I have been working as a communication trainer for 20 year, yet I still find communication as damn difficult. When things get down to the personal issues, intimate relationships and emotional realms, it seems to be so difficult to communicate, to truly reach an understanding, to get my messages across and to in fact get what other people are trying to communicate to me. Even if everybody involved is really trying very hard.
And I have been practising, wholeheartedly, the nonviolent communication which seems to me as the ultimate way to communicate and a clear bridge that leads from one shore to another. Yet, often, much too often, I feel completely hopeless, not having any ideas what to do, how to bridge the gap, how to communicate, how to reach the other person (or let the other person reach me). No bridges anywhere, just gaps and canyons. No answers, only piles of questions. An ultimate insurmountable mountain.
Gets me thinking about our human individual existential isolation. As Yalom puts it, existential isolation refers to an unbridgeable gulf between ourselves and any other being, or even a fundamental separation between ourselves and the world. We like to think we are cross-connected and not really alone, however sooner or later we will need to enter that last tunnel and experience, as Yalom beautifully puts it, the most lonely human experience – death. And face our isolation, I guess.
I know we do not like this idea of isolation and tend to seek shelter under concepts of universal connectedness, divine love, everything being one, and so forth. However, on the very experiential level here and now, aren’t we ultimately captured inside our own limited and isolated little individual beingness?
I guess no communication and no relationship can ever eliminate this fundamental isolation. Yet, it seems to me we are trying exactly this. To somehow cure our pain – or at least the heaviness of realisation – of being isolated, to run away from it, to make it disappear, to pretend it is not here. For as long as we can. Find our soul mates, deeeeeeep relationships, spiritual family… Isn’t it simply out of not being able to bear with the isolation?
At least this is what I can observe within myself. Putting so much effort in trying to be completely, properly, ultimately understood. Because I will than feel connected and not that isolated. Just how neurotic is that? I must be driving people mad by trying to accomplish perfect communication with them.
I guess this blog is one aspect of this neuroticism as well.
“I guess I am driving people mad by trying to accomplish perfect communication with them.”
When I read this sentence I realised the trap I’m probably falling into right now.
For a long time I wanted to be so adaptable and open to other people’s opinions, beliefs etc that I took them in immediately, until I realised that by doing this I was neither respecting myself nore other people. I was not listening to what I was thinking and feeling, and I was taking in what I thought they felt and meant, interpreting it with my filters, rather than exploring what they really meant and giving room for what they really felt. After I became aware of this I started a path towards more authenticity, with the aim to let more room for expression of my self, my thoughts, beliefs and feelings, as well as those of others, and trying to bridge them to bridge us. And I’ve been wondering those days if i was not falling into the other extreme of focusing so much on the quality of the relation that the relation was suffering from it because I was loosing part of the spontaneity and craziness and magic. So how can I find a balance, is it possible, should I, I don’t know.
Comment by Anne-Claire C — March 9, 2008 @ 4:30 pm
I’m also wondering if the isolation is really between ourselves and the others, or between what we are projecting and what we are within ourselves. Being in the communication field too (also for less time and less intensively), I wonder if all of this is to help us communicate better with the others, or if it’s not actually to help us connect better with ourselves. I do believe (or want to believe in the great connectedness, but at the same time I do feel so isolated, because of my body, the limits of language, and so many things.
if communication and relationships cannot eliminate isolation, an idea that I tend to agree with, then I don’t see any alternative but to strive to accept the isolation as part of the way we are, as part of the interaction.
It’s maybe not a question of either rejecting the isolation and striving for relationship, or accepting it and remaining isolated. There might be another option to combine both? Would leave me with more hope to keep walking.
Comment by Anne-Claire C — March 9, 2008 @ 4:57 pm
Hey Anne-Claire, yes, I guess this is the balance I am wandering about. To what extent is it possible to, throught communication, really get another person and, since I believe it is not really possible, to what extent than is it sensible to persist with communication at all. And from which point on is just simply wiser to let things be as they are, accept the fact that I can never really be 100% understood via communication (and vice versa) and therefore rather focus on my own being here and now, present, and just observing what I can observe… And perhaps just open up to another more fully, not just through narrow communication channels… I find it hard to describe it but somehow I feel rather clearly this distinction.
And your second point: it sounds brilliant really, at least to me it truly rings the bell. You know, accepting the isolation as a part of the interaction. It is like islands on the photo (taken this September from the mountain above the Montenegro coast, by the way), they can not move any nearer to each other and thus cease being isolated, yet perhaps they can open up and realize they are interacting already, through the air, sea, bottom of the sea, or, in other hand the thing that is separating them and thus isolating them is, at the same time not only defining them, but also connecting them.
I do not want to become to abstract, but I do sense that with letting go of the idea about the omnipotence of the communication and with the acceptance of our existential isolation we actually open up to a much deeper and fuller reality. Hard to explain with word, but somewhere within the realms of my beingness this is what I sense to be “true”.
Comment by Robert — March 11, 2008 @ 11:04 pm
After I read your post the other day and responded, I kept thinking about it, thinking that too much communication might kill the relation. The image that came to mind was a graph, showing the correlation between the tools of communication (the effort to make it work, the analysis of my attitude and that of the others etc.) and the quality of the interaction, of the relation. And I was thinking about a bell curve. If you have no attention to the communication, the quality of the relation might be quite poor, with some attention and good tools it improves, however if you try tom much to apply techniques and concentrate too much on wanting a good communication etc., then the quality of the relation drops again. (I don’t know if this description is clear enough, it’s pity I can’t insert a drawing here.)
I think more and more that it’s not so much about the communication with the other, the words that are used or not, the gestures etc., but about the intention that’s behind the relation, the quality of empathy and of presence to oneself, to the other and to what’s going on there.
I very much like how you took the idea of isolation being part of the interaction and applied it to the islands on the photo. You captured exactly what I was feeling. It’s not about forcing the two islands to interact with each other, but acknowledging how they actually do already, the way you described it. If I exist fully myself and develop the awareness (consciousnes? Never know the difference between the two words) of myself and of all that’s around me, and if you do the same, then the true connection appears by itself. And it feels more powerful that if we try to force the connection.
When we try to improve the communication, we actually try to improve the relationship, the connection. I do want the latter, however communication might just not be the best way of achieving it after all. I’m starting to do more photography, and with it it’s my look on things that changes, and many things start to “appear” just because I take the time to observe, to acknowledge they are here. And with people it’s a bit the same, if I stop interacting just with my brain but use my five senses, and even the 6th one to be fully here, sense what’s going on in myself, in the other one and around us, and giving the change for this to exist and express itself fully, then I’m amazed by how the relationship is much easier.
The only thing is that it’s a bit hard to have that quality of presence because that’s not the way i grew up and the world goes. At least I’m walking this path… when I don’t go astray
Comment by Anne-Claire C — March 13, 2008 @ 2:01 pm
Hey Anne-Claire, I really like your notion that it the intention behind the communication that matters. Or perhaps the intention behing it all. I, of course, would not want to justify harmfull ways of communication this way (well, my intentions are good…), but I guess the question whether or not my sincere intention to connect with another is present is the issue that indeed makes a huge difference.
Along with facing and accepting all the existential truths (or at least issues) as part of the reality, relationships, communication; the isolation, the imperfectness, the ups and the downs…
Comment by Robert — March 14, 2008 @ 1:10 pm
Yeah, I´m recently quite fairly chagrined about communicating… A five year community project I was heavily involved in is now on the point of folding. It is amazing the layers of “illusion” dropping off my “communication persona”. After five years,I tell myself, “Peoples are STILL “violating me” with their interpretations, their guilt, their praise (at least I know some of what I did was appreciated at some level). Did I stick my head out of the trench with my Giraffe ears on, with so much courage, for so many years, for so little reward? Did those people really learn so little, after my marathon hours of struggling to create life-serving meetings that flowed with mutuality? Am I just a neurotic, narcassistic, ego-centric baffoon trying to make everyone love me, believing I can CHANGE people, and bend the world to my own petty ego-centric self-interest, for ******sake?”
So, I feel grateful for your post… makes me think, “are forget it, it was great at the time”. There were “successes” ….who or what am I to hang on to them and categorise it all… now? Life is for living going forward, for understanding looking back.
But, as understanding goes… something comes up in me so much recently is my very personal understanding and appreciation of Marshall Rosenberg. … a guy who inspires feelings of love in me like no other. He doesn´t present any doctrines, or beliefs that he is not obviously demonstrating himself… and NVC finally extinguishes itself in no words at all. “I use less and less words…” (MBR on one of his “live” CD´s). All that´s left of him is this big, beautiful man, (well actually he is quite short) with his resonant intonations, sitting there, as naked and as mysterious to his origins and the origins of what arises in him, as the day he was born.
The whole business, all the nick-nacks and clickerty clack of “communicating” turn out to have been an hilarious conceit.
Thanks Robert for creating the space to share my loves and my life with more than just myself.
Comment by Feltgiraffe — November 22, 2008 @ 11:41 am
Feltgiraffe – thanks for this. The first paragraph describes what also often goes on in my mind. And yes, Marshall inspires me too: http://robertkrzisnik.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/freedom-from-and-freedom-to/
Thanks for visiting, I am happy to read your comments.
Comment by Robert — November 24, 2008 @ 10:29 am