Can our community bridge the new divides of our times?

This story first appeared in print in the Winter 2020 issue of Revelstoke Mountaineer Magazine. Read the e-edition here:

 Emotional availability is the ability to connect with others in honest and open ways. Without hiding yourself or feeling the (unconscious or conscious) desire to control someone else’s perception of. It’s a practice of learning to be open and be honest. The depth in which we can be honest with others is a direct reflection of how honest we are with ourselves.

While we don’t want to share everything in our lives with everyone we can choose to engage in meaningful ways. Our emotionally availability impacts the depth of connection we experience with others. It also seems to impact our mental and physical health in either positive or negative ways.

When we understand who we are and what self-honesty looks like, it helps us navigate with integrity and allows us to choose consciously. For example, when we experience conflict in a relationship, when we’re not feeling heard, and if it becomes systemic in the relationship, we might eventually react without understanding why we’re so frustrated. When we understand that our need to be heard is not being met, we are more capable of choosing to communicate that problem, if that is not received, we can choose to leave the relationship. Honesty gives us options. It allows us to carve out clear boundaries and act accordingly to support ourselves.

To use science to help me explain: the frontal lobe is the most evolved part of our brain and where our personality develops. Within the frontal lobe, we carry out everyday tasks from our morning routines to learning new skills. It affects our speech, language, spontaneity, sexuality, impulse control, and social behaviour. Our ability to be kind and rational are carried out through this region of the brain, and it is also the region that can be the most affected by sustained stress.

Through neurophysiological research, it’s been found that the brain stem and the subcortical regions of the brain (the areas deep within the brain) help filter out information that is irrelevant and to prepare our minds for action. This is all happening without our awareness. Yale University School of Medicine

Neurobiologist Amy F.T Arnsten explains how stress signalling pathways can impair prefrontal cortex structure and function in a 2009 paper. The basic idea is that we are deeply unconscious in our own conditioning. We build patterns and habits of behaving and thinking unconsciously and without intention. Which means most of us spend our days creating things, experiences and relationships that are not necessarily what we want or what serves us.

Nervousness, agitation, fear, anger, and stress have the tendency to be destructive habits, but only if they become a daily lived experience in the body. These behaviours can interfere with healthy social functioning. High levels of these emotions impact the onset of clinical depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease; they have even been shown to increase the rate of cellular aging.

To be emotionally available you must feel safe and as though you belong. To be successful at this you have to be aware of any sustained agitation in the body, which can be difficult if you’ve lived with it for so long that it’s become normal. If we’ve experienced high levels of stress and trauma in our lives, I believe this also affects the way we connect to others.

We need people in our lives who will show us that we belong and can love us even when we’re struggling. Over time this will make us feel safe. Anyone that’s in a stress response feels distrust and consequently cannot open up physically or emotionally. They remain in an emotionally unavailable loop because that’s where they feel the safest.

Emotional unavailability looks different for everyone, and understanding how it looks for you is important. I play it out by I locking myself into my body. My stress response takes hold and I shut the world out. I don’t share when I’m going through difficult times, because I fear judgment, I hold my jaw tight and I look at the world with distrust. I create a fortress around me, I go into lock down. I have digestive and anxiety issues from years of this playing out in my body.

If we understand how our stress levels impact our ability to show up for ourselves and others we might take them more seriously. We frequently hear how stress negatively affects our physical health but we still have lots of it in our world. Living in a small mountain town like Revelstoke, we experience lots of gossip, because it’s a relatively small and intimate community. As we navigate pain and healing from the impacts of this pandemic, we get to choose how we want to be as a community. Lies spread much faster than truths; do we want a community that lifts people up or tears them down? Do we want to build relationships by experiencing people one on-one or do we want to create more gossip?

If we aren’t aware of the amount of stress (all kinds) we have in our body we will be dishonest with ourselves and thus unable to create fulfi lling relationships. Our stress will dictate the depth we’re able to listen and connect with others.

Stress is like an electric wire. Anything that triggers it sends currents of reactivity and unworthiness. If it promotes us to lash out by blaming, shaming and judging ultimately we are harming ourselves and others by creating more stress, drama and (possibly) trauma.

Why is being emotionally available something you should care about? Without it, we lack compassion for ourselves and others. We lack curiosity, we lose perspective and we enter into to a ‘cancel culture.’ We aren’t able to meet our deepest needs and we end up feeling like victims. It’s possible that our narcissism deepens, and we lack empathy. In this state, we will continue to create families, societies and countries that are divisive and unrelenting in our own opinions.