Why Do Some of Us Spend Our Lives Searching for Connection?

I watched a short documentary recently called John Was Trying to Contact Aliens, which you can watch on Netflix.

John Shepherd spent around thirty years doing exactly that.

From his grandparents’ home in rural Michigan, he built an increasingly elaborate collection of receivers, transmitters, aerials, screens and dials and sent radio signals millions of miles into space.

And, rather wonderfully, he sent music.

Jazz. Afrobeat. Reggae. Experimental music.

If somebody was out there, John wanted to give them something decent to listen to.

I loved this almost immediately.

I liked the scale of it. The reaching and possibility.

There is something wonderful about a person looking at the available world and deciding it might not be all there is.

John had started building electronic equipment when he was young, with help from his grandfather. His grandparents seem to have done something quite important without necessarily making a great performance of it.

They made room.

Room in the house. Room for the equipment. Room for John to become extremely interested in whatever interested him.

Children can have magnificent interests.

Space. Horses. Engines. Ghosts. Dinosaurs. Dogs. Particular wars. The London Underground. A singer nobody else in the family can bear.

Sometimes an adult doesn’t have to understand the fascination.

They don’t even have to share it.

They can simply not shut it down.

Show me.

What does that do?

Where are you planning to put that enormous thing?

That is a kind of connection too.

As the film went on, though,

I became interested in searching.

John describes a difficult early childhood. His father left soon after he was born, his relationship with his mother was distant, and he was largely brought up by his grandparents. At around twelve he realised he was gay, in rural Michigan in the early 1960s, which he describes as difficult.

And there he was, building equipment capable of searching considerably further than rural Michigan.

It would be far too neat to say that this was why John searched for aliens.

People are more interesting than that.

He was fascinated by electronics. He was interested in space and the unknown. He loved music. He wanted to know what might be out there.

But I found myself thinking about the extraordinary number of ways human beings devise to look for one another.

I know another story.

A girl growing up in a small town became fascinated by America.

America was arriving in her sitting room through the television: films, cities, enormous roads, houses, people living lives that seemed much bigger and more interesting than the one immediately available to her.

So she covered her bedroom walls with pictures and posters of it.

She wanted to get there.

Long before the internet made it possible to reach almost anybody from your bedroom, there were public phone boxes.

She worked out the international dialling code for America and would go into a phone box and make up the rest of the number.

Then she would dial.

Sometimes the number didn’t exist.

Sometimes somebody answered.

Imagine that for a moment.

A child in a phone box in a small town, dialling a number she has invented, and a telephone ringing thousands of miles away in somebody else’s house.

When somebody did answer, she would explain herself.

You don’t know me. I live over here. I’m fascinated by America.

She would ask ask whether she could come and visit them. Sometimes the time difference meant they were awoken-they all answered her kindly.

I love this story.

But as an image.

A little enclosed phone box.

A world that feels too small.

A number made up out of nothing.

And the possibility that somebody, somewhere else, might answer.

John built transmitters.

She dialled America.

Once you start looking, searches for connection are everywhere.

Some are obvious.

We make friends. Fall in love. Have children. Join things. Send messages. Tell stories. Make somebody laugh and immediately look at their face to see whether they did.

Other searches are harder to recognise.

We become useful.

Interesting.

Funny.

Clever.

Good at looking after people.

Good at knowing what everybody else needs before they ask.

We become the organiser. The helper. The person who remembers. The person everybody calls when something has gone wrong.

Some people go in what looks like the opposite direction and become tremendously self-sufficient.

And quite a lot of people manage both.

Come closer.

Actually, that’s close enough.

This can look contradictory from the outside.

It makes considerably more sense if connection has been both something you needed and somewhere you learned to expect difficulty.

In Schema Therapy, we sometimes describe these longstanding emotional patterns as schemas.

An emotional deprivation schema is an expectation that the emotional care, understanding, attention or protection you need may not reliably arrive.

A social isolation or alienation schema is somewhat different: a feeling of being apart, outside, or not quite belonging with other people.

These can develop through childhood emotional neglect, inconsistent relationships or other early experiences.

Useful ideas.

But I sometimes think the clinical language describes what was missing better than it describes what people then build.

Because human beings adapt.

And adaptations can be astonishing.

Someone becomes exceptionally good at reading a room.

Somebody becomes funny.

Somebody looks after everybody.

Somebody creates whole imaginary worlds.

Somebody finds animals.

There is something particularly interesting about animals.

For some people, relationships with animals feel considerably easier to understand than relationships with humans.

A dog comes towards you.

Or it doesn’t.

There is less decoding.

And if you have spent years trying to work out what other people mean, that can be an enormous relief.

There may be a neurodevelopmental part to some of these experiences too.

For some autistic people, people with ADHD, and other neurodivergent people, the social world can involve more effort, more decoding or simply a repeated experience of being slightly out of step with what everyone else seems to find obvious.

Intense interests can bring pleasure, regulation, identity and competence.

They can also become ways into connection.

The thing you can talk about.

The community where suddenly everybody else wants to talk about it too.

The place where being intensely interested is not something to tone down but the reason you belong.

I don’t think we always need to decide whether an emotional pattern belongs to personality, childhood experience, neurodevelopment, culture or circumstance.

Usually people contain all of those things.

John was gay in a place and period where that left him outside what was expected.

Another person might be autistic in a family who cannot make sense of how they experience the world.

Somebody with ADHD might grow up hearing that they are too much, too disorganised, too intense or interested in the wrong thing.

Somebody else is simply the odd one out in their family.

Too emotional.

Too quiet.

Too loud.

Too sensitive.

Too imaginative.

Too interested.

Probably almost everybody knows some version of feeling alienated.

For some of us it comes and goes.

For others it becomes a much more significant part of how they understand themselves and how they approach relationships.

This is one reason I’m wary of therapy becoming an exercise in removing people’s adaptations.

We talk quite a lot about what difficult childhoods take from people.

We talk much less about what people build.

Curiosity.

Competence.

Humour.

Self-reliance.

An ability to notice the smallest movement in somebody else’s face.

A powerful relationship with animals.

Imagination.

Expertise.

Whole worlds.

Machines capable of sending music millions of miles into space.

An adaptation can have begun because something was difficult and still become a valuable part of who somebody is.

The more interesting therapeutic question is whether we still have freedom around it.

Can I help people because I want to, or do I become anxious when nobody needs me?

Can I be fiercely independent and also occasionally let somebody look after me?

Can I enjoy an absorbing interest without needing to disappear into it whenever human relationships become painful?

Can I tolerate somebody misunderstanding me without concluding that nobody ever will?

Can I go towards another person without having to become especially useful, interesting or impressive in order to earn my place there?

Can I keep what I built and have more choice about how I use it?

Perhaps that is a better way of thinking about some of our emotional patterns and adaptations.

Not:

How do I get rid of this part of myself?

But:

What was it doing for me?

What has it given me?

And do I still need it to work quite so hard?

John eventually stopped searching the skies.

And the documentary turns towards another kind of connection: finding a partner and a life with another person here on Earth. Netflix itself describes the film as a story about a man who spent thirty years trying to contact extraterrestrials and then made “a different connection here on Earth.”

I don’t think that means the alien search was secretly a relationship problem and love finally fixed it.

That would make John considerably less interesting.

I think perhaps both searches belonged to him.

The urge to know what else might exist.

The pleasure of building.

The fascination with things beyond ordinary life.

The willingness to send something out without knowing whether anything would answer.

And the hope that somewhere there might be somebody on roughly the same wavelength.

Which doesn’t sound especially eccentric when you put it like that.

It sounds remarkably human.

Perhaps we are doing versions of it all the time.

Sending things out.

A joke.

A story.

A message.

A piece of music.

A carefully constructed machine.

A made-up telephone number from a phone box.

And waiting to discover what might come back.

Watch John Was Trying to Contact Aliens on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81252991