Feeling All Alone in the World: Loneliness

Written by: Renee Brush, Ph.D.

For the past three weeks, I have been sharing my experience with going on my first mission trip and ultimately finding my purpose within the church and, really, in the world. But that experience led me to another experience that I had not experienced much in my life – the feeling of loneliness.

I have shared my earlier experiences and how I spent most of the past 7 years isolated in earlier posts in this blog. In those years, I mostly went to work and stayed at home with my dogs. It was only in the past year that I have started to really get more involved in other activities, such as joining a church, which resulted in the mission trip that I talked about over the past three weeks. 

On this mission trip, I traveled for eight days with six other people, and we were with the organizer and the people with whom she works. I was surrounded by people 24 hours a day that whole week. This felt a bit like a shock. But the nice thing about the seven people I was around is that we all got along so well. And when does that ever happen?

When I’m around a group of people, I usually find that I need to escape at some point for “me time.” But I did not feel the need to do this with this group. We spent all day together, we did devotionals in the morning and debriefing at night, we ate all of our meals together, and we hung out after we were done for the evening. Laughing. Crying. Getting to know each other. Becoming good friends. And it all was enjoyable. For 8 days.

On the day we returned home, we got home after midnight, very early on Memorial Day, and I was dropped off at the house. My daughter happened to be home and awake, so I told her a bit about my trip, but then we went to our own rooms. And before I woke up the next morning, she was gone for her own vacation.

When I woke up, the house was so quiet. I had my coffee, and the dogs and I just sat on the couch. I had my prayer time, studied my Spanish, and missed my new friends. I was glad I had taken the day off work to recuperate since we had landed so late. But after being around people for so many days, the quiet was deafening. I was missing my friends, but also something new popped up for me. I had spent time with two different couples who had good marriages, and I saw what that was like. So, I was also missing having a loving partner who cared about me.

I can’t even tell you what I did that day, though I may have texted people. I certainly did not go anywhere. I probably ordered groceries to be delivered and maybe meal prepped, but that is about it.

The next day I was back at work and telling people about my trip and seeing my clients. And it was nice to be back at work and talking to people, but then I went back home. And there was the quiet all over again. It was like that for nearly a week and a half. I couldn’t escape it. I was happy for Thursday when I had my small group to attend so I had one evening where there were other people for me to be around.

I didn’t recall ever feeling loneliness like that. It was deep and it felt dark, and it would not go away. Eventually after a couple weeks, it didn’t bother me anymore. I forgot about it.

Until this week.

My Thursday small group has started our new Bible study. We are studying emotions, learning about how God intended for us to feel emotions. And this week we are learning about… you guessed it…

Loneliness.

The lake in a resort area

We are working through a Bible study based on the book, “The Voice of the Heart,” written by Dr. Chip Dodd. In the book, Dr. Dodd argues that we each need to fully experience our emotions in order to get to know our heart. And, by getting to know our hearts, we will be able to live fully as God has intended. He calls our emotions God-given “tools” that we can use so “we can be who we are made to be so we can do what we are made to do.” Fully feeling our emotions gives us a gift that helps us recover from hardship, live a full life, and experience true joy. This makes a lot of sense to me. In my trauma training, I had one professor say repeatedly, “We have to feel it to heal it.” Not feeling the emotion, according to Dr. Dodd, will end up in some type of impairment that causes us to suffer and prevents us from growing.

In the chapter on loneliness, Dr. Dodd stated that we have loneliness so we will seek out relationships. We need relationships with ourselves (i.e., knowing ourselves), with others, and with God. The truth of the matter is that, as humans, we are social creatures. We are made for community. As newborns, we have to rely on our caregivers to provide for our needs. A sense of loneliness will cause us to look for connection.

But society as a whole does not like to feel emotions. Instead, people may want to busy themselves, seek out distractions, or use addictions to escape from feeling lonely. And I get it! When caregivers are not reliable or available or if they teach us that it is not ok to feel emotions, what else is a child to do? Children who grow up with parents who are abusive or emotionally unavailable are often left with a constant state of loneliness, because their needs are not being met. They are not being seen or heard or accepted. When this happens and we are unprepared to handle it, we may find a way to escape or ignore the feeling – through distractions, busy-ness, addictions, dissociation.

Dr. Dodd said that the impairment to not feeling loneliness is apathy, a state of indifference. You can be certain that this is a defense mechanism, protecting ourselves from being judged, dismissed, minimized, undervalued, etc. But, in the process, we are essentially denying our own humanity, our own heart, our own need for others. The ways we escape feeling loneliness I just mentioned become a way of life and move toward apathy and could look like not caring. Signs in our life of apathy include doing just enough to “get by,” leaving our mess for our partner to clean up, living on auto-pilot, and comments like, “It doesn’t matter,” or “Why bother?”

As we learned about apathy in the first part of the week, the workbook asked for any insights or takeaways. As I was thinking of my childhood, I realized that no one in my childhood took the time to connect deeply with me that stands out to me – except for my maternal grandmother, Grandma M, who was “my person.” She took the time to show me that she loved and saw me, though I can only really give you one good example. When I used to stay at her house and I slept with her, she said that we were showing our love for each other by sleeping with our backs to each other and touching our bottoms. I can’t tell you why she suggested that, but I felt so much love from her. Grandma M passed when I was 10 years old. That was the hardest year of my childhood, though I couldn’t tell you about that year. I just know from my mom that it was the only year I had trouble in school, where my grades were struggling. But I also don’t remember anyone trying to help me.

I never asked for help because I rarely received it without being made to feel bad for asking or being manipulated as the person helped me. Instead, I told people, “I’m fine,” because I was certain no one truly cared anyway. I was so shut down that I honestly did not even know that I was actually not fine. I did not know myself to know that I was masking my true emotions. And if I don’t know myself, how can anyone else know me? Truly?

The journaling for this study topic had me all messed up this week as I started to remember how loneliness has affected me throughout my life, and it was difficult to stay focused at work. So, I did a meditation at work one day to help me get grounded and re-centered. During that meditation, I was reminded that I did experience deep loneliness before – I dipped my toes into the pond of loneliness without knowing that was what I was experiencing during COVID. I shared this on the blog in an earlier post. At the time, I started asking, “Is it always going to be like this?” And that is when I wandered into the New Age and found a whole “spirit team” who was supposedly supporting me and sending me signs. But then after I learned how the New Age is a way of sin, I let go of my “spirit team.” They were how I was dealing with loneliness without even knowing it. Until I figured out about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, I was utterly alone, and I felt it deeply for quite a while after leaving the New Age. I wrote about it and posted about it on here.

But, during that meditation, the teacher asked those listening to consider the state of their heart, to feel into it to see if there were any areas that felt lonely or abandoned. What?! Yes! Of course I was abandoned. My mother used to brag about how I would spend all day in my room just playing by myself when I was four. It was in 2018 when I realized that that is not how 4-year-olds act. So, there was something wrong with 4-year-old me being in my room alone all day. Even if I did share any feelings, they were never validated. No one ever said, “Of course you’re sad!” Instead, I heard, “Quit crying or I will give you something to cry about.”

I was forced to be by myself all day at an age when I did not even know what loneliness was. As I think about the deep loneliness I felt after my trip, I can’t imagine feeling that same depth of emotion as a little 4-year-old with no one to help me understand what I’m feeling or to give me a hug to help me feel better. Instead, I learned how to ignore my own feelings and to distract myself so I wouldn’t feel the pain. This led to decades of unrecognized loneliness hidden under apathy and dissociation.

The ocean in a resort area

How Do I Deal with Loneliness?

According to Dr. Dodd, to live fully, we have to feel into our loneliness. If apathy is a defense mechanism designed to protect us and keep us safe from those in our lives who hurt us, then Dr. Dodd said that “survival living is a war against the heart.” This statement struck me. I have lived my whole life in survival mode. And my heart is suffering because of it. In trauma training, we talk about how defense mechanisms become our protection, but, when we begin to depend on them without using other strategies, we get stuck in our trauma reactions. A protective strategy becomes hurtful.

So, how do we start to deal with loneliness?

First, we get to know it. Yes, get to know your loneliness. Greet it. Welcome it. We have to identify the signs that tell us we are feeling lonely. What do you do to escape the lonely feeling? How do you distract yourself? Do you have addictions? Naming it helps us to start to treat it differently. About a week after getting home, I told a friend I was feeling the loneliness again and she suggested several things that would distract me from feeling it. I responded with a “no thank you.” I told her that I had named it, journaled about it, and then I was just going to let it be there. But I was also connecting with her over it. I knew it would be a matter of time and I would be ok again.

Second, what happens if you just sit still and do nothing? Dr. Dodd talks about solitude – that is, being with yourself doing nothing or perhaps journaling or contemplating – as a way to get to know yourself. I see solitude as a time to refresh your batteries after a busy day or week. Take this time to figure out what you want and need without judgment or criticism.

Next, as we get to understand ourselves, we will be naturally drawn to be around other people. Dr. Dodd differentiates between “contact” and “connection,” which I think is important. Contact is reaching out to someone through text or social media. This type of interaction is limited because you do not get to hear someone’s tone of voice or see their body language. Dr. Dodd argues this type of interaction is ok for a while, but it is not a replacement for true relationship, especially if you are not talking about deeper issues with someone. Connection, on the other hand, is “hearts meeting” where two people (or more) – best done in person – are together with appropriate boundaries and a sense of safety. Being with someone in this way allows you to feel seen, heard, and accepted. This connection is the gift of loneliness – intimacy. And being known on the inside (i.e., seen, heard and accepted) is more likely to lead to gratification and fulfillment.

Finally, or perhaps as a result of all of these steps (and I am not writing these steps in any type of order), connecting with yourself and with others will also bring us closer to God. For me, connecting with God has helped me do these earlier steps. When I am journaling or going about my day, like in the meditation I mentioned earlier, I hear His voice, encouraging or reminding me of whatever message I need in that moment. In that meditation, the message was “you are not alone.” God has vowed to never leave us and after Jesus’s time on this earth, the gift to us was the Holy Spirit, who is always with us, whispering to us when we need it. This is why we need solitude – so we can hear the messages we need.

So, if you do these things, does it mean you will never be lonely again?

No.

Our feelings are there to let us know what we need at any given moment. They are not bad, and they do not mean we are weak. But, when we recognize that we are feeling lonely for time alone or time with friends, then we can take action to answer that need. Once we have met the need, then we will back in a good state. Perhaps feeling connected, joyful, fulfilled.

So, what you end up doing to help you feel connected will depend on what fills you up. For me, I spend time each morning praying and journaling, which is my time of solitude. Throughout the week, I go to church with friends, my small group at church after work one night, and dinner and/or a hike with my friend, Linda. Once a month, I try to attend a women’s monthly study group. I do text with friends who are not local to me, but for those I am close to, I know how to talk about deeper issues bothering me.

What I do to connect with others may not be what you do. That’s ok! You have to do what makes you happy. If you do not yet know what that is, please take some time to figure it out! Try new things out if you need to. I promise it will start to help you have more joy and connection and less loneliness.

References

Dodd, C. (2014). The voice of the heart (Second edition). Nashville, TN: Sage Hill.