Why Do We Feel So Lonely?
Although we learn to relate in childhood, all is not lost in adult life. If we feel alone we can learn to connect with other people.
Human beings are designed to live in herds, because together we are always more.
Childhood is the period of life in which we need the full presence of our mother or the person who raises us. “Mindfulness” means permanent bodily and sensory contact. Children do not “are” if we are not related to another.
The cause of loneliness
If during our childhood we have been subjected to levels of emotional distance that are difficult to tolerate, the wounds will remain valid throughout our entire life journey.
We can evoke our childhood trying to glimpse if we have ever felt our mother, our father or the adult who raised us, imbued us with and feeling exactly what we were feeling.
If loneliness and emotional distance have been established since we were children, it is likely that later we perpetuate those scenarios through models of similar relationships.
The adolescence is the period of life in which we rehearsed ways of loving, that is, to bond with others. It is the perfect time to get closer offering our virtues and to open ourselves to receive what the other can give us. In these preliminary trials are the seeds of future emotional ties.
Reaching adulthood without training in personal relationships leaves us without resources, with great emotional clumsiness and disoriented compared to those who spontaneously bond.
It may happen that we choose solitude as the best way to be comfortable.
However – even having grown up in affective austerity – it is always possible to take as references other individuals more trained in personal exchanges and learn from them, even if it is frustrating or exhausting at first. The love rewards will not be long in coming.
When we have been loved, felt, accompanied, paced and taken into account, then we are free to choose moments of solitude, moments of recollection and meeting with ourselves. Self-support and self-regulation are extraordinary resources when they are based on self-confidence, the result of having felt loved and received.
Loneliness is neither good nor bad when we become adults. It is a possible way to live life.
It may happen that we choose solitude as the best way to be comfortable. However, it is worth observing if those who circulate in our environment are yearning for an affective approach on our part. Sometimes we have not even registered them, concerned about keeping ourselves at an optimal distance in favor of our protection.
Sometimes distance is the best way we have found to not be afraid. Closeness can be dangerous and we think that the chasm we build between ourselves and the world saves us from having to confront our inner demons.
If we want greater emotional closeness, we have to know that there are many individuals in the same conditions as us: longing for meetings of the heart. Just open the door and watch them go by.
