Session Four

Popping Bubbles

Objective:
Unlearn hiding indoctrination that breeds avoidance.

Pivot toward healing.

These pains you feel are messengers.
Listen to them.

—Rumi

T
he banter isn’t very forgiving. It’s the generation of coddling. We’re bubble-wrapping our children. Everyone gets a trophy. These kids have no backbone. They’re being babied. They’re made of tissue paper and allergy medicine. Parents, teachers, and even airlines refusing to serve peanuts are being pointed at as sources of our softening, everyone-wins, bubble-wrapped Generation Z—those born from 1995 on. Allegedly, they’re not just lactose intolerant—they seem to be life intolerant.

Our lives are like scenes from the movie Parental Guidance, where the parents track their kids with video surveillance, hold a funeral for the imaginary friend, spend endless hours in group therapy to build self-
esteem, and never let their finicky child’s component food items touch each other.

We offer seven choices of cereal, remove scratchy tags from all the clothes, and line up sock to toe with mathematical precision. There’s no kick the can, playing in the woods, or “Are we there yet?” emerging from the backseat, clad with its own multimedia entertainment center. It’s organized activities galore, starting with Baby Beethoven in utero, swimming before they walk, soccer before potty training, college choices nailed down by third grade, road trips with all the luxury of a five-star hotel, and National Guard searches when the beloved blankie or binky goes missing.1

How we went from generations past—who told us babies came from storks, smacked us on the butt, and sent us to bed without supper if we didn’t show full appreciation for the sodium-filled casserole and red-dye punch that made us bounce off the walls and would have sent most kids of today on Ritalin—to obsessively picking the seeds of our kid’s gluten-free buns topping their artisan ketchup–smeared nitrite-free meats is a matter of great public interest and, of course, finger pointing.

Gone are the authoritarian ways of yesteryear, when we’d never heard of sensory issues, and “Because I said so” brought order. Never have parents been more vilified and subjected to more parenting styles and advice. Cut the cord. Go free-range—but not to the point your kid gets picked off by a gorilla. Douse yourself in hand sanitizer, but don’t kill the good bacteria. Don’t dare smear that toxic sun lotion all over your child—you’ll give them a different kind of cancer. Let them go down the slide alone, but if they get concussed, you’re an idiot. Don’t be a helicopter, be a submarine. No, wait—there’s a new trend emerging. OMG.

Our feeds are brimming with how to embody what sociologists Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels call the “new momism,” a set of ideals negatively affecting moms, dads, and kids alike. It’s the kind of pressure that keeps us up to 2:30 a.m. baking cupcakes and cutting out of work so that we, like all the other good parents, don’t miss the game.

We end up with a lot of what Brigid Schulte, award-winning Washington Post reporter and New America Fellow, calls “stupid days,” where everything seems to go wrong and we’re practically imploding as we race to beat the clock and still not let anyone down.

Feel and Heal

Whether you’ve been raised this way or are in the throes of choreographing your own complicated parenting dance, understanding the bubble-wrap surplus is an important step to building mental agility that helps us move toward real impact.

The puppet strings and bubble wrap send us on a detour from building the agility that we and those we love desperately need.

We end up tossed around in some pretty nasty downward spirals. We get banged around, then shut down. We numb. We bind up and self-protect. We stay stuck and rigid.

We can’t simply pivot with all those uncut puppet strings and thick layers of bubble wrap tripping us up. And when we do fall, we’re too bulky to get back up, preventing us from building up the muscles we need and stopping the very bloodflow that allows us to feel and heal, two critical components of growth.

Feeling pain is not something we necessarily welcome with excitement. Except for Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, in his epic pre–shrimp harvest showdown with the heavens, I haven’t met a human that says to life, “Bring it on! Give me what you’ve got! Hammer me hard. The bigger the struggle, the better. I love to suffer!” But in my research, people who defined themselves as resilient said that pain had been one of their most powerful teachers. Getting to that point of appreciating the lessons it brought didn’t happen overnight—or without support.

Acknowledging pain was a consistent theme throughout my students’ stories. They said at first they went to great lengths to hide it, until they started to realize that the pain was preventing them from moving forward. As Evan put it,

I came from a military family and then went on to serve—so pretty much every setting I’ve ever been in has been about being strong . . . hiding my inner world. I think strength has its place, but once you get to thinking about it, you realize that you should be proud of the pain you go through, not embarrassed of it. The older I get, the more open I become, because anytime I’ve hidden it, it just makes me feel even worse and gets me nowhere.

Healing from pain is complex and cannot be oversimplified to a three-step process. Our wounds are deep, and even with all the resilience conversation swirling across our leadership, parenting, and business spheres, we seem to be skipping over the honest and messy parts we’d rather not acknowledge. Instead, we jump to words like bouncing back and stronger than ever, making it all seem so glamorous and magical.

Just keep your ears perked up. Even at funerals you hear this type of bleached rhetoric that minimizes our human responses to pain. People offer a lot of trite advice and epithets. You never hear anyone say stuff like, “This really sucks. You’re going to be in pain forever. Your life will never be the same.” Instead we say things like, “Oh, he’s in a better place,” or “Wow, she looks good over there in that casket. Go, Sephora.”

This is what social scientist Dr. Brené Brown calls gold-plating grit, or glossing over the pain we experience. She explains that we often minimize how difficult a process of recovery really is, and that we don’t simply bounce back from everything that comes our way. Instead, it’s often a “street fight” with our dark emotions, especially vulnerability, that eventually helps us progress.

Maybe our first stop is to call foul and swipe left all the messaging screaming at us that life can be solved if we drive the right car, have on-fleek eyebrows, follow some cute acronym—or that if we just try a little harder, everything will be just fine. Keep that “Suck It Up” T-shirt on. Stay shiny. Smile. You don’t want anyone to think bad of you.

Feeling and healing don’t represent a big Kumbaya fest or the touchy-feely stuff that most of us thinkers run from as soon as there’s a whiff of it in the air. In fact, science shows quite the opposite.

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secrets of the Brain, defines this as emotional granularity, the ability to adaptively put feelings into specific words. Her research shows how language affects coping. The more precise we become at naming what we are experiencing cognitively and emotionally, the better we become at taking the steps we need to maneuver through murky situations. For example, you’ve had an argument with your partner. If you say you feel “mad” about what happened, it’s easy to feel like not much can be done. But if you express being “completely offended,” you’re more likely to sit down and talk about how to make things better. Of course, this usually works better after a cooling-off period!

Know the Science Behind Feeling and Healing

Dr. Matthew D. Lieberman and his team of UCLA researchers discovered the precise science behind our abilities to name our pain and other emotions.

Their study found that when we name our emotions, even painful ones, the amygdala—the brain’s usual site of a lot of anxious activity—becomes less active, while the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead and eyes, ramps up. He and his team believe this might have something important for us to consider.

They tested a total of eighteen women and twelve men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six using functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity while being shown pictures of faces and the terms “angry” and “fearful.” Some participants were shown names like “Harry” or “Sally” and chose the name they felt matched. Those participants who verbalized the word “angry” calmed the amygdala, while the name Harry didn’t have any influence.

This research suggests that by putting our feelings into specific words, we might be able to move beyond our raw emotional responses, helping us to feel less angry or sad, or shall I say especially perturbed or excruciatingly depressed? Not a bad deal.

Seeing that our pain can be a catalyst for our healing process helps us to avoid sugar-coating our experiences and to acknowledge the true wear and tear of life. When we skip over this part—insulating ourselves instead of letting our wounds air out—we end up becoming more rigid and less agile thinkers, creating maladaptive behaviors that limit our potential for personal growth that lead us to social impact and the good life.

When we look at our resilience through a generational lens, we can see that every generation inherits a set of problems, goes on to correct some of them, and then makes new messes of their own. The pendulum takes violent swings in one direction, requiring us to stay alert that we don’t get knocked over when it comes flying back in the other direction.

Turning Out Okay

When you’re the eulogy person in your family, you learn a lot of unknown family trivia when someone dies. As I sat with my family at our local book café to gather stories to memorialize my nana, I learned something about the bubble-wrap deficit of her days—better known as the Depression era.

My nana, Teddy Lee, born in 1920, was a tough old-timer who exemplified grit. Bubble wrap was a scarce commodity through her whole life. When she was five, her mother, Agnes, died, and back in the day, that meant she and her four siblings were shipped away to a very strict orphanage—
no questions asked, no therapists in sight.

The nuns were incredibly abusive. My nana and great-uncles and aunt were hit and pushed aside, and you can bet their cereal longings were not atop the priority list. When my great-grandfather met his second wife, Catherine, they were relieved to be sent back home to start their new life as a family. Then, when Catherine took sick and died, my great-grandfather’s children were sent back to the orphanage for round two until their eventual rescue when my great-grandfather married Marie, his third wife.

You can imagine that my nana was a tough woman after all she’d been through. She was known for her biting humor and defensiveness. She even kept what she herself called a “shit list,” and if you were on it, you wanted to get off it quick.

My grandpa, Bob Lee, wasn’t without his share of burdens. A World War II veteran, he was later injured in a work accident, losing half of his left arm. At that time, PTSD wasn’t recognized, and his bottle was his medicine.

Of course, all this pain spilled over onto my dad’s generation. They moved several times, on the run from bill collectors. As my dad and his siblings unpacked their stories, I couldn’t help but see the contrasts and progression from the Depression generation to their baby boom generation to my own Generation X, and then for my own millennial–Generation Z children, born in the mid- and late nineties.

The suffering my dad and his family had to do was heavy. They fended for themselves—no helicoptering or coddling, no trips to pediatric orthodontists serving up warm cookies with Xboxes to improve wait times, no full-out clinical-quality counseling sessions when they lost a game or got left out; no refereed recesses, helmets, and knee pads, or cartoon character Band-Aids every time there was a scratch.

They didn’t worry about getting into their school of their choice—there was no choice. They moved out, went to work, and didn’t blink. Only a few from their entire town actually went on to college—the ones their parents called the smart ones, unafraid it would bruise the egos of the ones they called knuckleheads, dumbasses, and fuckups.

It wasn’t about the latest upgrade or having to contend with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). It was sink-or-swim, and they were content with their citizens band (CB) radios and card games with huge canisters of pennies.

They still had their share of puppeteers—but instead of overzealous teachers, parents, and coaches, they had bill collectors, drunken rages, and unfiltered adults who told them they’d be flipping burgers if they didn’t shape up. The stuff they now joked about was the kind of material that would get a teacher fired, or we would file a 51-A report to child protective services about it.

My dad and his sibs laughed it off, asserting they were perfectly fine. The we-turned-out-okay mantra they kept repeating seemed to be a front, some sort of a self-convincing shield against what they had endured in their own rite. Sure, they weren’t yanked in and out of a tormented orphanage, or clobbered with the ASSIEs of today, but their road wasn’t without its bumps.

It wasn’t until later that day when I was reviewing my pages of notes that I realized that we turned out okay was code for we’re incredibly wounded, too. Suddenly, a lot of their behaviors started to make sense. We have our own scars, but they’re not as bad as our parents’. That’s why we tried to protect you. That’s why we butted heads and got stuff wrong sometimes. That’s why my vein popped out of my forehead when you didn’t show gratitude for what we’ve done for you. We were lucky to have food on the table. There’s no way I was gonna let you slide when you complained about not having enough new clothes.

In the wake of my nana’s passing, I made some incredible discoveries that were paralleling the exact themes running through my work with my students who came from all over the world, with their own stories of tensions—all incredibly important pieces to provide context and perspective in a world where some people now throw down more money for a birthday party than we used to for a down payment on a house.

Even when we don’t call our kids to the table in a pitch-perfect voice, and the dinner is just spaghetti, not some sort of gourmet, organic, brain-boosting dinner, we haven’t damaged them. If we lose our cool with our students late on a Friday, we don’t need to resign ourselves to being the world’s worst teacher. And if our own parents don’t run to rescue us at every beckoning call, the world isn’t going to fall off its axis.

We’re all survivors, just trying to break cycles and do a little better to make life a little better for the next generation. We can learn a lot from our mistakes, and our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents provide us with endless lessons. It seems like no matter how hard a generation tries to undo the troubles of the past, mistakes will be made. It’s unavoidable. And it turns out, that is okay.

The Best Advice for sociallyinferior?

Some people would see sociallyinferior from the last session as the poster child of the bubble-wrap generation. It’s easy to beat up on him with all those layers around him. My nana would have given him some tough love, for sure. But underneath it, I wonder if maybe sociallyinferior was so overwhelmed by the choices before him, and so sick of auditioning, he opted to keep his supersize bundle of bubble wrap tightly strapped to him.

The truth is, we’re all scared, especially when we’re in the throes of trying to feel and heal, with people yanking our strings and telling us how to think and behave, instead of letting us name what’s going on and taking the action we need.

The advice from his forum mates, littlemisshy, kos, and pinkpurplepink, is fairly predictable, but not without some helpful messaging:

But Spaceghost nailed it:

You are now conscious. . . .

You can now focus.

Waking up is hard to do—but, as Julie Andrews sang, a very good place to start. Even when life delivers its punches, sending us from stage to stage to prove ourselves worthy, or in retreat mode, bundled up so dramatically we can’t even step out our door because we’re so tightly wrapped, a downward spiral doesn’t have to be our default. Too many lessons are available in the mess, and there are always steps to take to lean in to feel and heal.

For far too long, the downward spiral has dominated our psyches and obstructed our view. We can’t see beyond the immediate and are blinded by the trappings of our culture. Unfortunately, like sociallyinferior, most of us wait until the smelling salt of a crisis to thrust us into action. That’s because we’ve never been introduced to an alternative way of thinking that helps us overcome the puppet myth and bubble-wrap surplus to become more agile. Until now.