Where are you? Exploring strategies of disconnection.

Where are you, in yourself, right now?

Are you here, present in this moment? Or time travelling back to the past, into the future or distracting yourself ? 

Are you somewhere in yesterday, replaying a conversation or wondering what you should have said? Perhaps you are already in tomorrow, anticipating what might happen and trying to prepare for it.  Sometimes we simply withdraw, these strategies can also involve numbing or distraction, we may reach for our phones, work, food, alcohol, television or anything else that gives us somewhere else to go when being with ourselves feels difficult.

Mick Cooper has written about chronic strategies of disconnection: patterns through which we may move away from difficult experience, from ourselves, or from fuller contact with other people, and aren’t obvious. They can look like perfectly ordinary ways of living.

We might keep ourselves constantly busy. There is always something that needs doing, someone who needs us, another email to answer or another task to complete. Being busy can leave very little space to notice what we are actually feeling.

We might overthink, instead of experiencing an emotion, we analyse it. We try to understand it, make sense of it or solve it. We can become very skilled at explaining ourselves while remaining quite distant from the experience itself.

We might become highly attuned to other people, we notice what they need, what they are feeling and what might keep them happy, perhaps without stopping to ask ourselves what we need. Saying yes can become easier than discovering that we actually want to say no.

For some people, keeping the peace becomes an important way of managing relationships, conflict, disagreement or the possibility of disappointing someone may feel so uncomfortable that we move away from our own experience in order to preserve the relationship.

For others, control and perfectionism can offer a sense of safety. If we can anticipate what might happen, get things right and make sure everything is in order, perhaps we won't have to encounter the uncertainty or vulnerability underneath.

What is this strategy doing for me?

Our ways of disconnecting often make sense when we consider the context in which they developed. They may have helped us at one point in our lives. They may have been creative responses to experiences that felt difficult, painful or overwhelming. The question is not necessarily whether the strategy is good or bad. The more interesting question might be: Is it still serving me now?

A Gestalt perspective

Gestalt psychotherapy places particular importance on awareness and contact. Rather than seeing our difficulties simply as things happening inside us, Gestalt is interested in the relationship between ourselves and our environment, what happens between me and the world.

What am I aware of?

What am I feeling?

What is happening in my body?

What am I moving towards?

What am I moving away from?

What happens between me and another person?

And where does contact perhaps become interrupted?

Awareness creates possibility

When a familiar strategy operates outside our awareness, it can feel as though we have no choice. When we begin to notice what is happening, something can shift. The strategy may still be there. But now we can see it. And seeing it can create a little more space. Perhaps we pause. Perhaps we stay with the feeling for another moment. Perhaps we say what we actually think. Perhaps we discover that we don't have to respond in quite the same way we always have.

This is one of the things I find so valuable about a Gestalt approach. There is less emphasis on telling ourselves how we should be and more curiosity about how we actually are.

What is happening here?

What are you aware of?

What happens when you stay with that awareness?

Staying with ourselves

This doesn't mean that we should always remain fully present with everything we feel. Sometimes we need to step away. Sometimes distraction is useful. Sometimes we need distance, rest, boundaries or protection. The aim isn't to become permanently open or permanently connected.

It is about developing greater awareness and flexibility, becoming more able to notice what we are doing and to have more possibility about how we respond.

So perhaps the question isn't:

“How do I stop disconnecting?”

Perhaps it is:

“Can I notice when I leave myself?”

And then:

“What happens if I stay, just for a moment?”

Sometimes the first step is simply becoming curious about where you are.