The Nature of Loneliness
And what it is to really belong.
Some quick housekeeping:
I’m going to host a Zoom office hours on October 19 at 11amPT: It will be an AMA, so bring your questions and let’s hang. This is for paid subscribers and the registration link is below, after the paywall. I’m going to start doing these more regularly as I think we need some community, so look out for announcements.
There are a few more IRL events for the paperback release of On Our Best Behavior and Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness coming up. You can find everything here (including how to reserve your seat).
I’ve added a few more friends to the Healers tab. I’ll be adding more resources in the coming weeks and months. (Let me know what’s most useful to you in the comments below.)
I landed in Melbourne early Sunday morning—I’ve been coming once or twice a year for the past few years to do some work with MECCA, which means I’ve established some grooved routines. A post-flight walk through the Botanical Gardens to shake off jet lag, breakfast salad or chili eggs at Gilson amongst all the run clubbers (run clubs are big here), a wander through the streets to see what’s going on. I typically walk the same routes: With every year that passes, I find myself more wedded to the familiar. (See: “A Love Letter to Routine.”) This makes sense: The etymology of familiar is not surprising—it’s Latin (familia = “household servants, family,” and then eventually, “intimate.”)
When I was a young magazine editor, I traveled all the time for work—I would go to various cities around the globe and write guides to their best shopping (a crazy job for a 25-year-old). To produce these stories, I would spend days traversing cities by myself, typically on foot, scouting stores. And I would eat a good number of meals alone before a photographer would eventually join me. There were many days when I wouldn’t speak to anyone outside of ordering a coffee or sandwich. I had a Palm Pilot, from which I could tap out basic messages, but I don’t remember making a single phone call home. I would sit at bars while I ate, sometimes at a two-top; I’d people watch or read.
The iPhone changed solo dining culture, for sure, but at that time, eating by yourself was seen as sad, odd, maybe even a little scary. That was always the question when people learned what I did: So wait, you went to Paris…alone? Who did you eat dinner with? That sounds excruciating. I loved it though. I saw those stretches of solo travel as a training ground for managing my own loneliness and an opportunity to learn how to be with myself.
I didn’t have the language then, but I was working on my own individuation—made all the easier because I spent most of my ‘20s completely single. In the few short-lived relationships I did have during that time, I realized that there’s nothing lonelier than being with the wrong person.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as our attention (rightly) has shifted toward addressing a cultural epidemic of loneliness: People aren’t spending time with other people. That said, being around people in general isn’t necessarily a salve either—I would rather be by myself in a crowd, or alone in my house, than in a group where I’m not really seen or known.1 As schmaltzy as it sounds, addressing loneliness—and the foundation of all relationships—starts with seeing and knowing yourself.
In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis writes, “How much have we burdened our relationships as a treatment for loneliness, when all the while we have neglected our relationship to the only one who’s been with us from the very beginning? As Jung has observed this paradox, ‘Loneliness is not inimical to companionship…for companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality.’”
I think this is so profound, touching on basic reality that many of us are convinced that, to quote, Liz Gilbert, we’ll get LAVA (love, attention, validation, and approval) from someone else. In All the Way to the River, which is about Gilbert’s love and sex addiction and codependent patterns (along with a bunch of other things, you can hear her on Pulling the Thread: “Chasing Love”), she writes of codependency, that it’s, “Excessive emotional or psychological dependence upon another person—typically one who requires an unusual amount of support and attention on account of depression, anxiety, narcissism, mental illness, low self-esteem, trauma, and/or addiction. An intensive feeling of responsibility for another person’s life. The utter abandonment of yourself in order to fixate upon them. The belief that by healing them, you will be healed. The certainty that you will get all the love you have ever required by pouring your love into someone else’s heart. Not a medical diagnosis per se but a maladaptive set of behaviors that springs from a deeply painful unmet need for love, safety, and approval. A strategy of living that never, ever gives the needy person what they need. A timeworn and extremely effective means of avoiding one’s own pain.” The key phrase here is a deeply painful unmet need. The truth is that no exterior party can meet that need for you; it’s an inside job. I’m not sure that our culture understands this or reflects it back to us: Instead, so many of us grow up thinking we’ll only ever find love in the other—that it must be given to us, rather than something we can give to ourselves.
Hollis puts a bow on it: “There is an old saying that the cure for loneliness is solitude. Solitude can be defined as learning that we are not alone when we are alone. When we have achieved the stature of solitude, namely achieving a conscious relationship with ourselves, then we are freer to share ourselves with others, freer to receive their gifts in return and not be infantilized by the mutual archaic agenda of childhood, the agenda that covertly uses the other to provide for us.”
Obviously, relationships are incredibly important: Relationships are not only essential for our survival—individually and collectively—but they are the whetstone of self-development. We don’t really exist without an experience of the other—people, animals, or anything with consciousness (everything?), to which we can relate. We don’t really change and grow until we meet resistance and challenge (and love, and understanding) from others asking us to be better. Here’s Jung: “The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’”
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller (you can hear his podcast episode here: “There Are Two Moves When Faced with Uncertainty”) explains that belonging is one of our primary medicines against times of isolation and anonymity—and that belonging and communal grief is the only response to trauma. We are not built to withstand sorrow and pain alone. In fact, he uses a beautiful term, coined by psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan: intervulnerability. As proof, he offers the following story:
“One amazing example of this truth on a communal level comes from a longitudinal study of the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, an Italian American mining community. Researchers were curious why the rate of heart disease in this town was markedly lower than it was in the surrounding communities. They studied smoking rates, exercise patterns, dietary practices, the availability of medical services, and genetic factors—all to no avail. None of these could account for the difference. The study examined death certificates between 1935 and 1985. For the first thirty years, there was a marked difference between Roseto and the surrounding communities. In the 1960s, however, as cultural ferment swept the country, long-established patterns within the small community also began to change. Rather than living in multigenerational homes where sharing life and meals, rituals and traditions was the norm, people opted for single-family dwellings on the outskirts of town, and the young men and women left to find excitement in the bigger cities. As the bonds of connection frayed, so too did the protective effects for the heart. Disease rates rose and actually became higher than those of neighboring communities. The only thing that originally protected these people from heart disease was belonging.
“The disconnection between what we would offer others and what we feel we can ask for is extreme. We need to recover our right to ask for help in grief, otherwise it will continue to recycle perpetually. Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.”
All true things are paradoxes, and this is no different: To function in a relationship you must individuate and grow—and then bring all that individuation back into relationships, ones in which you are accurately reflected, seen, and hold.
In Swamplands of the Soul, Hollis explains: “The antidote to the fear of losing the world is to let go of it. The antidote for loneliness is to embrace loneliness. As in homeopathy. The wound is healed by swallowing a bit of the toxin itself.” I think he’s right. As I’ve wondered through Melbourne this week—sometimes with MECCA friends, often on my own—I’ve thought a lot about this. Whenever I leave home, I miss my husband and children dearly, while simultaneously rediscovering my own company, which is always a balm. I experience the fullness of our relationship in part by stepping away from it; I become reacquainted with my loneliness, while also realizing that my loneliness is always with me as well. It’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s my longtime companion, my friend. After all, lonely comes from alone: all + one, or “wholly oneself.”
Here’s Satish Kumar: “When you accept the state of being a stranger, you are no longer a stranger…I talk about being an exile when everything seemed to be strange around me and everybody was a stranger. Once I had accepted that I didn’t have to be part of the world, then I was free to be part of it. This is a paradoxical release of the spirit. This would became mine when I was no longer holding on to it.”
When you look at the manifestos of people—typically young men—who commit grievous harms, many have been bullied, or feel that they’ve been rejected, humiliated, etc. They want revenge. This is in Niobe Way’s research (her podcast episode: “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”) as well as James Kimmel’s book The Science of Revenge, which I wrote about last week: “What Can We Own?” Michael Kimmel’s work is also about this, see: “The Language of Beauty.”