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May 21 - June 2, 2023
“Let go of expectations of getting the response you want. We will always come from a more solid place if we speak to preserve our own well-being and integrity and refuse to be silenced by fear.”
It’s discernment, attention to the present moment and to the openness of the ears in front of us, that will allow us to carve out nourishing spaces for our vulnerability.
How often do we expose ourselves to the wrong people because we wish to make them different when we could just accept who they are and be different ourselves?
Men’s friendship crisis was explored in an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast called “The Lonely American Man”; in a Harper’s Bazaar article, “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden”; and in the book The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century,
anam cara, an Irish term for soul friend, the type of friend you confess to, sharing your innermost mind and heart.
“Games Boys Play,” describes how men include a third object in their friendships to avoid the vulnerability that might otherwise bob up among idle friends: “When you’re hunting, or working on a car, or shooting free throws, you can look together at the deer, or the transmission, or the basket, and talk. The common objective gives you something to talk about, and not having to face each other means you don’t have to lay the full weight of your emotions on each other.”
“women internalize; men externalize.” In broad strokes (and with exceptions), this means that when upset, women go inward, blaming themselves and feeling guilty and depressed. But men, instead, express their upset through how they interact with the world. This is evidenced by a study that found that women are more likely to suppress their anger, whereas men are more likely to act aggressively.
Vulnerability and dominance cannot co-exist. Vulnerability says explicitly, “I acknowledge you have power over me, and I’m hoping you’ll use it kindly.” Dominance says, “You have no power over me. I have power over you.”
Often our most spirited arguments aren’t about logic, but about the drive to be dominant to avoid vulnerable emotions brewing underneath.
a lot of what we assume others think about us is a projection of how we think about us.
people report being most authentic when they are around others who are open and accepting, and they feel inauthentic when others are judging them. They feel authentic when they feel good—joyful, calm, or loving—whereas they feel inauthentic when they feel lousy—anxious, stressed, or depressed.
authenticity flourishes in safety. It is a state of presence we access when we aren’t hijacked by our defense mechanisms.
It’s who we are when we aren’t triggered, when we can make intentional, rather than reactive, decisions about how we want to show up in the world.
Authenticity, however, involves allowing ourselves to feel rejected by the friend who abandoned us, hurt by our friend’s taunts, or incompatible with our childhood friend. It’s a state of internal honesty.
In precluding our primal defenses, when authentic, we access our highest self, rather than a triggered self.
They found that people see true selves, both their own and others’, as moral and good. When someone develops positive traits, for example, it’s experienced as discovering one’s true nature. According to the authors, “Though we are perfectly willing to conceive of other people as bad, we are unwilling to see them as bad deep down.”
When we’re insecure, we’re often so consumed by our own pain that we lack the resources to care.
Only a relatively secure person can easily perceive others not only as sources of security and support but also as suffering human beings who have important needs and therefore deserve support.” In other words, secure people, less consumed by their pain, are better at considering others.
Authenticity doesn’t mean always doing what we want or expressing what we think or feel (that’s rawness). It means we are responsive, rather than reactive, intentional rather than primal. It’s choosing behaviors that express who we are rather than being triggered to act in ways that don’t. Doing so requires us to give ourselves the space to decide whether we want to accommodate others or ourselves, depending on the circumstance.
or it might mean recognizing that the need to be happy for our friend is a greater priority than our jealousy, so we still congratulate and celebrate.
When we aren’t controlled by our defenses, when we’re responsive rather than reactive, we develop more flexibility to adjust to other people, which is why authenticity helps us care for ourselves and others. Accommodating doesn’t feel inauthentic when we are in touch with ourselves, our feelings and needs, and why we accommodate.
Embrace Mutuality
See the other side and acknowledge others needs
Adamma’s ability to perspective take, to value Victoria’s needs, even when they reflected negatively on her, is admirable. This style of relating, characterized by zooming out to consider others’ needs alongside our own, is called mutuality, and it is a telltale sign of ego strength, secure attachment, and, thus, authenticity.
“community,” as a group of people “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, and make others’ conditions our own.’
When we’re not being fair to friends, our defense mechanisms are likely at play. We hurt others to escape our feelings. Authenticity means acknowledging what’s truly there, feeling the feeling underneath the defense mechanism, so the defense isn’t necessary. It’s acknowledging the reality of the threatening emotion instead of acting inauthentically to protect ourselves from it.
we choose a behavior to deny, minimize, or project it. These defensive impulses are destructive for our relationships because they implore us to not only solely consider ourselves but also to control others so they can forget their needs and pander to ours too.
What’s the most uncomfortable emotion for you to feel?
Misunderstanding - feeling that others have a view of me that i feel is inaccurate
We can shed defense mechanisms and be more authentic by using mindfulness to feel what our defenses spring in to protect.
“rather than attempting to change or control anyone’s experience in any way, we are asking how much can I get to know and appreciate this experience of being [with] you in this very moment?”
Choose presence to understand and work through
Projection occurs when we assume our feelings mean something about the person who provoked them, rather than reflecting our own psyche.
on a fundamental level, we are more interested in being in relationship than in controlling the other’s experience or controlling the way we are viewed.”
All this self-conscious chatter overwhelms our attention, making us appear awkward. If we can, instead, give our full attention to the other person, then our organic selves emerge.
Adamma helped us unlock our first steps to being authentic. Self-awareness, presence, pausing, and breathing and feeling the trigger in your body, focusing your attention on the unfolding moment: all of these are examples of how to use mindfulness to be your authentic instead of your triggered self.
ability to look loss in the face and still be whole,
The anxiously attached come in too close, their sense of themselves crushed when others don’t accept them. Avoidants pull away too far, unaffected by others’ judgments but also by their love. Tapping into security and authenticity doesn’t mean you’ll never be rejected; it just means there’s enough distance between your self-worth and others’ judgments so that it won’t sting so bad.
When others’ actions don’t feel like our undoing, we find grace for them,
We must view rejection as something we can recover from, an instant rather than an eternity.
If instead of focusing our energy on an impossibility—avoiding rejection through inauthenticity—we focus our energy on softening rejection’s bitterness, then we can access authenticity alongside connection. We can even reframe rejection as a symbol of pride, a collateral for us making every effort to curate the life and the relationships we truly want.
making friends from disadvantaged groups feel heard when they express issues is vital. Instead of disagreeing, counterattacking, playing devil’s advocate, or justifying our actions, we can listen to and repeat back what they say.
I used to think authenticity was about rawness, boldly sharing whatever is on your mind. But now I see that it’s about listening, listening to yourself, not being afraid to experience what’s going on inside you, to acknowledge what you truly think and feel and fear and love, without covering it up with defenses. It’s not just about having the bravery to admit your opinions to others, but in having the bravery to admit them within. It’s only in this listening that we can sense which friends feel most safe for our authenticity and share our truest internal world. Because when we do this internal
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To be more authentic in threatening situations, restrain from indulging in what comes reflexively, because it is likely a defense mechanism. Be mindful and aware of the triggers that propel you to self-protect without indulging them. Pause and breathe. Shift your attention from defensiveness to openness. Access your higher self. To stave off social anxiety that impedes authenticity, focus on the person in front of you instead of yourself.
Take the Chaos Out of Conflict
Anger of hope energizes us, indicating that we need to heal an issue wedged between us to be close again. It is less of an overpowering emotion and more of a signal that something needs to change. It primes us to reflect on what our unmet needs are and how to act to fulfill them. It admits that we care for the other, even while we’re upset, and thus preserves the inherent worth of the other.
Anger of despair masquerades as protecting the self but is also about damning the other,
Anger of despair is the destructive force we typically associate with anger. Anger of hope, however, is a healing force that can deepen friendships, one that we should embrace.
Psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner distinguishes between two types of safety in relationships: “the flaccid safety of permanent coziness,” which is maintained by ignoring anger and conflict and pretending problems don’t exist, and the “dynamic safety whose robustness is established via . . . risk-taking and its resolution—the never-ending cycle of breakdown and repair, separation and reunion.” Dynamic safety, Goldner ...
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But the only litmus test for whether an issue is worthy of being addressed is if it continues to bother you.
in friendship, we too often choose to “endure a lifelong ache rather than getting surgery, dealing with four weeks of recovery, and moving on, being happier, and getting your life back.
when problems arise with friends, we should “think about what a friend brings to our life that no one else does.” This reflection challenges our tendency to trivialize friendship. It makes us realize what we stand to lose, which will help us face problems with friends instead of peacing out.
As an anger-in, here was my pickle, though: I knew by ignoring conflict, I was harming the friendship, but I wasn’t sure addressing it would help either. If I lounged on Freud’s couch and he asked me to reveal my unconscious associations with conflict, I’d say attacks, accusations, raised voices, fists clenched, burst arteries, Monopoly games toppled. Anger and conflict, based on what I knew at the time, destroyed rather than cured.
