The Death of Curiosity as the Death of Care
January 03, 2024
Being curious about yourself is a foundational way to care for yourself
The root of the word(s) curious/curiosity traces back to the Latin root for care—cura. Like the words’ historical origins, I also view care and curiosity as inextricably linked. You wouldn’t be curious about something if you didn’t, on some level, care about it. When you are curious, you are giving your attention and concern to these things. Being curious lends itself to an openness to learning and what you learn can inform a new way of showing up in the world or relating to yourself and others.
In particular, being curious about yourself feels like a foundational way of caring for yourself. These days when your attention is pulled in so many directions, including from your phone and digital world, drawing your attention inward is special in and of itself. Curiosity can be simply defined as a desire to know, but it also comes with a decision to be in a place of not-knowing. Being curious about yourself is to recognize that what seems known about yourself is worth questioning: to wonder about who you are, what it means to be a human being, and how you show up or act in the world (or how you want to show up and act in the world and how to change). By being curious about what you may want, need, or be lacking, you can step outside of yourself and examine new possibilities for being, as well as question assumptions about why and how you act or feel a certain way.
As you age out of child-like wonder, you can often lose curiosity, which can limit possibilities
In early life, there is often a sense of awe and wonder with which you encounter yourself, others, and the world. Part of this is curiosity, which is tied in with awe and wonder. To be curious about something, yourself included, is to be struck with wonder. Curiosity in childhood often manifests as a seeking-out of new experiences and information. As life progresses, curiosity may no longer be at the forefront of your attention and focus. Things become more routine, expected, assumed, and unexamined. This can manifest in multiple ways. For instance, making assumptions about why a partner is acting a certain way can stifle communication and breed resentment and feelings of isolation. Not being curious about what you want or your purpose can also make you feel hopeless about your future and its possibilities.
The inability to find the inner strength or resources (whether in or outside of therapy) to maintain your curiosity can lead to a death of possibilities for you to create a different, more meaningful life. Certain possibilities of ways of being or living may become lost or overlooked along the way.
Not being curious about yourself can manifest as symptoms, which can, then, get reinforced by a lack of curiosity about what they’re communicating
When you don’t question your decisions or how you are showing up in life, you fall into patterns and routines, some of which may not be helpful or healthy. This lack of curiosity can make you stuck—in how you’re feeling, in your relationships, in your job, and in the way you interact with the world—and can manifest as symptoms. Many of these symptoms are often categorized in mental health diagnoses: intense emotions like sadness and anger, anxiety, mania, and hopelessness. These symptoms can, then, be further reinforced by not being curious about them.
Symptoms are a form of communication—they’re trying to tell you something. Often instead of being curious about where these symptoms are coming from and what they might be saying, people seek quick fixes, hoping the symptoms will just go away. However, it’s only through being curious that you can discover what is at the root of these symptoms and then, how to shift to a healthier approach.
For example, an individual feels really critical or negative about themself and only thinks of these feelings as coming from their own inner well-spring. This assumption serves to keep them in a vicious cycle of self-blame, doubt, and depression. What is a possible way out of this cycle then? Curiosity. If they become curious about these feelings and ask themself, “Why am I being so critical of myself? Did something happen to me that sent me down this path?”, they could identify something in their prior experiences or present circumstances that may shed light on their self-critical thoughts. Maybe a parent or other caregiver was overly critical when they were a child. This process can help externalize these feelings and find means to deal with them in a way that was previously inaccessible.
It can be difficult to get back in touch with deep curiosity: Therapy can help
It can be difficult to regain curiosity but not impossible. Much like physical exercise, curiosity is a muscle you flex. It can become atrophied if you don’t use it that often. Like working out, it can feel difficult when just getting back into it and unless done consistently, it may feel easy to fall out of sync.
One of the tougher initial steps is trying to really sit with the question of whether you’re actually being curious about yourself and how you’re feeling versus thinking that you’re doing so. There is a way to begin to be curious and identify what you thought was the cause of a feeling or symptom but, in fact, just scratch the surface. For instance, you might observe, “I was feeling angry because someone said this,” without searching deeper for why that statement made you mad. Or you might assume, “I’m feeling depressed because I always feel this way around the holidays,” without being curious about why the holidays raise annual feelings of depression.
Therapy can be helpful here. Part of the goal of therapy is to be able to become curious about the way you are feeling and to bring the underpinnings of those feelings into your consciousness to be able to talk about and engage with them. In this way, you become responsive to them instead of unconsciously acting out and being reactive. Much like a personal trainer, therapists can help guide you to ask certain questions and more thoroughly interrogate things about yourself and your feelings, which you may not otherwise have known how to do or may have just needed some nudging in the right direction. Through learning to become more curious in therapy, you can make strides toward creating a life that feels more meaningful, fulfilling, or simply more manageable.
