Overcoming Aloneness
Accompanying my clients over the years, I have seen how the core fears we carry structure our lives and relationships. The fear of aloneness is one I witness frequently, and it can shape the arc of a life. The realities it creates may look remarkably different, like tributaries flowing from the same headwaters. Given its diverse geographies, I want to map out several permutations of aloneness and the ways it shapes how we relate to the world. Below, I reflect on how we can understand it, work with it, and change our relationship to it.
Aloneness as Isolation
Sometimes we choose to turn away from the world to find ourselves. This can come from a desire to create “a room of our own” to access our thoughts and inner worlds. As time goes by, if the walls of this room thicken, solitude can shift into a protective form of isolation. Painful histories of being misunderstood may cast a long shadow in our lives. They can create a sense of mistrust in others and a fear of allowing ourselves to be seen.
Some of the most poignant moments in coaching have come when I ask clients why they keep others at a distance: “What would happen if you let them in?” I hear: “They will see me—the parts of me I hide from the world.” I then gently ask what would happen if they were seen. After a long pause, the answer I receive again and again is almost too painful to articulate: “If I am really seen, I will be abandoned and left alone.” To avoid this pain, we sometimes choose aloneness—keeping others at a distance and tending to our needs by ourselves. This choice is a protective one that guards against rejection, yet it recreates the very reality we most fear.
In some of us, this response appears as introversion, shyness, a concern about taking up space, and a choice to retreat into seclusion because the world feels unsafe. In others, it shows up as fierce independence, self-reliance, the appearance of invulnerability, and, in some cases, a cavalier confidence that rejects support. These latter expressions are often reinforced by the wider waters we swim in, which valorize “the self-made person” and reward individuation over interdependence. I have come to see that when this self-reliance includes suppressing our needs for care, what appears to be confidence can instead be a defense—built consciously or not—around a deep fear of abandonment.
Both can have their roots in painful, even devastating experiences where our vulnerabilities were not held, when we were judged or left alone in moments of distress, or when forms of help were intertwined with control and a loss of self. The lack of safety in these experiences can create distrust in the capacity of others to care for us if we allow our vulnerabilities to be seen. It can lead us to compartmentalize the parts of ourselves that feel fragile` and to sequester them from others—and even from ourselves. When the world feels unsafe and we can’t trust that we will be held, self-reliance feels like survival.
This choice to keep others at bay is a protective one. It suppresses our longing for true connection, yet it rarely soothes the original pain. Often, the isolation it brings compounds our sense of loneliness.
Aloneness in Relation
The experience of aloneness does not only emerge in isolation. Some of the deepest feelings of aloneness my clients describe have come in the presence of others. This is sharpened when physical proximity is combined with emotional distance, when closeness and estrangement are felt together. Sometimes this loneliness arises when we feel lost in a group—family dinners, reunions, gatherings where social norms are reinforced and we feel out of step with them. This is heightened when there is a sense that we are “supposed to” belong, when the expectation of togetherness frames the group, yet we have an internal experience of separation. When there is a sense of dissonance between the outward discourse and our inner reality, aloneness is felt as a loss of belonging.
It can also be felt as a loss of self. When there is pressure to conform to the group’s expectations, we can have trouble accessing a separate sense of self. Our own individuality, our values, and our capacities to choose may recede into the background, overshadowed by the pain of not fitting in. We feel inadequate and ashamed. This is rarely a reflection of any actual lack within us. More often, it has to do with the workings of our desires for connection. Our need to matter to others can be so strong that when we don’t feel seen, it is hard for us to see ourselves.
Our loneliness can be heightened when difficult experiences—moments of crisis, events that rupture our sense of safety and predictability, or life changes that shift the ground beneath our feet—are experienced without accompaniment. We might be with others in these moments, but if they are unable to see us, attune to our needs, understand what has violated our sense of trust, and speak up for us, it can compound the intensity of the experience. Often, it is not only the painful event but also the feeling of aloneness in it that leaves traces of trauma that remain frozen within us, rendering memories hard to approach, process, or release.
In the empathetic presence of another who is able to understand the granularities of our experiences—what hurt, what felt overwhelming, what we needed—we can begin to articulate that which could not be spoken and give words to ineffable feelings. Accompaniment helps us repair our trust in our capacity to navigate the world with others.
Aloneness as a Fear of Separation
Another way loneliness shapes our interactions with others is when it leads us to hold on tightly to those around us. The same fear of abandonment that makes some people isolate and keep the world at bay can spur others to collapse any distance from the people in their lives. The difficulty here is not letting others in, but in the process of individuating, of moving apart, and trusting that connection can be maintained through distance, difference, and time apart. The fear of isolation makes being alone feel intolerable. Safety is most readily found in togetherness, creating the impulse to merge, meld, and fuse our reality with another’s.
For some of us, this makes it hard to hold our own boundaries, to say no to things that don’t serve us, to take time alone, or to tend to others without giving to the point of exhaustion. For others, this impulse to merge makes it hard to feel at ease with another’s separate sense of self, particularly when they are close. The other’s perspectives, when different from our own, can feel threatening to the connection. Their needs to retain their inner life and boundaries, rub up against our fears of not mattering. Their desires to take time and space for themselves appears to be a harbinger of a rupture in the relationship, the breaking of the bond.
The pain of this can be intense—a fear that takes hold in a cascade of anxiety that washes over the body. When we are unable to self-soothe, to trust in our own mattering to those we are close to, the intensity of our reactions can feel overwhelming for them. When this turns into hyper-vigilance, distrust, and control, it often pushes people away, even when they love us, creating the very rupture we feared.
Solitude and Togetherness
The depth of our desire for connection, closeness, and belonging mirrors the depth of our fears of rejection and the pain of being cut off from love. The experiences I described above show how aloneness—the ways we encounter it, fear it, and guard against it—shapes our interactions with others and the world. Understanding it can help us craft a different relationship with our fears and alter how we approach solitude as well as togetherness.
From this perspective, we can begin to see that solitude and isolation are not the same. It helps us parse the open, spacious capacity to sense inside ourselves while moving through the world from the walls built to keep others at a distance in order to shield our vulnerabilities. In solitude, we experience the pleasures of being with ourselves—tuning into the inner landscape, listening for the voices within, tending to their murmurs, and filling ourselves with the richness of our own experiences. It means becoming present and porous, opening our senses to soak in the points of contact with the landscapes around us: taking in the quality of the light, the patterns on the water, the open skies. It helps us reframe aloneness as a way of creating a quiet space within to take it all in.
In doing this, we can be held in our solitude by the world—like water that buoys us as we float, unburdening us, rendering whatever we carry weightless. This space of quiet can also help us cultivate the capacity to soothe ourselves, to develop an inner container to hold the intensity of our feelings, including grief, loss, and heartbreak. We can feel these emotions and let them pass through rather than suppressing them, keeping parts of ourselves frozen.
From this space of inner attunement and the capacity to hold ourselves, we can find a different quality of togetherness. It helps us let people into our world, especially those who truly want to see us. In moments of vulnerability, when the rug feels pulled out from under our feet, the accompaniment of those who can meet us with care and curiosity and listen with precision to the specificity of our experiences can help us see that we no longer need to compartmentalize ourselves or sequester our fragilities. The walls can slowly come down. In their place, we are able to taste true intimacy—love that requires no performance or mask of invulnerability.
The inner container that can hold our feelings also helps us meet others in a spacious way. We can learn the difference between holding and grasping. We can feel our fears, trace their origins, and understand them in relation to our attachment histories. We can name them in conversation and hold them gently within so they don’t take over our interactions.
When we do so, we can allow ourselves to be surprised by the discovery that trust is possible, that repair can follow ruptures, and that our pasts don’t have to repeat. We can remind ourselves that when we lose access to this inner container, relating turns into enmeshment, and our fears of aloneness can lead us to push others away or hold on too tightly—protective patterns that are two sides of the same coin. Over time, the container within can deepen its capacity to hold, increasing the strength of the containers we build with others.
As we learn to retain our interoceptive capacities in the presence of others—through moments of connection and disconnection—we create the ground for true intersubjectivity, the dance of attunement between self and other. We can melt our sense of separation from others without losing ourselves. We can move apart and hold our differences without losing connection. In these moments, we taste the delights of mutual recognition and the complementarity of difference.
This is the ground for entering a state of togetherness that Martin Buber calls the I-Thou relationship. It is a third space, a relational world built between two selves that neither can access without the other. In it, we move beyond the isolation of individualism and the dangers of enmeshment, giving way to a spacious and generous way of relating that includes both individuation and connection. Buber captures the experience beautifully in this phrase: “I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.” In this shared world, we can loosen the grip of our fears and learn what it is like to truly become ourselves and to belong.
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