Is anyone else feeling wet dog in a bathtub-level lonely?
With this pandemic loneliness is on the rise. And we already lived in an epidemic of loneliness.
Humans are social creatures with attachment needs–and many of us are alone or surrounded by people who make us feel more alone. Sometimes loneliness doesn’t make sense.
This is a time when loneliness has turned from epidemic to global pandemic.
As we physically distance, the emotional distance between each other becomes greater.
I don’t have a solution to loneliness, but the great minds of neuroscience, psychology, literature, philosophy, and spirituality have written on it a great deal, and so I’m going to examine some of it in the following paragraphs.
1. “Saying Hello Again”
When I first announced this project, many people reached out to me and talked about their grief: the loss of a spouse, a beloved pet.
Many more of us are grieving relationships with those who haven’t died, but who we don’t get to interact with as much anymore.
Grief is a tricky subject.
In our society we don’t have established rituals for grieving. In the DSM if you’ve lost a loved one more than two weeks ago, and your grief coincides with the symptoms for Major Depressive Disorder, you’re considered mentally ill.
Imagine losing someone important to you and not feeling depressed for more than two weeks…
In many instances we NEVER “get over” the pain of losing someone. And yet, in many ways, grief that interferes with our productivity and way of being is pathologized.
Narrative Therapy invites us to grieve in ways that I have always felt were the richest and most helpful.
It does this through a series of “Remembering Conversations”. (For more, I’ve linked to the paper “Saying Hello Again” by David Denborough.)
You can speak remembering conversations out loud with a friend or therapist. You can write them down, or walk in the woods and reminisce.
Find a quiet space where you can think of your loved one. It could be someone real, currently alive but not present–a religious figure, or a famous person. A stuffed animal. A pet. An ex-lover. Or someone who has passed away.
Call them into your memory, and consider the questions.
– What did [your loved one] see when they looked at you through loving eyes?
– How did they know these things about you?
– If they could be with you today, what would they say to you about the efforts you are making in your life? What words of encouragement would they offer?
– What difference would it make to your relationships with others if you carried this knowledge with you in your daily life?
2. Feeling Lonely vs. Being Alone.
“You come home, make some tea, sit down in your armchair, and all around there’s silence. Everyone decides for themselves whether that’s loneliness or freedom.”
Surely solitude and loneliness are related but not equivalents. My patients and friends who are married with children crave alone time. My single friends who live alone crave company.
What most of us want, however, is the feeling of freedom that comes with being ourselves. And we all know that this feeling can arise alone in the comfort of our own company or in the presence of those who fully accept us.
The Dalai Lama has repeatedly claimed that he never gets lonely.
When he was asked the question “Do you get lonely?” at a speaking forum, it took the translator a while to convey the concept to him before he was able to answer.
According to him, loneliness is not a condition of solitude. It’s a condition of mindset.
He weighs in:
“We often are alone without feeling lonely and feel lonely when we are not alone, as when we are in a crowd of strangers or at a party of people we do not know.
“Clearly the psychological experience of loneliness is quite different from the physical experience of being alone.
“We can feel joy when we are alone but not when we are lonely… Much depends on your attitude. If you are filled with negative judgement and anger, then you will feel separate from other people. You will feel lonely.
“But if you have an open heart and are filled with trust and friendship, even if you are physically alone, even living a hermit’s life, you will never feel lonely.”
The loneliest I’ve felt is when I was in a relationship with someone whose love I couldn’t feel. But, I’ve felt completely at home and accompanied while traveling with strangers.
When do you feel you can truly be as you are?
3. On being socially awkward and telling ourselves stories.
We were in the midst of … isolation and so my friends cancelled their baby shower. They asked for books (if we were compelled to send gifts) and something else, I don’t remember…(clothes?)
So I hopped on Amazon and happily ordered a few books I remember loving as a kid: Amos the sheep who doesn’t want to give up his wool, Frances the badger who gets conned into giving up her porcelain tea set in lieu of a plastic one, and so on.
My friend is a therapist and I was sure he’d appreciate the psychotherapeutic subtext of these stories: finding self-worth, developing boundaries, etc.
Anyways, I sent the books off and forgot about it.
Then, one lonely evening I sat on the couch alone and let my Default Mode Network run rampant. I started ruminating on the books–they must have arrived. I hadn’t heard from my friends.
Maybe they were going to send out more formal thank you card.
Or maybe something was wrong.
Then I realized that they were about to have a BABY, a mere fetus+1 day. And I realized in horror I had sent them a pile of children’s books–for 3-5 year olds.
I felt out of touch, self-absorbed–I felt ashamed.
And then I felt ashamed at my shame–surely this wasn’t such a big deal? What was wrong with me? I tried to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy my way out of this thought trap–this story about being weird and disconnected. I couldn’t do it.
I eventually reached out to another friend who has two kids. She played the role of my prefrontal cortex (using others for emotional regulation is extremely helpful). She assured me that babies can’t read anyways and so, whatever, any kind of book is fine.
Duh… then I realized: this is the collateral of isolation.
If the gifts had been unwrapped in person, I might have realized they were slightly age inappropriate and would have made a joke. People would have laughed, we would have moved on.
Instead, my mind was free to fill the silent void with stories.
Eventually I confessed my neuroticism to my friends, embarrassed. They laughed and thanked me for the gift.
We tell ourselves stories about how others see us all the time. About their judgements and prejudices, motivations, anger, hostility and failings.
What story are you telling yourself about the people in your life?
4. The Power of Art.
Remember this scene from the movie Good Will Hunting?
Sean : [during a therapy session, after coming from the job interview with the NSA] Do you feel like you’re alone, Will?
Will : [laughs] What?
Sean : Do you have a soul mate?
Will : Define that.
Sean : Somebody who challenges you.
Will : I have Chuckie.
Sean : You know Chuck; he’s family. He’d lie down in fuckin’ traffic for you. No, I’m talking about someone who opens up things for you – touches your soul.
Will : I got – I got…
Sean : Who?
Will : …I got plenty.
Sean : Well, name them.
Will : Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O’Connor, Pope, Locke…
Sean : That’s great. They’re all dead.
Will : Not to me they’re not.
This exchange has always come to mind when I think about the loneliness of trying to find a soulmate–someone who knows the secrets and truths that lie deep in our hearts.
Do our soulmates need to be living people who we share our lives with? People we can converse with on a daily basis?
Ideally yes. However, many people in literature will speak of the phenomenon about feeling alone in a crowded room, with no one to share their private thoughts.
When we read someone’s deep thoughts and feelings and relate it… makes us feel less alone, especially if what we’re reading speaks directly to our own hearts.
You know that sensation, when you’re feeling something really deeply and then you read or hear someone else (maybe someone you know, maybe someone famous, or dead) describe that phenomenon in a way that is far more eloquent and articulate than you feel you ever could?
That feeling of being deeply validated and understood.
Literary soulmates.
People who have thought long and hard about this particular existential human experience you’re going through right now.
Not only have they lived it, but they’ve taken the trouble to put it into words, images, music. To remind you that you’re sharing a nervous system with 8 billion other living human beings .
To remind you that you’re not alone.
5. Making Friends as an Adult aka Going After What Lights You Up.
“You can’t make friends in your 30s”.
My friend’s brother is an investment banker in Manhattan and this was his claim a few years ago. My friend, a bonafide hippie (they are hilarious opposites) and I wondered if it was true.
I’ve spent pockets of my adult life wishing I had more friends. I’ve had long conversations with patients who wish they had more friends, or are looking to date and having trouble meeting people.
One of the things I was grieving during the last few months was loss of the spontaneity of meeting people.
No more picnics on the Island where a random group of people invite me to share their wine and then write letters to my Nonna.
No more “networking” events I decide at the last minute to drop in on, where I meet a friend who introduces me to someone who would soon be a best friend.
No more of that randomness. A contraction of possibilities.
The same friend wrote to me, in an email we sent to each other in our early 20s when we were out of school and trying to find our way.
“I don’t even know what it is about making friends. It can just be so random the way you meet someone in passing you might really connect [with] or you might ignore each other after 5 minutes and never speak again.
“The philosophy is right — if you go after what lights you up you are bound to stumble upon someone else who is lit on that in their own way and for their own reasons so you are bound to connect on some level!”
And, of course we’ve heard this so many times: go after what you’re passionate about and the people will trickle in, like a kind of osmotic current.
And it’s easier said that done, finding out what lights you up. I suppose it starts with creating an open question and waiting for the answer to show itself.
Lake surfing was one of the answers that manifested itself to me.
It’s been a blessing for me in so many ways–from even finding out it existed, to randomly meeting people in the line-up to my regular surf buddies, to the photographers who celebrate us on social media, the sport, although technically a solo one, is all about connectivity.
Water is sticky. so are we.
6. Self-Soothing.
Will scientists and drug companies create a pill for loneliness?
Hormones like oxytocin, endogenous opioids (our body’s own morphine) and allo-pregnenalone, a steroid hormone related to estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and cortisol, are all common targets for “medicating” loneliness.
We can medicate loneliness ourselves, however through self-soothing.
Self-soothing behaviours include:
– talking about your emotions with others
– social and physical warmth (getting cozy and Hygge)
– Touching, including self touch and self holds
– Soothing music
– Satiety through consuming high-calorie foods (chocolate, anyone?)
– And even drugs, although engaging in the above self-soothing behaviours tends to protect against drug addiction in the research–if you’re able to reach for a cozy sweater and a puppy in order to self-soothe you’re probably less likely to turn to alcohol.
Self-soothing behaviours increase oxytocin in the brain. They calm areas of the brain like the insula and amygdala that are associated with anxiety.
Self-soothing boosts endogenous opioids (research shows that opioids like morphine help calm the sting of social rejection, which our brain perceives to be the same as physical pain), and serotonin and dopamine.
Self-touch or self-holds is an excellent way to self-soothe.
In my podcast on Polyvagal Theory with Dr. Steph Cordes, we talk about self-touch: things like putting a hand on your chest, wrapping your arms around yourself, child’s pose, or cupping your face in your hand.
Sometimes speaking your own emotions can be helpful (“I feel sad right now” or “This is hard”).
Also, particularly where these emotions pertain to loneliness, invoking a common humanity can he a helpful tool for feeling less alone and can help soothe and process hard feelings. “Everyone feels this way sometimes”, or “Suffering is a part of life”.
In Mindful Self-Compassion, invoking a common humanity is an important step in taking the burden of our feelings off of ourselves and recognizing that we’re all interconnected in the emotional space.
How do you self-soothe?
7. Attunement.
“[Attuning with others] is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships.
“Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”
– Dan Siegel, MD
Attunement is the process of responding to another’s emotional cues.
Infants first learn attunement from their parents. When a parent can read a baby’s expressions or hear her cries and respond appropriately: with comfort, food, warmth, a diaper change, it builds a sense of trust in the infant’s body. The baby feels seen and understood by the world.
A lack of attunement can cause attachment insecurity: leading to feelings of anxiety, distrust, emotional avoidance, depression, and relationship dissatisfaction.
It’s ultimately lack of attunement that results in mental health challenges in an adult’s life.
Attuning to others can be hard if you didn’t receive the proper attunement from your parents. However, we can still learn to attune to ourselves and others as adults.
Here are some tips for learning how to be more attuned:
– Attune to yourself first: starting by recognizing what you feel in your body: what thoughts, emotions and feelings are present? How are you breathing?
– Practicing mindfulness can help you understand what is going on in your body and mind, as you learn to attune to yourself emotionally.
– When trying to attune to another, limit distractions (turning off the TV, putting away cellphones, etc.) so that you can fully pay attention to the emotional space.
– Make eye contact and mirror the others’ physical cues: mimic their postures, gestures and even tone of voice. Physical mirroring is a hallmark skill of attunement.
– Listen carefully with compassionate curiosity: seek to understand before seeking to be understood (a useful cliche). Can you give the other person the benefit of the doubt? Can you try your best to relate to what they might be staying and hold them in what Carl Rogers called “Unconditional Positive Regard”?
– Can you try to identify what emotions someone might be experiencing as you talk to or sit with them? What are you feeling in your own body?
8. Sharing the Things that Matter
“Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people – it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.”
— Johann Hari, from his book Lost Connections.
Johann also writes:
“Be you. Be yourself…
“We say it to encourage people when they are lost, or down. Even our shampoo bottles tell us—because you’re worth it. But what I was being taught is—if you want to stop being depressed, don’t be you. Don’t be yourself. Don’t fixate on how you’re worth it. It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy. Don’t be you.
“Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it.
“The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.
“No, don’t be you. Be connected with everyone around you. Be part of the whole. Don’t strive to be the guy addressing the crowd. Strive to be the crowd. So part of overcoming our depression and anxiety—the first step, and one of the most crucial—is coming together.”
And,
“Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself—I try to do something for someone else. I go to see a friend and try to focus very hard on how they are feeling and making them feel better.
“I try to do something for my network, or my group—or even try to help strangers who look distressed.
“I learned something I wouldn’t have thought was possible at the start. Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better. Or I would try to channel it into more overt political actions, to make the society better. When I applied this technique, I realized that it often—though not always—stopped the slide downward. It worked much more effectively than trying to build myself up alone.”
I think what Johann is saying is that a sense of meaning, purpose, belonging can’t coexist with loneliness.
Psychoanalyst Francis Weller says it another way,
“at some point we have to stop being the one looking for homecoming and be the one offering it.
“As long as I identify as the homeless child who didn’t get welcomed back I need to make a pivot and say ‘I can also, because of that wound find the medicine of welcome’.”
In what way does being of service help you feel more connected?
How have you learned to deliver what Francis calls “the medicine of welcome” to others?
9. Needs are the doorway to the Inner Child, Imagination, Desire and Purpose.
James Hillman, the great Jungian psychoanalyst urges us to use our needs–loneliness being one–to explore the depths of our soul.
Loneliness, according to Hillman is, like any other need, “a voice that demands to be satisfied”.
We believe that loneliness represents a void that can be filled by something external: a person’s physical presence, or the actions or words of another that fills the space inside.
But a need is actually a doorway: to the Inner Child, who opens the door to the imagination. The need represents something much more, not just love but a kind of archetypal, “divine” love. Not just company, but the deep longing to be whole, to unite with “the beyond”.
When we feel needy, or lonely, our Inner Child, according to the Jungians, is crying out. It doesn’t just want to complain.
Hillman says, “The intensity of the need reflects the immensity of the world beyond from which it comes.”
The child can help us imagine–when we articulate the need, speak it out loud and feel deeply into the body the sensations that that need creates (where do you feel the need? Where do you feel loneliness?), we let it come up fully. We turn towards the child.
We can then be specific about the need. What are we fantasizing will fill this loneliness? Who do I want with me? What would they say? What would they do? Are we riding horses in the sunset?
Allowing the images to come.
Allowing the needs to become wants.
When we stay with the loneliness long enough, this voice crying to be satisfied, until it becomes a want, something interesting happens.
The emptiness of the need, the lack that represents loneliness begins to become filled: with wanting, with desire.
The writer DH Lawrence tells us that “Desire is holy”.
It is hot, fiery, passionate. It fills us: “I am filled with desire”. It motivates us. It makes things happen. Desire connects us with the beyond. It moves us towards our purpose.
According to Hillman, a fear of desire stands in the way of finding one’s purpose.
We are afraid of the Inner Child: the weakness that being needy represents.
We feel shameful at our weakness, at our neediness. We deny the needs, or try to fill them some other way. Or we criticize ourselves, punishing the child, or ignoring the child.
But what if this deep, existential loneliness, this longing to be united with what “lies beyond” or what lies deeply in our soul is really the doorway to purpose, to fire, to passion, to an integrated and complete psyche.
What if this neediness is not asking to be filled by external factors: parties, social media likes, validation, but with this deeply felt sense of desire that fuels us in the direction of our dreams?
What is the loneliness asking of you?
When you let the loneliness cry out, when you allow it to provide you with images, and when you allow the loneliness to become a want, what does it drive you to do?
What does it fill you with?
What does it inspire you to do next?
10. Getting To Know Yourself.
“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre.
Through this series we’ve explored the concept of feeling alone while surrounded by other people, and feeling utterly content while in complete solitude.
And, so loneliness isn’t so much about being physically isolated, but in our deeper inner feelings of connection.
The Stoics and the Buddhists tell us that, when we feel lonely it’s because we’ve stepped out of the present moment.
We’ve turned our thoughts to what we lack; we’ve identified with our suffering.
And, according to James Hillman and many other thought leaders on the psyche, we’ve decided that the solution to our suffering is located “out there”, in the external world.
But no, say the Buddhists, Stoics and other philosophers. The solution to our suffering is internal. It lies within. And so, they say, when you’re lonely, you need to spend even more time alone–getting to know yourself.
When we know ourselves, we feel relaxed in our own company. When we know ourselves, we can share ourselves with others when we’re blessed with their company, thus feeling more connected to them and less alone.
Perhaps loneliness isn’t being isolated from others—not all the time.
Loneliness is the feeling we have when we’re isolated from our true selves.
So, how can we get to know ourselves?
The Buddhists say, sit.
Pay attention to your thoughts, your emotions and your body sensations in the present moment.
James Hillman tell us to watch our pain turn into desire, which tells us what the soul deeply wants.
This time of year is hard for a lot of us. Add on a global pandemic, and this year is looking like a challenging one for most.
Can you spend some quiet time alone with yourself?
Can you watch the feelings of loneliness arise and fall in your body?
Can you deliver yourself a little self-compassion?
In those private moments of emptiness, say:
“Loneliness is here”.
“Everybody feels this way sometimes”.
“May I be kind to myself”.
And, can you say:
“Can I sit with these feelings?”
“It’s ok, they’re already here.”
