The Well in a Nutshell

While preparing to publish essays on this website, I have been asked by people to explain, “what are you writing about?” This is not an easy question to answer. I appreciate that having a very short description of the content and how I imagine this site may support people — if my thinking is not too far off the mark — is of great benefit. The following paragraphs provide a high-level overview of how I intuitively understand The Well in (or and) the Desert.

I see myself and other people stuck in perpetual cycles or loops of thoughts and behaviors. In my mind or mental map, these cycles share a lot of features with a desert in which a thirsty traveler walks in circles, desperately seeking for an oasis. In contrast to the desert, this is a place with a source of water and life — in short, the Well — to replenish and rest. The various locations which I myself and, in my perception, also other people visit as part of conflicts or other unresolved problems each contribute to an overall feeling of stuckness. We want to get out of the desert, but cannot find the way.

Part of the underlying problem is that the territory, life itself in fact, is cruel and filled with potential dangers — including dying of thirst or starvation or some other physiological cause, like bleeding to death. If my intuition is correct, life is the process that transforms the hostile conditions present in the chaos of nature into something beautiful and, at times, incredibly blissful and enjoyable. But this process is at times also quite painful, since it emerges from and through converting the slipping away of scarce energy into sufficient order to hold onto this energy for long enough to build something — like a flower that converts scarce carbon dioxide molecules in the air into a temporary beautiful form.

In this mental landscape of the desert of desperation, there exists a Well. It is a place of experiences that we can reach through several portals as it were. One of the most commonly described ones is falling in love romantically: a state of being in which what might otherwise be felt as living a worthless existence becomes a world full of magic and excitement. That is “being at the Well” — looking out into the world from a perspective of hope, of passion, of wanting to go out to make a difference, and of having faith that it is possible to do so.

Importantly, I have come to see this mental place of existence not so much as a direct consequence of romantic love. Instead, I believe it is an inner state that we can learn to discover and find consistently on our own. And with the occasional help from friends and family, we can learn to extend it far enough into the desert so that when we are triggered to take another ride on the all too familiar track of desperation through the desert, we then have a choice.

A slightly more psychological description is that I believe we can learn to become aware of whatever triggers us into a state of scanning for threats, and once this happens, we can then slow down our inner evolutionary and habitual programming sufficiently to learn, just as Neo does in the Matrix movies, to dodge and eventually even stop the bullets our subconscious processes fire at our experience in order to push us into survival mode, which keeps us firmly on the beaten track in the desert.

One critical problem humans are facing is that our psychology does not sufficiently differentiate between physical and psychological threats. Both have the power — at least at first — to pull our consciousness into this desert. Whether you are faced with an actual tiger that might bite off one of your limbs, causing you to bleed to death, or with your spouse reprimanding you for some mishap in the home, or with your boss who could disapprove of your conduct or productive output, it is difficult to remain fully conscious of the fact that you are and always remain free to choose what to do in any given situation. The question I want this website to help you find an answer to is this: How much freedom can you learn to experience when the end of the gun you are facing is really one solely in your mind?

When faced with a tiger, it probably makes sense — or to bet, if you are a betting man — that your evolutionary program will do a better job of saving your life than if you were to take a few minutes and think the situation through, by which time you are half eaten. In the situation with your spouse or your boss, on the other hand, humans are constantly prevented from finding better solutions by the fact that their minds are involuntarily drawn into a landscape of binary outcomes and desperate action. That is the place of having no other alternatives than fight or flight.

If we want to learn to live closer to the Well, I believe the following steps are essential for mastering and consistently achieving this quality of life:

• Understanding that this experience, the Well, is a place available to us at all times as an inner mental state
• Firmly locating this state on some kind of mental map, so that we know where and how to find it
• Identifying the safety conditions necessary to travel to this place — so long as our experience tells us we are immediately threatened, our consciousness will always bow to the survival needs programmed into us by evolutionary pressures
• A key factor is learning to dissociate between immediate and remote dangers, and understanding that while remote dangers, such as being fired from a job, are real, because they are not imminent, our best strategy is to no longer follow the evolutionary programming we are born with, in favor of a more conscious-choice driven approach

That is, if after thinking about a situation we decide that our best action indeed is to follow the same route as our evolutionary habits would suggest, we are free to follow this path. We simply are no longer experiencing this as acting out of desperation, as being in the desert. Instead, we can drink from the water that is at the Well, and act vigorously and decisively.

Finding Courage

For me, one of the hallmark features of human beings is our ability to show courage. The central feature of this ability is the capacity of acting toward a goal while at the same time fully appreciating the risks as well as the pain we may possibly encounter. One of the main reasons I find heroic stories captivating is their featuring this central aspect of acting courageously. For the longest time I have been asking myself: why do I seem to have so much trouble following in the footsteps of my heroes? In many situations in life — if I could step outside of the immediate moment, entangled in a complex web of feelings — it seems relatively clear that the actions I take are not how I would act if I were to act courageously.

Almost like some fiendish characters in a Shakespearian drama, I have come to see three experiences as being at the root of this quite tragic inability: uncertainty, fear, and shame. Looking at my own choices, and also out into the world at the choices of people I have met, I strongly suspect that almost all humans share a desire. We want to move through life in a manner such that we would thoroughly enjoy being told the story of our own lives. That is, we want to see ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, like Sam in The Lord of the Rings muses about Gollum.

Each of these three experiences plays a critical role in a drama, which sometimes turns into a tragedy. They form a dynamic system which makes acting courageously quite a challenge. In situations in which we feel a desire to act differently than we observe ourselves acting — against our intentions and desires — each of these alone already creates an impediment. Whenever they team up, as it were, they form a tremendously difficult to overcome obstacle.

The Well in the Desert is meant to describe a path not around this obstacle, but through. Several of my own experiences and those that people close to me have shared with me over the years have led me to the following conclusion: these three experiences are only obstacles in the form in which we tend to perceive them. Through both evolutionary pressures and cultural learning, we have come to relate to each of them with a habitual sense of wanting to turn our attention away. We do not like uncertainty, fear, or shame, and we often do whatever we can to avoid those experiences.

If a situation comes with a sense of uncertainty, many adult human beings — myself included — seem to have a habitual preference of finding a way back to a more certain terrain. Children still seem much less affected by the inhibiting qualities of uncertainty. Partly because they simply cannot learn about the world without guessing what will work. At some point between childhood and early adulthood, most people seem to lose the kind of passion for exploration, especially in the context of potential risk. The adults for which this seems not to be the case could be described as hackers. They relentlessly seek for new paths that reduce the amount of energy spent on a task — with admittedly at times disastrous consequences…

I believe that a critical aspect of this change from child- to adulthood is our culturally reinforced belief in the value of having the correct solution to a problem being more important than being fully engaged in the process that generated that solution in the first place. We learn and come to believe that knowing the answer is sufficient and, best (or worst) of all, that this does not require any painful experiences along the way. I want to invite you, the reader of this website, to consider the possibilities that come with allowing yourself to make mistakes.

Many times in my life, I was living in fear of such mistakes. What if I tell my partner that some of my experiences in our relationship are not enjoyable for me? What if I have already made a terrible move that endangers our relationship? What if I confide to my boss that I find a project she wants me to work on absolutely boring? What if the people around me no longer like me? What if what I say is met with disbelief and rejection? Would it not be much easier to just not say anything, or pretend everything is going well? Many such thoughts have rattled around my mind, and I appreciate that for each person they will be different.

These kinds of questions lead to the third experience: shame — in particular feelings of shame produced not by anything other people say about our behavior, but by the imagined outcome of “what if…?”. I sense that humans are born with quite a number of unwritten expectations that, somehow, manifest as this experience. We believe in all kinds of unspoken rules that we have to fulfill to like ourselves. And each time we imagine we have broken the rules, or are tempted to break them, we see ourselves as tainted with shame.

The path that I see through these three experiences — rather than around them — is a difficult one. It is not an afternoon stroll. And there are still many moments in which I feel myself being pulled back into a sensation of not having any good options. What I hope this website can offer is both a clear description of that path together with explaining why I believe it is worth taking. From a 30,000-foot perspective, all that it takes is to fully embrace these feelings of uncertainty, fear, and shame — not in their habitually experienced form, however.

Uncertainty can be seen as a signal of opportunity. If everything is certain, nothing remains to be explored. And embracing uncertainty from that perspective, opens up the possibility of change. When I get into a situation in which I feel “something did not go the way I would have enjoyed it” — whether with my partner, my boss, with a child of mine, with a neighbor, or with a stranger — and I do not know exactly what to say or do, I can start by appreciating precisely that: I do not know what the best way of addressing the situation is; and that is perfectly OK. So long as I am willing to explore the situation with the other person, together, maybe we can find something that looks like a solution.

Fear will then be a natural experience along this exploratory endeavor. And it is important not to brush that aside. The fear that emerges as part of genuine exploration of a risky situation — in which something of value is at stake — is a reminder to engage with care and full attention. Life emerged from this cruel and desperate place of the desert, and wants to remain safe. So, rather than looking at the fear as a signal of discouragement, I can appreciate that underneath the fear is my desire for safety, for staying alive, and maybe a hope for collaboration. If I can shift my awareness toward these positive values, I can act decisively while also signaling to everyone in the situation that my intention is not to dominate them.

That leaves shame. It is probably the toughest one to tackle. I suspect that humans are born with some kind of innate worry of not being good enough. This sense can be triggered by all kinds of outcomes, real and imagined. And unfortunately, it works as a self-reinforcing kind of impediment: in situations where you do not muster enough courage, you will feel ashamed. And the more shame you feel, the harder it will be to muster enough courage.

Similar to the experience of fear, I do believe that shame can be interpreted as a deeply rooted desire. It stems from a motivation that all humans share, which was selected for by evolutionary pressures: we all want to be accepted as a member of a tribe or larger group, since this is what has allowed humans to conquer the food chain, as it were. This motivation to belong is something genuinely positive. It creates a lot of opportunities for reciprocity and mutual benefit between people. And our attraction to heroic narratives is a clear indication that we feel acting courageously is an important way of signaling to our community that we belong.

At the same time, whenever we perceive ourselves to be less than what evolution has built into our self-awareness as an ideal human being, this easily leaves us feeling dejected. If we can appreciate that this state of consciousness is simply a signal telling us that we have a deep desire for belonging, and that our current behavior may not serve this desire, we are no longer forced to see shame as something to look away from. It instead offers the chance for asking the question: what can I do better?

In short, I believe — and will lay out in greater detail in future essays — that humans suffer from a perpetual, hard to shake, and naturally occurring misunderstanding. We easily perceive and conceive of emotionally painful experiences as harmful to our lives, and so want to move away from them, just as we would from sources of physical pain. And whereas it is generally useful to avoid physically painful stimuli, such as a hot stove top, or picking a fight with a much stronger opponent, by following the same pattern when it comes to emotional pain, we are trapping ourselves in an endless seeming cycle of not being able to integrate the genuine utility of the signals these experiences offer. My hope is that my writings will help you appreciate the value of these signals, and that by allowing them into your consciousness, you will be able to work through the uncertainty, fear, and shame, and come out on the other side with an increased ability to muster courage where and whenever that is something you want to apply in a given situation.

Why This Matters

When I took the decision to write out my thoughts, I strongly felt that knowing and understanding the purpose for doing what I do is one of the best ways I have found to keep me going when things get difficult. And by difficult I refer to the experience of feeling resistance — from whatever source. To then have the ability to muster enough energy to be devoted towards a certain end is what I would call acting out of purpose and describe with terms such as “deeply caring for” or “this matters to me.”

In that sense, this website matters a great deal to me. I care deeply for the topics I want to explore. I naturally hope that it will be helpful to you, and yet I admit that the main reason for posting these essays is that I feel an urge to bring the words to the page. I have learned that I gain more clarity from writing, expressing — even just for my own benefit — some of the sources of despair and frustration that I feel at times. My hope is that whatever of my own despair remains in the final edits will not be a barrier.

I am now in my forties, and looking back over my life up to this point, several instances stand out in terms of their impact. They mattered to me a great deal when I lived through them, and much of their significance remains. And this is true despite and also probably because of their not entirely pleasant nature. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the moments of my life that have taught me the most share this feature: they have a flavor to them which, to this day, serves as an at times painful reminder for how much I care about certain aspects in my life.

As one theme of this website, I want to suggest that emotional pain can be approached from and understood through two separate perspectives. The most common, and probably naturally occurring one seems to be of looking at pain as an unwelcome reminder of our vulnerability and our ultimate inability to prevent our own death. There is, however, this other perspective I would like to explore throughout my essays. Besides the worry of dying, it seems to me that humans experience pain in many situations as a consequence of not achieving a specific purpose in a given domain of life they care about.

This includes the most mundane situation of wanting a specific toy, and then hearing — either from friends or parents — that it is not available. It covers situations in which a teacher or mentor tells us that our efforts on a project we felt a lot of excitement for are insufficient. And being rejected when we pursue romantic love is probably one of the most emotionally painful experiences I can think of. In all of these situations, feeling a kind of pain or hurt is then not so much a signal of dying, but of not getting something we want.

An interesting property about such experiences is that they contain, through the pain, a very important lesson: they can tell us what we care about the most — at least in that moment. Humans have, however, not yet learned to habitually consider this perspective. As laid out in the previous section, in the physical domain pain is a life saving signal for us to shift our attention as quickly as possible to our survival goals. If our bodies become significantly damaged, then the genes we carry will not propagate. It is essential, from an evolutionary perspective, to avoid situations that could lead to such damage. And physical pain as well our anticipation of pain provides this kind of signal: get out of this situation as fast as you can. In addition, physical pain — especially when we do not expect it — is most frequently caused by things outside of our control, such as animals or objects hitting us, or other people inflicting physical damage. That is, we generally perceive the cause of pain to be external in nature.

One way to look at the usefulness of the overlap is the following image: your motivational system functions a bit like something that controls the energy provided to and necessary for a small seed to grow into a large plant. If a seedling experiences hostile conditions, such as too dry ground or extreme heat, it is best to wait for conditions to change, before putting all that energy into the growth. Similarly, in circumstances where our efforts are not yielding good results, it is often a much more rational choice to pursue other goals, to change our strategy or approach, or to wait until circumstances have improved. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be a conscious thought process associated with emotional pain. Instead we naturally respond with the same program generally suitable for physical damage avoidance: fight, flight, or freeze.

To the extent that human brain mechanisms reuse physical pain circuitry to process emotional pain, it leads to a similar experience of tightness, including a feeling a reduction in choice or of options available to us. We also generally seem to have the experience that other people cause our emotional pain. And this is, I believe, a central component in our current inability to appreciate the critical difference between physical and emotional pain. Physical pain does, especially for younger individuals — that is, before old age creates conditions of chronic pain — often imply some immediate danger. Emotional pain, on the other hand, may produce the same experience of urgency and inescapability, but this is I believe mostly a sort of attribution error, driven by the fact that we lack a more distinct emotional pain processing brain circuitry. I will explore this topic in greater detail in a later essay.

The Pain and Learnings of Unrequited Love

To give one concrete example of finding oneself in a paradoxical bind, I will relate an episode from my own life. The facts are not particularly unique, all things considered: about 10 years ago — I was three years into my first long-term romantic relationship — I found myself unable to express to the person I wanted to be closest to some of the most important experiences between us. And this was particularly painful, since they were revolving around where in the relationship I did not feel satisfied or happy. Our habitual ways of seeing things and responding to situations were not aligned, and that led to a lot of tension on my part.

It happened many times that, before we met up, I believed I had found the way to talk about my feelings, and about how to possibly improve matters. Then we got together, and I just could not get the words out. I first felt ashamed for being needy, with accompanying thoughts of, “this is not a big deal, why are you complaining about such small issues?” And after we parted ways again — since we did not live together at the time — I felt ashamed for not having stood up for myself. In short, I had entered a vicious cycle of ever decreasing confidence and self-worth.

This is one of the aspects I want to explore in the coming chapters. Our evolutionary past has left us with a fairly big and critical problem to solve: how can we communicate collaboratively with another person whenever we would like for something to change, if we are naturally inclined to think of the other person as being the cause of our unhappiness? We are seemingly naturally inclined to use language and a style of thinking that attributes blame for our emotional pain to some other person, regardless of how the facts may support that from a more objective perspective. Since I had decided not to talk to my partner that way, I stayed silent.

That is to say, I had already concluded that — given that humans tend to think of other people and their behavior as the cause of our anger, irritation, and jealousy — this way can in itself be the cause of much additional unhappiness. Yet, I still had not learned how else to inquire into and then express to my long-term partner that things were not going well enough for me. My silence lasted too long for things to continue, and as much as from today’s perspective I recognize my next steps as unhelpful and very much going against many of my values, I sought out other people through a dating app on my phone.

I ascribe it to some sort of fate that put a man into my path who I felt offered me the kind of experience I had been looking for. I feel some reluctance and uncertainty about my ability to convey precisely enough the core elements of that experience, but since it is important for what I want to tell, I will give it my best shot.

The truly essential quality of the experience I had been longing for is that of unconditional acceptance and what I perceived as a desire coming from the other person to understand me, and a willingness to deal with whatever mess I had created. Much has been written and said about transference in romantic relationships, by which people take an image of the kind of parent they wish they had had and project it onto a person they experience as “fitting the bill.” There is something to that, but I believe that the desire for being understood, for being accepted, and for not being judged is something that exists outside of specific relationship constellations, whether with respect to one’s parents, a romantic partner, or friends in general.

Instead, I believe that the experience I had was much closer to what the humanist psychologist Carl Rogers described as unconditional positive regard. It is mostly felt as an attitude coming from the other person. When I am able to muster it towards my husband nowadays — we have been together for over nine years — I would describe it as the willingness to look at a person’s pain, including the painful messages that might be directed at me, and to feel a sense of wanting to understand what is going on for this person, on their inside as it were. And this specifically includes moments when the other person is having a hard time expressing this without sounding upset, irritated, angry, hostile, or in some other way that is not particularly enjoyable.

I still feel quite some shame around what happened next. In my recollection, the experience of being with this other man — and him being willing not to look away from my messy parts, but to simply be present with them — eventually created the opportunity for me to have a long conversation with the partner I had cheated on. Admittedly, he also found out about this other man, and confronted me. Without having had the benefit of experiencing that my feelings, thoughts, and even actions can be looked at through loving eyes, I do however believe that this conversation would not have been possible at all.

As such, the man who showed me the path to the kinds of experiences I would hope many more people can have in their lives ultimately gave me a gift that led me back to the person I had been in a relationship with all along. It is certainly not what I had anticipated. And it did not happen in the way I wanted it to happen. At the time, I still had very little insight into why this experience had been so transformative. What I could tell a few months later — after the attempt to reconcile with my first partner had failed, and as I got stuck again — is just how much this episode had meant to me, and I recognize writing and re-reading these words how much it means to me to this day.

For months, I felt confused, deeply sad, and at times had difficulty finding much meaning in anything at all. Only much later — after meeting my now husband, and being briefly in contact with this person again — did I sufficiently appreciate the nature of the transformation, and I believe I have been able to find my way through a painful stretch of grief to a place where I no longer am dependent on someone else to provide these necessary signals for me:

When I can become aware of painful emotions, such as low self-esteem and shame, maybe about the fact that I feel afraid about something that most people seem to be dealing with on a daily basis, it is of critical importance to meet such feelings with a loving and curiosity-driven attitude, that is to say geared toward understanding. If and only if I can approach myself and my feelings that way, then they offer me the opportunity of greater integration, and of becoming whole. For as long as I remain too scared to meet the parts of myself that cause these experiences, they will cause trouble for me and other people.

Feeling Loved as a Signpost

The critical step I took was to realize that whatever feelings — particularly feelings about myself — were available to me in the presence of the person who had shown me this unconditional positive regard must be a state which my brain is capable of producing. And the image I have developed over the past years goes something like this:

When you fall in love with someone, and this person becomes the presumed source of “feeling good” (about yourself), it can be helpful to think of this person as someone with the ability to point your awareness into a specific direction. It is a bit like someone carrying a signpost to your favorite vacation destination — which you still have trouble locating yourself. Whenever you are around that person, it feels effortless, almost magically easy, to reach this place inside of your own experience. If the person isn’t around, it may seem (almost) impossible to reach it. And if you are getting the sense that the other person no longer wishes to be around you — during and after a break-up, say — it can then seem like you will never get to your favorite vacation spot again.

The important and good news is that you can find this place by yourself. The more difficult to hear news might be that it requires you to learn to enjoy looking at whatever parts of yourself you intuitively do not like without anyone else being able to take some of the bad feelings off your shoulders, at least in the long term. The ease with which the vacation spot can be reached comes precisely from the fact that for other people it is genuinely much easier to look at your dark spots without being as offended by them — since they are not responsible for them, all they need to do is look at them. For you, on the other hand, they represent, at least in the language I will explore in a future essay, everything “wrong with you.”

And it really can be quite a challenge not to look away or feel despair when considering all the aspects of your personality and past choices that you yourself may wish did not exist. I hope that subsequent pieces can provide a glimpse of insight into why these feelings are part of every human’s experience, how they were useful — at the very least in their function to help humans live up to some necessary virtuous standards, albeit at the expense of people having “bad feelings” — and how you might be able to transform them into an ability of meeting people who are in dire straits with an entirely different approach altogether.

The Vision

In short, what I am hoping for is a world in which people are no longer slaves to the kinds of experiences and feelings that, in our evolutionary past, probably were the most optimal solution to a very, very difficult problem: we had to learn to overcome the genetically selfish impulses that many life forms exhibit to a sufficient extent, in order to provide the necessary pro-sociality and altruism, which in turn allowed our species to survive as large enough groups in extremely precarious and resource-scarce environments — look at all the hard-to-survive-in places where humans have thrived all the same…

As part of the mechanism that natural selection ended up leaving us with, we are experiencing an almost endless stream of self-critical thoughts and feelings as a perversely borderline sadistic incentive for us not to stray too far from the Natural Law norms that generate collective benefit. And while these feelings still serve useful functions in the absence of understanding and choice, we now have so much better tools at our disposal. We can become aware of our ability to positively contribute to each other’s lives. And we can do so willingly, and with mutual respect for one another, rather than out of feeling guilty or ashamed if we act in selfish ways.

If you imagine a world in which someone wishes to receive something from you, and that person comes to you and says, “hey, I am lacking something, and I became aware of your abilities (or your possessions); I believe you might be in the best position to help making my life a much more wonderful experience; would you consider doing that for me?” And importantly, it would then be entirely your choice whether to do as the person suggests (or asks). That is, if for whatever reason you decide that it would not be good for you — maybe you do not know enough about the person making the request, or the person is misinformed about your skills, the resources you can spare, or some other aspect that keeps you from giving willingly, like a lack of trust — you can say “no,” and that response will be met with a kind of, “thank you for letting me know that at this time you really cannot help me, if it is OK, I would like to be friends, and maybe we can help each other in the future,” then nothing is lost.

Even if you have reasons to distrust the person — maybe a number of freeriders have recently made similar requests, and the community begins to suspect that people are being taken advantage of — so long as you neither initially feel guilty for refusing them, or the other person has the ability to use some manipulation to elicit such feelings in you, you can choose whichever path you feel is best for you as a whole.

An important addendum to the potentially idyllic seeming vision is that, naturally, some people will demonstrate behaviors that would under purely naive conditions lead to the potential for resentment or worse. That is, behavior that veers into the direction of criminal activity — wanting to live off of others’ skills and resources — is something that I believe cannot be eradicated. As long as people remain conscious of their ability to choose, however, this is not a problem. Including the choice to detain certain people which the community deems are not good for them, to prevent them from having the ability to poison the environment with their behaviors.

Desirable Experiences

At the core of the good life are experiences we strive for, that when they are present in our conscious awareness lead to an overall sense of life being in a good place. The following aspects of experience seem for me critical to that overall sense:

• Order and Predictability as the basis of coherent experience in the first place; to make any sense of anything over the course of time, including any sensation in the moment, it requires an element of orderedness and continuity, rather than scattered and fragmented randomness
• Ease coming from a sense of flow, an absence of the experience of any force counter to one’s desire to move, and seeing things move freely within the bounds of what is expected — which naturally suggests that engaging reality with poorly calibrated expectations is often a source of unease or comes with the experience of obstacles
• Joy as a feeling of unbounded and sudden energy, often experienced as coming from some depth, like the lower abdominal regions, rising up through the body, creating involuntary smiles, laughter, and contributing to ease; joy is a feeling of the moment in the here and now, without a consideration of time, past or future
• Fulfillment as the complementary sensation of achievement of purpose, based on the consideration and understanding of trajectory; it requires some — not necessarily propositional — grasp of where one comes from and the direction into which one wants to extend or grow
• Understanding and Recognition as the experience of being fully seen in an accepting manner, which includes the ability of the understander and recognizer of successfully integrating what they see lying beneath superficial behaviors into a constructive whole
• Welcome and Homeliness as the felt consequence of belonging, of not having to exert an effort to exist in, to leave, and to rejoin a given space, such as a group or community of people, including one’s nuclear family or a close-knit peer group; while ease and understanding are part of this experience, it really requires a container of sorts for welcome and homeliness to be felt, similar to a cellular membrane made up of many elements providing a space in which ease and understanding can come about
• Support coming from a sense of carriedness, of having the opportunity and permission to — temporarily at the very least — share the experiential weight of growing challenges with others, such as with a mentor or friend

An ongoing absence and felt lack of these experiences comes as a sort of pain, indicating to our consciousness that something is not going well enough. If we then turn this experience into a thought of shame or guilt — wanting to blame ourselves or some other person or group as the source of this lack — we create a tightness that makes it very unenjoyable to consider the positive value behind the feeling of lack. And if we project this lack outwards, onto other people through accusations, this generally makes it equally unpleasant for them to willingly support us in improving our situation. The coming essays will disentangle how our habitual way of using manipulative tactics on one another has created many situations of mutual gridlock.

To the extent we can appreciate that painful feelings of lack simply indicate to us in what domain we would like to see an improvement, and if we are feeling confident in our ability to communicate this to other people, we no longer need to feel afraid of the lack itself. All we need is to look into the depths of our souls and see what we are missing, and then tell the people around us what that is. My experience over the past few years has been that while this may take some practice, it is one of the most fulfilling ways to connect with others: if given the choice, they will often make the effort to support us in improving our situation, particularly if they feel that we are giving them this option as a choice rather than making demands.

Take Home Messages

At the end of each essay, I try to summarize what I believe to be the critical points I have extracted. My hope is that they will contribute to your understanding. Most importantly, I hope that you can take away from this piece that many of the feelings you experience in conflict situations can be seen as signals for what you value the most. And if understood this way, and approached with a sense of curiosity and encouragement — similar to how you might feel if a romantic partner inquired about your feelings, or a loving parent would have done if you had felt similarly as a child — I hope that you can discover that underneath the pain lies a desire for something genuinely positive: ease, joy, fulfillment, and belonging.

• Our evolutionary past has left us with feelings that create a tightness similar to physical pain, and since pain and the expectation of it were important signals of having to avoid certain situations, we have a tendency of looking and running away from such painful but critically important experiences.
• In our mental landscape, we can learn to locate a state of mind from which we can accept the painful experiences we are having as signposts to our positive values.
• This does not require us to pre-commit to certain choices, such as being naively pro-social — quite to the contrary, if we can learn to fully integrate our emotional experiences, we can make choices that serve all of our needs.
• One of the most challenging obstacles on this path is shame we might experience for having certain feelings in the first place; as long as we feel that some of our experiences are a sign of weakness, or of us not being good enough in some important way, it will be very difficult to accept these experiences as highly informative about our deeply held values.
• Conversely, once we can accept all of our experiences as simply part of how we feel about the world, much of the initial tightness eases, similar to how we feel when being listened to by a good friend.