Idiosyncrasies #3: A kind of eternal aloneness

Many people know that it is good to have someone to tell our thoughts and feelings to. There’s the sense that the more intimate material we share, the closer the bond we’ll feel. Also, the deeper we reach within ourselves and express personal truths to a caring and accepting listener, even those truths that feel shameful, the more we’ll feel free, the more we’ll feel proven human, the more we will realize we are OK and not a bad person. Paul Vereshack describes the defense mechanism of “avoiding negative self-belief.”* Avoiding what we feel is the worst about ourselves leaves us with malignant ghosts in our dungeon. Opening up to even the most shocking feelings and facts – even, as his example goes, murderous feelings about one’s children – will enable us to descend to the earliest hidden pain that formed those feelings. And in touch with the pain, we’ll see that instead of evil, we are simply injured and lashing out in ways that are not our truest self.

But there are questions: Is there a limit to how much personal, arcane truth we should reveal to another soul? Is it possible to expose too much and by doing so, undermine some critical sense of privacy or integrity of self?

I know my own answer: There are one or more secrets I will harbor ’til my death. This is not a matter of shame, because I have seen the worst and have accepted it with what may be called self-enclosed grace. The essence is an awareness of organic failure at the beginning of my life, a rudimentary wrongness, something that no one could ever see and few could imagine, but whose reveal would make me sound like the irredeemable. Exposing it to another person, I could no longer be its sole owner. Somehow, then, that privacy would be my necessary gift to myself.

So I suggest a principle that there is a limit to the power of the oceanic deep confession. Some disclosures pertaining to early development would injure a bond, a unity. The Existentialists, of course, have written about “our ultimate aloneness” (I. Yalom). But the way they mean it, I don’t believe is true. Some of us can feel completely one with a loved person. It is the kind of understanding that I have found, and that others might find were they to look at their blueprint, which ultimately separates us.

There would be another question: Does this separation exist between people even when they have no grasp, no glimpse of a fundamental mistake? I would think so. People can sense an obscure alienation from themselves, some impossible-to-describe remove from their life. That would have to be a barrier at the ready when another person comes too close.

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* Vereshack’s on-line book, at – http://www.paulvereshack.com/helpme/chapt20.html#9.