Loneliness. What is it? Why do we feel it? And how can we heal it?
Being alone and feeling lonely are two totally different things. Being in pain and suffering are two totally different things. So, what is this? Why are so many people feeling lonely? What does it take to create this feeling of loneliness? Why are some people walking around when they’re around a lot of people and still feeling super lonely? This a huge problem right now.
After coaching a lot of people and having my own experiences with it, I found two huge reasons that really create this what I would call “chronic loneliness feeling.” The first thing is when we have an emotion and someone can’t be with us in that emotion, especially a negative emotion, we suffer because we are alone in our pain. You know those people that always want you to feel better, you share your experience and they want it to change or you share your experience and they try to make you see it in a different way that feels better. Those things don’t really heal the loneliness. They don’t take the pain away, because they’re also denying your experience.
What you need is for someone to be with you in your experience. To let it be your experience and not judge it and not need it to be any different, which is a very rare thing. A lot of people feel that they just need to make you feel better. “I’m gonna make you think of something different. I’m gonna make you think that it’s okay or that it’s a different perspective.” But I’ve found what really heals people is when I let them be in their experience and make that experience okay… to see their experience… to see them in their pain and allow that to be okay.
I allow you to be in your experience and then you allow yourself to be in your experience, to see that part of yourself and then love it anyway. See, when we’re in a conditional environment – I talk about conditional love a lot especially when you go to your mom or dad and say, “I’m actually not having a good experience” and they say, “Everything’s great, you’re fine”. You’re not feeling invalidated.
We feel unloved, because we are not being seen for our entire experience. What we do is we start to not know how to deal with that. We feel so alone in that. We feel so lonely, because part of us doesn’t want to share it because we don’t think we’ll be seen, we don’t think we’ll be accepted. The other part of us is so unsure of anyone else’s reaction, because we’ve never had anyone really validate that part of us and make us feel that part of us is okay or that negative emotion is okay.
Our loneliness comes from being alone in our pain that creates suffering. We can have pain and not suffer. That happens when someone else can be with us in our pain and then we can be with our own pain. We don’t suffer and we don’t feel lonely. We feel like we’re with others in our pain. The worst part of pain or loneliness is feeling like no one is there with us in that experience. We feel disconnected, detached, alone. You know what’s interesting about this and probably frustrating to a lot of people? We never have to feel alone.
Sure, we can feel lonely when there’s no one around, that’s fine, but to be completely alone is different. We never have to feel alone, because we don’t have to invalidate our negative emotion or pain ever again. The way we can really start healing our loneliness is by allowing ourselves to be with ourselves in our negative emotion – in our pain. We can allow ourselves to ask for someone we trust to be with us. We can turn on a video and be like “wow, someone else feels this way”. We have all felt this experience before, but many people keep having the experience, because they don’t know how to change it.
The way I started changing my own loneliness was realizing that, “Hey, I’m not alone. There’s other people experiencing what I experienced”. By sitting in my own experience and validating it, loving it anyway and realizing that even though others have been conditional, I can be unconditional. I can be unconditional with myself. I can be unconditional with others. And why haven’t other people been that way with me? Because no one was like that with them. Then we start to heal that understanding of “Oh, people aren’t with me in my pain, because no one’s been with them in their pain”.
Huge thing I talked about in my video “Self-blame” is the way we feel is not our fault. We just feel what we feel. The way we feel is not wrong. We just feel what we feel and the more often we can sit with ourselves and say, “My feelings just need to be seen, have a voice and be accepted by me,” than we stop feeling completely alone. We stop feeling totally lonely. We stop feeling disconnected and separate and we stop suffering.
If anyone you know who’s feeling alone right now, let them know that they’re not the only one. You feel alone sometimes too, but when you can feel alone and be with someone else in that aloneness, you’re not lonely.
I love you guys.
Namaste.
