More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 20 - September 6, 2022
“propinquity.”
“locationships,” or low-cost friendships that are sustained because friends live in the same location.
“mere exposure effect,”
insight and question method developed by David Hoffeld, CEO and chief sales trainer at Hoffeld Group. This involves simply sharing a statement or insight and asking a question to follow up. We might say, “I really loved the main character in the book we read for book club. What did you think about her?” or “This drink is so sweet and tastes so good. How do you like yours?” or “It’s been so long since I’ve been to the beach and I’m so glad to be here. What do you like about the beach?”
The truth is, what feels vulnerable for us reveals something deeper about what we’ve learned to be ashamed of.
Since we were studying to be psychologists, leaking our guts in class was the norm.
“Feelings communicate information to you, and that’s beneficial. They’re not just a reaction. They give us data on ourselves, on how important things are,”
Weakness tells us to slow down and be soft with ourselves, revealing the truth of our vincibility, the knowledge that we are mortal and must take care of ourselves. Our weakness is an invitation to experience our inherent worth, a worthiness that doesn’t evaporate when we’re too weary to sustain, create, or produce.
We hope that in suppressing our feelings, they evaporate. But the rebound effect reveals this isn’t true. Our feelings survive in the cold backyard we leave them in, eventually prying open the back door to get into the house.
“It used to be so hard for me to apologize,” Bruk said. “My perfectionism made things black and white. It was as if, if I made a mistake, then that would make me a bad person, so I had to defend myself. To actually be able to say ‘I’m sorry’—that was a big change for me.”
In times of crisis, our greatest fear may be burdening others, yet when we don’t reach out, the biggest burden we place on our friends is often our silence.
To keep from oversharing, we need to understand our motives when sharing, to ask ourselves, “Why am I sharing this?” Our sharing should reflect the safety we feel in a friendship, rather than the lack thereof that we are trying to compensate for.
To get yourself to be vulnerable, it’ll help if you remember that you’re not practicing it because it’s comfortable; you’re doing so because it aligns with your values. If you value connection, well-being, intimacy, meaning, honesty, self-care, showing up in the world as your truest self, then being vulnerable expresses your values.
“There’s no amount of money, drugs, or women that will fill the hole in your heart. You’re going to have to grow. Because you didn’t really have a father, you will need to create a community of men who will support you. It’s all going to take some work.”
Manhood, as he had known it, was a great charade. Men don’t show emotion not because they don’t have any but because they learn, early on, to fear what would happen if they did. “We’re human beings. We were put on this earth to be vulnerable. We have that capacity within us and denying our evolutionary biology is the problem we face as a human race. As a man, I was given the ability to feel and be vulnerable for a reason. We can’t deny our ability to be human,” Lucas said.
Society is starting to attend to the lacking state of Western men’s friendships and the horrible effects this lack has on men’s health, both mental and physical.
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, where husband-and-wife authors Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz highlight how men are intimate only with romantic partners while neglecting friends.
anam cara, an Irish term for soul friend, the type of friend you confess to, sharing your innermost mind and heart.
Dax Shepard.
“Men police other men, so we keep our vulnerability in. Once men see weakness in other men, they go in. They become the butt of jokes and are teased and bullied,” Christopher St. Vil, a professor of social work at the University at Buffalo who studies Black masculinity, told me.
@dadswithwisdom,
“No Game Days. No Bars. The Pandemic Is Forcing Some Men to Realize They Need Deeper Friendships.”
EVRYMAN,
EVRYMAN groups allow men to process their emotions among men. Some of their goals are to destigmatize men’s vulnerability and help them make deep friendships.
choose spaces and work that make him come alive.
“For almost every aspect of well-being, social support is a critical part of what makes us endure and survive hardship.”
The only way we truly become strong is through being deeply supported by others.
We love a rags-to-riches story of a self-made man (rarely ever not a man or not White) who never depended on anyone, who teaches us we can make it on our own, no matter how abysmal our surroundings.
In his lecture on the self-made man in 1872, Frederick Douglass disclaimed, “It must in truth be said, though it may not accord well with self-conscious individuality and self-conceit, that no possible native force of character, and no depth of wealth and originality, can lift a man into absolute independence of his fellowmen.” The French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville feared that American individualism would lead to a situation where “each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”
“The goal of independence is not to be completely autonomous, but to recognize when you need somebody, and know how to reach out to them to get what you need.”
Being invulnerable also led me to drop great friendships when conflict arose because it would take vulnerability to apologize.
As Morgan Jerkins, essayist and editor, put it, “Sometimes it’s good to let people love you in moments when you’re not strong so you can see their capacity for love.”
People use authenticity as a cop-out for being mean.
Research finds, for example, that people report being most authentic when they are around others who are open and accepting, and they feel inauthentic when others are judging them.
It’s a state of internal honesty.
The secret to authenticity, then, is security. When we’re insecure, we’re often so consumed by our own pain that we lack the resources to care.
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.
authenticity is who we are without defense mechanisms.
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.
What’s the most uncomfortable emotion for you to feel?
Mine feel like a hot flash. When I’m really triggered, it feels like a hole has been blown in my heart. When it continues, it feels like my heart is a circuit breaker, with someone snatching all the wires out. In breathing and locating the trigger in our body, we calm ourselves so we can respond rather than react.
Without mindful awareness, we coast on autopilot and surrender to our uncomfortable feeling, allowing it to provoke us to attack, blame, criticize, or otherwise defy mutuality.
our goal is to bring ourselves to a state where “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?”
Our ultimate goal, as Cerny puts it, is to “tolerate hearing the effects we have on others [and the effect they have on us] because, 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.”
We Need to Hang Out,
“I’ve always been a mostly good human being, in a box-checky way,” he said. “I woke up every day and I was going to be a good husband and a good father and I was gonna go to the gym and I was gonna eat my broccoli and I was gonna be a good employee. What I have done is added ‘be a good friend’ to the list.”
having social connection is one of the strongest determinants of our happiness.
Loneliness is more fatal than a poor diet or lack of exercise, as corrosive as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
The toxicity of loneliness was a slow poison: a tamping of joy, a malaise, a not-quite-myself-ness. But when my sporadic walk dates with friends came around, I’d inflate with life.
Don’t take friendship for granted. Don’t be passive, letting friendship fizzle because you forgot to reach out. Don’t dip out when friends need you. Don’t wait for calamity to rock you into realizing friendship is priceless.
