The 4 Season Solution: The Groundbreaking New Plan for Feeling Better, Living Well, and Powering Down Our Always-On Lives by Dallas Hartwig

Author:Dallas Hartwig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Four Forms of Disconnection

I’ve painted a grim picture of modern life and (dis)connection, ranging quite far in my discussion. Let me focus my commentary a bit by identifying four forms of disconnection that I’ve been touching on in one form or another. As I see it, no single form of disconnection outweighs any other, but taken together they prevent us from feeling rooted, happy, and at peace. It’s only when we understand how far off track we are that we can become unstuck from summer, and begin the process of reconnection.

Self

Following adolescence, most people move away from the comforts of home to explore, create, and establish roots elsewhere. They might move physically from their hometowns, or they might make a psychological break, or both. Whatever happens, they leave their own established sense of self behind to learn, grow, explore, and build.

Such behavior is both physically and psychologically healthy during the spring and summer phases of our lives, which for most people occurs during our twenties and thirties (something I explore in chapter 8). After a childhood phase in which we practice, prepare, and dream, we need to get out in the world and busy ourselves with actually doing and accomplishing our summertime projects and goals. And yet, all this action and adventure can become dangerous if we take it too far. We can lose contact with our core self, to the point where we become terrified of spending time alone and feel as if we’re inherently “not enough.” The longer we stay away from our home, our selves, the deeper we dig ourselves into a hole of disorientation and oblivion.

Disconnected from ourselves, many of us turn to mainstream culture for opportunities to reconnect. In recent years, as social media has influenced the way we share with and signal to one another, we’ve seen catchy content telling us to set boundaries around work, take our “me time,” and make room for self-care and self-love. But when we finally end up scheduling that much-needed massage or taking a weekend away, the peace of mind we’re hoping to attain escapes us. We walk away, wondering, yet again, what’s missing.

While I certainly agree it’s essential to nurture, love, and accept oneself, emphasizing bubble baths and massages, the setting of boundaries or “self-acceptance” alone isn’t enough. Without complementing such activities with close observation of our very real, often unpleasant qualities, we miss the opportunity to connect with our whole selves. If we encounter an experience that challenges our positive but incomplete understanding of ourselves (divorce, major injury or illness, job loss, infidelity, eating disorders, mental health conditions), we struggle to integrate it within our larger sense of self.11 We then fragment into two people: the person we reveal “out there” in the world, and the person we are in the shadows of our own home and minds. Such compartmentalization leaves us feeling unseen, unheard, and unaccepted by both ourselves and others. After all, if we don’t show anyone who we really are, others can’t know, accept, and embrace our real selves, either.

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