How to Work Through Loneliness

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Hannah Reads About Things. So today I'm gonna read an article that I wrote for Psychology Today on August 21st, 2019. I got my laptop ready to go and it is called one of my favorite topics of all time, Why Am I So Lonely? So without further ado, Why Am I So Lonely? Being alone and feeling lonely are two different experiences. Human beings are wired for connection on every level. Physically— I'm really trying to figure out like what the best way to do this is. Ah, okay. Human beings are wired for connection on every level. Physically, we crave the comfort of a warm, nurturing body from the moment we leave the womb. Mentally, we are taught and conditioned to seek opinions, advice, and guidance from others. Emotionally, we crave connection, intimacy, and the feeling of being seen and heard by others. So what happens when we feel as though we have been stripped of connection? Loneliness sets in. The feeling of loneliness can exist in us even when we are surrounded by people. We can be in the midst of a crowded room, we can be the life of the party, we can be on stage in front of our peers, and yet feel incredibly alone. And yet feel incredibly lonely. Loneliness and being alone are two different emotional states. We can feel lonely even in the confines of our intimate relationships. Just like I said in my last video, we can lay in the same bed as our partner and feel the weight of loneliness grip our psyche, our soul, and our hearts. So how do we deal with, work through, and cope with loneliness? We need to first acknowledge that it's there. Just like any problem-solving process, the first step step— not in the 12 steps, but the first step in acknowledging and working through any problem— is first identifying the problem. So sometimes we come into therapy, or we're talking to our friends or our family, and we'll say things like, I just feel stuck, I'm full of shame, I'm so uncomfortable, I just— I'm just not happy, I'm just not happy. And that's a lot to unpack, and we need to really get specific and hone in on, well, what's there? Why am I unhappy? And one of the most common causes of unhappiness is that feeling of loneliness. And loneliness can stem from a lack of authenticity in our relationships, which I'm going to talk about in a second. So, so how do we deal with, work through, and cope with loneliness? We need to first acknowledge that it's there. We can feel lonely in a myriad of experiences. The most overtly processed experience of loneliness is the one that follows a painful breakup. Heartache is an incredibly painful emotion to endure. We have an internal narrative that may feed us lies about our self-worth, as in, "No one's ever gonna love you," "You're not good enough," etc. We may also have a tape of negative self-talk trying to convince us that we will never find love, that we will never be happy, and that we are inherently flawed due to not making this specific relationship work. In this case of loneliness, the first step is to notice what's there. When we bring a level of mindfulness, which is non-judgmental awareness, to our internal narrative, it sets in motion a process that can prevent driving ourselves into a shame spiral. I just want to make sure this is positioned in a way that, that I— okay, don't hate. In this case of loneliness, the first step is to notice what's there. I just read this. Moving on. Often post-breakup, we slide into a slew of negative self-talk. Not only are we feeling lonely, but we often shame ourselves for not being good enough. We must ask ourselves, am I perceiving this situation realistically, or am I shaming myself to find meaning behind this pain? Maybe we feel angry because being angry is easier than feeling the weight of the pain we are experiencing. This negative self-talk and self-directed anger compounds the intensity of our loneliness. So we must first become aware of what we're feeling. Then we must accept that we're feeling that way. One of the worst things we can do, and also we do this to other people, like, "Oh, you shouldn't feel sad. Oh, don't feel that way." So unhelpful. If I'm going through something and someone tells me, "Oh no, it's not that big of a deal. You shouldn't be stressed," that's not going to make me less stressed. That's probably going to lead me to feel ashamed that I'm feeling that way, resentful at the person who's minimizing my emotions and trying to silver line my experience, and just annoyed at the world because I feel totally not seen seen and heard, which we now know is the cause of a lot of loneliness. So try not to silver line other people's experiences. I have a whole video, I think, about gratitude shaming, where we meet other people's pain with this level of almost faux spirituality, like, "Everything happens for a reason." Great. That's cool if you believe that. That's actually something— I don't know, sometimes I believe it. But in any case, that may not be helpful for everyone else. I'm actually working on a project that some of you have seen on social media that It's like a coffee table style book called something along the lines of Things People Say That Are Unhelpful, right? Because we don't like seeing someone else in pain and we take it on as our job to fix it. But really we're just minimizing their emotions and it's so not helpful. Okay. So we need to accept that we're feeling that way. Throw out the should narrative. I shouldn't be feeling this. I should be more grateful. I should. Stop. Try to just stop to the best of your ability. Notice when you're shitting on yourself, as coined by the positive psychologist Albert Ellis, and instead accept your feelings. Radically accept it. Okay, I'm lonely. We cannot grow through pain, trauma, wounds, etc. if we don't first radically accept the feeling and the experience is there to begin with. Okay. As humans, we have— okay, we must first become aware of what we're feeling, and then we must accept that we're feeling that way. Rather than radically trying to change it, we learn to accept it, embrace it, and then begin to nurture ourselves. As humans, most of us have a hard time with self-compassion, but working through loneliness requires self-compassion. And I'm not saying it works better with— requires. The wording is very important. So that we can provide ourselves with the nurture and care that we aren't receiving from others. It's important to note here that we accept the love we think we deserve. This is a quote from Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and it definitely rings true. Once again, we accept the love we think we deserve. Rather than digging a hole in our loneliness and getting comfortable there, we can begin to take a realistic look at what went wrong in the relationship, even if you're still in it. Am I self-sabotaging? Did we try to change ourselves to make it work? Are we feeling lonely because we miss the person or because we miss the idea of being in a relationship? These are important questions to ask ourselves. But loneliness doesn't only stem from heartache. We can also feel lonely amongst our friends, coworkers, or our peers. We can feel lonely in our own family. Loneliness can stem from a lack of authenticity in our relationships. It— if we feel as though our peers or anyone around us doesn't truly know us, that they don't see the real me, or that they misunderstand us, this may be a reflection of our own lack of authenticity. Living our authentic truths can be incredibly difficult, especially if we struggle with a lack of self-worth or an abundance of shame. This internal incongruence can lead to feelings of loneliness in all aspects of our lives. So I truly believe that if I'm wearing a mask, if I'm trying to play a role, if I'm trying to show you my representative, right, the best version of myself, I'm going to feel lonely in that relationship cuz I'm not truly being seen. And if you feel not seen and not heard, are you showing your true self and are you speaking your truth? And if the answer is yes and you still feel not seen and heard, that may be a reflection of the other person's capacity for true empathy and emotional availability. But so there's two different things going on here. Is it that the other person's truly incapable or have you not even given them, whoever it may be, the chance to see you and hear you because we're so scared of what others think, which is really, really common and normal, but we have to talk about it. Hmm, perhaps we are trying to maintain relationships and friendships with people that we don't actually like. This may sound absurd, but it is often true. I asked on social media a while ago, if you, uh, let's see, if we totally eliminated the feeling of obligation, who would we keep in our lives? Who are the people that are in our lives because we feel obligated to keep them there, or we're afraid of how they'll react if we set a boundary? That is definitely something to look at. Just saying. The sad truth is that many of us would prefer to be around people who we don't like than to not be around people at all. But it doesn't have to be so black and white. We can live authentically and attract people who value the same ideals as us. This may require us to detach from former relationships or friendships that no longer serve us. And as selfish as that can sound, the reality is, as human beings, we're always growing and changing, and sometimes this Illusion of I need to keep them in my life because we've been friends for so long. That longevity thing can be really toxic because we're maintaining relationships and friendships with people who we feel like it's a one-sided relationship. We feel like it's just toxic in general. We feel like we can't be our true selves, et cetera. Things to look at and think about. Trying to force relationships with people who are growing at different rates and potentially are on different wavelengths can lead us to a feeling of loneliness. Many of us can feel inherently lonely due to a lack of nurture that we received as children, as stated earlier. I don't know if I stated that earlier, but the worst part about this feeling of learned loneliness is that we have a tendency to internalize it as being an inherent flaw within ourselves. This is simply not true. So I was recently at a trauma training, and the presenter said that when we're children, right, if you had parents who got divorced, who fought, who one of them left, one of them was never around, any level of conflict, which if you grew up in a family with no conflict, that's alarming because what is that a thing? Please comment on this video if you grew up in a family that was 10 out of 10 functional and healthy. Does that exist? I'm genuinely asking, not for a friend. I'm just asking. Um, so this presenter in this trauma training was saying how as children, let's say She has a 4-year-old, and at that level, brain-wise, cognitively, developmentally, everything is about them. So she said her son's favorite store is Target. So when she walked back into the house from a conference with a Target bag, it wasn't for him. He didn't know that. His first question was, "What's in the bag for me?" Because we internalize things as being about us when we are children. So when there's any level of family conflict, abandonment, lack of nurture, neglect, anything, we take it on to be about us, even when that's just not true. And so that's something that if that's a wound that has not healed— not about the target bag, but let's say something, you know, your own experiences— we carry that into adulthood. If you're someone that constantly is on the lookout, lookout for if someone's mad at you, are they upset with you, are they disappointed, and you need to make sure that everything's okay all the time, that smoothing of conflict, that doesn't just pop up as adults. That's usually rooted to something that happened or a period patterns that happened in our childhoods, right? If you had a parent who was volatile and angry as a child, you internalized it. That's just how we operate as humans. So again, there's just like a world of stuff to unpack and uncover if you are truly willing to work and grow, etc. So we are not flawed, we are wounded. These wounds have led to inconsistent and potentially, potentially unhealthy attachments with many people. That we have come across throughout our lives. But as a result, we can begin to tell ourselves that we are the problem or that we are unlovable. This often leads to us feeling depressed and losing all optimism for the future and lonely. This depressed feeling or clinical depression— two different things— can then compound on itself when left unattended. Untreated wounds can lead to loneliness. Loneliness can lead to depression. Depression can then exacerbate the loneliness, which creates more wounds that are left unaddressed. This downward spiral feels impossible to get out of, but it isn't. There is always hope and there is always a solution. We just need to acknowledge the problems and then go after that healing. As aforementioned, we need to seek help. We need to address and treat our wounds. If we saw a wounded animal on the side of the street, we probably wouldn't shame it for not being able to connect better with his animal friends. And if you were to look at a wounded animal and say, God, he should be doing better, that's really disturbing. That's an opinion of mine. But like, what? We would ideally care for the animal, nurture it, and love it back into health. If you are a dog lover or a cat lover and your dog or cat got sick, you probably wouldn't get mad at the dog or cat for being sick and wounded. You would take it to a vet so that it could get the healing and the nurture and the treatment that it needs. Human beings are the exact same way, but because of our frontal lobe, we go to this place of complex thinking that is almost always internally shaming. I should do better, I should be better, what's wrong with me? And we compare ourselves to other people. Social media is a cesspool of loneliness because we're comparing our insides to everyone else's outsides. This is an opinion and this is really harsh, but if I'm really secure about something in my life, I don't feel the need to post about it all the time. That doesn't mean I don't post, but I think posting and sharing intentionally and kind of pausing and checking our motives is really important. If I'm having a bad body image day and then I start posting tons of pictures of me in a bikini, That's alarming because what I'm doing is I'm really lengthening this divide between how I feel and what I'm promoting to the world. And then my validation and self-worth is then contingent on the amount of likes I get. It's all— it's just like this cesspool. And because a lot of us grew up with social media on some level, it's, it's like instinctive. It's like, that's what we know how to do. Here's another— this is an opinion. So I will say that. But in my opinion, if I'm in a relationship and I want to post about it all of the time, pictures of us, look what we're doing, is there a part of me that's insecure? Because the more secure I am in my relationships, the less urge I feel to post about it and to tell everyone. Social media is essentially us just screaming into the void, look at me, because we want to be seen and heard. But if we're so active on social media, are we also truly nurturing the relationships in our life? Just something to think about. Again, people probably won't like this tangent I just went on, but it's my YouTube channel, so it's fine. We need to treat ourselves as a wounded animal or a small child that didn't receive that which we needed. The reality is that we do not feel— that we need not feel lonely, as we have a world of possibility and connection inside of ourselves. But the real work is first accepting the loneliness, identifying the root cause, and then working at whatever is blocking us from genuine, authentic connection. You are not alone, not now, not ever. But we need to deconstruct the things that are in our way from genuine connection and authenticity. So if you want a quick fix, try limiting your social media use. Try looking at the relationships in your life and kind of taking that inventory of why you're in certain dynamics, why you're in certain relationships. Is it obligation? Is it because you get something out of it? Is because you like being a helper? Is it because you like being needed? Just really increasing your level of mindfulness non-judgmental awareness as what's going on. Because if you feel lonely and you don't change anything, you will keep feeling lonely. If nothing changes, nothing changes. That's not an original thought of mine, but yeah. Anyway, okay, bye.