Snowballs

I am reading Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope by Johann Hart, not because I am depressed but because I am fascinated by the current brain research behind depression and anxiety (they are nearly the same as far as the brain is concerned.) It is fascinating. Probably one of the most interesting brain books I have read in a while. 

Setting aside the incredibly bizarre and infuriating section on SSRI's and how pharmaceutical companies bring drugs to market (which personally, I think every single person should read), I want to focus instead on my favorite topics of felt safety and connection. 

"In just a decade ... [between 1984 and 1994] ... across the Western world, we stopped banding together at a massive rate, and found ourselves shut away in our own homes instead.

We dropped out of community and turned inward, Robert [Putnam, author of Bowling Alone] explained when I [the author] spoke with him. These trends have been happening since the 1930's, but they hugely accelerated during my [the author's] lifetime.

What this means is that people's sense that they live in community, or even have friends they can count on, has been plummeting. For example, social scientists have been asking a cross-section of US citizens a simple question for years: 'How many confidants do you have?' They wanted to know how many people you could turn to in a crisis, or when something really good happened to you. when they started doing the study several decades ago, the average number of close friends an American had was three. by 2004, the most common answer was none.

It's worth pausing on that: there are now more Americans who have no close friends than any other options." (p. 96)

To continue...

"Many years into his [John Cacioppo, a neuroscience researcher] experiments and research, John discovered a cruel twist in this story.

When he put lonely people into brain-scanning machines, he noticed something. They would spot potential threats within 150 milliseconds, while it took socially connected people twice as long, 300 milliseconds, to notice the same threat. What was happening?

Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this the 'snowball' effect as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.

Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed -- to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place.

The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgement, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place." (p. 99)

Does this hit you as hard as it hit me when I read it? Here is another piece to the puzzle of children who have been traumatized. Lacking connection has made them fearful of connection, with increasing behaviors which makes them harder to be around. The author wasn't writing this to adoptive parents, but I think we need to take seriously what he has to say. Once again, it is the parent who needs to figure out how they are going to connect to their hurt and anxious child. It is the connection and the feeling of safety which break the avalanche of increasing disconnection. 

These dual needs: Connection and felt safety are everywhere in the brain literature. It is how we need to relate to our children to help them heal, It is how we are to relate to other family members. It is how we are to relate to the broader world. I hope we as a society are not so hurt by continued disconnection that we cannot rise above the idea that strangers are dangerous. It is only by being open and flexible and willing to engage in dialogue and offer connection that our society can pull back from the abyss of perpetual disregulation. I have lived with children for whom this level of fear was present... that connection was to be avoided at all costs because it was too terrifying. It is no way to live. It constricts your world to a very small circle of perpetual fear. We cannot let voices who seek to take advantage of that fear to stoke it further in order to gain power. What we can do is be the brave ones. To reach out and offer community and peace to anyone and everyone; to stop seeing other human beings as the enemy. 

I can tell you, it is tough to be the one to reach out with tentative connection towards someone who is likely to spurn that offer. But someone needs to be the bigger person, to offer more love, more reassurance, more safety, and less judgement. Imagine if we could turn the snowball effect to our advantage... to create a world that is so overcome by love and grace that those who receive that love cannot but help to offer that same love and grace to someone else.