2023-03-03

The idea, the sense, the feeling that the shared collective trauma of our time is one of disconnection — that's with me now. There are so many threads to pick up and connect here, I guess I'll only make a start today.

There's a huge amount of relevant viewing and writing around just now. On Wednesday I was listening to the live conversation between Jonathan Rowson and Iain McGilchrist. (Now on YouTube.) Iain's work is much about the divided brain, but not just the division itself, but also the sense of disconnection that comes from focusing on the left-brain version of the world. Then there is what Jonathan calls and has written about as the McGilchrist manoeuvre. I won't try to replicate his explanation, but my superficial summary is that it is about a subtle and nuanced way of reconnecting without erasing distinctions.

Yesterday, via Resilience, I came across Nina Simons in conversation with Nate Hagens.(YouTube; Podcast, where the transcript is available.) It's a very rich conversation. Towards the end, Nate asks:

If you had a magic wand, what is one thing that you could wish to happen to improve human and planetary futures?

and Nina replies:

But one, of course would be if I could wave a magic wand and rebalance the masculine and the feminine in everybody and our culture and our institutions, I would do that right away. And the other one is, I would shift our focus from counting things and quantifying to mapping relationship and to understanding. I mean, I also remember my father saying, “The measure of a person's life is really how many people you've touched and how many people you've affected and helped move towards love.” And that feels true to me. And so that magic wand would be to create a focus on creating connective tissue and learning how to relate across difference and dance with apparent contradictions.

“…connective tissue…” Interesting. Let me try to pick out just a little from this rich context.

Disconnections mentioned above include those separating masculine and feminine; left and right hemispheres; but there are so many. Reflect on your own experiences of disconnection, and how they are mirrored in the wider world. To me, there is a feeling of disconnection between each person and the environment in which they would have a full sense of integration, meaning, being valued — if you like, a disconnection between the individual and their ikigai.

I have seen it written that the chief cause of addiction and substance abuse is a lack of human connection. That does not surprise me.

IFS gives me an extra perspective on how this disconnection may be working in our culture. If we have this great collective trauma around disconnection, then it continues to cause us, great pain, anguish, grief, when restimulated. So the psyche has a natural response to press “protectors” into the role of keeping us away from being overwhelmed by re-experiencing that pain. In IFS, we work with the idea of how the internal parts are disconnected from each other, and have never experienced the kind of dialogue between the internal parts, which would allow them to rebalance their roles rather than struggling to take over the consciousness of the individual. Reconnection is through the faculty that Schwartz calls the “Self”; the essential being in each one that has the capacities of compassion, curiousity, and many more.

How to reconnect, more generally? In conversation, what came up for me was that there are two starting points for reconnection: internal and external. In recent years, I have noticed people giving their opinion that, something like, “you need to do the inner work first” and only then will you be able to reconnect with others. This, to my mind, rather individualistic view, where personal responsibility is key, contrasts with what I see as a much older view, that inasmuch as we are all interconnected anyway, typically reconnection starts with reconnecting with one or more others. There must be countless stories of individuals being rescued from danger or despair through connection with others, whether individuals or healing communities. Often in the form of devoted love from the other(s).

On the other hand, I recognise clearly that external reconnection only works if it is able to bring about internal reconnection. Internal reconnection also only works if it goes along with external reconnection. So to overemphasise only inner or only outer connection misses the point. Both must be present; both infuse and give life to each other. A starting point in one or the other may be related to the governing healing narrative that is internalised by the individual. If someone believes that internal connection will enable external connection, then as they achieve inner connection, the outer will surely come. Equally, if someone feels that external connection is a genuinely effect agent of change, then surely it will lead to inner connection.

Maybe I'm doing a “McGilchrist manoeuvre” here? It's not either/or or both/and, but both, though not necessarily in exactly the same measure. And the two sides of either/or are not exactly equal either.

You could well say that it is health that we are seeking, and we imagine achieving health in accordance with a healing narrative that we believe in. That takes me back to the words of George Scott Williamson, famous with Innes Pearce for The Peckham Experiment, who defined health as “mutual synthesis of organism and environment”. The word “mutual” does the job beautifully. It is both ways round, and at the same time.

Which brings me back to a relational view of life, that I have written about under the theme named Relating in Collectivity. I see a lot of virtue in relational thinking, prioritising the consideration of relationships between things over the isolated existence of things. What is a thing that is unrelated? Disconnected? What are we when we are disconnected? Of course that is a terrible fate, thus protecting oneself against that is completely understandable, even if another thread of ancient wisdom reminds us that death means absolute disconnection. Or does it? So many religious and spiritual traditions teach otherwise.

I see also a connection with ontological commoning, which I wrote about recently on 2023-02-22. I see ontological commoning, in essence, as reconnecting the conceptual models that have been disconnected through isolated individual thinking in response to having to cope with a complex domain.

Note, though, that as I see it, the commoning can only come about after a recognition of the essential disconnection between different conceptual models. We need, not to be arguing about which model is right, or more accurate, but instead listening to where the models of the others come from. We can be mutually learning through practicing that process.

Honesty and integrity are essential here, and if you can't provide that yourself, of if your protector parts are pushing you towards outer or inner dishonesty, then get yourself some critical friends and welcome what they tell you.