What is Detachment and Why You should Practice it.
Date Posted: December 2nd, 2009
Last week when I wrote about how to develop a thick skin, I mentioned that one way to do it was to practice detachment. I’ve found detachment to be a weird, uncomfortable, hard to really wrap my mind around kind of topic, so I’ll take some time here to examine it in some detail.
First: What is detachment? Why is detachment a good idea?
Detachment is not letting your primitive brain get emotionally involved with a situation. It’s not letting emotion be the sole driver of your decisions. It’s pretending that you’re an outside observer watching what’s happening. Here are some examples to illustrate the concept and show you when it’s a good idea to be detached.
Buying a house When you’re buying a house (or making any large purchase or big decision) it’s a good idea to not be too attached to it. Meaning it’s a good idea to not care about what your buying or at least remind yourself constantly that it’s not yours yet. If you fall head over heels in love with it you run the risk of not seeing the flaws it has or of getting incredibly disappointed when it fails the house inspection or when your lender refuses to give you the money you need to buy it. On top of that, the house is a physical object. It could burn down. A meteorite could crash into it. It’s impermanent. The more attached to it you are, the more unnecessary disappointment you risk.
Your kids Or more specifically, the dreams you have for your kids. The truth is your children are not what you dream, hope, or wish them to be. You may envision them as captains of industry when really all they want to do is teach. You may envision them as staying nearby forever when they really want to travel the world and go on adventures. The more attached you are to what you want your kids to become, the more difficult your life will be. Your kids either won’t fulfill their potential and will resent you, or they’ll go off and live the life they were meant to live and you’ll mourn the loss of something you never had. The less attached you are to the dreams you have for your kids, the more able you are to help them flourish. By being less attached, I mean you still care and love your kids but you’re willing to put aside your expectations of them. You’re willing to remind yourself that your hopes are not necessarily reality.
Beliefs Your beliefs are based on the experience you’ve had until now. In the future you may find that beliefs you’ve had no longer make sense to you anymore. The less attached you are to your beliefs the easier it will be to live in keeping with where you are at any given moment. This is where things get tricky. What does it mean to be detached from your beliefs? They make up your identity, after all. The trick here is to be attached to truth. That is, be attached to what’s real, to what is. Our understanding of what is true changes over time, but the commitment to truth doesn’t have to change. All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, want truth in our lives. Identify yourself as a truth seeker, and you’ll almost automatically be detached from your beliefs.
Proposals Let’s say you’ve made a proposal for some project that you need to get approved by an executive board. The more you attached you are to each of the details in your proposal, the less likely it will get passed. And if it does get passed it’ll be with a lot of changes you feel uncomfortable about. On the other hand, if there’s a goodly number of aspects you don’t really care about and only a few things you can’t compromise on, the more likely your proposal will get passed and the more likely you’ll be happy about what got passed.
Detachment is not about suppressing emotion
Whenever I heard or read about detachment I’d always felt uncomfortable about it because I was afraid it meant I was supposed to be totally and completely rational. That my having warm attachment feelings was bad. That it was a bad idea to let those feelings have any say in my decision making. Whenever I thought about it I’d see that actually doing what I thought detachment meant would be stupid. If you’re choosing your career based solely on what’s practical you may find 9-5 schedule unbearable. If you’re choosing a partner based solely on practical rational things (How much debt does he have? How much money does he make? Do I like her parents?) you’ll find your home life lacking. It’s often an excellent idea to follow your intuition.
On further examination and after practicing detachment anyway, I realized that’d I’d misunderstood what was meant by detachment. Detachment is not the same as not feeling anything at all. When you’re detached from your emotions, you still feel them. They even can play a part in your decision making (Acting on intuition, anyone?), but your emotions do not control you. They’re a source of information.
Take the house, for example. Aaron and I are buying a house right now and it has been a fairly emotional process. For one thing the house I’d sort of been eying since the summer turned out to be in our price range, was still available in the fall, was one of the first houses we looked at, and when we went to see it it fit a lot of our wants. I basically fell in love with it. But I didn’t let that attachment feeling drive me to make an offer right there. I acknowledged the feeling, made a mental note, and then Aaron and I got a buyer’s agent and looked at 20 more houses.
Waiting to get a buyer’s agent and looking at more houses was a great idea, and something I could only do by forcing myself to be somewhat detached from the strong warm feelings I first had toward the house. By getting a buyer’s agent that meant that we weren’t the ones doing the negotiating, and by looking at all those other houses we really appreciated what the house had to offer. Also by being at least somewhat detached, I was mitigating the disappointment I’d feel if the house failed the inspection or we couldn’t get a loan or something. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be disappointed if it doesn’t go through, but it won’t be nearly as bad as it would be if I let myself be totally attached to it.
In short, detachment is a really good idea. It gives both sides of your brain a chance to work out a problem. It lessens the pain you feel when things change unexpectedly. It makes you feel happier because it aligns your life with truth. Yay detachment!
