Expanding Personal Potential through Relationships
How social connection contributes to our futures
In “The Extended Mind”, a paper written by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, mind and cognition generally is explored as extending from and being bound within external tools or entities such that the processes of cognition are not just what occurs in the brain.
…the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behaviour in the same sort of way that cognition usually does. (Clark and Chalmers)
This mental extension connects strongly with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work “Philosophy in the Flesh” where cognition is seen as inherently embodied, and relationally embedded. The contemplation concerning mental extension simply, though the mechanisms are complicated, sees that the line between embedded and embodied as being a dotted one rather than a solid uncrossable one.
Daniel Siegel has coined the phrase, “The me that is we,” that largely captures the above framing. We are not so much individuals cut off from one another, but indelibly connected like nodes at the intersection of a social spider’s web.
The need to connect and belong is as indelible a part of being human as it is for our hearts to continue beating and our lungs to continue circulating oxygen. I use biological analogies here precisely due to how belonging makes physiological changes in our lives. That ache associated with missing a loved one is not simply in our minds, it’s a chemical reaction that permeates our bodies. That sense of safety and wholeness when in a group of like-minded people is not a poetic license, it’s a reduction in stress hormones. From the roaming bands of our evolutionary ancestors on the savannas of Africa to team-building exercises at our places of employment, the biological need to connect and belong has been concerned with expanding the repertoire of our behavior in the face of changing circumstances.
If we desire to expand our personal potential we need to look to our closest relationships.
As we begin a new year and contemplate whether and to what extent we wish to embark on personal changes in our lives, it’s imperative that each person begin with a recognition of how friendships and other social connections play a role in how our lives evolve, even in small ways. In an article in Psychology Today, the author collects from various psychological studies five reasons to choose friends wisely:
1. Strong-willed friends can increase your self-control.
2. Having fewer friends increases the likelihood that you’ll take financial risks.
3. Having too many social media connections increases your stress level.
4. Close friends may be the secret to longevity.
5. Friends greatly influence your choices.
The studies associated with each point are well worth looking through. The results put yet another nail in the coffin of the simplistic notion that we are our own masters, the principle determiners of our behavior. We like the ease of such beliefs because they reflect the felt feeling, or phenomenology, of what it is to live our own lives. It certainly feels as if the decisions we make come from “inside,” and since nobody else is in there but us, we must therefore be the final arbiter of our outward decisions. The internalized and oft-repeated mantra of “I am my own boss” captures the only sense of responsibility that makes intuitive sense in a world dedicated to increasingly separating us from a shared humanity.
Taking a few moments to consider how we actually live our lives will undermine this simplicity. Take your own thoughts for instance. Where do they come from? Are “you” choosing each and every one of them? How so? Are you sitting there contemplating from a smargasboard of cognitive elements what to combine into a coherent whole? Of course not. Thoughts, just like their fraternal twin emotions, simply appear in whole, without any decision-making on our part. We’re so busy moving forward to the next thing that we ignore this, a self-blindness that seems, at least in part, an aspect of how our brains function. We do not have access to the subconscious or preconscious mechanisms, in our brain and bodies, from which consciousness appears like a magic trick.
If you’re bristling at this, consider how often mood and decisions change once you realize you’re hungry, thirsty, or find yourself in an unknown environment. If we were complete masters of our consciousness, what we call experience, changes in environment would have zero effect on what we think and do. And yet, the opposite is the case. We finish songs, put together puzzles, and, to varying degrees of success, predict the behavior of loved ones without any conscious or deliberative contemplation of alternatives. The latter is, in fact, a central problem of communication in intimate relationships, but that’s a concern for another article.
What these studies from the Psychology Today article show is not merely the influence of our friendships, but how our sense of belonging is legitimately conflated with our decision-making abilities. We do not decide the course of our actions from a celestial existence, picking and choosing what variables in our lives will affect us. We are not engineers putting together pieces, we are co-conspirators in the creation of our personal mythologies, the personal narratives fleshing out the various identities we view ourselves through.
A Prescription for Relationships
Decisions are predicated on those notions of selfhood, and memories provide the historical substance for the construction of current perspectives, it is therefore safe to say that the potential of our lives resides in the extent to which the relationships, both interpersonal and inter-environmental, allow for the manifestation of various behavior.
This point is where the author of the Psychology Today article seems to miss the ramifications of the research discussed; where if the influence friendships have on our behavior, and personal potential, is as large as indicated, how this then undermines the simple notions concerning choice and self-hood that we assume. Relationships are not unidirectional but bidirectional in their causative power for life decisions and direction.
If the quality of one’s friendships is a determinative variable in (as per the author’s list) our ability to make fewer financial mistakes, live longer, increase self-control, and shift other behavior we manifest, then it is imperative that we reflectively consider who we’re spending time with and the degrees of intimacy we have with one another. Better finances, better choices, fewer mistakes, reduced stress, are all easily inferred prescriptive notions associated with increasing the quality of our personal lives. This is a case of science noting what is, so that we can then consider what we then ought to do dependent on the identified and desired outcomes we want.
A similar situation would result if studies concluded that the cessation of smoking leads to a better quality of life both for the smoker and for those around them. The fact that this is exactly what has happened, resulting in social proscriptions against smoking in enclosed public spaces, indicates that science does inform us concerning issues of morality. Certainly, there still exist questions as to which values are of greater concern, personal freedom or public safety, but nobody is going to deny that an increase in quality of life, however objectively determined, is going to generally be found as a moral good.
The power of our friendships, and social connections more broadly, is why when determining the direction for personal development in therapy, the question of “How do relationships shape and contribute to your experience(s)?” often is raised to my clients. No problem in life exists without a connection to personal and experiential relationships. No solution will develop without taking those very relationships into account.
As we enter into a new socially-constructed year and decide how we’re going influence our lives in light of the potential struggles we see on our individual horizons, this is a reminder to reflect upon how your notion of self is intimately connected with what and with whom your life is being shared.
The people we have in our lives are not simply pieces on the chessboard of our lives, they are extensions of the board itself providing an expansion or constriction of how and in what ways we are able to move. They heavily influence the extent of our personal potential. Recognizing such can provide a near-infinite source for exploration of just how we and those we are engaged with are expressing life and what direction the ‘you’ that is bound to a ‘we’ is embarking on.