Life "behind The Glass". Emotional Isolation As A Way To Survive

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Do you know the feeling when the whole world around is like behind glass? It is difficult to talk about this experience, it is difficult to notice it. The world seems to exist, the eyes see it - these people, a girl in a blue skirt or a boy in a red hat. But someone is talking, and there they throw out the garbage. But…

I - as it were, not with them. I am completely separate. Emotionally separately, I look at it all - as if it were a film strip, and it seems that I am not there. Nobody sees or feels me, and I don't see or feel anyone.

Where does the feeling of one's own isolation from the world come from?

If the parents were not empathic enough with their child, then he has to atrophy his sensitivity.

How does it manifest? For example, a child wants to play with a paddle, a mother just pretends not to hear him. Or he says: take a bucket, it's better. The child trusts his mother (and who else?), Takes a bucket. But he feels that he wanted a spatula … But this feeling is so weak, barely audible, it seems to gradually disappear, dissolve. And after mom gives a bucket instead of a spatula a few more times, an apple instead of a pear, turns off the light, instead of hugging - this feeling “but I wanted to …” - will cease to be felt at all, it will simply cease to be.

Clearer and more stable structures will replace it. These are stereotypes put in by my mother. Play well with the bucket. It is good to eat apples. You need to be able to fall asleep alone.

This is what our baby will be guided by.

And also - the mother may also not notice the feelings of the child. When he is angry, when he is offended, when he is anxious or afraid. The child is confused - he does not know what to do, but she says: “go, put on your pants, don’t stop!”. The child was offended, the toy was taken away from him - this fact was not taken into account at all, as if nothing had happened. The insult seems to be there, tears are asking, but for my mother - she is not at all, and in general there are no tears, I seem to be invisible …

When we are "invisible" to the mother in childhood, we cease to feel ourselves visible to the world when we are adults. Moreover. We ourselves stop noticing and feeling the world.

Manifesting Feelings of Emotional Isolation in Adulthood

When we are unaccustomed to hearing ourselves - for years and decades, as adults, we can also shut ourselves off from the world without experiencing connection with it, believing in the idea that the world needs something completely of its own, that the world needs me only when I respond to the desires of others, consistent with the ideas of others, useful and convenient to others. That no one in the world is capable of compassion, sympathy, empathy for me. No one is able to notice my needs and respect them. And I myself am not capable of this either.

I only myself am left alone with my total and dimensionless loneliness, which can be felt as a "hole in the chest", a pulling, exhausting sensation that does not allow breathing, does not allow to draw a thread between myself and others, which does not give the opportunity to feel that there are not mannequins around but living people, and that I am also alive among them.

Coping with Feelings of Emotional Isolation

This is a very difficult task. Accustomed to living in total isolation, they cannot even imagine, but how could it be otherwise? They did not have this in their experience, or there was very little and so long ago that the emotional trace evaporated.

Sometimes it takes several years of regular therapy for an emotionally isolated person to finally "unfreeze" and begin to believe that he is still important in this world, he is not superfluous. And the first person he is able to believe is his psychotherapist.

It can be extremely difficult to believe in this. Every day, mirroring ourselves from the world, we confirm our usual scheme: I am not important to the world, the world does not notice me. And even if we meet on the way an empathic person who is able to notice, see, sympathize, we may not trust him. We may think that he is "pretending" to deceive us and get something. It can be very, very difficult for us to believe this attitude towards ourselves.

How to try to get out of this familiar isolation

1. The first and most important thing is to notice that it is there. To notice this life “behind the glass”, to feel this enormous insensitivity to others, to pay attention to the fact that “I do not experience anything at all looking at this man or this woman, except for unpleasant sensations in the chest or solar plexus area. Such a remark will be a very important step, because in our everyday life we can all the time avoid the experience and awareness of isolation, filling our life with some kind of obsessive activity - deeds, haste, vanity.

2. Try to imagine what the people around me are going through at the moment. They all feel something now, because they are all alive now. This man with such a sullen face? Perhaps he is tired or desperate, perhaps angry or resentful about something. And here is the woman with the basket - her eyes are running, as if they are afraid of something, anxious. And this little boy eats an apple with such pleasure! Such work will help to form emotional "strings" with others, to start somehow experiencing a connection with them.

3. Notice how I feel around these people. What sensations, besides the usual unpleasant stretching in the chest? Perhaps I have other experiences as well? Perhaps I began to sympathize with this man in his gloom, remembering that I can also be quite gloomy, or this woman with her anxiety - I, too, can be anxious and afraid of something! And this boy - looking at him, he wanted an apple so much, I remembered how joyful it was in childhood to feast on fruit in my grandmother's garden.

4. Feel if the general condition has changed after I did this work. Maybe for some half a percent my body was filled with calmness and warmth? Or maybe nothing has changed. Or maybe I got angry at something and thus felt life in me?

In fact, restoring your emotional sensitivity, the ability to experience yourself, and empathize with others is one of the most difficult tasks in psychotherapy. There are people who were not lucky enough to develop the emotional sphere due to upbringing in unemotional, cold families, where relationships were built on certain functions that everyone had to perform, and what and who wants and how they feel were not taken into account.

If they haven't shown enough empathy for me, I simply won't be able to show it to others. I will be closed and afraid of the world and people, I will keep my contacts with others to a minimum, just in case, so as not to face again my pain of rejection.

I will choose to be alone and isolated so as not to relive that pain and despair.

In personal therapy and therapeutic groups, we begin to restore our living part, our experiences, letting them flow, because we begin to get the long-awaited experience of acceptance. And this is the experience that begins to reshape life and relationships. It is not easy to get out of your own isolation, when for many years you have been accustomed to being there and only there, it is not easy to notice it, it is not easy to talk about it. It seems that this is how it should be, that this is - a normal life. But once (and then again and again), having tried a new experience, we can gradually begin to believe that it was not a "dream", and still try to get out of the "case". Gradually, but more and more confidently, feeling like a part of the human world, an important and valuable part of it.