On Introversion

Filed under Articles on 2. December 2006 »

When I read Jonathan Rauch's article Caring for Your Introvert in the Atlantic Monthly a few years back, I had an immediate recognition of what he described, about feeling drained by social interaction and about wanting to be alone whenever possible. I then went on to read books like Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher, and a nice little collection of quotations called The Wonders of Solitude.

I've been gaining a new perspective on the nature of my wanting to be alone lately, and have found that it's not really about wanting to avoid other people after all. I haven't yet formulated this into a concise theory or anything, but the gist of it is that the reason I want to avoid social interaction is that it activates my ego and forces me to play out reactions and patterns on the level of form identity.

Playing a person, reacting, participating in the game of acceptance and rejection, was becoming harder and harder for me to do. I had begun to feel incredibly drained whenever I was with or around other people, up to a point where I would sometimes find it hard to even talk after a few hours of constant interaction. When I got the chance once in a while to spend a few days mostly by myself, I felt a sense of becoming more centered and more at ease, but as soon as I got into the world again I felt like I was being somehow scattered all over the place, continuously straining to keep up with the demands of responding to other people.

As I've gone through this process of awakening, a lessening of the ego/person and a corresponding lessening of pain and fear, I've found it much easier to be with other people. And that got me thinking about the possibility that interacting with other people wasn't the issue; that there was a possibility for me to feel as good while with others as I did whenever alone.

When observing or imagining myself in social situations, there are some things that have helped me identify the source of the problem and which have made me realize that the issue lies entirely within me and not on the outside; that the source of the problem is my own identification with ego, and the realm of ego in general.

The painful part of being with other people was always the interaction, and feeling the demand for a reaction. So if I simply let go of the level of reaction all together, the pain went away as well. To give you an example, one particular area of human interaction that repelled me was male banter. The almost completely meaningless surface chit-chat between men, often noisy and with an undercurrent of violence. It is a very ego heavy form of interaction, and something that seemed to arouse my own ego with more force than others.

Contemplating the possibility to simply stop speaking was one pointer that brought out the real source of the issue, and through it I found that I could respond to people without the reactive patterns having to be activated. The response then comes from a deeper place, and there is space between the demand for a response and whatever response I give, if any. I am then responding intuitively, bypassing the reactive patterns altogether.

Other pointers I've used is to imagine myself as invisible or as not being there at all, asking the question "what would I do if it weren't for myself?" in a situation to see if I gained a different perspective on it.

After having dealt with this issue for years and gone through a sort of trial and error process with it, I think that the differences between introversion and extroversion have mostly to do with the nature of the person's ego identification, and the level of tolerance for playing it out. As in my case, I start to feel uneasy and drained of energy very quickly when I start playing out ego patterns, when I've inflated my sense of self in some way or when I interact with other people on the level of ego.

Right now the challenge for me is to approach the world and other people on these new terms, on this deeper level, interacting with people in a way that's not necessarily going to be accepted by everybody. I recognize that if I go through with this fully, which is needed of course, it might seem to others at times that I'm detached, or even that I'm ignoring them when I don't respond immediately to their demands for a reaction and so on. For example, I've managed to personally offend more people than I care to remember with the simple act of turning off my cell phone, or leaving it at home when I go out for a walk. When you don’t participate in casual banter and small talk, people often think that you must be judging them or rejecting them in some way. So I'm still not always able to let go completely of the reactive level, afraid that if don't react, other people will feel offended and rejected and reject me in turn. But it is only a matter of practice, and allowing the habitual patterns to gradually lose momentum by not feeding them.

If we pretend for a bit that I’ve come to some sort of conclusion about introversion, it would be that introverts don't necessarily want to keep away from other people, but simply avoid having to participate in the realm of ego. It seems to me that people we call introverted are ill-equipped to function in the man-made systems of the world -- or rather; the man-made systems of the world are ill-equipped to accommodate the introverted.

And of course that, to overcome introversion as a problem, the solution is not for people to attempt cultivating extroverted behavior, but to transcend that level altogether. Which happens to be a path to the highest levels of human consciousness, and the ultimate in any human endeavor.

The feeling of not belonging in the world is then no longer a handicap, but a divine invitation to help create a better one.

This is a slightly modified version of an entry I posted in the Steve Pavlina Forums a few weeks ago, where you can find some further elaboration on the ideas I talk about in the article, along with an interesting discussion on introversion in general.