Inability To Endure Loneliness Or What Does The Childhood Experience Have To Do With It?

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

Can you be alone? How do you feel at this time? It is precisely about the ability to endure loneliness, and not about the compulsion due to circumstances

Someone, by virtue of the profession, has to be in solitude all day, but at the same time experience tremendous discomfort. Another person may feel abandoned even among people, because it is not always a matter of the physical presence of others.

The experience of loneliness is familiar to all of us from time to time. Moreover, the ability to be in this state is directly related to the emotional maturity of the individual.

Unlike the so-called "normal", periodic, feelings of loneliness, pathological loneliness is total and hopeless, it is felt as an inner emptiness, absolute isolation. In this case, solitude becomes for a person akin to non-being, he does not feel the reality of his existence, as if everything around him is an illusion.

Sometimes from people with a strongly pronounced schizoid radical in a confidential conversation, you can hear that alone with themselves they experience fear or even panic, and the only way to cope with the horror of losing contact with reality is to obsessive thoughts or actions.

And here we come to the main question of this note: so after all, what helps people to endure loneliness calmly and how is this ability formed?

As the famous British psychoanalyst D. Winnicott laconically put it, “… the capacity for loneliness is based on a paradox: it is the experience of being alone with the presence of someone else” (Winnicott, D. W. (1958) The capacity to be alone).

In other words, we all need a sensitive and caring adult from early childhood in order for us to learn to be alone with ourselves.

An emotional connection is established between the child and the adult, most often the mother, which is especially pronounced in those moments when the child seeks comfort when experiencing anxiety and fear, in cases of novelty of the situation, danger, stress. Affection gives the child a sense of security, safety, comfort.

Researchers of the phenomenon of attachment distinguish four types of attachment:

• Secure attachment
• Insecure avoidant attachment
• Unreliable anxious-ambivalent attachment
• Disorganized attachment

The child's ability to calmly endure loneliness is laid exclusively in conditions secure attachment to a significant adult. In this case, mother and child are in tune with each other like musical instruments in a duet.

To assess the child's attachment to the mother, back in the 1970s, an experiment was carried out called the "Strange Situation". An unfamiliar environment is stressful for a small child, and in a stressful situation, the attachment system is activated. The purpose of the experiment is to find out how a one-year-old child will meet his mother after a separation that lasted several minutes. The child and mother had to play in the room where the toys are, in the presence of an unfamiliar third person. According to the conditions of the experiment, at some point the mother leaves the room, and the observer tries to play with the child, at another moment the child was left to play all alone. In a few minutes the mother returned.

As the experiment showed, babies with a reliable type of attachment to parting with their mother react by crying, calling and looking for her, experiencing obvious discomfort. But when mom returns, they joyfully greet her, hold out their hands to her, ask for consolation, and after a short time resume their game, interrupted by the departure of the mother.

The fact is that the child first learns to play with himself in the presence of the mother. Thanks to the feeling of safety and comfort (with secure attachment), the baby can even forget about his mother for a short time. For a while, he is able to maintain a fantasy about her, but if mom is absent for too long, then this fantasy becomes obsessive and does not bring comfort. Of course, it is necessary to gradually increase the time a child is alone so that his psyche can adapt.

As he grows up (by about 3 years), the child is able to retain in his consciousness the image and feeling of the mother's presence for longer and longer. In this he is helped by the so-called "transitional objects": a favorite toy, mother's handkerchief with its smell, or other things that remind of her.

So, the personality's capacity for self-complacency is formed due to the transformation of the external supportive environment (parents, first of all) into an internal feeling. It is like a conviction in the benevolence of the environment, not so much at the level of thoughts as at the level of feelings.

"An individual is able to endure loneliness in external reality only if he is never alone in internal reality" (G. Guntrip, British psychologist).