No One Is An Island

This article explores our interdependence on one another and society as it relates to theological concepts, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and modern-day social media connection.

Donne’s Bells

I have been thinking a lot about connection recently. Whenever I do, I always return to John Donne, an English pastor and poet who lived in the 17th century. In Meditation XVII, famous for the phrase "for whom the bell tolls", Donne highlights our human connection through our shared experience of death, represented by the bells that would ring out a requiem during a funeral service. For Donne, these bells united the human experience, reminding us of the certainty of mortality. It might be a bit macabre to discuss connection by beginning with death, but for Donne the ringing of the bells was an opportunity. “No man is an island” says Donne “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”[1] and therefore we each have a share in every death; every funeral bell is an opportunity to reflect and remember that we are connected.

Our great tool of connection today is not a shared funeral rite, but the Internet and social media. Over the Internet, we can communicate with those on the other side of the world. Social media allows us to share our sorrows and triumphs, our thoughts on everything from the weather to politics. Because of these powerful technological advances, it might be easier for us than Donne to understand how every human being is "a piece of the continent, a part of the main." We no longer need to wait for a bell to reflect on our connection. We have access to a public square through the screens in our pockets.

But there may be something lacking in all this connection, despite its many benefits. The problem comes if we over-depend on social media and the Internet for connection while neglecting our need for something deeper. We need more than likes and retweets, more than the mere passing attention of someone scrolling through a feed. We don't just need connection, we need attachment. This is where the work of Sue Johnson and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) can help.

Public Domain: retrieved from Pexels.com.

Emotionally Focused Therapy

EFT emphasizes the human need for attachment in relationships. Based on John Bowlby's pioneering work on parent-child relationships, EFT asserts that it isn’t just children who crave secure emotional bonds with those around them. Attachment might be described as the emotional need we all share to trust and rely on another for support and encouragement. These attachment needs are satisfied most obviously in romantic relationships, but EFT has found significant nonromantic relationships can also satisfy these needs. Furthermore, EFT provides a vocabulary for helping us understand what these attachment relations entail. A secure emotional connection, according to Sue Johnson one of the creators of EFT, is marked by accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement.[2] These three postures represent the necessary formula in any healthy attachment-level relationship. Accessibility is understood as the availability of an individual, that they are not just present but attentive. Responsiveness is the act of receiving the emotional baggage of another and responding in a positive, life-giving way. Likewise, engagement is the need for both individuals to have "skin in the game."

In providing us with these three postures, EFT highlights an important part of the human condition: it is not that we are simply connected, we are interdependent. We all have this deep-seated emotional need that must be filled by others. We are social beings in need of community. Seen in this way, Donne's meditation isn't just a beautiful piece of prose: we need real accessibility, real responsiveness and real engagement from one another. And so, in a world increasingly dominated by relationships mediated by screens, we might find ourselves connected but not securely attached.

Humans: Beings-for-Others

This need for community should not surprise the reader of Scripture. The Genesis account highlights this from the very beginning, where God declares it is not good for man to be alone. This “not good” statement tells us something about being made in the image of God: it tells us we are social beings, dependent on others to meet our emotional and psychological needs. As the theologian Justo Gonzales clarifies “This story does not mean that humans are complete only in marriage. If that were so, Jesus would not be fully human. [Instead] being fully human is being-for-others.”[3] Someone like Sue Johnson might add, it also means allowing others to be-for-you. When Paul charges the early church to bear one another’s burdens, he is asking them to live interdependently. The church as an environment where our human interdependence is celebrated and satisfied (think of Paul’s word picture of the body of Christ) is just one aspect of Paul’s vision for the church. But it is an aspect that we often miss in today’s church culture.

Modern, western cultural assumptions about adulthood, independence, and individuality mean we struggle with the idea that we are interdependent. But any discussion about what it means to be human must acknowledge this basic truth: every skill we have is derived from this interdependent system of relationships. Theologian Richard Bauckham, reflecting again on the early chapters of Genesis says

humans are not demi-gods with creative power set like God above creation, but creatures among other creatures, dependent, like other creatures, on the material world of which they are a part, and immersed in a web of reciprocal relationships with other creatures.[4]

A web of reciprocal relationships, I might add, includes emotional attachment.

John Donne ends his reflections with a call to meditate on God every time one hears the bells ring out, for it is God “who is our only security.”[5] This seems to me to be a truly human response in the face of death: acknowledging our dependence on God. This same kind of acknowledgement can be applied to our need for attachment as well. With gratitude, we can thank God for community, foregoing the independent life for one deeply interdependent, and as a result, far more emotionally healthy.

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References

[1] John Donne “Meditation XVII” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions originally published 1623, accessed here: http://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/.

[2] Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships (Little Brown and Company, 2013), 299.

[3] Justo Gonzales, Mannana: Christian Theology from an Hispanic Perspective (Abingdon Press, 1990), 133.

[4] Richard Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Baylor University Press, 2010), 27.

[5] John Donne “Meditation XVII.”

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of other Therapy and Theology contributors.

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