Contact with Reality | Ethical Adulthood Evolves — Part II

What happens when people cannot stay in contact with the reality their lives are asking them to face?

In this episode, I explore a difficult but deeply human part of Ethical Adulthood: the people in our lives who are not overwhelmed exactly… but who cannot remain present long enough with discomfort, grief, responsibility, or truth to respond ethically and consistently.

This is not an episode about “bad people.”
 It’s about capacity. Conditioning. Avoidance. Survival. And the consequences of living at a distance from reality.

Through personal reflection, psychological insight, family dynamics, and examples including the film Ordinary People, we examine:

• why people disconnect from reality
• how unresolved grief and discomfort shape behavior
• the difference between understanding reality and staying with it
• what happens to relationships when avoidance becomes a lifestyle
• how Ethical Adulthood changes when the people around us cannot meet us there

This episode is for people trying to live clearly, responsibly, and compassionately in complicated relationships — without collapsing into judgment, rescuing, denial, or self-abandonment.

Ethical Adulthood continues to evolve.
 Part I explored overwhelm.
 Part II explores contact with reality.

Part III will explore what it means for a life when no action seems ethical.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Oh, welcome back. This is part two of a three-part series: Ethical Adulthood Evolves. Contact with reality. Ethical Adulthood was the essay I wrote when I realized something unsettling. Neither I, nor society, nor self-help, nor therapy, nor wellness culture had the answers anymore. The question was and is: how do I live ethically in a world that is not overly concerned with ethics? Because there isn't going to be applause for addressing this in my life or in yours. There isn't going to be a way to monetize it either. There isn't going to be a way to know if I'm doing it right. And there will be no way to know for sure if any of it will even matter. And still, I needed to act. But once I began to see a path, and others looked at it with me, I realized that there are at least four kinds of people that I have come into contact with in my years of observation. But we all have capacity. And how we were shaped affects how much of it we can access. So, as I said, there are at least four kinds of people we come into contact with. The first group I call resourced. They're ready. They read the original essay, they hear the podcast, and they respond with recognition and energy. The second group is overwhelmed. Life is asking too much of them. The third group is what this part is about: people who are not making contact with reality in an important way. The fourth group will be discussed next time. These are the groups I'm addressing now because when we come, we come into contact with all kinds of people for whom the ethical adulthood framework is not appropriate. Not everyone can do this work. Not everyone can access it. Not everyone should be held accountable to its standards. So this is about learning how to navigate relationships with people who can't meet us in capacity-building work and how to apply our own capacities in real time with the most challenging people in our lives.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

So let's get situated.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

We grow up inside a family. Our family is the first place we learn what it's okay to believe. Even when parents are not religious, they teach their kids about honesty, about how sharing your things beats hoarding your things, how learning to apologize is a skill. How to behave when confronted with more powerful people and less powerful people.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

And our culture builds upon that.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

It tells us how to belong outside our family, but inside our society. Securing a feeling of belongingness is what late childhood and adolescence is all about. We all want to be part of a community where we know the rules, where we all follow them so that our society is kind and secure and helpful and steady. Well, that kind of certainty that we can rely upon a society to hold us up when we need it to, that's essentially a utopian fantasy on this planet. We probably hoped for this 50,000 years ago, too, and bumped up against reality just as quickly then as we do now. We can be certain of one thing only, that our way of viewing a situation is not the only way of viewing a situation. Reality may appear before us as coherent, distinguishable from fantasy, clearly requiring a certain set of actions to engage with it properly, and recognizing outcomes will depend upon our choices.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

It's not like that for everybody. Let's go back for a minute. Back to middle or high school. Become aware again of who you were back then.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

We are asked to make contact with reality pretty early in our lives. Usually by the time we're teenagers. And it's not usually a gentle introduction. What do I mean by reality? Seeing things as they actually are, and not how we see them through conditioning, beliefs, and the illusion that things should be a certain way, closer to our preferences. We begin to see the world is not designed for us to flourish, thrive, and grow up strong and capable. We begin to see doors are not going to simply open for us. We begin to see guides presented to us as leaders are not always wise and are not always trustworthy. We begin to see that systems may exploit us rather than support us.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

That's the reality. We have to contact that. And we're not anywhere near being adults yet. And oftentimes the caregivers in our lives?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Well, they may be adults, but they haven't contacted reality directly.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

They may have spent their entire lives in denial of the truth.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Or they may not deny it, but they may be unable to face it without constantly numbing themselves. We watch the strategies of protector parts. We may watch them push away feelings of discomfort and by extension push us away. Maybe they offboard their inconsolable grief onto us. Maybe they model for us a mask that is see-through to everybody but themselves. They think they are their mask. Maybe they latch on to some certainty. God, a life-consuming wellness practice, a series of self-help books, a particular therapy, their method of spiritual bypassing. And they declare to us that they know the answers about how to live. But they are not in contact with reality at all. How can you tell? They are harming people they love and the systems that they have to live inside. And they're harming themselves by living without real connection to other people. Back to our reality, though. The reality we meet may be harsh. It may be benevolent. It may be somewhere in between. But as much as possible, within the context of our perceptions and conditioning, we must try to see clearly and respond ethically to what is being asked of us. If we are interested in living as ethical adults, we have a duty. Why even bother, you may ask? Well, if we don't try to meet reality as it is, we become part of the chaos. We say we don't want. For a long time, my life looked pretty normal. But in my 50s, I had a crisis. I experienced a real fork in the road. I was either going to change everything I knew to be comfortable and familiar in my life, leave everything behind, and start over again, or I was going to stay put and change myself instead. So once I understood through years of yoga, meditation, and insight and IFS therapy, that life is me and not out there, well, the thinking and pattern making machine called my brain, my mind, kicked into high gear. I was on fire to understand how to live without a map. I had questions I thought I needed to answer in order to rearrange the furniture in my mind.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

The questions looked like this. What can I rely upon to be the same each time I return to it? Who can I ask about how to live ethically?

SPEAKER_01 13:47

And be sure they aren't selling me something called certainty, which I know is gone.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

What is the blueprint for ethical behavior in all circumstances?

SPEAKER_01 14:10

What thoughts and behaviors can I understand and implement to get some assurance that I can connect with truth and beauty and live a reasonably happy life?

SPEAKER_00 14:30

The first questions returned silence.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

This last one got answers. And as I began to answer that question, I also began to see that my life included a lot of people who were not like me. Many people in my life were not situated in such a way as to connect cleanly with reality. That realization required some real reflection and growth on my part. It's not a moral failure on the part of other people. I'm not interested in judging others or declaring anybody a failure at ethics. It was just that I wasn't sure how to meet other people in my life who seemed to be living in direct contradiction with my values. I had some certainty around my values, about balance, fairness, justice, democracy, substance use, and a variety of other things. You know how this is. The world does not agree with our values all the time. We have to live in the world that is full of other people, being who they are, behaving in ways we see as wrong.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

And I needed more capacity to meet people in a way that was sustainable, ethical, and actually rewarding.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Working on myself, gaining awareness, regulating my nervous system, and still having strong and unpleasant feelings about my relationships and how misaligned I felt. You know, you can't just bail out every time you discover someone is being, well, not how you would be. You will end up alone or surrounded by folks, but not connected. You have to increase that capacity to stay aligned with yourself and tolerate the discomfort of sitting in the energy of others. So, hmm. The original piece was written for people who, like me, had realized some things about certainty and were at a bit of a crossroads as well. Do we keep doing exactly what we are doing and sort of watch things wobble around? Watch our family members and friends flounder about, wondering how to manage the increasingly complicated situations in their lives. Or not even wondering how, simply stopping contact with reality so as not to engage with the discomfort of their choices. People whose contact with what their lives are asking of them when it's tenuous, you know, it's not that they're unable to think clearly about their life situation. They're able to ask good questions about what they understand about being a human being under pressure. They're able to navigate a complicated situation and not collapse. They're able to show up and be accountable for their behavior, at least some of the time. People who aren't dealing with reality directly, they're not necessarily unethical adults. They're often mature, wise, resourced, and thoughtful. But they may not be living in such a way as to be able to say, if everybody behaved the way I do, would the world be a better place? Are the things I do privately, if they were publicly known and commonly adopted by everybody, would I be comfortable with that? If my patterns were the patterns of all my friends and family, would I be okay with the consequences of those patterns? Am I a person that I can say is careful with the world?

SPEAKER_00 19:19

As if I am a steward of it and not a victim of it.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

When we don't deal with situations that require our attention, ethical living drops down the list. Not because we don't understand what's being asked of us, but because we're trying to maintain our lives and the only way we know how to survive inside terrible discomfort. Let me give you an example. Many years ago, when I was in my 20s, I had a friend who became a father at 22. He only had a high school diploma, no interest or money for college. He worked hard in construction, mostly. Kind of work that wears your body down before you're even 30. He and the child's mother couldn't make it work. There were mental health issues there, instability, and pretty quickly the grandparents stepped in. The little girl ended up being raised mostly by them. At some point, he had what you could call an awakening. He started to see that he had trauma, that his life hadn't really been his own. He began having panic attacks. And he didn't have the resources to stabilize. He left the city, then the state, then the country.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Not forever, but for long stretches.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Travel, retreats, psychedelic work, communities that felt powerful, spiritual, certain about how to live. And every time he came back, there was insight. There were new and stronger connections. There was deepening love for his daughter.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

But then he would leave again.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

And over time, you could see the pattern. Cared a lot about being a good father, and he could see that he was failing, but he just couldn't stay with the part of reality that was asking him to step outside his own discomfort and extend comfort instead to his daughter. Reality, as I mean it here, is what's actually being asked of us before we filter it through what we need to believe. He may have believed, I'll be ready soon, someday, but not right now. I am not ready now, and I'll do more harm than good if I stay. These beliefs reduce the reality of the situation to sentences that may have afforded him some comfort in a situation where he lacked the capacity to respond appropriately.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

I'm going to say that again.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

These beliefs reduce the reality of the situation to sentences. Sentences that may have afforded him some comfort in a situation where he lacked the capacity to respond appropriately. I'm telling a story of what it might look like when we're unable to show up in our own lives and respond appropriately to reality. We push off the accountability for our actions to others who we think are better able to carry the situation that we actually should be carrying ourselves. His daughter needed stability. She needed a parent who stayed, even an imperfect one. He was not so mentally ill that he could not show up for his daughter, but he was so convinced that he lacked the capacity to shoulder this responsibility. He spent the better part of his daughter's developmental life working on himself to be good enough. I don't know whether or not she forgave him, or even if he ever did contact the accountable reality of fatherhood. That's one version of this. Here's another. In the film Ordinary People, there's a mother, Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore. Her son dies in an accident. Her other son survives, but he's shattered. He's grieving. He's trying to make sense of what happened. He is trying to connect with his mother at the level of the grief. And Beth. Beth cannot stay in contact with that reality. She's composed. She holds it together in every situation. She's appropriate. She keeps the house running. She shows up socially. She smiles. On the surface, she looks like the most stable person in the room. But she cannot stay present with the grief. She cannot stay present for her son or her husband. She avoids connection around the grief. She shuts down around it. She becomes irritated, even angry. When grief enters the space she has curated for herself.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Even in therapy. Her son and husband move toward reality. She moves away.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

She isn't dramatic about it, she's just adamant about avoiding contact.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

She quietly, consistently, and firmly prevents contact. It's not that she doesn't understand that her son died. It's that she cannot stay with what the grief she's experiencing is doing to her.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

And eventually the distance she has to create between herself and the reality of her grief becomes the relationship. The distance becomes the relationship she has with her family. These look like very different lives, but the pattern is the same. In both cases, there are parts of real life that cannot be stayed with. The situation is so difficult that it cannot be sat with long enough to respond in an ethical manner. That is, a manner that does not harm other people who are important in our lives. Now, I want to be clear about something. That's not who this is for. This is for people like me and people like you. People who are interested in how we live, how we act, how we take responsibility for what we do in the world. Because whether we like it or not, we're going to come into contact with people who cannot meet us there. Sometimes they're overwhelmed. And sometimes they cannot stay with a situation where people in their life are asking them to stay. Now, this part matters. When that happens, they, and maybe we will not be met. But not being met doesn't remove our responsibility to stay in alignment with ethics.

SPEAKER_00 29:09

But it does change it.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

These people are not just in the movies. If we're willing to admit it, they are our parents, our children, our siblings, our bosses, maybe our child's secondary caregivers, teachers, aunts, uncles, cousins, sometimes they are our best friends, we don't get to opt out because we see a situation more clearly than someone else. Even if we have perfect clarity about why people behave the way they do, we don't get to opt out of being in a relationship with people who seem to be doing more harm than good in their lives. Sometimes they're doing all kinds of good and slowly abandoning themselves in the process. And when someone cannot meet their life in a way that is grounded in reality. You're going to hear stories that don't quite add up, or stories that do, but don't lead to change.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

And stay oriented toward the person anyway. And you may feel the urge to correct them.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

You may feel the urge to offer a book, a podcast, or maybe something structural like money.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

Most of the time, don't. Let them speak. Let yourself feel the discomfort of not fixing it. Then there's rupture and repair.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

If someone you're close to in your life, if their behavior or values are far enough away from your own, you're gonna feel it. And the more time you spend in that space feeling that discomfort, the more likely you are to rupture. To get sharp, to get reactive, to say something you can't take back. So this is where discernment matters. You can be kind, you can be respectful, but you don't have to build a close relationship. You don't have to entangle yourself financially. You don't have to take on responsibility that isn't yours. You don't have to stay in proximity to a situation you can't regulate inside of. You can care without getting pulled in so far that you begin to take on the burdens that aren't yours to carry.

SPEAKER_00 33:19

Next grief.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

Wow. We can really suffer when our family members or close friends are clearly struggling. We may want to blame ourselves, especially if we're parents. But one thing I've learned about blaming ourselves for how other people's lives are unfolding, that's really a protective part of ourselves that wants control over our lives. Because if it's my fault, maybe I can fix it. If it's my fault, it's not their fault. And so they don't bear responsibility, and I can look upon them as victims who are blameless and innocent. If it's my fault, I can finally have some certainty about why bad things happen to good people. If you're grieving the losses in your life, my dears, you're already doing your own work. When with people in challenging situations, you're already trying to stay present. You're already trying not to harden, and trying not to disappear. In our life, we will meet people who cannot tolerate discomfort, repair rupture, grieve without harming others, and act within their own ethical lane time and time again. It's common. It's not helpful to correct them or call them out. God forbid, turn them on to a podcast on ethical adulthood. And it's not your job to teach them how to grieve, how to tolerate more, how to repair, how to act without certainty.

SPEAKER_00 35:38

But you can see them and you can soften around them.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

And finally, that part about acting without certainty. Yeah, when someone cannot stay in contact with reality, uncertainty increases. You don't always know what's true in the stories they tell. What's stable, or what they're going to do next.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

So you adjust.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

You stay aware, maybe even vigilant. You move carefully. You don't have to be in fear around them or even very worried. You just want to stay clear about the situation. You don't assume alignment of values, you don't assume follow-through will occur.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

You don't assume a shared reality. And that protects both of you. And I want to say one last thing.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

If you are listening to this and you recognize yourself anywhere in it, you may already know what I'm talking about. You may have noticed that people keep a little distance, they don't fully lean in, and that they're kind, but not available in the way that you want. Not because they don't care about you. Many of them love you so much. But they don't know how to build something stable with you when the ground under you keeps shifting.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

It's not a judgment.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

It's not a moral failure on anyone's part. It's the reality of what happens when contact with the situation in front of us isn't consistent. This isn't about deciding who is good and who is not. That's not our lane. It's about recognizing where contact with reality is happening and where it isn't and then choosing how we meet that.