Loneliness Is Frightening And Beautiful

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

For many people, the word "loneliness" carries a negative, frightening connotation. We will not talk about the state of solitude that all people want from time to time, but we will talk about that very feeling of total loneliness, when there is no couple, when there is no one to fall asleep with and to wake up with, no one to hold the hand, walking in the park on a weekend, when not with someone to drink aromatic coffee in the morning, hurrying to work, there is no one to hug when they are waiting for you in the evening, not even children, but only four walls of your empty house and, at best, your old cat.

Why does loneliness sound so sad and scary? And what happens to you when you are left without loved ones? Why does your joy and feeling of fullness of life depend on whether there is someone close to you or not?

The answer is terrifying: because you don't have. Without the other, there is such an unbearable emptiness in my chest. There, in this void, until recently there was someone close and now there is a black hole in the chest, a void that is described by almost all single people who have experienced parting and are actively looking for a soul mate. Or those people who are still in relationships, unsatisfactory relationships, and sometimes very toxic, from the very thought that there will be no tormentor nearby and will have to come into contact with this black emptiness inside, describe the cold and horror in their chest, as if we are talking about their own death.

In fact, the fear of loneliness is associated with the fear of death and with our early childhood, with our mother. At first glance, this is not an obvious connection. But let's imagine a small child lying swaddled in his crib. He is hungry and crying, he calls his mother and demands her breast or a bottle of milk. And my mother lingered somewhere for half a minute or a minute. Perhaps she warms up the milk … But this minute seems to a baby as long as sometimes hours and days of waiting for a text message from a loved one after he has left. The child experiences mom's delay in a very dramatic way, because hunger is felt to them as a threat of death, the gap for this minute seems like an eternity, tinged with grief: “I am so helpless, how can I survive without you, come back soon and hug me, let me merge with you in your arms and enjoyment. You do not find that any child could say these words to his slowed down or unconsciously rejecting mother, the same words could be said by any abandoned lover who came into contact with loneliness and emptiness, the frightening emptiness of psychological death without a soul mate.

Only this second half for the baby is the mother, and for the adult - the partner of the opposite sex, onto whom the mother is projected. That is, based on the above, we, in fact, are afraid, like children, of losing a mother, and not the second one who has left or may leave. There is fear of loneliness, abandonment, strong love, thirst for merging, passion, desire to possess another person.

The fear of loss, the fear of being alone, is the state of that little child you once were. The memory of the time when you were breastfed is imprinted in our subconscious mind as paradise, and we strive all our lives to this paradise - to merge with another person, to whom we offer this role of mother, and then we are so afraid of losing, like a little the child is afraid of being lonely, afraid of losing his mother. But for a child, these are natural experiences: without a mother, he simply cannot survive. Losing a mother and being lonely for a child means death. And for an adult, this is only a projection of the child-mother fusion.

After all, many adults, answering the question why they are afraid of loneliness, answer like children: “I cannot cope alone, I feel bad alone, no one will hug me, will not support me, how will I survive alone, I feel inferior if I am without couples, one."

Isn't it true that these are similar conditions in an adult and a child? An adult biologically who speaks and feels like a child is, in fact, psychologically an infant.

Therefore, in order to become adults, we all need to strive to overcome this fear of loneliness, to learn to be happy, regardless of whether there is someone with us or not. Fear of loneliness is a sign of codependency and fear of loneliness leads a person to loneliness in order to grow up. A person, fearing loneliness, finds a toxic partner who will surely present him with a choice: endure violence or choose loneliness. All paths lead to the same place - maturity and awareness, and fate beats and oppresses us so that we become wise and adults, passing the lessons, we break this umbilical cord of merging with the mother. But as long as we are afraid of loneliness, we will not be able to establish an adult mature relationship with another person. We will definitely attract the partner of the psychological Teacher - the Tormentor - into our life. If a person is afraid of loneliness, he will be afraid that he will be abandoned and will sacrifice his interests, he will suppress a lot in himself, which means he will get sick, there will be a lot of violence in such relationships and manipulations for fear of loss. All toxic codependent relationships are colored by fear of loss and fear of loneliness.

Once in my life there was a period when, being very codependent, I was afraid to think about loneliness. For me, loneliness was like a sentence, like death. But the more I was afraid of him, the more I organized situations in my life with my own hands, in order to be lonely, to live all the horror of loneliness. What we are afraid of, we ourselves unconsciously attract, in order to finally stop being afraid and grow up.

I knew that it would be painful and scary, but I took this step into the abyss and collapsed into the pit of total black loneliness. I felt it like psychological death. And when my psychologist and my friends, who were never totally alone (someone lived with a child, someone jumped from marriage to marriage, but none of them lived in four walls alone), they told me: “Love yourself, what is terrible alone,”I was ready to kill them. I hated everyone who tried to tell me that loneliness is not terrible. It was terrifying, catastrophic, and I stepped into it and lived in it for a whole year. It was a year of the deepest depression, the same as in infancy, when I was weaned, taken to my grandmother in the Crimea and left there for a week. I refused food, water, and after several days of crying, I fell silent. To calm me down, my grandmother gave me chocolate, after which I became covered with red spots, but was silent. And when my mother arrived a week later, I did not recognize her. This depression stayed with me for life. I was afraid of breaking up with men, but being a psychologist, I understood that I had to live it in order to find myself, to become an adult and strong.

And so I found myself in the abyss of my loneliness. Four walls and tears down my cheeks. Longing and horror. The skills of a psychologist helped me to observe my condition, as it were, a little from the outside. And I understood that you need to live what is and tried to strengthen the experience. I downloaded animal sounds from the Internet and began to listen to them. The crying intensified to the screams of the dolphins. I howled along with the howl of a lonely wolf, and anger and rage began to awaken in my soul. I knew that aggression is a way out of depression, and increasing the experience of my feelings helped me. Then, at a year old, I fell silent and did not give vent to grief, but now I cried out all my tears and was angry with all those crazy adults who surrounded me then.

Gradually, I shifted the focus of attention from the bitterness of loneliness to "here and now", to what is in the present moment, I was looking for a hobby and writing a book, I began to make short trips alone, in which I gradually began to feel the joy of the present moment … I realized that instead of merging with my mother, which I missed so much and which I was looking for in relationships with men, I learned to enter the state of merging with nature, with the sea, birds, trees, wind, sun, sky and … creativity. I noticed that gradually I felt good alone. I focused on my bodily sensations, on my breath, on sounds, smells …

By the end of the year, I felt the joy of being alone. Because there was no more emptiness. Because my emptiness was now filled with me, I returned to my home.

And only after such a transformation of consciousness I felt that I was ready for a qualitatively new relationship with a man. But I also admitted that I could live a happy life without a man, because now I had something interesting to do - myself, my creative projects.

I used to say sincerely that relationships are just as bad as loneliness. Now I speak with absolute sincerity - loneliness is beautiful as well as relationship. It should be noted that all this time I was in psychotherapy and twice a week I was in touch with the therapist via Skype, which greatly supported and moved me forward. Now I myself work as a psychologist with a fear of loneliness, and now I noticed that men and women experience loneliness in different ways.

Men tolerate it much worse. When a couple break up, what do we see? In most cases, a woman remains alone for some time, and a man almost on the day of separation acquires several women at once. This proves that a woman is more capable of surviving loneliness than a man by nature, but why are so many women striving then to get married, tolerate husbands of tyrants, are afraid of loneliness and do not leave toxic relationships? Why do many women have such a persistent feeling of inferiority without marriage, without a man?

Let's see what lonely women are called in society: old maid, blue stocking. What are single men called? The proud word "bachelor". Why such an injustice? And who, in general, inspired a woman that she is incomplete without a man? For centuries, grandmothers and mothers have passed on this feeling of inferiority without a husband to their daughters and granddaughters. And so many women, not even understanding, not feeling their strength and their resource alone, take the path of hunting for a man and then become hostages of a marriage in which a man manipulates on her fear of losing him.

In fact, it was not the grandmothers and mothers, but the men themselves who "implanted" the attitude into the brains of women that a woman is incomplete without a man? It was these nicknames like "blue stocking" and "old maid" that they branded women who did not marry. Thus, a woman had no choice not to marry at all and not to be in a relationship with a man, to live, for example, alone. How is it? Isn't that wrong? What will people say? "Nobody even took her in marriage."

Why did they do this to us? Because they are more afraid of loneliness than we are and they need dependent, frightened women who will suffer from fear of loss. A man has become a supervalue, thus, for a woman. And who benefits from it? Of course, to him, a man.

The fear of loneliness is more or less inherent in both sexes, but in women it is aggravated by a negative attitude towards female loneliness. But alone, there are so many resources. It is beautiful. It releases a tremendous amount of energy for creativity. But life is creativity and it is not necessary to create only children. Many of us are talented and even brilliant, but ruining our lives at the bottom of a toxic marriage with the wrong, wrong, and then. To know the joy of love, know the joy of loneliness.

(c) Latunenko Yulia