What comes to mind when you think about self-reliance? Until recently, my academic training steered me toward a critique of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her daily newsletter on March 18 (was that only 9 days ago!?), “After more than a generation of a culture that idealized individualism and said selfish greed was good, the coronavirus is forcing us to evaluate whether that is what we want to be as a government, and as a nation.”
That critique remains sound, to be sure. Now that I am a psychotherapist who is ever more interested in the significance of our attachments to each other, I also see self-reliance in a more intimate, devastating light.
During the past six months, I have been blessed to participate in an intensive sensorimotor psychotherapy (SP) training that focuses on healing developmental wounds. The sources of this pain are frequently our earliest relationships with caregivers and other individuals who were consistently in close proximity to us, such as siblings, peers, and teachers.
Attachment research shows us how infants orient toward what invites a caregiver’s attention. Infants also learn to mute or shut down the behaviors that result in their caregivers turning away. In light of how dependent we are on our caregivers for survival as a species, the strategies we develop to ensure that our caregivers attend to our basic needs are vital. According to SP, self-reliance is a particular adaptation that forms in response to our needs not being met during the developmental period when we experience separation anxiety. This phase begins as early as infancy and can last until we are about five years of age.
Part of the rub in convincing people that self-reliance is linked to early unmet needs is our society’s stubborn refusal to treat emotional needs as critical, not only to our survival but also to our flourishing. So many of us believe that if we had our material needs adequately met, in a country and world where many do not, we are fine. This is exactly the self-reliant mindset that is born from not having sufficient nurturance. The young child who is not adequately seen, heard, and valued wisely learns not to need these forms of connection. We learn to do things on our own—“I’ll figure it out”—and do not practice asking for help from others when we are struggling.
Moreover, we develop a wall of distrust (a nourishment barrier to use SP terms) since we have not been able to rely on those around us to consistently meet our relational, emotional, and additional needs. As children, we do not yet understand that this necessary self-reliance is specific to our earliest relationships. We therefore generalize the need for self-reliance to the world at large and, in so doing, inadvertently cut off connection from people who have much more capacity to be present with us, even in our most vulnerable, needy moments, than the individuals involved in those early-childhood relationships.
Here is the real kicker. Because we are not robots and have real physical, emotional, and mental limits, the ongoing insistence that we do not have needs means that eventually we collapse. Maybe we get sick or have a mental breakdown. Maybe we relapse into addiction of one kind or another. Maybe we even die.
I have been reflecting on how the most self-reliant among us are potentially more at risk of death in this era of the coronavirus. Surviving COVID-19, as well as preventing the contraction of it, often requires support from others rather than going it alone. One of the most self-reliant people I know recently had coronavirus symptoms and didn’t know what to do about the fact that they were running out of food and didn’t want to risk spreading the illness to others by going to the grocery store. The idea of asking someone to shop for them or, less vulnerably, using the delivery service that many stores offer had not occurred to them.
I personally suck at identifying and attending to my own needs. The weekend that I had the training about the self-reliant adaptation, I was repeatedly slapped in the face with the limitations of this strategy. I had just seen 30+ clients the previous week and also thrown a 50-person surprise party for my partner’s birthday (the planning of which I chose to do almost entirely on my own). I came to the weekend with a respiratory infection that greatly diminished my capacity to speak, let alone breathe. When our trainer asked if we all could withstand watching a video about a 17 month old who was significantly and negatively impacted when his parents left him for 9 days while his mother was birthing his sibling, something in me screamed no. Since I was on the verge of collapse, I couldn’t contain that refusal, and said, “No,” loudly enough for the people around me to hear it. Almost all my peers were up for watching the video so I hunkered down to endure it, knowing I’d likely be fighting back tears through the entire thing. At the time, I attributed the overwhelming emotion I felt to the fact that I had a four-year-old child at home who was the age of the boy in the film not so long ago.
I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder by one of the trainers who had heard my no. I quietly said to her, “You are going to tell me to leave for this part aren’t you?” She nodded her head. I left the room, feeling ashamed of my inability to toughen up and stay with the group. That same trainer soon came to find me and ask if I needed anything. I was in the stairwell of the training facility. “I’ll just walk up and down the stairs. I’ll be fine.” I was not fine. The remainder of the weekend hammered that home a million times over. I am grateful to my trainer for having the wisdom and presence to instruct me not to watch the video since I could not do that for myself.
I had the luck of going to my parents’ house soon after the training and finding photos of myself during the age when self-reliance takes root. Because my mother is a diligent photo-album keeper, I found pictures of my parents on a two-week vacation, without us kids, when I was 13 months old. It was a different era, and I’m not here to blame anyone. What I felt was vindication that I hadn’t been over-reacting when my intuition told me not to watch that video at the training. The documented evidence of my own separation from my parents at such a critical developmental stage strengthened the growing belief within me, “It’s not my fault.”
Little Me
Realizing just how self-reliant I am has been rough. Time and again, I have gone to almost any non-human resource I can think of to figure something out or get through a tough moment. SP would say I’ve learned to auto-regulate instead of interactively-regulate. Had a tough day? I’ll take a bath or do some deep breathing. Need to understand why I’m out of sorts? Solitary meditation or a Google search to the rescue! Feeling overwhelmed? Off to the pantry for some chocolate or maybe the refrigerator for a beer. Experiencing conflict with someone? I’ll journal about it or delve into a psychological thriller to distract me. Feeling anxious? I’ll run, walk, or hike, by myself, with my favorite podcast blasting through my earbuds.
I am learning to interactively regulate, however, and I invite you to do so, too. When I am feeling a lot of arousal in my body, which shows up as trembling, racing thoughts, and fast speech, a hug from my partner soothes my nervous system like nothing else can. The challenge has been to acknowledge the nourishment barrier between him and me, bow to it, and ask for the hug anyway.
Two days ago, I had an opportunity to interactively regulate in the coronavirus era. An accident occurred, while I was solo parenting my daughter, that resulted in a gash on my head and momentary shock about what had taken place. Touching my head and finding blood on my fingers scared the shit out of me, and I was not able to be the grounded, calm presence for my daughter that I do my best to be. I told her I needed physical space from her. Although I did need a moment to calm myself, I sure wasn’t kind or gentle in the way I demanded it, and she ran to her room and began crying. She was scared, too, since she saw the blood on my fingers and the emotional flood on my face. I immediately heard a critical voice in my head. She told me to get it the hell together so I could be there for my child.
On this particular day, I was able to say to that voice that it’s okay to ask for help from others. I turned to the Slack “workspace” that my partner set up for a group of us working parents in the immediate neighborhood who are trying to keep our shit together while we maintain physical distance from everyone outside our households. We help each other with grocery runs, childcare activity ideas, and additional needs. I went to the “general” channel and told my neighbors about the injury. The response was immediate and nurturing. Not only did I take a deep breath after receiving this support, but I also was quickly able to invite my daughter onto my lap, embrace her, and repair the relational rupture that occurred when my head injury happened.
I am finding the COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect opportunity to break what for so many of us is an intergenerational pattern of doing for ourselves regardless of the cost. And some days we are better at letting others support us than others. Self-compassion and forgiveness are key. After all, the young mapmaker in us is the one who wisely learned to turn only to ourselves when no one else was available or responsive.
We recently had another weekend training, this time online due to the risks of meeting in person. This experience taught me that deeply meaningful connection is possible across a distance and using video-based interactions. In one of the practice sessions, when I assumed the role of client, I realized that despite my years of therapy and practice with self-acceptance, I have kept that young mapmaker at arms length—I see her and offer her words of comfort, but the relationship is one of sympathy more than genuine empathy. With the support of the therapist, I found myself capable of offering her the intimate nurturance she craves. An image came up of holding my four-year-old daughter on one knee. My current adult, parent self invited that child part of me onto the other. I drew them both to my chest and kissed the top of their heads.
During an interview on NPR, Jennifer Michael Hecht, who authored Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, stated in no uncertain terms, “We belong to each other.” And we do. May we (re)learn to act from this belief and remember that in this wild, sometimes harsh, and beautiful world, we need each other more than we need to be self-reliant.