How Connection Breaks: From Children with Innate Wholeness to Lonely, Lost Adults

My earlier article, “Connection Is the Key to Zhuangzi’s Healing,” discussed the importance of connection, how we are always searching for it, and how difficult it is to connect with ourselves. This article explores how connection breaks. Young children, their vitality still intact, often have simple connections with their parents, animals, nature, and themselves. How do they lose their sense of connection with themselves, their parents, other people, nature, and society?

From Daoist and humanistic perspectives, human growth moves from innate wholeness through socialization/alienation, then toward awakening, returning to simplicity and authenticity, and seeing into the heart and understanding one’s nature. From the perspective of connection, it is a process of moving from the simple connections of childhood to broken connections, and then to rebuilding connection. Life emerges through seeing all things as equal; heaven and humanity become one.

The Breaking of a Simple, Fragile Connection with Ourselves

Connection with ourselves means self-care, awareness, feeling, compassion, unconditional confidence, and the freedom to be at ease. The fullness, abundance, and radiance of our own nature are the foundation of a sense of innate wholeness.

Children naturally have the foundation and core of innate wholeness. But psychological trauma and insufficient resources, such as selfobject experiences, during the development of the core of the self also give rise to problems such as inferiority–conceit–self-hatred, self-attack/devaluation, toxic shame, repression, self-objectification, and a people-pleasing personality.

See my earlier article, “How to Address a Harsh Superego and Self-Attack.”

The Breaking of Connection with Our Parents

A large proportion of people experience a break in their connection with their parents.

Early on, they may still experience healthy connections through organic interaction, care, and attention. But these gradually break down because of factors such as their parents’ unresolved psychological issues.

There is an interesting question online: “Why do fewer parents post about their children on their social feeds once the children reach fourth grade or turn ten?” Parents enter a midlife crisis, while children embark on the path of socialization/alienation/involution. The parent-child relationship increasingly focuses on abstract concerns about future prospects, grades, effort, status, and changes in class position.

Socialization ≈ Alienation

My earlier article, “The Small-Town Exam Ace Syndrome,” discussed how compulsive involution, shutting oneself away, vicious tournament-style competition, competition among peers, a linear scale of values, the pursuit of superiority, and so on gradually sever students’ connections with the people around them and those at the bottom of society.

The breaking of connection with the body: the body becomes alienated and instrumentalized. When our sense of connection with the body is weak, we tend to respond to it through approaches such as working through test questions or taking medication.

The breaking of connection with the psyche: we respond to our low periods by whipping ourselves into a frenzy of motivation, putting ourselves down, psychologically manipulating ourselves, or criticizing ourselves for procrastinating. We do not know how to face and accept our various emotions. (See my earlier articles, “Procrastination Is a False Concept,” “Most Personal Problems Are Social Problems,” and “Accepting the Shadow Side.”)

We “soothe” emotional pain, inner emptiness, and anxiety by mistreating our bodies through binge eating, junk food, staying up late, alcohol, and so on.

“The Fundamental Contradictions of University Students” discusses the contradiction involving the people around us: they are our peers, people in the same circumstances and on the same path, yet they are also competitors in involution, vanity, peer comparison, and meritocracy. They are others who affect our sense of superiority and uniqueness. This creates inner conflicts about interpersonal relationships, while we also project outward our internal conflicts, such as self-doubt and self-criticism.

Disconnection from Other People

My earlier article, “Petty-Bourgeois Malaise,” discussed how issues such as alienation, class exclusion, and self-loathing naturally lead to intense, inescapable loneliness. As discussed in the earlier section on “Ways of Working,” unlike proletarians, the petty bourgeoisie have no “fellow workers.” Most members of the petty bourgeoisie have no true friends, and they avoid this truth. (See my earlier article, “Social Relationships: The Differences Between Comrades, Confidants, Close Friends, and Friends.”)

The repetition of people’s patterns of suffering, psychological patterns, and unhealthy relationship patterns also causes suffering to recur in interpersonal relationships.

My earlier article, “Screening Social Relationships,” advocates being strict in screening others and gentle with yourself. Select relationships that offer mutual respect and nourishment.

Disconnection from Nature

An internet user who was a small-town exam ace recorded a typical experience:

After leaving the countryside at seven, I moved to a cleaner city. I did not know that I was saying goodbye to nature for more than a decade and beginning an adolescence and young adulthood marked by socialization, alienation, thinness and impoverishment of experience, one-dimensionality, and a single scale of values.

Greenery and vegetation are somewhat sparse in northern China. Shanghai’s ornamental plants also make it quite hard to feel a connection. Instead, they readily stir up “the small self, attachment to the self, the notion of a self, and the notion of sentient beings.” Shanghai’s flowers, greenery, and parks are too exquisite, the trees too neatly arranged, and the human intervention too conspicuous. They constantly remind me how much nearby homes cost to buy or rent before one can enjoy this atmosphere.

This continued until I eventually made my way to Yunnan. As I wrote in “Why Hangzhou’s West Lake and Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park Are Less Healing for Me Than a Small County Town’s Park”: beside West Lake, I always think, West Lake is so beautiful, so special—it truly lives up to its name. And what conditions did I, a rural small-town exam ace, have to meet to be able to come here?

In a small county town’s park, I do not think about having to meet any “conditions.” The ordinary people in their simple clothes also tell me that everything is in unconditional harmony. I see nature, trees, leaves, birds, fish, flowers, dead branches, fallen leaves, and clouds. I immerse myself in the details and in the whole. There is no notion of a self, no notion of a “park.”

Daoism teaches us not to prize what is hard to obtain, and to return to simplicity and authenticity.

Disconnection from the People and Society

Many children who leave the countryside lose their connection with the countryside, rural people, and nature because of the shadows and traumas of their upbringing or family of origin. This is a great pity. Generally, children from rural backgrounds who still love the countryside, see rural people as unpretentious, and find nature and pastoral scenery beautiful and energizing are less likely to have psychological problems and more likely to awaken. Their connections with the people, nature, and society nourish them. These connections also provide a good defense against excessive petty-bourgeois malaise.

Many children who grow up in cities are unfamiliar with “the countryside,” “rural people,” and “people at the bottom of society,” and are easily influenced by propaganda about “barren mountains, foul waters, and unruly people.” This is a pity. Sometimes it is difficult to “explain” to them the people—the unpretentious truth, goodness, and beauty of workers and peasants.

The disconnection of the petty and micro-bourgeoisie from people at the bottom of society, meanwhile, is a characteristic of their class. As discussed in “Petty-Bourgeois Malaise,” their rejection and fear of the lower classes is one issue within petty-bourgeois malaise. Behind it lie complex issues such as class separation, a sense of superiority and belief in a just world, existential crisis, issues involving the family of origin and extended family, regional discrimination, self-loathing, and the projection of inner conflicts. Their rejection and fear of the lower classes, and their disconnection from the proletariat, society, and history, intensify their unease, anxiety, and existential crisis. It is a vicious cycle; taken to its extreme, it becomes German Nazism.

I previously wrote several articles aimed at cultivating awareness, including “The Chinese People and Chinese Internet Users Are Different Groups and Classes” and “The Syndrome of Being Surrounded by the Petty and Micro-Bourgeoisie.” They all discuss the sociological background of people’s cognitive misconceptions.

Discriminating between people, insisting on separation, worshipping Leviathan, escaping from freedom, and so on sever people’s connections with other countries and races, putting them in opposition instead.

Disconnection from History

“Marxism Is the Elephant in the Social Sciences Room.” In the second half of the twentieth century, Marxism and the left entered a period of decline. Mainstream ideology became confused, blending neoliberalism with various right-wing ideas.

Narratives centered on workers and peasants and on historical materialism faded away, while heroic, elitist, and Whig interpretations of history came to dominate. People’s understanding of history became confused, and their connection with history broke.

Disconnection from the Universe

The moon and stars are people’s first point of connection with the universe, and a major advantage for children in the countryside.

Experiencing the vastness of the universe is also a very common approach to healing the body and mind.

How long has it been since we looked up at the stars?

How to Restore Connection

“How to Connect with the Unpretentious Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of People at the Bottom of Society” and “The Literature of Pinduoduo’s Review Sections and the Healing Power of Food Markets”: see the suffering of all people and recognize our class brothers and sisters. Break through indifference and the small self, break free of self-pity and self-hatred, and develop greater awareness, empathy, wisdom, and compassion. Seeing heaven and earth and seeing all beings helps us see ourselves.

“Screening Social Relationships”: be strict in screening others and gentle with yourself.

“How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness”: connect with history, the people, society, other people, nature, and the universe. Connect with yourself—your body, deep feelings, emotions, and libido.

“My Structure: The Real Self Accompanies the Libido”