Two's a Crowd: The Stress of the Other

The only thing worse than

the egoic me is the egoic us.
Eckhart Tolle


I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and suggest that if you were to follow the trail of your stress to its source, more often than not there will be another human being at the end of that trail. Sartre’s famous comment that "hell is other people," might as well be our generation’s theme song. We rub shoulders daily with our fellow citizens and that rubbing often leads to sparks and maybe even a three-alarm fire.

I know from my work with teenagers in residential treatment centers that this experience begins very early in life. Many kids, no matter how awful their upbringing, no matter how traumatic their early years, will do relatively okay when left to themselves. Throw them in with a peer group and you will immediately see the divisions arising, gangs forming, and the inevitable "us against them" mentality taking form. Watch the news on any given day, and the state of the world will show you that these youngsters are simply imitating what their elders have taught them—life needs enemies. The stress that this social dysfunction creates is felt around the world.

Why are we so bad at something that is supposedly wired into our DNA? Why do we spend our lives trolling the waters for that one other person to make us feel complete and then work so hard to cast off all of the other fish that have accidentally landed in our nets? How much more enjoyable would life be if our brothers and sisters were no longer seen as proof that God should have created either Adam or Eve, but not both? While it would be stretching it to suggest that I can help you love your enemies as yourself, I would like to suggest that with the healing power of stress comes the ability to better navigate the social waters you find yourself in. I want to assure you that once you begin to see that stress is within you, your interactions with others will take on new flavor. The hell of the other is none other than the hell that you have made. To move out of this hell takes only a minimal amount of awareness on your part.

This awareness begins by realizing that our social interactions are filled with stress because we are each a mini stress factory, and when we gather together we fuel each other’s fires. Want to keep this fire from burning out your relationships? Remove the fuel inside of you that gives it life. Take away the mind-kindling that catches whatever spark it can and turns the casual passing comment into a personal attack on your integrity.

Finally, we are going to have to come terms with the advice of sages past and present that all good relationships start with the one we have with ourselves. Narcissism and ego mania aside, most people need to work at learning to get along with themselves. Years of self-loathing, self-deception and even down-right abuse leave many people feeling like they should have walked out on themselves a long time ago.

Since no discourse on relationships would be complete without some unsolicited advice, I want to give you a list of tips to help you fall back in love with yourself.

1. Leave your mind out of it. Over-analyze anything and it dies.
2. Give yourself space. Stop trying to fill yourself up with things (this includes thoughts) and give yourself time to be really alone. Put down the books, turn off the television, log off the internet and take the blue tooth out of your ear and simply be still.
3. Surprise yourself. Nothing kills relationships like boredom and predictability. Do something different. Set a goal to do something that scares you at least once a week. Feel free to check with a close friend just in case your "what scares me list" includes things that could get you arrested or a prime spot on Youtube.
4. Forgive yourself. Practice telling yourself that it is ok that you never became the top executive of a fortune 500 company. If you are a top executive of a fortune 500 company, forgive yourself for having to crush so many people in order to get there.
5. Don’t go to bed mad. Anger is the jack hammer that grinds relationships into specs of human dust. Stop beating yourself up, that’s abuse without the benefit of the make-up flowers or candy.
6. . Let go of your need to have the admiration and adoration of every person who happens to stumble onto the stage that is your life and you will find that your exasperation and desperation goes with it. Change the theme song in your mind and watch to see if others don’t start whistling a different tune. Then just sit back and enjoy the music.