I wrote a book about ten years ago called Less and Less, and with the subtitle Personal Minimalism. It’s not a book about organizing your home and learning how to throw things away, or at least that’s not what it’s mostly about. Mostly, I wrote the book to try to answer a very simple question: does my tendency to hate mess and clutter and to discard things in my domestic space, also apply to the way I deal with people in my life? Do I drop people, all people but especially girlfriends, as soon as the relationships become messy, rather than accept a bit of clutter and work towards compromise?
It was important to me as I wrote the book, and I believe I stuck to this principle, that I be absolutely honest, that I not massage the facts or the analysis just so that I could come off looking normal or acceptable, just so that I didn’t look bad. Tell the truth no matter what it was.
In the end I concluded that, yes, I do have this tendency in my relationships, but that after many months of research and self-analysis, I was now pretty clearly aware of the tendency, and so, hopefully, less likely to summarily cut people out of my life without giving it some thought first. It’s a mental-health truism now, and it’s something that I also discovered in my psychoanalytical therapy about five years after the book was published, that it’s not a bad thing to limit or even eliminate your interactions with people who don’t truly have your best interests in their hearts, people who are not dealing with you in a manner based firmly in integrity on their part, people whose relationship with you is not really real because they are not honest with themselves and therefore not honest enough with me to sincerely care about and be interested in my life. I wanted, and after therapy want—insist—that the person that someone appears to be is exactly the person that they are, that they are authentic.
Just as a brief side discussion, my experience has been that most people are not like this. They unconsciously play at treating you well for all sorts of reasons. They want someone to chit-chat and have a few laughs with. They are related to you and so they are acting on obligation rather than true interest and even true love and respect. And perhaps the biggest group are those who, like me, have been damaged and traumatized in their childhood, but are either unaware of it or, perhaps most often, in denial about it.
I still think my Less and Less book is based in thoughtful analysis and also well written. I remember that in the writing of it, perhaps characteristically and not surprisingly, I started with a large amount of research and text, and the effort was always to compact it down to the basics. Not to make it short and glib, but to distill it. Those many pages from various drafts eventually ended up as 73 pages in a book only eight inches tall (twenty centimetres in Canada). I like the book. I’m proud of what I accomplished in it.
A couple of things happened last week though that made me see it in a different way. I was doing what I usually do when I want to take a little mental break from writing or editing, that is, scrolling through YouTube Shorts (basically, it’s TikTok for those of us who don’t want to have yet another social medium in our lives). I have my phone set so that a reminder pops up at fifteen minutes asking me if it’s time to take a break, and I obey. I don’t expect to be surprised and certainly not to be made to think when I’m taking these YouTube breaks, but last week I was. I’ve since searched for the exact page where I read the quote that I did, but alas can’t find it, but, paraphrasing, it was something like this: when a person is able to easily cut other people out of their life, this is not a sign that they don’t want relationships with other people, but rather a trauma response to not having anyone to rely on in childhood.
It made me pause and gave me pause. It was the first time I had ever thought of my actions not as something that was just the way I was, or of myself as someone who liked minimal relationships as much as I like minimal and spare home décor, but rather (or additionally) a characteristic with a cause in the past. As I talked about in episode 3 of this podcast, I sought out therapy in 2018 for the continuous anxiety and tension and nervousness that I felt, with no apparent cause, and unfortunately with no respite either. I’d go to bed with butterflies in my stomach—sorry for the cliché, but that’s what I’ve found explains the feeling best to people—and wake up exactly the same way. And feel the same way all day. I was like that for over twenty years, but I was, so to speak, functionally anxious. I got things done, was successful in my career. And ironically people would often tell me that I was the calmest person they’d ever met, and for that reason, because I was empathic and a good and trustworthy listener as well, many people felt very safe and comfortable confiding in me.
So I approached the therapy hoping for some relief (which I did get by the way) and the psychiatrist used a controversial technique called the Davanloo method, or also intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. I won’t go through all the sessions I had. The therapy is very confrontational and eventually, having been broken down to tears, I talked about the issues and the people in my childhood that were still affecting me all those years later. I’m immeasurably grateful for the doctor who performed the therapy and the second doctor who prescribed medications, both of which changed me profoundly, and, yes, which virtually rid me of my anxiety.
The other thing that happened is that a former therapist I know named Cindy (not my own therapist BTW) had read my Less and Less book. As I said, I had tried very hard to be focused and honest and thorough in that book, but frankly I forgot to make one step further back and inquire about the source of my minimalism, and particularly its manifestation in me being so easily able to discard people in my life. When we were talking about it, she told me quite directly and simply that when she read the book she knew there had been past trauma. This is a woman with an extremely high degree of authenticity and forthright honesty, and of course years of experience working as a therapist, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that she easily saw something that I had not even noticed or thought of. I was impressed with that degree of insight.
And so.
I consider myself to be, as they say, in a good place in my life these days. I am calm and peaceful, which are perhaps the two feelings I long for most after so many years of tension. I’m more confident. I speak up for myself and worry less about pleasing people. I’m also honest, and I have been reaffirmed in that trait by a video snippet I came across online from the writer and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, who says:
If you say the truth and nothing else, you’ll have a immense adventure as a consequence. You won’t know what’s going to happen to you and you have to let go of your clinging to the outcome. You have to let go. But the truth will reveal the world the way it’s intended to be revealed and the consequence for you will be that you will have the adventure of your life. And the other part of that ethos is this, and it makes perfect sense to me and I can’t see how it can be any other way, which is that whatever makes itself manifest as a consequence of the truth is the best possible reality that could be manifest even if you can’t see it.
Since I’ve taken on this practice and tried to do it all the time, I’ve been mocked for it, I’ve had someone assume that because I strongly agree with Peterson on this point that I must agree with everything else he says too (I don’t), and I’ve caused a lot of fuss and upheaval in various social, family, and general professional situations. I take it as a good sign, frankly. I’m not trying to upset anything, I’m really not. I’m just trying not to tell lies. The truth is something I can rely on.
