how far you have come musings on beauty and courage

We are too scarred to know how to stay around and mention that we are hurt. At an early sign of being disappointed, we therefore now understand the need to close ourselves off from pain. We became, without consciously realizing it, determined that such levels of exposure would never happen again. We grow into avoidant patterns when, in childhood, attempts at closeness ended in degrees of rejection, humiliation, uncertainty, or shame that we were ill-equipped to deal with. Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviors guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims.Īvoidance is one of the commonest ways of hedging against our fear of rejection and hurt - a coping mechanism for disappointment that we developed when the people first tasked with caring for us let us down. We haven’t found a winning way to keep admitting just how much reassurance we need. It continues, even in quite sane people, on a daily basis, with frequently difficult consequences - chiefly because we refuse to pay it sufficient attention and aren’t trained to spot its counter-intuitive symptoms in others. One of the odder features of relationships is that, in truth, the fear of rejection never ends. Recognizing the paralyzing fear of hurt, rejection, and abandonment at the heart of avoidance, he writes: In The School of Life: An Emotional Education ( public library) - the book companion to his wonderful global academy for skillful living - De Botton explores the deeper dimensions of avoidance and how to live with it, both as its proprietor and its partner. That is what Alain de Botton explores in this animated essay probing the psychological machinery of avoidance in intimate relationships - where it comes from, how to live with it, and where it can go if handled with enough conscientiousness and compassion. Our avoidance of that terrifying, transcendent place holds up a mirror to our most fundamental beliefs about life and love, about what we deserve and what we are capable of, about reality and the landscape of the possible.

And yet that is the only place where two people earn the right to use the word “love.” There is no place more difficult to show up than where marrow meets marrow. We think we want connection, but as soon as contact reaches deeper than the skin of being, we recoil with the terror of vulnerability. The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want, isn’t even knowing what we want, but knowing what to want.

How far you have come musings on beauty and courage