Last month I wrote an article called “Waving on the Dirt Road” about how we are suffering under the false belief that we don’t need each other. We therefore are living in our respective bubbles, hating all the other bubbles, and that is OK with us. Thanks for all your comments about that article. (Here is a link to that Newsletter in case you missed the article:
http://conta.cc/2uBPYsg)
We can start with waving to each other but that’s not enough to get us reconnected as societies, so I kept digging. I had Brene Brown’s TED Talk on Vulnerability recommended to me and watching it revealed another piece of the puzzle. This disconnected state we live in not just in our politics but our families and our businesses, its becoming epidemic. It is true united we stand divided we fall. There are many on the political front leveraging our separateness for their political power grab. This is ruining us now and will continue to ruin us if we don’t take responsibility for our separateness.
So I watched Dr. Brown’s talk on Vulnerability and WOW! (BTW over 30
million others have viewed it too.) Here’s how Dr. Brown’s seminal work on Shame Vulnerability and the dirt road all connect.
1. Shame: The fear of disconnection.
2. Blame: A way to discharge pain and discomfort.
3. Vulnerability: The way out.
In this chaotic time we live in, when jobs, careers, companies, trusted institutions, even countries and governments disappear in the blink of an eye people feel very uncertain, very
EXPOSED
.
I think people and men in particular feel very, very
ashamed
that they can no longer provide for their families in this chaotically shifting economy.
This leaves people and men in particular trapped. They can’t express what they feel overtly (and still keep their image as a man) so they
blame to discharge the pain. Stop for a second and think of all the blaming going on around us.
Dr. Brown notes that we numb our selves to avoid feeling vulnerable. We are the most
in-debt, obese, addicted, medicated adult population in US history! All of the spending, eating, and drugging
numbs us to the overwhelming uncertainty we feel. But ultimately the blame and the numbing keeps us separate from each other. Even groups on the same side blame segments of their
own party for not being Conservative enough or Progressive enough. Yes, we eating our young.
The massive uncertainty in our world has people turning the uncertain in to absolute certainty to obscure the sense of inner chaos. Rather than “you have your religion and I have mine”, its now I have the ONLY ONE TRUE religion and rest of you are totally and unequivocally wrong and damned to hell and your children cannot play with mine.
Stop for a moment and allow your self to feel the pain and uncertainty of this world and then express what you feel. Don’t numb it with a beer, a Xanax, and a home shopping network senseless purchase. Then allow yourself to be vulnerable to the other side. In the
Advanced Men’s Course© the assignment is to listen to the emotion of someone who does not see the world the way that you do and just hear it. Stop listening for the expressed purpose of winning the argument and ultimately losing our connection and maybe our country and world.
As always we invite your comments.
Here are the link to Brene Brown’s TED Talk:
The Power of Vulnerability