28/09/2025
I disagree with this post. I love deep people and self-reflective people. And actually they are everywhere! Seeing ourselves and others like us as rare isn’t helpful. That mindset doesn’t help us to find connection.
Depth doesn’t have to be isolating!!
Self-reflective spaces exist. The Focusing world is deeply reflective in its very nature. The Hakomi world is about self-study. The mindfulness world is about sitting together and fully experiencing our depth (even if we do it in silence, we still talk about it afterwards!) The LGBTQ+ world is generally about exploring experience and delving into societal constructs like gender and sexuality. The polyamory community explore relationship in depth. The neurodivergent community are often much more willing to talk about something than nothing! ADHD people flow from subject to subject with passion and ease. Autistic people can offer the deep dive on the subjects that fascinate them.
We just need to listen. Just about anyone will tell you their struggles and talk about how their inner world works, if you are a grounded empathic non-judgemental listener.
Many people who say they aren’t good at making small talk, fail to consider whether they might be able to listen to small talk. When you don’t know what to say when you talk to someone, that is worrying about the wrong thing! We can let go of what we should say and instead lead with our ears - and we get to hear a lot more. And when you listen to someone generously, they will be much more forgiving when you talk about deep things!
And similarly, if we let go of our fear of failure or rejection and instead remind ourselves that it’s ok to make mistakes and to risk saying the wrong thing. And we remind ourselves that we won’t die if we sit through an awkward pause in conversation, we could just get curious about the sensation of how it feels. Doing these things repeatedly, we can gradually desensitise ourselves to the fear of starting conversation.
We can also let ourselves regard connection as simply humans being with other humans. This lets us tune into the abundance of people in the world, rather than focusing on our lack of connection. When we meet everyone with loving presence and warm-hearted attention, then we place less pressure on ourselves to seek a relationship. We turn off the anxious seeking circuits of our brain. We focus less on our sense of loneliness or loss. And instead we turn on our tend and befriend circuits that are capable of feeling a sense of deep connection and belonging. This is priming the connection pump, so to speak.
Seeing depth and connection as rare isn’t helpful. Most people want to be deep but outdated social rules (especially in the UK) make it taboo. That might make it seem rare but if we are deep people we can take our depth out in the world with us. We can be deepeners wherever we go, spreading permission to reflect and speak about the big things!
