Vitality and Lifelessness: Connection and Disconnection in Human Relationships

I was moved to write this piece through my work with a client whose relative inability to connect with others got me thinking about what we mean when we speak about connection versus disconnection in human relationships, and what makes for good, quality connections with others. This client consulted me for help dealing with upper management in the tech company at which she was employed. The middle of three children, she lost her father to cancer at the age of 10, and was left with a mother whose attempts at reaching her were experienced as aversive. Except for the fulfillment of basic needs, she was left on her own to cope with a devastating loss, which indelibly colored her view of life. She felt then as she does now in her mid-thirties; empty and alone, vacillating to and from mild hopes for finding a meaningful connection to someone or something and an ever-present hopelessness that this is all life has to offer.

Despite the sad circumstances of her life, she managed to find herself in a leadership role in middle management. She was intelligent and savvy enough in her expertise that she could convince prospective employers to hire her, though her history had been that it wasn’t long before she found herself in conflict with her bosses, and out the door. Aside from whatever manifest content characterized our meetings, I found myself experiencing a sense of aimlessness with her. She had a way of speaking which lacked motivation and interpersonal impact. I imagined her growing up with her siblings, each one of them stranded on their own private island, as I felt in relation to her, separated by an unbridgeable gulf. In our meetings I often found myself reciting the lyrics to a Slipknot song in my head, which go, “…nothing to do but hold on to nothing,” sung in a shrill, desperate voice.

The disconnection I felt in relation to my client was undoubtedly what she felt in relation to her mother, as well as in relation to herself. To digress for a moment, Webster’s defines ‘connection’ as a bringing together to establish a link, whereas ‘disconnection’ is the severing of that link. Indeed, this client was cut off from herself, which created a palpable experience interpersonally, perhaps best characterized as lifeless or lacking in vitality. We all have at least pockets of disconnected experience within us, which are precisely what create any serious difficulties in living. However, those in relation to whom we would characterize as disconnected are more pervasively cut off from themselves.

To the extent that anyone is cut off from one’s self they have a restricted range of access to their feelings, and are thereby deprived of the ability to empathize with others and consider an alternative perspective. Even those who may intellectually be able to consider the possibility of a different perspective are unable to feel their way into a different experience. Instead, they are locked into a view in which the world is as they experience it in their heads. They cannot take up their perspective as an object of reflection in itself because they have no other experience internally with which to contrast it. The world simply is as it is, and interacting with disconnected experience takes on a concrete, literal quality, which forecloses the possibility of making meaning.

Interpersonally, when disconnected experience is in play, as it is for some more often than others, interactions typically are structured according to a perpetrator-victim dynamic. One is perpetually ‘done to’ by others, and reactive in some way as a concrete given. For my client, those in upper management were constantly placing unreasonable demands on her, which, upon inquiry, hardly seemed unreasonable at all. She indignantly presumed an unrealistic degree of autonomy within the organization, and was fairly unable to reflect on the role she played in creating the discord with her bosses. As I got to know her a bit through our work together, it became apparent to me that the relationships with her bosses were no different than others in her life, and aside from a few scattered acquaintances, she was alone.

Relationships need to be nurtured in order to grow. Just like water for a plant, relationships need to be reflected upon by the participants, particularly in circumstances of conflicting needs and feelings. Healthy relationships are characterized by each partner’s willingness and ability to reflect on his or her view of the other as but one among other competing perspectives. To the extent that they are able to reflect on their points of view they are capable of engaging in open conversations, in which defensiveness is kept to a minimum, and neither is attempting to influence the other. Rather, mutual understanding of experience is the goal of conversation, and each participant recognizes that understanding is not the same as agreement. Partners in a healthy, connected relationship can agree to disagree, and use their understanding of the other as a means of deepening their relationship in the development of a more intimate connection.

Those who we would characterize as connected in human relationships are not only capable of, but often find themselves having, conversations which take on a life of their own. They are more at one with themselves and therefore better able to spontaneously engage with others in creative, vital conversations, which end up far from where they began in a way that is enriching for both participants. These conversations stand in stark contrast with the experience elicited by my client, in which an aimless, lifeless feeling was the context in which she felt on the receiving end of others’ supposed unreasonableness and inconsiderate actions. Our work was helped along by my efforts to get her to consider where others might be coming from in relation to her, and the role she played in bringing about the very circumstances she felt victim to.

In the end, none of us can establish healthy connections without the ability to reflect on the meaning with which one is imbuing the other’s actions in a given situation. Difficulties in living are precisely brought about through the inability to reflect on the experience of self and other. Ownership of one’s contribution, even in situations which can be imagined in no other way than according to a perpetrator-victim dynamic, is required for the establishment of healthy connections that are life sustaining for us all.