Emotional Detective

Tending Instinct

 Tending others is as fundamental to human nature as self-protection - especially for women. 

 

Caring for others can calm both the receiver, and the caregiver.   Offering nurturance to others often reduces stress, facilitates growth, and strengthens attachments.  Old people live longer by just caring for plants. 

Women's neurocircuitry is especially geared toward altruistic and nurturing behavior.  When tending others, women may be rewarded by oxytocin (the so-called love hormone).  Men, on the other hand,  are more likely to need coaching to learn how to enjoy giving care; tthey may experience a reward from the  release of vasopressin, but this remains unproven.

In her book The Tending Instinct: Women, Men and the Biology of our Relationships, Shelley Taylor Ph.D. (one of my professors from graduate school) suggests that “tend and befriend” is a highly adaptive response to change and chronic stress.   She supports this claim by citing fascinating research showing how tending others reduces reactivity, increases positive emotions, and improves overall health.  

This traditionally feminine approach to stress reduction is an effective alternative to “fight or flight".  

Dr. Taylor shows how “social relationships forge our biology, even at the level of gene expression.”

Our nurturing instinct is driven largely by biology, but can be suppressed or encouraged by experience.    The better tended we are, the more easily we can tend others.  What does it mean to to take good care of someone else?    According to Dr. Taylor, good care involves “attentiveness, nurturance and warmth”.

In my experience, good caregivers usually have secure attachments.  They  devote themselves to someone else's physical, social, and/or intellectual needs while remaining tolerant, responsive, supportive, affectionate, ...  and even playful.  

This helps us understand why all happy families are alike, to paraphrase Tolstoy.  Happy families are those in which children are well tended and secure.  Such families encourage growth while offering the support and benefits of a group.

How lucky to be born into a happy family!  Although we don't get to pick our families, we can take another option and  try to find  someone or something to lovingly tend to yourself.  

 

If you are new to tending, start small. 

Consider caring for a plant, pet, or a neighbor in need.   If you are going to try to tend a neighbor or member of your community, you might think about what they cannot do easily for themselves, and think about what ways that might be sort of pleasant for you to offer to help.  For example, offer to bring some food over to an elderly neighbor, or take out their garbage bins on trash day, or offer to do an errand for them.  

Alternately, you can try offering care to a friend, lover, or family member in new ways.  This might include  talking less in your interactions and letting them take center stage.  Or perhaps it might involve becoming more patient with their shortcomings, or offering a back rub when they are stressed.    It is best to offer to do things that you kind of enjoy, or else to hold back on doing things that you know are disturbing to others. 

The benefits of tending to other people are far-reaching, as long as you keep yourself in balance.  As you care for others you may:

               

   Develop a more loving heart

       

  Fall a bit in love

 

   Feel proud of your sacrifice

 

 The good news is that you can help yourself as you tend others.

Pitfalls of Analysis

Some people consider therapy or self-analysis to be useless or even destructive, pointless navel-gazing that can cause paralysis or unnecessary pain. 

 

Despite many personal and professional experiences in which introspection has been incredibly useful, I still know why people are often skeptical of too much self-analysis.     While on vacation I read Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.  This book, about life at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Germany, explores perceptions of time, illness, identity, and personal meaning.     Writing in 1924, Mann highlights the constructive and destructive potential of a new treatment, psychoanalysis, that was becoming popular at the time. 

"Analysis is good as a tool of enlightenment and civilization - to the extent that it shakes stupid preconceptions, quashes natural biases, and undermines authority.  Good, in other words, to the extent that it liberates, refines, and humanizes - it makes slaves ripe for freedom.  It is bad, very bad, to the extent that it prevents action, damages life at its roots, and is incapable of shaping it."

 

I think this eloquently describes the difference between productive insight and paralyzing self-absorption.
 

  

 

Sometimes  an inward focus can become a substitute for change, and people get stuck in their own thoughts.   Introspection and careful thought about your life can fuel self pity, rage, paralyzing shame, or unquenchable guilt - without providing any forward momentum, if it is not accompanied by new knowledge and a plan to constructively use this new insight.   New knowledge, in the absence of a new direction or behavior, can be used as a weapon for intertia, rather than a catlyst for growth.

How to use self-awareness as a starting point for change and growth?

As you start learning new things about yourself,  pay attention to how you react.  For example,  if you  realize that you are more envious than you ever imagined (most of us are), you may feel self critical and even ashamed.  If you just focus on how much you don't like yourself, you will miss an opportunity to find new ways to manage your envy, and your investigation will be counter-productive.  This type of self-criticism undermines the job of an Emotional Detective, distracting from the hard work of understanding with compassion and working to change your life to promote better feelings.   Instead of flogging yourself, try to devise new ways to manage and transform your envy.  Perhaps you want to study the person whom you envy, to figure out how they came to have the qualities or circumstances that you admire or covet.  While some of their attributes may be the by-product of good luck, the chances are pretty good that they made good use of what they have been given.     

Becoming more self-obsessed without working to make changes is one of the pitfalls of self-refection.  You can avoid this problem if you put your mind to making changes based on your new knowledge -- changes designed to help you get more of what you want in life.