Understanding Loneliness

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We all feel lonely at times and there is a growth potential in enduring it.

Self-acceptance, not rescue, empowers us against the hold of loneliness.

Trusting our own completeness leads to healthier, liberating relationships.

Any one of these false beliefs might lurk within the fear of aloneness:

I am alone because no one wants me.

No one wants to be with me.

I have nothing to offer.

I am totally powerless.

It is never going to get any better.

I feel less than other people who are able to live their lives happily.

I may have to grieve and not be able to handle it.

I may feel fear and be devastated by it or not be able to do anything about it.

I am the only person feeling this.

To deal with loneliness, it is helpful to stay with yourself, not abandon yourself. Trust yourself. Stay one more minute in the abyss than you can stand, increasing the time each day. That one more minute will increase your power and inner resources exponentially. Unconditional love of yourself is loving yourself when you feel the worst. This creates a sense of completeness. Carl Jung wrote, “There is no loneliness, only ever-increasing all-ness.” You are all yourself when you let yourself feel all your feelings.

I can say to myself: The dragon of loneliness suddenly appears and wants to control me. This loneliness is the longing for mirroring, unconditional acceptance, and affiliation that I missed out on long ago. Loneliness is the resident pain in my psyche. It is an abandonment fear that has been in me all my life. It is a wilderness only I can cross on the demanding trek to my adulthood.

A face of someone I miss—or a wish for company—arises between the dragon and me. When I want someone to be my St. George, I am avoiding my dragon. Paradoxically, the solution is not in a rescuer but in an unconditional acceptance of the loneliness itself, allowing it a full unobstructed track to run its course within me. I then feel my own vulnerability safely because, by taming the dragon on my own, I am empowering and nurturing myself.

The loneliness is actually the signal of a wound that is already healing since I am finally feeling it—allowing it into consciousness, the only place where the fear in it can be truly faced and befriended.

When I think literally that a person is what I desperately need, I am going for the lowest stakes: soothing, distraction, and immediate relief. One's absence is not the true source of my pain nor would their presence be freedom from the pain. It would only go underground, into my unconscious, the only place in which it can truly hurt me. My unconscious assumption is that I cannot survive without this person, or sex, or a new partner. When I bring this assumption into consciousness—even vocalize it—its absurdity is revealed and my neediness is reduced. In all my relationships, I may have been trying to armor myself against the dragon’s fangs by interposing someone else’s body between me and them.

The dragon survives and derives its power from unconsciousness. It bows to me and diminishes when I relate to it in a direct and courageous way. When I fear or am ashamed of my loneliness, I am hiding the most precious, sensitive, and winsome part of myself behind frantic attempts to become invulnerable. I slap my own face and think I am protecting myself.

I stay with my loneliness by holding and cradling it—my feelings. I whisk away the conditioned response of anyone else’s face and keep coming back to what I am feeling in my body now. In this way, I defang the spiteful grimace loneliness makes at me when I gaze into it and stay with it. In such self-mirroring, I speak to myself as the good parent to the child: “I know you are hurting and that you want him now, and yes, it does feel good to be with him. But he cannot really heal your pain. You already tried that many times and it did not work. Now try being with yourself just one more minute than you can stand. Only then do you find out what you really want and become free to be vulnerable while owning your power.”

Understanding Loneliness

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Then you may hear yourself say to someone: “My work is not to be free of the need for you but first to trust my own completeness. Then I do not demand or crave or beg but simply ask you to be with me. This liberating truthfulness teaches me how to give to you in return. I pause between the stimulus of my loneliness and the response of craving your presence. Thereby, I strengthen myself in the skills of intimacy, one of which is accepting the times between us when you may not comfort me but still love me.” Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.”

David Richo: Adapted from When Love Meets Fear (Paulist Press).

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