Currently viewing the tag: "loneliness"
For a several years, I’ve been aware of a young blond girl who inhabits my subconscious. She came to be once when I was consumed by fear and anxiety. Meditating on that fear, I saw this girl, 6 or 7 years old, with long, straight blonde hair, who rocked in the corner of a room, trembling in fear and crying. Eventually, I was able to go to her and take her into my arms, comforting her. I’m aware of her as my little Fear Girl, the one who’s communicating with me when I feel deathly afraid, insecure, or anxious. She’s shown up to me many times, once when I was overcome by despair, sitting on the edge of my bed. Suddenly I felt a presence there, a young girl, who came to me and hugged me, in a moment of my supreme loneliness and fear. She doesn’t have a name, or I haven’t heard it. But I know she’s there.
Recently, discussing a new dating situation with a friend of mine, I described my feelings of anxiety and agitation by saying that the situation was triggering all my ‘Little Girl with a Rejecting Daddy’ stuff. It’s the same little girl. She’s sensitive. She’s exuberant. She just wants to be loved and to give love. But she’s so afraid and confused by her loneliness and by peoples’ reactions to her, that she sometimes hides in a corner to cry.
One of my first memories is of being in a high chair in the house of family friends where my family stayed as my parents looked for a house in the area to buy. My father, at least in my memory (I don’ t know if this really happened this way) is laughing at me as I cry, desperately, because my mother has just left the house. I want her back. The feeling is of desperate loneliness and of not being taken seriously. I cry and cry. And all I get is laughter and mockery. And I can’t leave because I’m trapped in the high chair.
I saw a counselor once who helped me revisit this scene. He helped me visualize my older self coming into the room, taking the girl out of the high chair, and out the door, over to the park that was – in real life – across the street from the house. In my new vision, we play in the park. There’s a dog. The sun is shining. We throw a ball and the girl’s white-blond hair is limned with sunlight.
Getting to know this little girl has helped me understand so much of what’s driving my emotional responses, especially the ones that feel difficult and desperate. When I’m anxious or afraid and I can remember to be this self-aware, I will go visit her and take her in my arms again. I tell her she’s going to be okay, and that I will protect her. I feel her relax in my arms. I feel myself relax.
Most of us have one or two deep, soul-shaking issues that we carry with is on our life journeys. For whatever reason, they are imprinted on us; they are the patterns that we revisit over and over in our lives, trying to come to some resolution. Wherever these patterns come from, one way to understand them deeply is to personify them, to envision the characteristics they would have if they were a sentient being. What age are they? What gender? Are they even human, or do they take a different form? What do they look like? What are their characteristics? Often, when we personify our deepseated issues in the form of a being in this way, we can have more empathy for them, we can separate ourselves from them to a certain extent, and we can work on how we relate to them, so we can give them — and ourselves — what they (and we) need.
My little blond girl needs to feel safe, protected, and loved. As do most children, she looked for this from other people but didn’t receive what she needed. Now she’s extremely sensitive to rejection or abandonment, even if only perceived. It sends her into paroxysms of confusion and despair, often way more than the situation dictates. The role I can play is to acknowledge her when she makes her fear known, and go to her with a hug and comforting words. I can be the adult who actually IS there for her.
How about you? Have you characterized any of your emotional experiences in this way? How do you use this image to help yourself when you experience difficult emotions?
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image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horlik/3982744969/
By Melissa Kirk
Loneliness and I have a strange and long-standing relationship. No matter how socially active I am, no matter how fast I’m running around filling my hours with friends, projects, chores, and daily tasks, loneliness is always there behind me, like a little kid holding onto my shirttails. It likes to come to the forefront on grey weekend days when I have no real plans, or when something has happened to disconnect me from friends or family. It likes to feed on my self-doubt and my insecurities about my connections with others, the feeling that if people knew the real me, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Sometimes, loneliness and I will lie in bed together on those weekend mornings, sharing coffee companionably, like lovers.
The difference between being alone and being lonely is an important one. Loneliness makes us feel something is wrong. Simply being alone and not lonely doesn’t. When I’m lonely, I feel a pressure to be elsewhere, to feel better about myself by having people around me. My ego wants to be stroked. Specifically I want friends around me, people who know me well. We all know that feeling of being lonelier in a crowd of strangers than we would be if we were actually alone. Loneliness makes us want to seek out companionship and support. Perhaps loneliness is rooted in that ancient feeling of the hunted, that being alone makes us vulnerable to attack
As a 41-year-old woman who lives alone and has no kids, loneliness takes on a very particular cast. If I let it, it will whisper to me that something is terribly wrong with me because I’m not in a long-term relationship, don’t have a lot of close friends. It will remind me of the times I’ve tried to connect and been rejected; it will tell me that other people can’t be trusted. It’s almost as if loneliness, in these instances, is feeling lonely itself and wants to make sure I stay to keep it company.
But is there really anything wrong with loneliness? Can we make friends with it?
As with all emotional states, loneliness lets us know something about ourselves. In this case, it lets us know that we crave connection, and that other people are important to us. If we listen closely, loneliness will even let us know what sort of connection we crave. For myself, it’s deeper connection, rather than surface conversations that never get to the heart of things. I can feel incredibly lonely talking with someone when I can’t seem to find a way to go deeper with them. So the message loneliness has for me is to seek deeper connections with people.
About a month ago, I returned from Burning Man. Prior to leaving for my trip, I was so busy I could barely see straight. I was getting ready for the trip, hanging out with friends, excitedly planning and anticipating the experience. After I returned, things slowed down socially, as I knew they would, and I felt lonely again. I’ve been spending the last month or so getting to know loneliness again, realizing that the intensity of loneliness is directly related to the intensity of connection I’ve experienced. So, sitting here at my kitchen table on a grey Sunday, feeling lonely, I realize that loneliness is also telling me that I have felt strong connection with others.
Loneliness is the flip side of feeling connected. As with joy and sorrow, we can’t feel one without the other. If we can’t feel loneliness, we may very well not feel connection, either. Can we sit with loneliness the way we sit with the dusk, knowing that we can’t have sunny days without also having dark nights? Can we develop a comfortable relationship with loneliness, understand what it’s trying to tell us, and not act on the urge to make it go away at any cost? Try it the next time you feel lonely. Invite it in for a bit, even if just for a moment. Ask it what it wants to tell you. And listen to the answer.
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