You Cannot Be Abandoned
You can also read this article in Psychology Today here
Greetings from Rome,
I have just returned to teaching in Rome after spending between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Copenhagen, where I chaired a symposium on workplace loneliness at the Academy of Management conference.
In Queretaro, Mexico last Thursday to Saturday I facilitated, along with 18 other thought leaders whom I recruited, a nonprofit leadership conference for 225 nonprofit leaders from all over Mexico.
With all the negativity and belligerence occurring in the world right now, especially with US – Latin America relations, it was really heartwarming to see some of the world’s most distinguished leadership professors and researchers on workplace relationships such as Ronald Riggio from Claremont McKenna College and Julianna Schroeder from UC Berkeley volunteering their time to help build Mexico’s social sector.
Half of the trainers flew, drove and bused in from other parts of Mexico, also volunteering their time. We need more of these types of initiatives focused on peace and growth rather than conflict and polarization.
I hope you enjoy my latest article in which I share one of the most important learnings in my own life, one that most of us experience as we learn to stand on our own two feet after early traumatic experiences.
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I felt an inner devastation that caused so much emotional distress I could no longer hide it or hide from it through my work. I did not feel like doing anything except cry and share my suffering with anyone willing to listen.
After Karla left me for the third time, I went to a meditation retreat in Estes Park, Colorado, led by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who founded mindfulness and was nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize.
An Epiphany
During the first few days of the retreat, the severe disappointment I felt with my life permeated every moment of my daily meditations. I had thought that Karla was stable, more so than any woman I’d ever known.
Yet she had left me three times—not exactly the dictionary definition of stable. Each time, I judged her as unstable, unworthy of marrying because
I couldn’t count on her not to leave me after having children. I just couldn’t live with the thought that I would do to my children what had been done
to me.
Then, on the fourth day, I learned a lesson that would change my life forever. Eating lunch silently with hundreds of other meditators, I could not stop thinking about the engagement ring I had made for her from a diamond handed down from my grandmother, who passed away when I was a few
years old.
I could not remove the image of the ring, and the love inside me it represented, from my mind. At that lunch, I broke down into tears.
An older man and his wife whom I had earlier confided in about what
had happened between me and Karla came over to hold me. I cried uncontrollably for fifteen minutes.
Abandoment No Longer Possible
The next day I was standing on a nearby hilltop gazing at the surrounding mountains. I had slept for four days in a trailer with eleven male strangers in bunk beds. Now I was in the middle of nowhere, by myself. Being okay with that, I came to a realization: I cannot be abandoned.
I realized that I was no longer a child but a grown man, and that the concept of abandonment no longer applied in my life. In leaving me, Karla had
held up a mirror to the deepest part of my soul that I had never been able
to confront.
I realized that relationships decay and die just as they are born and grow, and that this is part and parcel of the Tree of Social Life. While children can certainly be abandoned, an adult who is left has not been abandoned; rather, they are confronting a natural element in the trajectory of most relationships.
Acceptance Impossible without Rejection
Rejection and betrayal sting hard in any form. A series of experiments led by social psychologists Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University found that even a brief experience of social rejection can propel someone into a downward spiral that includes feelings of hopelessness, increased aggression, binge eating, and irrational, risky behaviors.
Still other research by Twenge and Baumeister has discovered that when people feel rejected, they become less self-aware, more lethargic, time passes more slowly for them, they feel life is less meaningful, and are less able to delay gratification to achieve long-term goals.
Here is the reality of social relationships: Every relationship you will ever sustain will contain a healthy helping of both acceptance and rejection. Whether it’s a friend not returning our call, being broken up with or being pulled off an important project, each of us has experienced rejection and we are very aware that it hurts.
Yet just as one person’s trash is another’s treasure, two people can each be physically alone and one can experience a devastating rejection and abandonment by others while the other can feel an ineffable wholeness and oneness with the world independent of—or interdependent with—the other people in their life.
In This Moment, It Can’t Be Different
Out of fear of stagnating in a place you do not wish to be, you may be unwilling to accept your life, in this moment, as it is. Make the decision to 100 percent accept your life and the people in it with no clauses, conditions, or prerequisite changes. You will then be able to envision the destination—with changes that are not required but desired—toward which you want to lead your life.
Acceptance in the face of overwhelming life challenges provides immense benefits. An impressive trove of research has found that individuals facing stressful situations and life conditions—from surviving a natural disaster to managing a learning disability to being imprisoned to facing a debilitating medical disorder or other traumatic life episodes—benefit tremendously from the acceptance of their current situation.
When you give up the idea that your life should have been any different than it has been, when you accept your life exactly as it is, you will have taken the first step. You will have launched yourself on the Love Progression, which I describe in my book Love and Suffering: Break the Emotional Chains that Prevent You from Experiencing Love, which integrates the latest psychological research on acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, and love.
This journey will enable you to forgive others and, finally, to truly love yourself and others—not as you would like you or them to be but as you and they actually are. As you travel along this journey and expand your capacity to love, you will experience transformative personal changes that will bring more happiness, success, and meaning into your life.
To your finding your own balance of togetherness and separateness,
Anthony
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Once you understand the way apps and social media have flourished, you can design your own strategies to contain them and shift your life in a better direction.
To understand how dopamine works, it’s important to note that even negative information can keep us hooked, as it’s a primordial signal that we had better pay attention to our long-term chances for survival and flourishing—which, after all, is one of our deepest existential goals.
As I found in a recent study, we feel emotion about what concerns us, what we care about, what helps or impedes our progress toward an important goal—even if it’s negative.
How can you develop strategies to prevent incessant digitally-mediated distractions from taking over your life?
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