Hungry for Connection

Over the course of the past several months, I’ve written about self-medication—medicating those uncomfortable feelings that arise in response to life’s challenges. One of the feelings that often arises in psychotherapy, especially in the treatment of depression, is the feeling of emptiness. However, when I ask clients to try to describe their experiences of emptiness, their responses often reflect very different feeling states: numbness, the feeling of being overwhelmed, helplessness, paralysis. Indeed more often than not, the emptiness clients describe is not the absence of feeling. Rather, it is often quite the opposite: at its core, it is a painful hunger for emotional connection and nourishment. Emptiness signals a desire that has been subverted. Responses to emptiness, emotional hunger or deprivation can take many dysfunctional--even destructive--forms: addictions, compulsive behaviors (i.e., compulsive shopping or spending, gambling, compulsive sexual behaviors). Indeed, people with addiction often struggle with acute feelings of hungry emptiness—using substances or other compulsive behaviors to sate the hunger. Unfortunately, filling the emptiness with substances or compulsive behaviors usually fails because the substances (or compulsive behaviors) are poor substitutes for nourishing emotional connections. Indeed, there are never enough drugs (or alcohol, or sex, or money, or material goods) to satisfy the hunger.

The themes of emotional abundance and deprivation thread through psychotherapy sessions. Early family experiences with emotional deprivation reverberate throughout our lives, coloring our experiences of ourselves, our relationships, and the world. How our basic emotional needs were met (or not met) in early childhood form us and inform our beliefs about ourselves, our relationships, and our world. These beliefs are largely unconscious, but exert a powerfully out-sized influence on how we live. These unconscious dynamics inform the decisions we make for ourselves and drive a great deal of our behavior.

Moreover, the experience of deprivation brought about by prolonged confinements, profound losses, isolating illnesses, and other traumas magnifies the experiences of hungry emptiness, especially when the trauma puts you is in a position of having to actively suppress or repress your needs. When these experiences are coupled with earlier experiences of deprivation, the hunger--the need--can seem overwhelming.

One of the goals of therapeutic work is to identify and address unmet emotional needs--those gnawing hungers, the emptiness, the sense of deprivation. And as work on those issues progresses, other issues related to the theme of emotional deprivation emerge. Indeed, a question that will eventually arise: “what will be enough?” What emotional nourishment do I need that will ameliorate the pangs of hunger? How much emotional nourishment do I need? Will the nourishment I receive today be enough? Obviously, figuring out how to meet one’s emotional needs is also important, but the question of adequacy is one that also comes into focus.

Seeking emotional sustenance is really the whole of therapeutic work. And meaningful answers to these questions will vary from person to person and will probably emerge only over a long period of time.

It seems reasonable to start with the here-and-now. What can I do to meet my needs today? What will it look like to have my emotional needs met? How will it feel to have my needs met? To whom do I turn to meet my needs? Who do I trust with my needs? How can I meet my needs without engaging in an addictive or compulsive behavior, without getting hurt or without being betrayed? How can I manage when my needs are not met?

However at some point, the therapeutic work must turn to the past, looking at the origins of the addictive/compulsive behaviors and the feelings of emptiness/hunger that drive them. Approaching the search for origins with curiosity with a therapist can yield surprising insights, lead to the ability to accept your emotional needs, and even find new ways of addressing and satisfying them. Indeed, the connections made in therapy with the therapist and with yourself may open paths on to new connections that sate those hungers.

The Habit of Self-Compassion

My Tuesday morning subway commute typically includes reading the science section of The New York Times which reports on the latest developments in a wide variety of fields—from archeology to physics. Neuroscience and psychiatry are frequent topics. At least one article is devoted to some aspect of mental health or psychology. This past week, the article that caught my attention was titled “Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges.” The article, (published 3/1/11) described psychological research on self-compassion which suggests that a key to mental health involves “giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections.”

This rang true for me, since many of the clients I see beat themselves up for the mistakes they’ve made, for their perceived flaws, for their imperfect relationships. And while most people are vaguely aware that they are very hard—needlessly hard—on themselves, the habit of self-abasing criticism is so ingrained that self-denigrating thoughts are automatically triggered whenever a loss of control or a personal failure is experienced. As many a client has said, “I tend to be very hard on myself. I HAVE to be so that I keep myself in line”. And they proceed to beat themselves up. (A variation: “I was really dumb. I should have [fill in the blank with your favorite ‘should’].”)

It makes sense that the lack of tolerance for one’s limits and imperfections—lack of self-compassion—is linked to depression, anxiety disorders, addictions, and other problems. And it makes sense that developing the habit of self-compassion would be a key to sustaining mental health. So how to change a lifetime of being hard on yourself?

Kristin Neff, the psychologist interviewed for the Times article, identifies three components to self-compassion: self-kindness (being warm and understanding toward our imperfections), affirmation of a common humanity (recognizing that all people experience inadequacy and make mistakes), and mindfulness (developing a balanced approach that suspends "good/bad" judgments, experiencing life as it is, not as we think it “should” be). Developing self-compassion focuses on cultivating all three. (Her website [www.self-compassion.org] provides more detail.)

It seems to me that self-compassion begins with developing awareness of and understanding how certain situations or events trigger self-punishing thoughts. What pushes the self-critical buttons? Notice the familiar sequence of thoughts triggered by those circumstances, the feelings associated with the thoughts, and the behaviors that tend to emerge in response to those thoughts and feelings. In other words, being present to yourself in the moment—being present to your thinking/feeling—is the first step.

Cognitive therapies offer specific techniques for changing the thinking patterns in support of self-compassion: consciously stopping the negative train of thoughts, introducing distracters, engaging in self-talk aimed at changing the content of the self-abasing thoughts, substituting negative thoughts with affirming self-statements. Some therapists also draw upon Buddhist mindfulness meditation traditions and suggest meditating on compassionate texts or statements (i.e., “lovingkindness meditation).

In addition, I think it is important to look more deeply at the patterns of self-abasement themselves in order to sustain a change in the direction of self-compassion. Where do the self-condemning thoughts originate? How did the pattern of self-abasement begin in the first place? Whose voices do you hear when you beat yourself up? What deeper purpose do these thoughts serve? How critical are these patterns of thoughts to the architecture of your psyche? How do these patterns play out throughout life?

It seems to me that developing compassion is related to learning to self-acceptance (with all our imperfections and limitations) which means, in turn, accepting our deepest desires. And we may not be fully conscious of our desires. (In fact, Freud taught us that we often defend against that which we most desire.) I suspect that those times when we are the least self-compassionate are the times when we have the most difficulty accepting ourselves, and have the most difficulty identifying and accepting our desires within the context of the present moment. Too often, we contort ourselves into untenable and unsustainable positions because we are not able to compassionately accept ourselves or our desires. Accepting ourselves often means becoming awakened to our desires.

(The word “should” in this context becomes a tool for perverting desire, changing desire into something unrecognizable. I think that one step toward self-compassion is becoming aware of the way we use the word “should” and even trying to move away from using the word. “Should” does not reflect what is. Self-acceptance, self-compassion focuses on what is.)

The habit of self-compassion is critical to mental health, but creating a new frame of mind founded on self-acceptance and self-compassion is not easy. While it takes conscious effort and practice (and sometimes professional help), living with self-compassion will bring greater satisfaction and joy to life. This is very hard work; it is the work of psychotherapy.