In chapter 1, we described four signs that you need to stop dealing with your stressors and just deal with the stress itself. Here we’ll describe four signs that you have to disengage from your autonomous efforts and seek connection. Each of these emotions is a different form of hunger for connection—that is, they’re all different ways of feeling lonely:
When you have been gaslit. When you’re asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or is there something completely unacceptable happening right now?” turn to someone who can relate; let them give you the reality check that yes, the gaslights are flickering.
When you feel “not enough.” No individual can meet all the needs of the world. Humans are not built to do big things alone. We are built to do them together. When you experience the empty-handed feeling that you are just one person, unable to meet all the demands the world makes on you, helpless in the face of the endless, yawning need you see around you, recognize that emotion for what it is: a form of loneliness. Find your people. Call your friends and commiserate; consume all the YOU GO, GIRL! social media memes you like; watch Wonder Woman or Hidden Figures or Moana or whatever immerses you in a story of women working with a team of men, a team of women, or nature and the divine itself.
When you’re sad. In the animated film Inside Out, the emotions in the head of a tween girl, Riley, struggle to cope with the exigencies of growing up. Joy, the emotions’ leader, tries to contain Sadness, to keep her from getting in the way. Joy literally draws a circle on the floor and tells Sadness to stay inside the circle. That’s the way many of us have been taught to treat our sadness: keep it under control, because it makes others uncomfortable. (Because, again: human givers.)
But at the critical turning point, when Joy is in a pit of despair, on the verge of giving up all hope, she remembers the day Riley missed the winning shot of her hockey game. On the verge of quitting, Riley sat alone, until her parents came to talk to her. They led her to her team, who embraced her.
“Sadness,” Joy whispers in revelation. “Mom and Dad…the team…They came to help because of Sadness.”
Sadness is the beacon; it is the Bat-Signal. Though many of us were taught that we should mask our uncomfortable emotions, the truth about sadness is that we find our way out of that tunnel most efficiently when we have a friend who calls through the darkness, “I’m right here!” or better yet, someone who can take our hand in the dark and say, “Any step we take together is a step toward the light.”
When you are boiling with rage. Rage has a special place in women’s lives and a special role in the Bubble of Love. More, even, than sadness, many of us have been taught to swallow our rage, hide it even from ourselves. We have been taught to fear rage—our own, as well as others’—because its power can be used as a weapon. Can be. A chef’s knife can be used as a weapon. And it can help you prepare a feast. It’s all in how you use it. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and rage is indeed very, very powerful.
Bring your rage into the Bubble with your loved ones’ permission, and complete the stress response cycle with them. If your Bubble is a rugby team, you can leverage your rage in a match or practice. If your Bubble is a knitting circle, you might need to get creative. Use your body. Jump up and down, get noisy, release all that energy, share it with others.
“Yes!” say the people in your Bubble. “That was some bullshit you dealt with!”
Rage gives you strength and energy and the urge to fight, and sharing that energy in the Bubble changes it from something potentially dangerous to something safe and potentially transformative.
üBER-BUBBLE
For eight years, Emily worked as the health educator at Smith College, a campus crowded with Lisa Simpsons: highly intelligent, high-achieving women, who are also intensely driven, ambitious, hard-working, sensitive, and social justice–minded. Many struggle with anxiety, depression, disordered eating, or self-harm. And Emily was their health educator.
In 2014, she gave a talk titled “Love Is an Open Door: Frozen and the Science of ‘the Feels,’?” in which she explained the science of emotion, as illustrated by that year’s Disney blockbuster, Frozen.
Emily asked Amelia’s musical advice. “Should I play recordings from the movie? Would it be better to ask a music professor if she has students who could perform the songs live?”
“Make it a sing-along,” Amelia said. “Let them do the singing.”
She did, and it turned out to be the highlight of Emily’s time at Smith.
Three hundred students attended on a Friday evening in September. Half an hour in, right at the midpoint of the talk, Emily played the video of “Let It Go,” complete with lyrics at the bottom of the screen.
Hundreds of driven, brilliant, perfectionistic women belted out, “That perfect girl is gone!” The sound filled the entire Campus Center. You could hear it on the lawn outside. It was breathtaking. Emily looked at the sea of upturned faces, lit by the larger-than-life video of Queen Elsa fully expressing her power for the first time in her life, and thought, How do we get them to do this every day? After that talk, students approached Emily in tears, telling her that was exactly what they needed—and nobody was saying the science part of the talk was what they needed. It was the singing.
This is what we call über-Bubble, and you make it with rhythmic play, including music-making. It happens to singers in a choir, players on a team, voters on election night amid a group of likeminded supporters, or even moviegoers in a crowd of strangers who share enthusiasm for Black Panther. In these activities, through synchronous rhythmic movement, through song, through play, through intense effort to achieve a shared goal, for a few moments we step onto a neurological bridge, and the barrier between us and other people dissolves—sometimes a lot, sometimes just a little—and we experience our own identity as something that extends beyond our skin, into the intangible “Us.” über-Bubble.
über-Bubble doesn’t just feel good; it actively increases cooperation within a group.23 Laurel Trainor at the McMaster Institute of Music and the Mind has demonstrated that toddlers who experience synchronous bouncing with another person are much more likely to help that person when she drops a pencil a few minutes later than babies who are bounced asynchronously with that person.24 Adults who tap their fingers in time with a stranger are three times more likely to volunteer to help that person with a math and logic questionnaire than if they tap asynchronously.25
The pleasure of synchronized movement is built into our biology, and it’s a powerful tool to access your greatest well-being.
When we share trust, authenticity, and connected knowing with someone, we change, and it’s scary and good and important. We come to know certain people, the right people, as intimately as we know ourselves, and, in coming to know them, we come to know ourselves in new and deeper ways. Sophie’s butterflies knew that Bernard was one of those people.
But because Bernard was not what she was looking for, Sophie declined his invitations to dinner and movies and various other date-like activities. She became friends with him, though, almost against her will. He was funny and smart and warmhearted and a great dad, and he listened to her in a way that made her know herself better.
“It’s extremely inconvenient!” Sophie said to Emily.
“Positive reappraisal!” Emily answered. “When it’s inconvenient, it’s probably doing the most for you.”
We don’t need other people’s love in order to love ourselves; we don’t need a romantic partner to be “complete.” But we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best.