Post-connection
What happens when we experience a profound sense of unity at an event — and then lose it when it ends?
These interlocking circles pop up a lot for me.
These seven pictures make up the Inclusion of Other in Self (IOS) scale. It was originally developed to measure interpersonal closeness: how connected you feel to another person (Aron et al., 1992).
Early studies using the IOS scale formed the basis of the self-expansion model. That’s the idea that humans seek out new experiences and exposure to new perspectives in order to develop their self-concepts. For a long time, self-expansion via the inclusion of the other in the self was mostly studied in the context of romantic relationships (Mattingly & Lewandowski, 2014).
Of course, feeling close to someone else is not the only way that people can extend or blur the boundaries of their selves. And so many other researchers have adapted these clever little circles to measure other types of connecting and self-expanding experiences.
Yaden and his coauthors (2017) call a group of such experiences self-transcendent. Self-transcendent experiences are states of consciousness that have two defining aspects: firstly, a diminished sense of self, and secondly, an increased feeling of connectedness or oneness. It’s easy to see how the pictures in the IOS scale illustrate both of those qualities.
For self-transcendent experiences, the different pictures of the IOS scale represent not your closeness to a particular person but the intensity of your experience and the degree to which you feel a sense of unity. Intensity really does range within the broad category of self-transcendent experience, which includes flow states; mindfulness; mystical, peak, and psychedelic experiences; and emotions like awe, love, and gratitude. (See also: Yaden & Newberg, 2022.)
If you are designing a collective event, I feel safe assuming you are designing for some flavor of self-expanding, transcendent, or connecting experience. Some of your goals could probably be expressed as moving participants farther along an IOS-type scale: merging them with each other, a group identity, or something “bigger” through a feeling of awe.
But this is The Afterparty, so as you might have guessed, all this explanation leads us to what happens after. Here’s another reason why I love the IOS scale: it gives us a great visual metaphor to understand what could be going on.
I don’t have any articles to cite, so let’s just use our imaginations. Think of a time when you were at a seven out of seven on the IOS scale, or pretty close. You are way, deeply connected with the Other. Maybe that Other is nature. Or it’s the crowd at a concert. Or, like a friend of mine from a couple months ago, it’s your fellow ecstatic dancers letting loose in an unadorned studio. (The idea of the IOS circles seemed to resonate with her, so hopefully it does for you too.) There is hardly a distinction between you and them. There is hardly a you, or your normal awareness of you-ness.
And then you step back into the normal world, where everyone is a contained Self circle, hardly getting into contact with Other circles. The Other to which you were connected goes away. Or at least, it’s no longer present in your felt experience. Where does that leave you?
There are a couple of possibilities.
Possibility 1: You leave feeling more. You remain expanded. Although physically separated from the group (or whatever entity you’re remembering), the sensitivity and openness from the connecting experience persists. Your boundaries of self are blurred and permeable.
Greater openness is actually inevitable. That’s what positive emotions do to us. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory is so named because positive feelings help us take in more information from our environments and build social resources.
If the Other we’ve connected with is a particular person, we may experience that unity as positivity resonance. This is where an emotional and biological synchrony reverberates between people, expanding our capacities for connection and well-being (Fredrickson, 2013). Fredrickson’s writing about positivity resonance implies what is depicted in the IOS scale: “Under the influence of positive emotions, your sense of self actually expands to include others to greater degrees” (p. 46). During a moment of connecting positivity resonance, she says, “you come to view one another as part of a unified whole—a single ‘us’ rather than two separate ‘me’s’” (p. 67).
A state of expansion is clearly wonderful. At the same time, it could be a little disorienting, or paradoxically alienating, as we go back to navigate the normal world of barely-touching circles.
Possibility 2: You leave feeling less. You go from one pole of the connection scale to the opposite end. If this change is too rapid, then it could feel like you’ve left behind the parts of yourself that had merged with the Other.
Maybe you are suddenly just a sliver of a self: as if you were still on the extreme end of the IOS scale but now disconnected from the huge part of you that was overlapped. A narrow crescent, which must somehow wax back into fullness.
I don’t mean this in a pathological sense. Even for the most intense mystical experiences of unity, the great majority of people consider them to be positive and meaningful events that don’t lead to any dysfunction (Yaden & Newberg, 2022). But if a feeling of connection can persist in the immediate aftermath of an experience, surely it’s possible for the “small self” to persist for a time too.
And sometimes we really do feel a loss after an amazing event is over. Could we understand part of that loss to be the loss of a self we left behind? At least until we’ve had a chance to recover, and then ideally to integrate the experience, leading to self-growth.
Both possibilities might be true at once. The very experience of connection is a paradox in this way, involving both an expanded and contracted self. So I wouldn’t be surprised if both aspects continued and lingered.
Party-starter guide: Gradual disconnection
If you suspect an experience you’ve designed may bring people way out to the deep end of the IOS scale, it will take some extra effort to gently bring them back to the shallows.
Find ways to gradually turn down the intensity of the experience as you approach the end, or provide an extended “off ramp” threshold
You may be able to reverse whatever techniques you used at the beginning of the experience to ease people into it
When gathering in person, create spaces that allow for lingering and debriefing—or afterpartying (for instance, my friend’s ecstatic dance group picnics in a nearby park right after class, which I love because it’s also time for recovery and replenishment)
Create less intense follow-up moments of connection or transcendence to help extend the positive experience, like a virtual reunion gathering or a space to share gratitude
Afterparty talk
Do the two possibilities following an intense self-transcendent experience (feeling more and feeling less) resonate with you? Have you felt mostly one or the other, or a mix of both? Was the transition from your experience back into a typical way of being abrupt, or was it gradual? How did that affect your feelings of expansion or loss afterward?
Party on
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References
Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596-612.
Mattingly, B. A. & Lewandowski, G. W. (2014). Broadening horizons: Self-expansion in relational and non-relational contexts. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(1), 30-40.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Love 2.0. Plume.
Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood Jr., R. W., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). The varieties of self-transcendent experience. Review of General Psychology, 21(2), 143-160.
Yaden, D. B. & Newberg, A. B. (2022). The varieties of spiritual experience. Oxford University Press.
Have we ever talked the sublime from the Romantic art era? It seems to have a lot of overlap in the ideas of "flow states; mindfulness; mystical, peak, and psychedelic experiences". I've heard the sublime causes us to lose track of time, feel connected to the universe (and the divine) and feeling infinitely large and small all at once. Perhaps it is just one sensation within the self-transcendent umbrella.