Do You Feel Alone in the World?
#complextraumadoc
News about the rise in social isolation and the epidemic of loneliness is everywhere these days. So too, are studies highlighting the health benefits of positive social connections. While raising awareness of these issues is crucial to the public good, the steady drumbeat of these reports can be damaging to many vulnerable people. Instead of inspiring action, these messages often reinforce feelings of shame — leaving people who already feel like outsiders in even worse shape.
If you’re one of those outsiders who long for closer relationships, you’ve probably heard the usual suggestions —join a club, volunteer, strike up a conversation with a stranger, stop watching Netflix, and just put yourself out there. Unfortunately, this well-meaning advice overlooks the fact that most people in your position have repeatedly tried to connect with others. As a result, the biggest impediments to forging new social connections are a growing distrust of others and a sense of hopelessness about the possibility of change.
In my practice, I regularly see people grappling with these sorts of feelings, turning inward to protect themselves against further betrayals, rejections, and abandonments. Self-imposed isolation becomes a way to limit exposure to hurtful experiences, but it comes at the price of loneliness.
Why Does Loneliness Feel So Awful?
Evolutionary psychologists look to our distant past for clues about why isolation and loneliness elicit such intense feelings. They examine how humans adapted to adverse circumstances by finding compromises and workarounds that allowed us to become a wildly successful species.
Evolution aims to pass our genes to successive generations with the highest possible level of efficiency. Success is akin to optimization — happiness and interpersonal security only matter insofar as they contribute to the overall business of making greater numbers of efficiently procreating human beings.
While Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest has generated the most headlines, he also wrote extensively about the role of social interdependence as the cornerstone of our success. Mutually beneficial relationships allow us to form cohesive groups with specialized functions. They help us better navigate the burdens of daily living and accelerate progress. We are not only stronger and more capable when we work together as a unit — our very survival depends on it.
We’ve been hardwired with the imperative to maintain positive connections with others. As a result, we’ve developed a highly advanced and nuanced repertoire of feelings based, at their core, on survival. That’s why rejections and slights often feel like life-or-death situations — even when logic tells us otherwise. As such, most people work diligently to build and maintain connections with others — sacrificing their welfare for loved ones or working the dating apps to find a mate.
The Profound Isolation of Trauma Survivors
When most people think about PTSD, they imagine combat veterans or someone who survived a natural disaster like the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. However, many more people live with the trauma of domestic abuse and societal oppression. In these instances, a perpetrator has broken boundaries, shattering the victim’s sense of psychological and physical integrity.
In my new book, Daddy, I share my experiences with complex trauma that was triggered by my parent’s murder-suicide and compounded by the deaths of many close friends during the AIDS epidemic. While the shock and horror of these deaths left me reeling, I was unprepared to find myself increasingly isolated in the months and years that followed. People I counted as close friends pulled away, and my few remaining family members moved on with their lives. For me, life stopped and then got worse and worse. The more I wanted to bring others near, the more I seemed to push them away.
I’ve since learned that isolation is a hallmark of trauma survivors — dissociative states and the terror of being abandoned or exploited by others hinder our ability to relate normally with others. As a result, a visceral sense of abject vulnerability seeps into every area of life, distorting everything it touches. After a while, a person can come to feel like a freak, unfit for human companionship.
In my work, I regularly encounter traumatized people who are utterly alone in the world. Consequently, they become experts at concealing the details of their lives: home confinement helps lower their visibility, and most have adapted strategies to deflect attention away from what they feel is a highly shameful situation; asked about their weekend plans by a co-worker, they are vague or make something up. They turn away from connections so often that people finally give up.
While it’s a relief to have privacy, being constantly alone with one’s thoughts fuels an acute sense of self-consciousness, allowing the observing self to become all-powerful in the absence of meaningful input from others. Distorted beliefs about yourself and others can run rampant. Feelings of panic induced by our hardwired imperative to connect or die can kick into overdrive, leading to a state of prolonged paralysis.
I continue to experience vestiges of the stranglehold of trauma-induced loneliness. However, I’ve extricated myself from the worst of it with a lot of time, effort, and luck. While I recognize that many people have experienced — and continue to endure — far worse traumas than mine, I still believe there’s hope for everyone. A good first step can be an anonymous chatline or phone hotline focused on people who are lonely and isolated.
Here’s a good place to start:
https://www.verywellmind.com/depression-chat-rooms-1067331
Have you ever felt ashamed of being lonely? Any tips on things that have helped? I’d love to hear your feedback!
