Cultivating Authentic Connections
An excerpt from How to Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re an Adult by Ira Israel
In How to Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re an Adult: A Path to Authenticity and Awakening, author and psychotherapist Ira Israel explains that the origin of this voice of dissatisfaction is the wounded child within who is subconsciously and retroactively seeking the acceptance, approval, and love of primary caregivers who either withheld love, loved us conditionally, or treated us in ways we did not understand.
We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the book
Let’s take a look at the way people communicate in the twenty-first century. We know that 95 percent of communications are nonverbal, so how has technology affected our relationships? Text messaging may seem wonderful for the occasional brief note to reschedule a meeting, but it often engenders ambiguity and confusion by failing to convey essential nuances such as disappointment, hope, irony, sadness, and elation. Texting is a terrible means of communicating emotions, WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF TEXTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS (a.k.a. shouting) — LOL! — DUH! — sideways smiley faces, and multiple exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have witnessed countless patients lose important relationships over miscommunications caused by texting and what I call “subtexting.” Subtexting is the implied information given and the rampant misinterpretation of that information — namely, the response time between text messages. When we stand in front of a fellow human being and look into his or her eyes, we get a tremendous amount of information, and we receive that information in real time. When we speak with someone on the telephone, we can hear his or her breathing and the timbre, rhythm, and tone of his or her voice, and we get a sense of what that person’s current disposition or emotional state is. Are they frantic, discombobulated, out of sorts? Or are they serene, calm, composed, lucid, empathetic, and thinking clearly? All of this is lost when texting. You have no idea if the other person is sitting on the toilet, driving furiously, high on crystal meth, massaging their wrists with a razor, having sex, in a yoga class, or having a meltdown. During every second that we wait for a response, our minds try to assemble visual scenarios of the other person’s current reality from the pixelated characters of the text message and the time it takes for the other person to respond. We wonder, “Is my husband really shopping, or is he chatting with a pretty cashier?” “Is my son safe or was he hit by a bus?”
I am not sure what the etiquette is where you live, but in Los Angeles it has become moderately acceptable to “ghost” someone, which is when someone slowly stops returning your messages and you end up, like a frog being boiled alive, scalded by the silence. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” All new technologies are exciting, but if we do not quickly comprehend their limitations, then they may end up being more detrimental than helpful. In this case, I strongly advise people to avoid answering open-ended questions in text messages and to text back “When is a good time to speak?” to arrange a telephone or face-to-face conversation.
I consider my iPhone a frenemy. In fact, I have implemented my own strict etiquette for text messages, and I usually make very specific requests: I ask people to please text me only to arrange telephone conversations or face-to-face meetings, or to report unexpected emergencies with a note such as: “Running late. Sorry.” I have witnessed so many people have entire one-sided, passive-aggressive conversations and implode like Jon Favreau in Swingers that I feel confident in advising people to avoid anything that resembles a conversation via text message.
Human beings need physical contact — we need to see into other people’s eyes. This interaction does not transpire via text messaging. One hug equals one million text messages. Posting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat deludes us into believing we are engaging in relationships. But nobody is ever going to receive a pat on the back through a video screen. We need contact, we need to break bread with other human beings, we need touch, we need to practice the dying art of conversation, we need empathy, love, and compassionate speech. Authentic face-to-face interactions are how we heal the attachment wounds of our childhood (and they probably create new neural pathways, too!).
Texting subconsciously reinforces avoidant behavior that results in alienation and distance, and I believe it correlates strongly with the rise in depression over the last twenty years. In five hundred years, when historians look back on our society, I believe they will correlate the increase in cases of clinical depression to the rise of social media. I have never heard of a patient going into a psychotherapist’s office and saying, “I feel truly loved, supported, and appreciated by my friends, family, coworkers, and loved ones...and I am depressed.” Compassionate, empathic, face-to-face interactions are where the healing of emotional wounds takes place.