heal, patch, and seal up our cracks. That’s not what typically happens. Instead, the light of divinity makes use of our cracks and transforms them into a source of illumination for others’ healing.
Think of how many times you believed you were alone in your struggle, and that no one else knew what it was like. You felt alone until someone came along that could relate. They, too, had suffered once and came through it.
They may have offered an encouraging word, a piece of hard earned wisdom, or just a loving touch. Through the cracks of their humanity, they were able to offer you some guiding light. They were a seer who saw you, too.
They same is true of you. The light you allow through your own cracks is the medicine you’re meant to share with others. It’s that sharing of light that heals, connects, and creates intimacy. In seeing and knowing your self intimately, you’ll naturally begin to see and know others. You’ll turn your attention around and become a seer, one who knows the “other” and allows your light to illuminate others’ shadows.
Intimacy is True Wealth
Everything I’m saying here is a profound shift for most people. It is the equivalent of living most of your life in a cave and then, one day, deciding to step out into the sunlight. This is a process, though, that takes time and patience. Go too quickly into the sunlight and the experience could be too intense to maintain.
Earlier I said that intimacy is the compound interest of consistent, courageous connection. I think of intimacy as another kind of wealth. It is relational wealth. In fact, it is the only enduring kind of wealth because it cannot be snatched away by recessions, it doesn’t rust, and no one can steal it.
Like every other kind of wealth, true intimacy builds. It is the result of compounding. Its nature is to build and grow, but it must be approached with intention and courage because it requires taking a certain amount of risk.
And there is no shortcut. There is no equivalent of hitting the Powerball when it comes to intimacy. It requires time and consistency. We must open ourselves again and again. It isn’t something you do, it is way of seeing and being in the world.
Ultimately, this is the way the world will heal because the world “out there” is simply a reflection of our inner worlds. When you know your Self and your true worth, you’ll naturally begin to see the truth of others and their true worth, too. And then, one by one, person by person, everything will change.