291. Reaching The Other

When someone is overwhelmed by anxiety, they can become difficult to reach. Such a person is completely in the grip of attachment and thus in a place of enormous suffering. To attempt to escape from their suffering, they will do anything they possibly can.

One thing they will try is to adopt beliefs that make them feel safe from the objects of their anxiety. To an outsider not under their spell, these beliefs look like delusions. Strictly speaking, any belief is a delusion if it is taken to be absolutely true, as it simply cannot possess that degree of certainty. We tend not to notice most of our delusions because we share them with the people around us. It’s because we share them that it’s also easy for us to talk to each other.

When someone adopts beliefs far outside our usual territory, it can become almost impossible to communicate with them. For us, the challenge seems to be to make particular facts known to the other, while for them, their security seems to depend on holding onto their existing beliefs. We want to undermine what we see as false, but the other refuses any such attempt because they cannot allow the protection supplied by their beliefs to be lost.

We want to bring the anxious person back over to our side directly, but this is not possible. They have become too alienated from our shared form of life, sometimes so much so that it can look like they’re living in another reality altogether.

To reconnect with the other, we need to adopt an alternative approach. Instead of trying to enforce strict boundaries between truth and falsehood, we need to see these categories as conventions and as less important than they usually are. We need to focus on making our concerns shared so that the anxious person can begin to cooperate with us and vice versa.

To do this, we cannot be adversarial. We have to start from what we have in common and present it in a way that is salient to the other. This will be difficult, as we cannot know in advance what will work. We need to be patient, kind, and willing to experiment. In the end, the only thing that prevents communication is the decision to give up. If we refuse to do so, our shared humanity will eventually come to the surface and provide the bridge we need to reach the other.