Let’s take a moment to explore the connection between trust and “authenticity.”
Authenticity means “being totally yourself” and sharing the most intimate parts of yourself, including the parts people might judge.19 Being authentic requires trust, knowing that the person with whom you share these potentially rejectable thoughts and feelings will not betray you. A lot of self-help books (and, notably, a lot of books on marketing and sales) promote authenticity.
But strategic inauthenticity is part of trust, too.20 Sometimes you go to your kid’s best friend’s birthday party even though your ex will also be there, and you smile and make socially acceptable conversation, because that’s what you want your kid to remember about the day. You don’t want her to remember that time you threw her best friend’s birthday cake in your ex’s face while screaming like a banshee.
Polite, socially acceptable suppression of our rage is “inauthentic,” insofar as we are not sharing our full selves. And that is part of trust, too. Part of being trustworthy is meeting expectations and staying in line, as if you were a well-behaved woman.
Authenticity comes on the phone that evening, when you tell your best friend how well you behaved, despite the desire to kick the table over and go full Hulk. It comes when you cry as you say your kid will probably never know how hard you had to work, that the whole point of all that hard work was so that she would never need to know how hard you had to work.
And your best friend receives the cupcakes of your difficult emotions and returns them to you by saying, “But I know how hard you worked, and I am proud of you. And what is your plan to purge all that rage your body is still holding?”
When the people in our Bubble can turn with kindness and compassion toward our difficult emotions, and we can do the same for them, it strengthens the Bubble like nothing else.
Bubble Ingredient #2: Connected Knowing
Blythe McVicker Clinchy codified two divergent ways of knowing: “separate knowing” and “connected knowing.”
In separate knowing, you separate an idea from its context and assess it in terms of some externally imposed rules—rules that have proven to be immensely powerful as a tool for scientific advancement. Still, it’s easy to read her 1996 description of a “separate knower” and think, with our twenty-first-century social-media brains: “mansplainer”:
If you approach this chapter as a separate knower, you examine its arguments with a critical eye, insisting that I justify every point…looking for flaws in my reasoning, considering how I might be misinterpreting the evidence I present, what alternative interpretations could be made, and whether I might be omitting evidence that would contradict my position.21
And immediately, she points out the crucial strength of separate knowing:
The standards you apply in evaluating my arguments are objective and impersonal; they have been agreed upon and codified by logicians and scientists.
There’s a reason your entire formal education was likely devoted to training you in separate knowing. Separate knowing winnows the wheat from the chaff.
Connected knowing, in contrast, involves coming to understand an idea by exploring it within its context. You put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to try on their point of view. You suspend (temporarily) your doubts, judgments, criticisms, and personal needs, in favor of exploring their perspective—not because you accept it, but because you want to understand. Then you bring in elements of your own life experience or personality, holding these up to the other point of view, testing it and turning it and testing it again, exploring what it would be like to have this person’s perspective, within your own point of view. Sometimes we experience the process of connected knowing as a morphing or reshaping of ourselves into the form that fits the other person—like trying on someone else’s clothes. In the process, you feel how comfortable (or uncomfortable) it would be for you to have the same perspective.
It’s called “connected knowing” because it doesn’t separate an idea from its context; it insists that we can only understand something if we also understand how it relates to the context it comes from. If separate knowing separates wheat from chaff, connected knowing explores the relationship between the wheat and the chaff, seeking to understand where each comes from and why they accompany each other.
Though everyone uses both, women are more likely to use connected knowing than separate knowing, and the opposite is true for men.22
Perhaps because of this difference, connected knowing is often dismissed as “irrational,” as if the only alternative to the scientific method and logical reasoning is nonsense. It’s not. Connected knowing is careful, effortful, often slow, and intensely rational, meaning it follows predictable patterns and progression. It integrates emotion into the information needed to understand an idea. It’s also imaginative, requiring the listener to suspend their emotional reactions to differences and allow themselves to try on a viewpoint distinct from their own.
But the most energy-cresting characteristic of connected knowing is that it isn’t just a way to connect with and understand others; it’s a way to connect with and understand our own internal experience and develop our own identities, through connection with others.
Women, more so than men, build our identities within the context of our relationships. We don’t know why this difference exists—Are we born that way? Do we learn it from our culture? Who knows?—but for our purposes, it doesn’t matter why. What matters is that connected knowing fosters both healthy relationships and healthy individual identity. Connected knowing is why women often find profound satisfaction in understanding themselves and their identity in terms of their relationships—sister, daughter, mother, friend.
Of course, insisting that women can only develop their identities within relationships is just another way of imposing gendered rules that limit women’s access to other sources of growth, as well as to basic autonomy. But if we insist women “should” develop their identities within the pursuit of “achievement” rather than through relationships, we’re pathologizing women’s (and every human’s) innate search for themselves through connection. Knowing yourself better by learning about others is healthy. Neither is right or wrong, good or bad, and people vary in the degree to which they practice both ways of knowing. Again (and again), we need both; we need the freedom to move into and out of connection.
The blend of connected and separate knowing is “constructed knowing.” This book is, by necessity, a product of constructed knowing, integrating separate and connected knowing into a textured whole. Emily and Amelia can try to learn and explain everything science has to say about the brain’s and body’s responses to stress—separate knowing—but we can never know what it feels like to be you, nor can we predict what’s going to be effective in your life for dealing with the stress. Only you are the expert in you, so we’ve included stories and experiences from as many sources as possible, hoping you’ll try them on as you read, see how they fit, and consider how you may accept or reject any given idea—connected knowing. Between the three of us—Emily, Amelia, and you, reader—we’ll find our way to a plan that will work for you, even if it wouldn’t work for anyone else.
Signs You Need to Recharge in the Bubble of Love