Community and Affirmation

Even in a community where people are engaging in mutual self-disclosure, mutual hospitality, active and unconditional love, and honesty, there are bound to be challenges. Any time more than one human being is in the same place at the same time, the potential for conflict exists. No matter how loving and honest you're trying to be, there will be times that anxiety wins.

I still have old, well-ingrained habits to defend myself when someone challenges what I say, rather than just accept that they're entitled to their own opinions. Intellectually, I'm all about peaceful disagreement, and in practice I can be in that space most of the time. But when my personal vows get triggered, I go into this zone where I believe I have to prove I'm right in order to be worthy -- I have to defend what I say, because if I'm wrong, I'll be unlovable and unacceptable.

You've got your own set of vows that you made at an early age, in times of high anxiety, when you decided subconsciously what you had to do in order to be safe, accepted, and loved. Everyone does. And when all of those vows bump up against each other, it causes some emotional friction. Healthy community develops appropriate ways of handling that friction, and those healthy practices become part of the community culture. We'll explore those practices in coming weeks.

There's one fifth essential ingredient that plays a part in the health of a meaningful, authentic community. In addition to mutual self-disclosure, mutual hospitality, active and unconditional love, and honesty, meaningful authentic community requires mutual affirmation and celebration. I'm not talking about throwing parties for people, although you could do that. Mutual affirmation or celebration is about acknowledging what's awesome about the people with whom you're in community. This has a few functions for community, and it also has a couple of pitfalls to avoid.

Sincere affirmation is rare. People are constantly being told how they need to improve, or what they need to do differently. Even when it isn't explicit, we compare ourselves to more outwardly attractive, successful, wealthy, happy people and easily focus on what's wrong with us. Few people hear often enough that they are powerful, capable, beautiful human beings. Cultivating a culture of sincere affirmation may seem like overkill, but people need others to accurately reflect their positive attributes back to them.

You may have heard the equation that you have to say six positive things to balance out one negative comment. This means that -- just by the way our brains process things -- if you hear six positive comments about yourself and one negative comment, you'll have a kind of break-even average opinion of who you are. And we hear negative things about ourselves all the time. Sometimes it's specifically about us, and sometimes we personalize negative comments about a whole group of people. If we're in a marginalized group -- immigrants, people of color, atheists, transgender folks, and plenty of others -- we hear a lot more negative commentary about ourselves than positive. That's one big reason meaningful, authentic community needs to practice mutual affirmation and celebration of one another. We need to hear an awful lot of affirmation before we even consider believing it might be true.

In order for people to be meaningfully engaged in community, they have to believe something positive about themselves. If people don't believe they have something of value to offer, they wind up not offering anything of themselves. If people don't believe they can make a meaningful contribution, they wind up not contributing anything. When people believe they have value, they can be more fully engaged in creating wholeness with other human beings. And it takes a lot of reassurance for some people to start believe something positive about themselves. We've become convinced somehow that saying too many positive things is coddling, or that people will become egomaniacs. It's a crappy reason not to say something affirming about a person.

Incidentally, this is why some people find it easier to believe in a supernatural source of love and acceptance. People often do a rotten job of praising one another. Many religions cultivate a perspective that human beings are worthless, weak, and unworthy, and that it takes the perfect benevolence of a superior being to actually love human beings. So, people try to believe that a being who never communicates with them directly and doesn't make itself known in any verifiable way, loves them more than any human being could, and accepts them even though they are thoroughly unacceptable.

All this is great PR for whatever god you credit with being able to love the unlovable, but it perpetuates the view that human beings are essentially unlovable, unacceptable, and unworthy. And it perpetuates the view that human beings are incapable of providing sufficient love, acceptance, and affirmation to one another. This is patently false, and it's a cruel lie to perpetuate about yourself and other people. You are both lovable and capable of love. You are both acceptable and capable of being accepting. You are both worthy and capable of affirming the worthiness of others. This view of humanity -- of yourself -- is essential to meaningful, authentic community.

The reason this view is essential is simple. When we believe lies about our own unworthiness or incapability, we are not our authentic selves. Authentic community can't be built from false selves, and false selves can't persist in authentic community. The way to authenticity isn't to shame people for presenting a false self, though. People have been through enough without someone trying to shame them into being authentic. Sometimes, people just need to see the other side of the coin, and they need to see it presented to them consistently and sincerely. We've been told how worthless or unlovable or unacceptable we are so much that many of us think it's true. We need to be told something different about ourselves so it seems safe to be vulnerable enough to be authentic with a community of equally flawed and beautiful, challenged and capable human beings.

Now, none of this is to say that we should overlook problematic behavior or that we should pretend people's weaknesses don't exist. We all have things we can work on, and we all have growth areas or opportunities for improvement. One of the reasons we appreciate meaningful, authentic community is that we can grow into greater wholeness as individuals -- which we wouldn't need to do if we were perfect. So, healthy community offers feedback that helps people address areas of growth. But it does so in a way that doesn't shame or condemn a person for having things to work on -- or just being imperfect. And some areas of imperfection don't require work -- they're just areas of imperfection.

Holding up a mirror to someone and lovingly showing them where their actions may not be in alignment with their guiding principles is tough. It's also a really important feature of meaningful, authentic community. We need people who are willing to hold us accountable to the things we say we are going to be or do. Accountability isn't me holding you accountable to what I want you to do. When I hold you accountable to your own vision of a best possible version of yourself, though, that has real value to you. It's a lot easier to hear that sort of feedback from someone who habitually offers sincere affirmation. We can be more vulnerable with people we trust to see the best in us. 

You may notice I mentioned sincere affirmation. We still have honesty as a core ingredient, and that honesty still needs to be a part of our affirmation of one another. Saying things that aren't true about a person isn't loving or helpful, even if those things sound positive. Telling a person they're a great musician when they sound like a cat caught in a blender is only going to lead to embarrassment and possibly unnecessary shame down the road. Telling people what's true about them -- over and over again until they believe you -- allows them to see who they are more clearly.

We don't actually see ourselves very clearly. For instance, I'm afraid of being seen as confrontational or abrasive, so if I say or write anything that could be construed as hostile or unkind, I'm super self-conscious about it. When people tell me how tactful I am, I have to check to see whether they're being sarcastic sometimes, because I'm hypersensitive to coming across as confrontational. Now that an awful lot of people have told me numerous times that I'm a tactful person, I'm learning to trust that I can say things hearably, even when I'm saying something challenging to someone. I've been at this for years, and it's taken years of people saying affirming things to get through all the other noise inside my own head -- most of which has been rattling around in there since I was a kid.

A community of people committed to offering honest affirmation of one another -- mutually celebrating each other -- can do a lot to create wholeness. People who aren't as worried about being lovable, acceptable, and worthy are better able to cast a vision of a best possible version of themselves. People who feel safe and acknowledged can live by their deepest values and guiding principles more easily. People can live more fully when mutual affirmation is the cultural habit of a community that also practices mutual self-disclosure, mutual hospitality, active and unconditional love, and honesty.

These five ingredients are not often found all together in communities. Keeping them all in balanced proportions takes intentional effort. Even having all five of these practices in place at all takes some intentional effort. If people are willing to allow these ingredients to define their relationships with one another in meaningful, authentic community, I'm confident that greater wholeness will be the outcome.

There will be challenges, though. While these five ingredients describe the consistent day-in and day-out intentional practices of a community, it's also important for the community to have a couple of pieces of infrastructure. One of these is clear boundaries within the community -- not defining who is an insider and who is an outsider, but defining safe and healthy behavior in the context of the community. Another is a clear shared purpose or vision. As you might imagine, these two topics will be next up on the docket.

Community and Self-Disclosure

We've said that if we want wholeness in our lives, we need meaningful, authentic connection with other human beings. One requirement for meaningful, authentic connection is mutual self-disclosure. We can't live fully in our relationships if we aren't able to reveal who we really are. When we hide our true feelings and needs, we can't reasonably expect other people to know us, to accept us, or to participate in satisfying relationship with us. The best we can hope for is that other people will know and accept the masks we wear. It's up to us to grow in our ability to show our authentic selves to others.

Self-disclosure is tough, though. We hide our true selves because it seems safer than letting people see who we really are. Somewhere along the way, we learned that we aren't acceptable as we are. We became ashamed of something about ourselves, or we became distrustful of others. Somehow, we decided that it was safer for us to hide who we really are and pretend to be someone else -- maybe someone who didn't have the same wounds and needs and wants that we have.

The problem is that we all have wounds and needs. No one gets through life without emotional wounds. Some people are more skillful at tending those wounds, but everyone has wounds. No one gets through life without needing something. Some people are more skillful at getting those needs met, but everyone has needs. When we wear masks that hide our wounds and our needs from others, we have very little chance of having those wounds healed or getting those needs met. We walk around thinking that we're fooling people into accepting or loving us, thinking that we are safely hidden behind a false self we've created, carrying our unhealed wounds and our unmet needs within us.

Of course, we still want to have those needs met, and we still feel pain from those wounds. If we aren't willing to be vulnerable and let other people see those wounds and needs, we try other ways to get what we want from people. We play emotional games in our relationships and in our communities. We try to manipulate people or bully people into doing what we want, while keeping ourselves from feeling vulnerable. Or maybe we try to make the masks we wear as appealing or entertaining as possible, so that people will give us the love and acceptance we want without us having to reveal our true selves. This gives us the illusion of having power -- keeping our real wants and needs secret while figuring out how to make other people give us what we want or need. How much simpler would it be to just tell people what we want or need?

When you think about it, though, people aren't actually accepting or loving us when we play these games or wear these masks. People are responding to our tactics or the false self we show them, but they aren't responding to our real selves. They can't. We keep our real selves hidden. So, we keep the illusion in place that our real selves are unacceptable or unlovable or shameful because we never give anyone the chance to see who we really are. We're too busy playing games. And before we beat ourselves up too much about that, it's worth acknowledging that we have really good reasons to hide who we really are and show up in masks.

No one wakes up one morning and just decides to hide who they really are from everyone around them. We learn what's acceptable and what isn't from other people's reactions -- usually our parents or other significant people in our lives when we're very young. We start evaluating ourselves based on other people's fears and judgments, and at a certain point we shift from being honest about who we are to being very concerned about who other people want us to be. Instead of learning about what we need in order to live fully, we create an illusion of ourselves to try to accommodate everyone else. Maybe we create multiple illusions of ourselves for different relationships.

Sometimes, we encounter communities that encourage us to be vulnerable and self-disclosing, and then those communities betray us. Some organizations want people to be self-disclosing so that shame can be used as a weapon to keep people loyal. Religious organizations are especially practiced at turning people's vulnerability against them, using fear and shame to reinforce beliefs about human weakness and depravity so that people will remain convinced that they need the religious institution. Perhaps other relationships come to mind in which vulnerability and self-disclosure proved to be detrimental. Often, this is because the self-disclosure was one-sided. The priest rarely confesses to the parishioner, for instance.

Our society is constructed around this practice of creating a false self -- an avatar of sorts. We rarely engage in relationships directly because we're convinced that it isn't safe. Instead, we engage in relationships through the filter of a public avatar we've created to keep ourselves safe while enticing or compelling others to give us what we want or need. One-sided self-disclosure is often risky because other people are still committed to playing emotional power games to get what they want from us, and our self-disclosure would seem to put us at a disadvantage in such games. So, there are two responses to this reality that will help us heal our wounds, get our needs met, and live more fully.

First, we can recognize that our self-disclosure removes us from the emotional game. Other people may still want us to engage by their rules of manipulation or persuasion, but our willingness to be vulnerable and honest about our wounds and our needs actually puts us in an entirely different arena. The best reason not to hide who we really are is because we aren't afraid or ashamed of who we really are, and getting rid of our fear and shame opens the pathway for us to commit our time and energy toward things that really matter rather than playing emotional power games.

Of course, dismantling our fears and shame are life-long practices, and we can't wait until we're over all of our fears about who we really are to set our masks aside. Instead, as we develop a willingness to show up authentically, to let people see our true selves, we have the opportunity to build more evidence that our fears and shame are unfounded. We also have to recognize that other people's reactions are usually based on their own fears and beliefs. It's helpful if we can find others who are willing to set aside their masks, too, so that our journey toward authenticity isn't a solo venture.

This brings us to the second response, which is meaningful, authentic community in which people practice mutual self-disclosure. If the agreement of the community is that people are expected to show up as their true selves and not project some idealized avatar, it becomes easier for everyone to set the masks aside. Ideally, mutual self-disclosure is part of a community's covenant with one another, or is in some way part of its stated identity. If this agreement is clearly stated and not just assumed, a community can hold one another accountable -- hopefully because they sincerely care about contributing to wholeness in one another's lives. So, "You seem like you're hiding something. Is there more you want to say?" becomes more of an invitation than an accusation or interrogation. And, "What do you really think?" is a question that can be taken at face value rather than a coded message that your acceptability is based on your willingness to agree with an authority figure or with the herd. Likewise, it becomes easier to say, "It seems like you're trying to persuade/bully/manipulate me a little bit here. What do you actually want or need from me?" Imagine a community that practiced communicating that honestly, directly, and respectfully with one another!

None of this means that all your problems will be solved if you are more self-disclosing. Showing up as your true self doesn't guarantee that your emotional wounds will be healed and all your needs will be met. It just increases your chances. People can't really know what you need from them unless you tell them. And hiding your emotional wounds and your needs from other people pretty much guarantees that they won't be effectively addressed. Pretending you don't have wounds or needs doesn't make them go away. Being willing to show up as your authentic self is a more reliable path toward being fully alive. Since this would constitute new behavior for a lot of us, practicing letting others see your true self in a community where other people are committed to the same level of authenticity and vulnerability is better than developing this new behavior all on your own.

Mutual self-disclosure in community leads to greater ability to be confidently authentic in other areas of your life, and it helps to prevent members of a community from engaging in manipulation, bullying, and enticing others while neglecting their actual wounds and needs. Meaningful, authentic community requires mutual self-disclosure. There are a few other necessary ingredients, as we'll continue to explore in the weeks ahead.