The Quiet Rise of Introverts

by Brenda Knowles

  An interdependent person has the ability to share him or herself meaningfully and has access to the vast resources of others. Each person is maximized in their potential to care for themselves, but maximized even further by the addition of what the other person has to offer.

  Dr. Jonice Webb, psychologist and author of Running on Empty, defines mutual interdependence as when both parties in a relationship are capable of a healthy level of independence and self-reliance, but each person relies on the other for some things at sometimes. Each person is maximized in their potential to care for themselves, but maximized even further by the addition of what the other person has to offer.

  Out in the world, we discover how interdependent we are. It is necessary to advocate for ourselves and rely on others’ contributions to our well-being. We take responsibility for our actions and expect accountability and respect from others. Our friends give us warm companionship and trust but we have to earn it by being responsive and consistent with them. Our employers pay us in exchange for our skills and effort. Romantic relationships offer love, growth, and a safe place to be ourselves but those gifts are the by-product of effort, patience and understanding.

  Most of us flourish when we feel supported. The sum is far greater than its parts in mature interdependence.

  Practice Four: Getting Past Independence Principles of Love and Relationship

  “We might think that knowing ourselves is a very ego-centered thing, but by beginning to look so clearly and so honestly at ourselves—at our emotions, at our thoughts, at who we really are—we begin to dissolve the walls that separate us from others.” —Pema Chodron, To Know Yourself is

  to Forget Yourself

  One spring, I focused on working on the outside of my house. There were maintenance issues inside as well, but the big projects happened outside. I had the deck restained. I had the shake repainted, and cleaned up the landscaping. The outside work ran parallel to my then new views on living and loving. I began to see that to have healthy self-esteem, the outside world had to be cared for as much as the inner.

  I’d spent the previous few years working on accepting myself and justifying solitude. I thought I was bolstering my self-esteem by gaining self-awareness and validating my sensitive nature. I gained understanding and knowledge, but my self-esteem didn’t fully rise until I applied that understanding to relationships and meaningful work—both entities outside of my heavily analyzed and prized, inner realm.

  INTROVERT FEELS COMPETENT IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD

  Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden (in 1969) defined self-esteem as “the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness.” As a sensitive introvert, it takes courage to push myself into the external world, but when I do, I feel truly alive and fulfilled. Dealing with the outside world is a basic challenge of life for the deeply introspective.

  Our inner world feels so safe and the outer world bombards us with stimuli and emotional energy. I spend a good portion of my coaching time helping clients gain personal power to manage energy and the two worlds—inner and outer.

  NURTURING RELATIONSHIPS HELP WITH CONFIDENCE

  As relationship coach Bruce Muzik says in his post, “Fuck Self Love”, we build lasting self-esteem by cultivating nurturing relationships with supportive people. The truth in this has become clear to me over the years. My self-worth plummeted when I was not in a nurturing relationship.

  For a while, I only had a few people who offered supportive and nurturing companionships. That was when I went deeply internal and studied myself. I don’t think this was a bad move—I learned so much—but in the end, it left things unbalanced. I focused intently on my own feelings without applying them to anything. Even when I started writing, the self-expression was heavenly but still missing that fortifying real interaction with the environment and people.

  I needed a more hands on way to contribute to the community.

  Once I reached out with coaching, I not only felt validated, I felt more confident. I genuinely felt I added value to the world and was worthy of love and happiness. The act of using my skills made me feel competent and purposeful. By building secure and nonjudgmental relationships with my clients, I help them feel confident and competent as well—a win/win.

  Dr. Elaine Aron, author of the Highly Sensitive Person series, mentioned a study she and her husband, Dr. Arthur Aron and their colleagues conducted with ninety-six individuals found in the top and bottom quartiles of the Sensory Processing Sensitivity Scale. In the study, the subjects rated their arousal level when viewing emotionally evocative and neutral pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System.

  High SPS (sensory processing sensitivity) individuals rated pictures eliciting emotion, especially positive emotion, as significantly more attractive (positively valanced) and tended to respond faster to the positive pictures; also, high SPS individuals who had reported having high-quality parenting reported greater arousal in response to positive pictures.

  Overall, results suggest that high SPS individuals respond more strongly to emotional stimuli—especially positive stimuli—without being more aroused unless they had especially high-quality parenting, in which case they were more positively aroused.

  “This is the second result to show that we respond more to positive than negative stimuli, helping to explain our ‘differential susceptibility‘—that we do worse in poor environments, true, but better than others in good ones, apparently because we pick up on and process more of the positive experiences in our life.” —Dr. Elaine Aron

  No matter how much I love myself through self-awareness, self-care, and self-soothing, I am still going to crave connection. There’s a draw toward emotions and humanity. We aren’t meant to be in isolation. Even people especially sensitive to stimuli (many introverts) need and desire interaction to grow and thrive.

  Introverts and extroverts consciously (and subconsciously) absorb feedback from people in our environment. This affects our confidence. It makes sense that we’d want positive people in our environment to foster our growth. Of course, this needs to be a two-way street. We need to offer support and responsiveness as well.

  I’m not so idealistic (but I’m pretty idealistic) to believe we can only have positive feedback in our world. We need constructive feedback too. Those into nurturing (love + care + help) give criticism with diplomacy and actionable steps.

  HARD TO SAY WE NEED SOMEONE

  I’ve written a lot about loving yourself first before you can love another. I’ve encouraged being your own amazing boyfriend and love affairs with solitude. I’ve been embarrassed to say I wanted or needed someone. I still have attachments to those ideas but more and more I see the power of growing through relationships.

  As a staunch advocate for solitude, autonomy, making yourself happy, and the right to be gloriously content as a single person, it was difficult for me to consider putting a romantic relationship first, before my needs and ideals.

  After my divorce, I was determined not to settle for anything less than pure magic when it came to my next relationship. I wanted the heady, perfect, romantic, sexy, intelligent, steadfast lover who could keep me on cloud nine mentally, spiritually, and physically. Of course, that did not work.

  One day I caught Dr. Stan Tatkin, Doctor of Psychology and couples therapist, on Jayson Gaddis’ Smart Couple Podcast. His main message? Put your relationship first. Partners must depend on each other. They are in each other’s care. For a secure relationship, the couple team comes first before children, job, performance, appearance, friends, pets, everything and everyone. Your job is to comfort and soothe your partner. You need to know everything about them to understand/alleviate their distress and foster their growth. Their job is to do the same for you. No matter what, you are a team and together you are better than you could be on your own.

  After several short unsuccessful rela
tionships and one long-term (but ultimately ended) relationship, I decided perhaps I had been wrong in my approach. I had been, as Dr. Tatkin says, pro-self instead of pro-relationship. I had expectations for my partner and spent a lot of time making sure my needs were spelled out and met instead of focusing on creating a secure relationship. My pro-self-behavior involved pointing out where my partner fell short. Pro-relationship behavior would have worked to gain understanding about his and my behavior.

  My battle cry to be magnificently independent and solitude-seeking was based on my fear of being dependent on someone (and being used or let down) and my introverted and creative nature. I wanted love, but no one had soothed me or put me first in a long time. And honestly, I had not done that for anyone else in a long time either.

  Dr. Tatkin’s words, and scientific data to back them, made it OK to rely on someone. I did not have to be tough and self-reliant all the time. My attitude about dependency within a relationship shifted.

  I began to strive for interdependence, that lovely existence where individual integrity ebbs and flows with dependency.

  HOW TO KNOW IF WE ARE DEVELOPING AS HUMANS

  I consider personal development, particularly for an intuitive introvert, the transformation from a superficially focused being -> to one willing to explore their complete inner world -> to one interested in reaching out and creating nurturing and supportive relationships. In the end, internal and external worlds unite and form a mature being who meets their own needs and those of others.

  As introverts, it’s oh so easy to retreat into our shells. We will always need solitude and downtime, but the real growth and power comes from sticking our necks out and improving our connection with the outside world.

  Making improvements on the exterior of my home changed my focus and gave me a different kind of satisfaction, one not based on my inner world but one shared with those around me.

  ARE WE SEPARATE OR RELATIONAL BEINGS?

  Hungarian physician and psychoanalyst, Dr. Margaret Mahler’s separation-individuation theory (not to be confused with Carl Jung’s individuation process) stipulates that to grow—beginning in infancy—we have to move further and further away from others. The mature person does not need others. They are a self-contained unit. In fact, the separate-self model has us intrinsically motivated to create firm boundaries between others and us. It states our nature is to gain power over others and compete for limited resources. Sounds like life in the meritocracy, doesn’t it?

  Dr. Amy Banks, psychiatrist and author of Wired to Connect, suggests that mutuality or interdependent connecting (the relational cultural theory) is the more natural human inclination. She argues our brains and nervous systems are designed to move us toward more relational complexity. Studies using fMRI show the same part of our brain that lights up when we feel physical pain reacts when we feel social exclusion. Healthy social inclusion tells our brain to stop the stress response.

  Within the relational cultural theory people come together, experience each other and then move away in order to absorb what was learned. There is flexibility and an ebb and flow to our mutuality. It allows us to see ourselves and the other person more deeply. It enhances our personal growth by strengthening positive neuropathways and processes through repetition.

  In a growth-fostering relationship, we are not denigrated or silenced. We don’t have to put our guard up. We are free to develop clarity, boost our self-worth, become more productive, and move toward other fulfilling relationships.

  In fact, in patient/therapist relationships where relational cultural theory is practiced, the therapist does not remain reserved or withhold personal experiences, thoughts and evolution. The patient and therapist work together and form a bond.

  ARE WE DISTRAUGHT BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH BOUNDARIES AND INDEPENDENCE OR BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH CONNECTIONS WITH OTHERS?

  According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders affect 18% or 40 million people of the US adult population. Of those 40 million people, almost 7 million of them suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, 15 million suffer from social anxiety disorder, 14.8 million suffer from major depressive disorder, and 7.7 million are affected by posttraumatic stress disorder.

  How many of those who suffer from anxiety or depression are introverts? That is not known exactly, but a study done by members of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 found suicidal affective disorder patients were significantly more introverted than non-suicidal affective disorder patients.3 Other studies show isolation as both a cause and effect of depression. With our sensitive nervous systems, society’s preference for extroversion and our penchant for alone time, it is a fair assumption we make up a good percentage of those suffering.

  After learning of the separation-individuation theory and the relational cultural theory (which has growth and healing occur through human connections), I wondered if anxious and depressed people—many of them introverts—are distraught because they do not have enough independence and personal boundaries or if they are distraught because they do not feel connected to others.

  Dr. Banks and many studies point to a sense of belonging and companionship as antidotes to stress and potions for positive well-being.

  A large and long-term study started in the 1940s and done at Johns Hopkins involved 1,100 male medical students (all healthy at the start of the study). They were asked how close they felt to their parents. They were tracked down fifty years later. Those who had developed cancer since the start of the study, were less likely to have close relationships with their parents than those who did not have cancer. The correlation, not necessarily the scientific causation, demonstrates the importance of positive relationships to our health. Interestingly, the lack of a close relationship between a male student and his father was the strongest predictor of cancer. These findings were gathered after eliminating known cancer risk factors.4

  Another particularly intriguing study done at Yale University, looked at cardio angiographs of 119 men and forty women. Cardioangiographs tell whether our coronary arteries are blocked and if so, to what extent. The patients who reported more “feelings of being loved” had far fewer blockages than those who did not. Interestingly, the patients who felt loved had even fewer blockages than the patients who reported having busy social circles but didn’t feel particularly nurtured or supported, thus giving credence to the idea that positive nurturing relationships are more powerful than superficial relationships. It should be noted that the angiography study took into consideration genetic disposition for heart disease and any known environmental risk factors.5

  Put this together with the study mentioned in Practice Three about children who lost their mother at an early age showing warm relationships are vital to our self-esteem and self-discipline, and we have an excellent argument for the necessity of good caring relationships.

  Dr. Tatkin says from a psychobiological perspective, most people need to feel closeness and ongoing connection with another human being. We need other people. We can’t do it ourselves. Relationships with others reduce our stress and enrich our lives. Another person can understand us, amplify our enthusiasm and joy, provide guidance, make us more productive, help when we are in trouble, motivate us to be more than we are on our own, touch our souls, and, as we will see in Practice Five, heal past wounds.

  COUNTER-DEPENDENCE

  We know complete dependence on others to help us physically, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually is at the far-left end of the maturity continuum. It leaves the locus of control in other people’s hands. We all start out this way as children, but as we grow and mature we move to independence.

  The practice for this chapter is to get beyond independence and embrace relationships or interdependence. Now, independence is more mature than dependence because it means we are not completely influenced and reliant on others. We
make our own decisions, take care of ourselves physically, are emotionally inner directed and find self-worth from within.

  Many of you may have heard the term codependent. Codependency has its roots in the “Alcoholics Anonymous” program. Codependency is a type of dysfunctional helping relationship where one person supports or enables another person’s drug addiction, alcoholism, gambling addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or underachievement. The codependent relationship requires the participants to rely on each other’s approval for their sense of identity. It sounds a lot like dependency but it is two-way and involves the dysfunctional element that perpetuates addiction, poor mental health or underachievement.

  The majority of you have probably not heard the term counter-dependence. Mental health professionals mostly use it. Counter-dependent people avoid asking for help, prefer to be completely self-reliant and have a fear of dependency. They will do whatever it takes to avoid needing someone.

  What causes counter-dependence? Usually, a message we receive early on from our parents that says, “You’re on your own. Learn to be fiercely independent.” Sometimes a parent is absent as is the case with a death, deployment, or divorce. Sometimes the parent is there but not really there, such as when parents have issues with chemical dependency and depression or a parent is a workaholic. Sometimes the parent is just overly permissive, not willing to establish and enforce rules, and leaves the child to his own devices. In any case, a sense of the importance of being self-reliant develops. That aversion to dependency gets carried into adulthood and applied to any relationships the individual aspires to create. Unfortunately, healthy long-term relationships require independence and the ability to rely on or trust someone else.