How well-intentioned attempts to help others help themselves can actually hurt them.
Do any of these sound familiar?
“When she finally reached the destination, she realized what she’d really been looking for had been inside her all along.”
“He had been desperately trying to get someone to see him, to understand him, but now he realized that the only person who could give him the insight he craved was himself.”
“She’d thought that she needed a man to complete her, but now she saw she’d never feel right in a relationship until she felt whole on her own.”
These common sentiments suggest that we can find all that we need inside ourselves. I’ve often found these narratives uplifting because, in the right context, they are empowering. Being beholden to others for acceptance, affection, and belonging can feel terrifying, and thus, when isolated, we want to be able to find what we need inside ourselves. Vulnerability can make the idea intoxicating. However, glorifying the above sentiments contains a hidden danger; these ideas oversimplify a complex dance between autonomy and connection – and the deep truth that we absolutely rely on other humans for our core needs.
This essay doesn’t aim to deny the solace of meeting our own needs to the best of our ability – particularly during times of extreme isolation. Offering ourselves a healthy dose of self-love is critical. However – as we’ll explore in the section, How Attachment Narrative Are Born – the more relational stability we’ve had in our lives, the more capable we’ll be of handling an isolating experience in a psychologically healthy way.
The self-help industry has popularized the notion of inner wholeness as a cure-all for life’s ills. Yet when independence is exalted as the ultimate virtue, it promotes a retreat from the very relationships that sustain us. If one believes that all needs are met from within, why engage in the messy, unpredictable dance of human connection? As critics of self-help literature have pointed out, glorifying total independence can mask deep-seated pain and foster isolation rather than healing it. Later we’ll delve into this deeply in the section called How Isolation Creates the Dark Triad.
The Social Species We Are
“Doing it alone” is coping. We’re a social species and thriving hinges on our social drives – which are fundamental needs. Biologists and psychologists agree that human social behavior is a cornerstone of our evolutionary success. Our brains are hardwired for connection: social neuroscience shows that circuits underlying empathy, trust, and cooperation are central to human behavior. For a detailed evolutionary exploration of these concepts, I recommend reading The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich.
The 20th-century sociologists Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead understood the individual – the self – as entirely a product of the social forces around it. In opposition to this, the self-help literature serves up a self outside a social context, putting it at odds with social science research. The autonomous self, obviously, does exist – we do have boundaries – but context is everything. Our selfhood is highly reliant upon the context of social support structures, and, as we’ll see, the value of “it’s all within” teachings is also wholly reliant upon context.
Related essay: Your Identity = Your Boundaries
Humans are, by nature, social creatures. Neurobiological research shows that positive social interactions trigger the release of oxytocin, lowering cortisol and reducing stress. This “social immune system” not only improves mood but also has measurable benefits for cardiovascular health, immune function, and longevity. Studies have demonstrated that individuals with robust social networks live significantly longer and experience lower rates of depression, heart disease, and other stress-related illnesses.
While self-resourcefulness is valuable, the goal is never to become “self-reliant.” We are relationally dependent from the moment we’re born up through our death. When we’re heartsick, we can’t eat or sleep. When we’re babies, we die without human touch. When we’re happy, we seek someone to share our joy with. At every stage of life, and through every emotion, we’re a social species.
The Slippery Slope: Independence or Narcissism?
The idea that we must find everything we need within ourselves is not just a comforting illusion, but a dangerous one. If you can meet all your own needs, why not simply abandon your social ties for a solitary life, answering to nobody? Why bother to explain yourself, or to apologize, if you need nothing from others? These aren’t words of wisdom – they’re words of suffering. In most cases, the pursuit of independence stems from unresolved pain rather than genuine desire for increased self-sufficiency.
While personal growth is important (as I’ll discuss in the section Interdependence Doesn’t Replace Introspection), relying solely on inner resources without seeking external support is counterproductive. The modern self-help narrative often valorizes “doing it alone,” but research shows how damaging isolation really is. Marriage, belonging to a congregation, and having more people in your life in general are all strongly correlated with living longer. Chronic loneliness is associated with increased risks of stroke, dementia, and premature death – to the point of being as bad as smoking over a pack of cigarettes a day.
When someone’s struggles are met with the mantra, “it’s all within you,” they are receiving the message that their very real, visceral need for companionship is not legitimate after all.
What about introverts?
Researcher Robin Dunbar proposed that our cognitive limits allow us to maintain stable relationships with roughly one-hundred-and-fifty individuals – a number that underscores our social complexity. And for extroverts, having a hundred or more friends is a fine thing. (Extroverts define and experience friendship differently than introverts, so to an extrovert, having a hundred friends is possible, whereas, to the introvert, this may rightfully sound absurd.) We need extroverts to help hold the network of humanity together. However, we also need introverts – who hold the fabric of society together in a different way.
Introverts are still social, but not by having dozens of people moving through their life. Introverts engage in being a social creature through depth with a few people, rather than breadth with many people. The societal balance between cognitive types is evolutionary and another critical part of our success as a species. Other successful species have a similar balance of cognitive types, with around a quarter of the population being significantly more sensitive. The sensitive quarter tends to mostly overlap with the introverted half of the population.
Sensitivity allows for specialization: the sensitive few can warn the social group about poisonous foods, hazardous air, and dangerous situations. This sensitivity is a boon to the group when it is recognized and honored, but it can be a liability for the sensitive individual who needs extra time and space to recover from their experiences.
Introverts and extroverts both belong to this same social species. Our social strategies aren’t identical, but the underlying needs nearly are: we all need belonging, acceptance, affection, camaraderie, recognition, and respect. How we go about seeking affection or belonging may differ greatly. Both cognitive inclinations still include deep social drives which correlate to powerful social needs.
While an introvert may prefer affection from one familiar person, and an extrovert may lean excitedly into contact improv – dancing while in contact with one or more other people, usually at an event including strangers. An introvert may prefer a gathering with two or three friends, where an extrovert may enjoy a rollicking party. An introvert may prefer to grocery shop with “blinders” on, not noticing other shoppers or even the employees they encounter, whereas an extrovert may make small talk with anyone they encounter. These are simply examples, however, and exceptions abound – particularly because there are four types of introversion and four types of extroversion, but that’s a topic for a different essay.
Independence is a Modern Illusion
Being a social creature means that your needs being met is deeply tied with others’ needs being met. The idea of independence and autonomy as grand, wonderful things is very modern and western. Throughout history we’ve had to rely on others for our day-to-day survival. Hunting large animals requires a group of humans cooperating, as does amassing food for a long winter. Raising and feeding offspring was never something an individual human could accomplish, and even today, the idea that it can be done remains preposterous.
The illusion of independence is a fiction fostered by our adoption of modern economic theories as a lifestyle. We think if we can earn money and then spend money on our own, we must have “earned” something. Yet we’re entirely out of touch with the raw costs of actually accomplishing anything. Most people reading this likely don’t know what it feels like to walk twenty miles, or how to tell the difference between clay and soil, or how to harvest enough calories from the local surroundings to survive. We have no idea how to build our own shelters, craft our own clothing – or what it really takes to raise healthy, happy humans.
Some self-help media may have led you to believe that if you still crave intimacy, support, or belonging, you simply haven’t done enough inner work. But no amount of self-discovery can erase the innate need for companionship and community. Yet few of us even know what community even means anymore. It’s trendy to pass around the phrase that “it takes a village” to raise a child (among other things), but few people in first-world countries have witnessed – or even read about – what that really looks like in practice. To begin to engage more deeply with these ideas, I suggest reading The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
Related Essay: How Modern Life Limits Connection
For some reason we actually need studies to tell us that deep, reciprocal relationships are essential to our psychological and physical health. That’s just how far we’ve taken our individualistic coping strategy: we need expert researchers to tell us what every baby knows from birth – that we desperately need others.
How Attachment Narratives Are Born
Popular social media posts put forward a dogma of so-called “self-sufficiency” – but these teachings are a coping strategy for having been rejected, isolated, betrayed, or abandoned. Let me explain how this happens, starting with what healthy attachment looks like.
If your caregivers reliably attend to your physical and emotional needs, for example, by promptly feeding you when you’re hungry, you learn that your needs will be met predictably. This reliability builds trust and security. When your caregiver was emotionally available, tuning into your feelings and providing comfort during times of distress, you receive valuable mirroring which teaches you about your experience. This is coregulation, a product of emotional attunement which lends itself to healthy self-esteem and the ability to regulate your emotions effectively as an adult. These experiences cause you to develop a secure attachment style.
A totally secure individual is comfortable with intimacy and independence both. They are adept at seeking support, offering support, and communicating effectively. Knowing you have a family or community who will support you if you fall gives you the courage needed to leap. And even if you – through a great tragedy – lose your community in adulthood, having previously had these secure attachments gives you the foundational beliefs that reciprocal, satisfying relationships are possible. Thus, you can handle both isolation and loss much more effectively if you have experienced reliable connections before – especially if these were the bedrock of your childhood.
Now, let’s turn our attention to the alternatives to secure attachment bonds.
When a human is cut off from a sense of belonging and feels there is nothing that can be done about it, they must find a way to cope with this impossible predicament. If it feels impossible to truly be yourself and let anyone else in, it’s because you have been served an indigestible childhood experience where that was the case. You weren’t able to have your authentic truth and the compassion, acceptance, and love of your care-givers.
Let’s say you wanted to read fantasy novels, but whenever you tried, the books were taken away and you were told these were “works of the devil.” Maybe the books were even burned or put in the trash. This is enmeshment trauma. You learned – at a deep, instinctual level – that you had to choose between your selfhood (your preferences) and connection with others. Because we’re social creatures, when you were given that choice, you chose to conform in order to belong.
Related video: Abandonment & Enmeshment Trauma lead to Anxious & Avoidant Attachment Styles via Boundary Violations
But what if you tried to conform and failed? Let’s say you were grounded if you didn’t achieve certain grades, but as a neurodivergent, you were unable to live up to the standards expected of you – regardless of how much effort you put in. As a result, you learned it was impossible to receive acceptance. Only when belonging is impossible to achieve do we turn to the strategies known as “the dark triad.”
The dark triad consists of three personality traits: narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy. These traits exist on a spectrum, and while archetypal individuals who fully represent these disorders exist, it’s more valuable to recognize how these traits show up in ourselves – even if at a small scale. We’ll revisit the dark triad shortly.
When you can’t belong – yet you need to – you’re in a gut-wrenching position. Your human need for secure attachments to other humans is primal. When the attachments in our lives are threatened, we feel as if our very life is being threatened. Some commit suicide – but there is an alternative. And this alternative is the sinister face that many self-help gurus are now wearing: avoidance dressed up as strength.
When childhood taught you that closeness was impossible, you develop something called an “avoidant attachment style” – which might be better titled “attachment avoidance.” Individuals with this attachment pattern often struggle to form deep, authentic bonds and may inadvertently isolate themselves, even when they crave connection. While there are also serious issues with having a highly anxious attachment style, there is one critical difference that makes the avoidant style far more problematic: it seeks to dodge the need for human intimacy.
The more avoidant you are in your relationships, the more distant your relationships are kept. If you’re highly avoidant, you don’t just keep others at arm’s length – you don’t let them get close enough to touch. You put on a brave face, and you may even feel “fine” most of the time. But is your “fine” actually a highly dissociated state you developed to cope with chronic loneliness?
Avoidant individuals often find it hard to trust others or reveal their vulnerabilities. This lack of trust often extends to self-trust and self-revelation, meaning that many avoidants are not conscious of their emotions. This lack of awareness readily lends itself to failures to communicate boundaries, expectations, and desires – as how can you explain something you’re reluctant to look at in the first place?
The inner conflict between desiring connection and fearing intimacy can be exhausting, leading to increased incidence anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression. When you’re avoiding intimacy, feeling anxious and depressed, and failing to communicate key information in your relationships, it’s not surprising if this leads to break-ups and isolation. Furthermore, it can be hard to recover from these blows when you’re not being bolstered by social connections.
Worse, when individuals habitually avoid emotional closeness, they can struggle to provide or receive genuine empathy. In other words, an avoidant strategy in life bleeds into a narcissistic one – which returns us to the dark triad.
How Isolation Creates the Dark Triad
Experiencing chronic social isolation as a child will lead you to develop a complex mesh of strategies for trying to stay emotional afloat. When we experience something negative, we attach reasons to it – even when we’re quite young. Isolation is often rationalized as something we believe we deserve due to being inadequate, unlikable, or somehow inherently bad. This negative self-concept is readily reinforced by any ostracization, exclusion, or further neglect. Most importantly, this core negative feeling about ourselves – known as shame – is leveraged by other people to control us. Even in households that generally seem wealthy, kindly, and loving, we have normalized the practice of “guilt-tripping” someone into doing what we desire.
Guilt-tripping is named after “guilt” – the emotion attached to having done something bad, but people often feel shame in response – the emotion of being bad. The process of guilt-tripping – or shaming – someone works like this: you cause the person to steamroll some of their own boundaries in order to be close to you. This process is called triangulation: pushing one person (or part of a person) away in order to bring another one closer.
For example, if you guilt-trip someone about being too disorganized, you are asking them to reject any parts of themselves that are disorganized (and any associated needs attached to that) in order to experience closeness with you. This is, of course, a very mild example of triangulation.
A childhood containing a lot of shame needs to be balanced with a lot of “resilience factors” to result in a healthy adult capable of empathy, introspection, and emotional regulation. Resilience factors will include things like having someone who you feel safe to confide in, a group to which you feel a sense of belonging (such as an afterschool program or church youth group), and knowing that someone in your life really loves you. Even having one of these factors helps with the load of shame we carry.
However, if the shame load is insufficiently mitigated with positive, buffering social support, then you develop an insecure attachment style, and have some amount of dark triad traits. This happens because shame – the belief that we’re inherently bad – undermines all healthy social behavior. How are you supposed to navigate a dance between autonomy and connection when deep down you don’t believe you’re worthy of either?
The dark triad is three different variants on how insufficient support leads to antisocial coping strategies, each rooted in negative emotions which are implausible (if not impossible) to carry alone.
Insufficient Validation → Narcissistic Defenses
Narcissists, in particular, can’t cope with their shame. Likely due to a lack of coregulation in childhood, narcissists don’t know how to handle their emotions in general. Instead of acknowledging how they feel and seeking support, those with narcissistic tendencies are more likely to hurl blame and shame on everyone else around them. They can’t see themselves as having done anything wrong because then they would have to feel shame – which feels like death to a lonely, isolated ego starved for connection.
If you have some narcissism in you, you’ll notice that sometime in your childhood you decided to reframe your sense of exclusion as you choosing a certain sort of “exclusivity” – pretending that you’re above others. This is a “sour grapes” approach: you declare that the grapes you couldn’t reach were sour to console yourself for not obtaining them.
When nobody sits with your emotions, coregulates, or mirrors you adequately, it leaves a lot of (desolate) room for inventing yourself. This – like “seeking everything within” – provides empowerment in the face of a bleak experience. Inventing yourself may mean a grandiose self-image, or a superiority complex to mask how inferior you feel. But the thing is, the more narcissistic someone is, the less capable of acknowledging this they will be. They will tell you that they never feel lonely or sad, and their life is one of adventure and bliss. This is the story they’ve tightly woven around their consciousness to protect themselves. If the story wasn’t convincing, appealing, and charismatic enough to fool you, then there is no way it would be effective enough for it to fool themselves.
Insufficient Care → Machiavellianism
If you suffered from neglect as a child (such as inadequate food, encouragement, or medical care), but were able to sometimes tip things in your favor through enough wheedling, it can lead to a scheming mechanism where you enter relationships with a focus on how you can convince them to meet your needs. This can lend itself to being overly manipulative and transactional.
By becoming manipulative and controlling, you shield yourself from losses. You maintain the upper hand through always having a backup plan, always ensuring others need you more than you need them. By mentally reducing people to stark notions of what they can do for you, you shield yourself from caring about any rejections you might receive. All of this helps shield a vulnerable core of shame.
While I argue in many of my writings that people are inherently manipulative, the key is to bring our desire to manipulate others into the light of conscious understanding. Making our relational transactions conscious removes the dangers which have caused us to attach stigma to these concepts.
Related: Romance is Manipulation (Consciousness Alchemy Glossary)
Insufficient Empowerment → Psychopathy
If everything you did was utterly futile as a child, it can lead to emotional numbness. A totally unresponsive mother combined with a consistently hostile father – for example – teaches the lesson that it doesn’t matter what you do. If you can’t empathize with your parents and track their moods (becoming empathic) and abandon yourself (by becoming the “golden child”) enough to win their approval, then these strategies are ditched. Psychopathy develops when you are incentivized to stunt your emotional development and detach as fully as you can from your environment.
Healing Dark Triad Traits
One important part of healing anyone from dark triad traits is to see them in ourselves and find compassion for this part of ourselves. Through that compassion we can naturally empathize with others who have also adopted these strategies which, at one point in their life, were sensible adaptations. Because people who are deeply enmeshed in dark triad strategies (especially psychopathy) are largely cut off from intimacy with others, they often can’t recognize real love even when it is being plainly handed to them. Because of this, self-awareness paired with self-compassion is usually the first step to dark triad recovery.
The Latent Narcissism Everywhere – Including Within
Avoidants and narcissists both laud autonomy above all else, and many modern self-help gurus make this kind of behavior look appealing or prestigious. Wealthy, “independent” men can brag about how many women they can “get” without anything “tying them down.” But these words have deep pain behind them: the pain of never feeling truly safe in human companionship. If the idea of commitment feels like being “tied down” – then you’ve never had a truly healthy relationship in your life.
But this isn’t just about obnoxious behavior from powerful people – this is about the way we casually relate to friends and family. When we tell a loved one that they need to learn to self-soothe, or that the best validation comes from within, are we implicitly telling them that they should stop seeking social support when really, we just feel inadequate to give them what they need in this moment? Are we just parroting these trite ideas about “everything is within” as a way of masking our own guilt at not being “enough” for our friends or partners?
You may feel guilty, inadequate, or simply burned out. If so, just say so. (I’ll discuss healthy ways to interact more in the section Practical Ways to Help – Even When You Can’t Empathize.) But we must stop shaming people for seeking help. We must stop glorifying doing things “on your own.” We must stop putting narcissistic narratives on a pedestal. The notion that you’re complete on your own is actually rubbish. It suggests that longing for support, validation, or companionship is a sign of weakness rather than a natural, biological drive.
There are a wealth of powerful coping strategies out there, but it is important to understand that anything you’re doing to help you deal with being lonely or feeling like you don’t belong is a coping strategy. Your family should feel like your safe haven, and your friend group should be a place where you can really speak what’s in your heart. Your partnership(s) should feel like places where you can be yourself and feel celebrated for who you are. If you aren’t experiencing that, then it is natural to feel a lot of negative emotions, and it is justified when you feel angry if someone suggests you should feel fine because “it’s all within.”
Interdependence Doesn’t Replace Introspection
Don’t get me wrong: self-awareness and personal growth matter. Needing other people doesn’t let you off the hook for introspecting. Other people aren’t meant to do everything for you – but rather, to work with you to help you bring your specific gifts to the table. Other people are there to encourage, validate, question, and support you in ways that make sense for them, given whatever means they have. Some people may support you by listening. Others may support you by questioning whether you’ve eaten enough lately. Still others may offer support financially. There are dozens (if not infinite) ways for other people to support your journey, and your existence in this life – and none of it replaces the need for you to also work on yourself.
Introspecting and developing a strong sense of self allows us to engage in healthier relationships, set boundaries, and avoid seeking validation in ways that are harmful or unsustainable. Personal growth does not lead us to outgrow our social needs. Growth helps us cultivate relationships that are harmonious and fulfilling.
Ironically, if you introspect often, you will sometimes find that what you needed was, indeed, within. We contain multitudes within us, and the more we can access those multitudes at will, the better we will function – even when we’re isolated. However, when you have this profound realization of the inner multiverse, remember that this is relevant to you in this particular moment. This realization is valid and real, and yet it also has the capacity to cause harm depending on how it is presented to others. Most people would be far better served by working on their relational skills rather than their isolation coping strategies.
Transcendent One, Please Come Down to Earth
Just today I finished reading a memoir, In My Boots by Amanda Jaros, where the narrator sincerely remarks she finally had her father’s pride, yet Amanda writes, “I stood atop the Greatest Mountain and realized that I didn’t need my father’s pride anymore. I am proud of myself.” I have no doubt about the truth of this statement, and in the context of her story, it was a moving statement. The memoir had been about climbing physical mountains, but this internal summit was perhaps the biggest achievement of all.
Amanda remarks often in her memoir that each person must hike their own hike. This literal statement serves as a metaphor for our own internal journeys. We, too, may crest an internal summit where we find that the love we most wanted was within all along, but the walk to that summit may include striving for the perfect therapist, the perfect romance, the perfect parental experience. Seeking these things externally is an expression of self love.
Thus, it doesn’t actually matter whether you can find what you’re seeking in the external world. Maybe you won’t ever find the recognition you feel you deserve. Maybe nobody will ever see you as deeply as you crave. Maybe the perfect relationship – as you envision it – isn’t something you can actually achieve. Even if you won’t or can’t succeed, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Whether you’ll reach the mountain top you’re aiming for isn’t the point. The point is to aim yourself in the direction which feels like it leads to your greatest fulfillment.
On your journey toward the fulfillment you want most, you may face losses. You may not be able to get a certain person in your life to respect you, love you, or forgive you for something you did. But these roadblocks are part of achieving the closure you need to fully move on from relationships that aren’t working – including relationships with food, substances, and activities. There is a truism that is known in the addiction-recovery world that goes, “Relapse is part of recovery.” And when it comes to human relationships, we’re not talking about addiction, but the source need underlying addictive behaviors which try to substitute something else for a human bond.
Relevant TED Talk Video: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong.
When you let yourself go for the thing that feels like it would be the most emotionally fulfilling – such as external validation through writing essays – then you learn first-hand what needs this actually fulfills. Maybe it doesn’t “fill you up” in the ways you hoped, but perhaps you gained something else valuable instead. More importantly, now you won’t sit around thinking about “one day” when you “finally start that blog” because you’ll have actually done it.
At an esoteric level, the teaching that we can find everything within is based on a cosmic multi-dimensional truth: each of us is a fractal of the universe. We don’t just contain the multitudes that Whitman professed – we contain everything. However, this truth is often used to do something called “spiritual bypassing” – where we use a universal truth to ignore or dismiss a subjective truth. The thing is, the subjective truth in question – of our human social needs – isn’t just subjective to the individual, but to our entire species. We incarnated as humans to have a human experience – not to pretend to have transcended it.
There are infinite ways to cope with feeling rejected, alienated, or otherwise disconnected from the social web of humanity. One of those ways of coping is through transcendental disidentification. This strategy usually begins through dissociating from your body – usually to escape painful situations which you can not bodily remove yourself from. Learning to find an inner quiet through a troubled childhood can develop into a career as a spiritual teacher as an adult.
While meditation, astral travel, and the practice of disidentification are all powerful tools, these are still almost exclusively sought – unwittingly – as coping strategies. Humans who were blessed with a loving family and community from infancy (and thus have a secure attachment style) rarely go seeking spiritual truths. When healthy, reliable attachments are available, why would you need to learn to practice nonattachment?* Unless you were suffering, why would you need to seek religion or spirituality to ease your suffering?
(*This is a bit of wordplay. The eastern concept of nonattachment has to do with practicing good deeds without attachments to specific outcomes. However, spiritual practices like this are nonetheless a safehouse which we flock to when our social needs are going woefully unmet.)
Spiritual awakenings, like the realization that you are love – as well as consciousness and source energy itself – are profound and real. However, spreading these divine epiphanies to others often isn’t the boon that you’d hope for it to be. Even if you came to your own sense of wholeness through a path of meditation and the realization that you’re “one with the universe” and thus never alone, it doesn’t mean that this path will bring genuine healing to others. In fact, I’ve watched it do the opposite – both secondhand and firsthand. Why is that?
When you’re coming from a place of feeling connected, secure, and whole, and you’re speaking to someone who is feeling disconnected, insecure, and broken, your teachings about “finding everything within” are invalidating. You’re bulldozing their suffering and asking them to do the same. If you’re honest with yourself, are you really doing that with their best interests at heart – or your own? Is it that you actually want what’s best for them, or is it that you’d like to pat yourself on the back for having rescued them without having to empathize with their reality?
Teaching an isolated individual to “go within” to ease their suffering lets you off the hook for empathizing with them – joining them in their pain. But empathy is the cornerstone of having a kind, compassionate society. To illustrate how harmful it is to utilize objective truths in a subjective human experience, try this comparison on for size: Telling someone that they (1) simply need to practice nonattachment to eliminate their suffering is similar to (2) excusing murder since, after all, the objective universal truth is that “right or wrong” don’t exist.
Leaning into empathy is one of the most direct ways we can provide healing for others. Empathy provides the other person with mirroring, and offers them the lifeline of connection required for them to become coregulated by your emotional state. Coregulation isn’t just for children, it’s for our entire social experience as a human.
Helping another human usually doesn’t require a therapy license or some profound spiritual teaching: it mostly requires having the bravery to empathize with where they are coming from, to engage with them curiously, to explore how they feel and why, and to validate and reflect it back to them. At the core of so much suffering is isolation. By simply seeing another person, you are taking the burden of aloneness off their back. Even if you can’t offer sage advice, you’re helping them.
Practical Ways to Help – Even When You Can’t Empathize
You are not obligated to empathize with every human who crosses your path. You may have plenty of good reasons not to. Perhaps you’re exhausted, depleted, or feel uncomfortable with certain people. Perhaps you’re finally in a good mood after a long depression and you need this reprieve of simple joy. You have a right to your boundaries, and it’s okay to enforce them.
When someone comes to you seeking empathy and you’re not willing to give it to them right now, it’s okay to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t be there for you right now. I hope you can find what you’re looking for from someone else.” This may feel inadequate, and you may be tempted to add some sage advice about inner-resourcefulness, but sometimes simply redirecting someone to seek support elsewhere is a greater gift.
Naming the fact that you don’t feel like you can empathize right now can cut through muddy social waters, clarifying social dynamics which can feel excruciating for someone seeking help. When you offer advice without naming your reluctance to empathize, your suggestions can feel like confusing attacks. The supplicant may wonder: Why are they pretending to care about my wellbeing when they obviously don’t?
I ask you to be brave enough to say: “I recognize that you need empathy right now, but I’m not able to do that for you at this time. It’s no substitute for deeper connection, I know, but if you want some practical tips, that’s what I feel capable of offering you right now.”
If they say that they, indeed, would like some practical tips, then you can suggest a shower, a healthy meal, a long walk in fresh air, writing in their journal, and/or a comforting cup of hot tea. If it is within your power and preferences, you can offer them a hug. You can suggest parts work or other forms of consciousness alchemy. Somewhere in your advice-giving, I also encourage you to encourage them to seek other social support. When we start acknowledging social needs in our every-day communications, it validates the longing that every one of us experiences.
If you are open to diving deep with someone into their experience – to empathize, connect, and attune to another person’s reality – then here are some practical tips for how to engage with someone who is coming to you with their pain:
First, be curious. Listen and ask questions. Inquire about anything that is unclear, but try to do this without interrupting if possible.
Second, validate. Offer statements like, “That makes sense,” or, “I see why you concluded that,” or, “You have every right to feel that way.” Validate in ways that feel natural to you.
Third, explore. If they’re open to it – and ready – offer to explore their ideas with them, offering your own related experiences, ideas, and insights. To find out if someone is ready for this, you might ask, “Would it feel good for me to share some of my ideas about this, or do you just want a listening ear for now?” This phase is sometimes best broken into two stages – first a personal approach of relating through individual stories, and then second, an integrative exploration of how your narratives and theirs paint various concepts, and how these are different as well as similar.
Fourth, advise. This step is entirely optional, but if it feels natural and good to both of you, things may naturally progress to practical advice. Again, it is wise to ask first: “I have some advice which I think might help you. Is that something you’re interested in right now? Because I’m also just happy to be here with you.”
Teach a Man to Fish . . . Or Not
There is a saying that goes, “Feed a man a fish and you feed him today, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” This paints a false dichotomy that there are only two ways to help a human: do it for them, or teach them to do it for themselves. You can also fish alongside them. You can also ask if fishing is actually the best practice for them given their life circumstances.
For example, when westerners tried to help various impoverished African societies, they began with the equivalent of “giving fish,” and then they attempted to upgrade to “teaching fishing” by setting up western-style farms. These farms didn’t work for the climate or the society, and largely failed. Western interventions didn’t start making a lasting difference until we became curious. We needed to ask a lot of questions. What works for the specific climate in question – and what wisdom about that climate can be gained from the peoples who live there? What works for this specific culture – according to the people who actually are part of that culture? And what would be empowering for this specific individual who I am working with?
Two Kinds of Bravery
I’m not advocating for the removal of narratives which demonstrate how we can find things that we need within ourselves. On the contrary, these are an important part of many people’s healing path – including my own. But I don’t feel that my growth peaked when, during a “fever awakening” in my late twenties I experienced total disidentification, connected with universal energies, was able to channel the subjective experiences of everyone around me, and experienced no loneliness. I feel my personal peak was embracing my developmentally delayed aspects of self and going inside the part of myself that most starved for human care because it had been sidelined when my relational needs were most intense – as an infant.
Related essay: Developmental Trauma
Connecting with my “infant self” – over many years – enabled this part of me to begin to grow. It allowed me to begin building internal resources within the most traumatized and infantile part of myself. Prior to that kind of healing, I’d been working on myself in the ways I was empowered to by myself. I’d read The Mastery of Love and The Four Agreements. I’d practiced positive focus and affirmations. I’d studied self-love and self-healing. All this self work was building a strong, spiritual aspect of myself which was adept at meditation and holding space for others. This adept priestess-self could muster up words of wisdom, impress others, and hold a vibration so detached – so “pure” – that mosquitoes no longer bit me even after landing upon me. Yet these abilities and strengths were done outside of my core self – leaving my most personal and authentic truths to collect dust.
It takes bravery to go to seek what you need within yourself. It takes much more bravery to enter the vulnerable reality of dependence and ask for what you need from others. Both kinds of bravery can be powerfully transformative – whether you’re more anxiously attached or avoidantly so.
Learning to dance between autonomous explorations and connecting communications is something we can all practice. Those who are anxious or codependent aren’t exempt from needing to practice relational skills, and those who are avoidant or lean towards narcissism are not exempt from needing to practice solitary introspection. Regardless of the trauma you’ve experienced and the gems of wisdom you’ve extracted from your life’s struggle, we’re all still in a collective process of learning the autonomy-connection tango.
I’d like for us to do our part to make it safer for people to ask for their needs to be met. Let’s make this a kinder world – one where people don’t feel they are risking ridicule or rejection when they ask for the healing experiences their core self most desperately craves.
Radical Dependence
Ultimately we’re built to thrive through relationships. After all, all those self-help gurus are only thriving due to the prestige, money, connection, and sense of purpose that their social contribution is gaining them. We’re radically dependent creatures, so let’s embrace it.
— Raederle Phoenix
Consciousness Alchemist
