A Summer with Susan Cain

On being introverted in a world that values extroversion, as well as how the concept of "Bittersweet" allows us to connect

A Summer with Susan Cain

When I was a little girl I used to hate children’s parties. I found them exhausting and couldn’t see the fun. I quite liked pass-the-parcel, as we all had a nice sit down. But most of the time I felt a strange mixture of boredom, confusion and dissonance.

In some ways I’ve always had a sense of feeling a bit freakish, and whilst I’ve read the rules about what is supposed to be fun (adult parties now) I don’t see them as the big pleasure in life. I can enjoy them for a short while, but nearly always want to leave early. Over the years I’ve learnt how to handle a party – I single out someone who is up for a deeper conversation or find a group that is happy chatting all together and sit back and observe. All the time wondering if I am the only one who is finding the situation hard work and exhausting.

I want to go to parties. I certainly want to be invited to parties. I crave connection, friendship and belonging. I believe the hard graft pays rewards. Friends – if you are reading this – please don’t leave me out! And these days, I am much less confused about not finding parties fun.

I think I figured out on my own, as well as through talking to other people, that I am not the only one challenged by socialising. This summer, I finally read Susan Cain’s book ‘Quiet’, ‘The Power of Introverts in a World that can’t Stop Talking’. And the penny, that had sort-of dropped, landed deep. I felt profound relief and self-acceptance, I saw myself more clearly and felt that I better understood my own constitutional make-up. It was as if my very self was explained.  The research was presented in an alive and accessible way, and I understood that …

·      Quick fire conversations in dinner party situations are difficult for introverts to follow and join in with – and quite frankly – exhausting. We are not constitutionally made to mentally multitask, and I know I slip into my main ability to observe as my single task.

·      Introverts can be highly reactive and sensitive to stimulations. This explains why I find being ‘out there’ in the social arena exhausting and hit a limit as to how much I can keep processing.

·      All of us need connection – introverts are more likely to do this with deep and meaningful conversations about feelings and … well …. I guess that accounts for my focus on psychology, philosophy and the meaning of life. Once I have connected with a person on the deeper level, then I can chit-chat away. I can talk about shoes and whitter on about nothing till kingdom come, but I don’t enjoy doing the small talk first – which is often a more common way for many people to initiate connection.

·      Sometimes I think I am as happy as the unhappiest person I care about, like a herd animal scanning the horizon with my peripheral vision looking out for danger. I can have a constant hum of anxiety for my loved ones – what can go wrong? It feels hard to let go and be in the moment, and dance like there is no one watching. This is aligned with Dr Elaine Aron’s research on The Highly Sensitive Person, which Cain associates with many introverts, and I certainly associate with myself.

·      How can it be possible to crave intimacy and be an introvert? Well – being an introvert does not mean that we are socially inept nor even socially anxious. I just know that I can’t sustain long periods of high-octane socialising. Longer periods of deeper connection with small numbers are much less draining for me.

·      How can I be so comfortable giving lectures when I am an introvert? Cain explains how we can allow our passions to be a vehicle for energy to support us in reaching out and harnessing the extroversion needed to speak publicly. My passion for my subject allows me to ride the wave of the energy it gives me, as well as connections with students who share the passion.

Cain draws from numerous sources to present her take on introversion/extroversion, including Elain Aron (mentioned above, my response to threat and risk) and Jerome Kegan’s research on high reactivity and anxiety (see above, my response to stimulus). Here, Cain describes a Jungian perspective: -

Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external world of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough (p. 10).

Cain describes Aron’s work as including ‘sensory processing sensitivity… its relationship to conscientiousness, intense feeling, inner-directedness, and depth of processing…” (p. 270). Perhaps, if you are a counsellor, or a counsellor-in-training, you might identify with the above introverted qualities? There’s something very counsellor-ish about them!

As I wonder how my life experiences as an introvert are connected to the Person-Centred Theoretical framework, I also think of all the confusion of being in a culture that so values extroverted qualities, and Carl Rogers oft quoted words come to mind:

When I am not prized and appreciated, I not only feel very much diminished, but my behaviour is actually affected by my feelings. When I am prized, I blossom and expand, I am an interesting individual. In a hostile or unappreciative group, I am just not much of anything. People wonder, with very good reason, how did he ever get a reputation? I wish I had the strength to be more similar in both kinds of groups, but actually the person I am in a warm and interested group is different from the person I am in a hostile or cold group. (A Way of Being, p.23)

I think I’d go one step further than Rogers and say that I can feel ‘not much of anything’ if I can’t connect with a person. They may not be at all hostile, and perfectly friendly, but if they are not able to ‘see me’ then I withdraw, like a snail retreating into my shell. And to see me involves digging deeper than surface-level. It leads me to consider how Unconditional Positive Regard works in therapy, and is about seeing a person without a distorted judgemental view - beautifully summed up by Rogers as he says: -

When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity—then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship offered by an empathic person… provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another. (pp 160-161).

Having read Susan Cain’s book, I felt seen, understood and accepted, which somehow helped me to see myself, accept myself and feel as though I had a rightful place in the human race – perhaps the book offered me the core conditions of unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence? Cain certainly presented relevant and pertinent research that validated and resonated with my own experience, allowing my own unconditional positive self-regard. A process that happens within therapy.

I came to read “Quiet” ten years after it was published, as Cain’s work was dropped in to my psyche with a glorious splash earlier this summer as I watched her TED talk called “The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days”. Watching it I felt an electric charge when I recognised her description of how music in a minor key can infuse her with longing and joy simultaneously. I have been drawn to sad music all my life, give me a requiem or a Smiths song any day. I know I am not alone – Cain explains that people listen to sad songs on their play-list more than 4 times more than their happy songs. What is this bitter-sweet feeling that is evoked from music?

I feel it when I am in love, or in grief, or moved by a powerful line of poetry, or connected to another person. The delicious ache can feel almost unbearable, as there are no words for it. Cain quotes C.S. Lewis talking of “The inconsolable longing for we know not what”. The power of this longing is in joy and pain and seems to accompany feelings felt so deeply that they transcend something within us, as if the ‘sum of the parts is greater than the whole’. Even my daughter notices it in our dog. “Mum” she says… “When I get back to the house Olly is so overpowered – she loves so hard it hurts and she doesn’t know where to put it. She has to grab something to express herself – she’s got to squeeze a shoe or a teddy or even my sleeve!” I think of the times when I have been in my deepest contact with the rivers of my own pain, and there always seems to be a weird vein of something that is constant and peaceful and reassuring that steadies me whilst in my anguish. I do not know what that is.

This reminds me of how therapists and clients alike express that they can’t find the right words for when they seem to connect at a deep level. The moments of Relational Depth can feel ineffable, numinous, expansive, transcendental, as if ‘souls touch’. For me I can feel so present, and open to the experiences of my client and my own visceral responses to them, that all the emotions of the universe wash through me and the power of the moment seems to take over. There is a creative energy where new possibilities seem to emerge.

Cain’s TED talk accompanies her book “Bittersweet”. I’ll let Cain describe to you something of the essence of her thinking:

What we like are sad and beautiful things – the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing – fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. (p. 36)

Perhaps it is the capacity to be with all emotions that makes moments of Relational Depth seem so powerful. It certainly is a phenomenon that seems to be more frequently experienced within a therapeutic setting. We live in a world that values cheerful, and sees emotions such as sorrow, pain, fear, disgust and anger as ‘bad’ emotions. Being sunny can be a tyranny. At a dinner party I confessed to preferring winter to summer, finding summer anarchic, and the pressure to get out and have halcyon days to be quite oppressive. I like the peace of quiet evenings in, and the creation of warmth from the inside. Having described this, a couple of the dinner party guests looked at me as if I’d just confessed to having gonorrhoea. Oh, the shame!

In the best moments of therapy, a client is aware of such deep acceptance that they accept and connect with all of their feelings, dropping defences, no longer fighting difficult emotions and experience themselves as a whole person. Yesterday, a friend of mine was reflecting on her trauma with me. She feels that through engaging with it fully she will have ‘clean scar tissue’. I thought of the practice of Kintsugi, a Japanese process of repairing ceramics with gold, leaving a pot intact, whole and possibly more beautiful with the visibly repaired cracks.

Another friend has just recovered from her seventh cancer treatment. She talked of how cancer has been part of her life for so long that it has allowed her the space to know her own mortality. She uses words like ‘space’, where she does not grasp hold of life but allows herself to surrender and yield to a kind of emptiness. The emptiness is more like openness – as if the light floods in and a breeze flows through.

There’s something about realness here – an ability to meet life as it is – with joys, agonies and humdrums. I think of what allows a client to dare to meet a therapist at depth, and draw from Mearns and Coopers’ seminal book “Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy” that quotes clients as saying “I sort of felt I had more permission to be forward with her because she was OK about her own. … She was just so secure” … “I never felt kind of entangled in anything or that she had any agenda other than to just be there and be really warm and professional with me.” Mearns and Cooper describe therapists who can facilitate meeting at depth to be “…not trapped into relating only the surface level of self but who can respond to the client from their own depths. They are people who can be both receptive and expressive: they can take people in and they can reach out to people. In both these activities they are not deterred by clients’ various systems of self-protection. They honour these, but they do not collude with them.”

I recently contacted a clinical supervisor with whom I’d worked for years, and who’d been deeply with me over a time of personal grief, loss and anxiety. In her email she said “You and I had some close times together over the years and that leaves traces for ages. Idea for discussion: scars, scaring are such negative words but I cannot think of anything that means the same but positive.” It made me think of how my own life-wounds can act as touchstones of connection. These life wounds can be “events and self-experiences from which we draw considerable strength and which help to ground us in relationships as well as making us more open to and comfortable with a diversity of relationships.” (Mearns and Cooper, 2018). Maybe through being open to the bitter and the sweet in life, being able to be with that powerful place where we feel everything, that leads to a possibility of clean scar tissue and wholeness.

I believe many of my life-wounds have been through being constitutionally introverted and highly sensitive, in a present culture that imbues this constitution with shame. And thanks to wonderful books (thank you Susan Cain), friends, supervisors, therapists and my own ability to reflect and engage deeply with all of my experiences, some of the cracks are mending quite nicely, with some gold filling helping me feel more whole and real.

Here's a Rumi poem, to confound you, and maybe you might choose to see how you feel when you listen to some sad and beautiful music? Over to you – however Susan Cain has a whole play list on her website – it starts with “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve of course!

Cain, S. (2023). Bittersweet: How to Turn Sorrow Into Creativity, Beauty and Love. Penguin.

Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Penguin.

Mearns, D. & Cooper, M. (2018). Working at relational depth in counselling and psychotherapy. Sage.

Rogers, C. (1995). A way of being. Houghton Mifflin.