Here is the podcast recording link, if you'd prefer to listen (listening time-1 hour).
Much has been written by mindfulness experts about the Power of Solitude. Spending time alone is considered an important key to getting to know who we really are.
I agree, certainly, with the notion that being alone can be restorative, enlightening, and even enjoyable. I cherish my alone-time!
In fact, one of the reasons that I talk about The Artist’s Way in my work as a Life Coach is to share with others how author Julia Cameron’s work in this area helped unblock my own creative gifts, by helping me learn to set aside time to explore and development them. Her techniques of daily journaling and reflection, and one-hour dates with myself (she calls them “Artist’s Dates”) led me on this whole path I am on now. I started these INTENTIONAL “alone with myself” practices about a decade ago, and I continue them today.
I am much happier being alone—giving myself time, attention, and space to create and express myself creatively—now, than I have ever been in my life!
Our overstimulated nervous systems of today suffer from having no place to rest and recharge. Self-imposed solitude—with no cell phone and no WiFi even—can help us regain our sense of self, renew harmony with nature, escape from sensory overload, can stimulate creativity, and awaken spirituality.
You can find peace in a busy world.
But, how do you balance that with the feelings of loneliness you can experience when you feel “too disconnected?”
People experience loneliness in different ways.
Some people may only feel lonely at certain times.
But some people may experience chronic loneliness. A deep feeling of loneliness can go on for a long time. You may be around others and still feel like you are alone.
The psychology of feeling lonely is a huge field of study. Especially post-pandemic. According to evolutionary theories of loneliness, loneliness is part of our biology. With social and environmental triggers, it produces psychologic and physical responses that affect behavior and wellbeing.
People describe thoughts and feelings of loneliness with words like anxiety, fear, shame, and helplessness. These powerful emotions can influence not only how we think, but what we believe, and how we act. They can create a downward spiral where loneliness causes someone to withdraw further from family and friends and so become lonelier.
The field of “positive communication” has evolved scholarship on some of these human experiences, too. I recently was able to attend a small bit of a university-based conference on “positive communication” (in the field of Applied Communications), when I was introduced to the community that Arkansas-based scholar Julien Mirivel and colleagues across the country inhabit.
Dr. Mirivel is a leader in The Positive Communication Network, and author of the book, “The Art of Positive Communication.” Dr. Mirivel hosted the conference through his position at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where I now also have a “day job” as a business consultant assisting technology startups in the state with early-venture funding strategies to grow their innovative technologies in the marketplace.
Positive Communication tenets promote connecting with someone in a meaningful way intentionally throughout your daily goings on. Dr. Mirivel suggest offering some positive comments and encouragement. He coaches us to “listen deeply with authenticity.” He is a proponent of taking some time to reach out and connect with a friend, family member, a colleague and that happiness is found in the process of relating.
Can I just say how much I love these messages? They resonate with me, for sure, and I also try to live and breathe the essence of this every day in my work with clients, my work with my colleagues, and in my relationships with friends, family, and my closest intimate relationships.
I want to point out the work of one particular professor who spoke at the online Positive Communication conference.
Dr. Kory Floyd, a Professor of Interpersonal Communications at the University of Arizona, presented a brief segment of his work on the communication of affection in close relationships and its effects on stress and physiological functioning.
He cited some techniques from his latest book, “The Loneliness Cure: Six Strategies for Finding Real Connections in Your Life” that are cognitive techniques to cope with loneliness.
One of the processes—not a cure, he cautions—is to proactively seek and practice ways to attract more intimacy into your relationships and everyday life. People are hard-wired for connection! It’s in our DNA. With healthy practice, and healthy interpersonal boundaries I will add, you can help stave off self-reinforcing spirals of the type I mentioned earlier. Again, these are not panaceas for all things loneliness!
However, I found value in Dr. Floyd’s expression of particular techniques that can help address “stuckness” in loneliness. These are ways he suggests that you can at least help DISRUPT THE CYCLE.
It may take some work to overcome the stuckness by getting back into those connectedness, or “anti-loneliness” practices.
They can help. (But don’t let them cut into your treasured alone time TOO MUCH, lol!)
If you are wanting to get unstuck in your feelings of loneliness:
Examine the evidence
Where is the proof to support the belief you have (shame, anxiety, fear, helplessness, not wanted, undesired, unworthy, etc.)? If you look for actual evidence in your life, there may not be any! OR, you may find that you are only looking at evidence that confirms your belief (confirmation bias)!
2. Change roles
We are often more generous to others than to ourselves. If you are stuck in a cycle of “I’m lonely/I’m not worthy/I’m nobody to no one” you may be able to console or encourage someone else who feels that way but not yourself!
Wait, what? If a friend says “I deserve to be lonely,” you wouldn’t affirm that, would you?
Why would you tell yourself that same thing then? Does it make sense to tell yourself that you deserve to be lonely if you wouldn’t even consider entertaining that thought about a FRIEND?! Be a friend to yourself, why would you think that you deserve to be lonely?
You’re awesome, that’s what you would tell a friend, why not tell that to yourself about YOU, then?
3. Find the opposites
Where is the “counter evidence,” Dr. Floyd suggests. Where can you point to times in your life that you KNOW you have had value? Certainly, you can rationally think of times in your life when other people have needed you, wanted to connect, share time, enjoy your contributions to their life, and so on. If you can try to articulate the times you have been helpful or enjoyed by someone else, that evidence can be compelling!
You’ve just forgotten, because you got stuck in this loneliness cycle, what it is like to have enjoyed knowing those feelings of connectedness. You may think you will never have it again.
4. Do a cost-benefit analysis
How does it help you to believe that you “deserve to be lonely?”
What is the benefit you derive from this belief and behavior?
If you say you have “social anxiety” as so many people today do, what is the payoff for holding onto that? Maybe its feeling embarrassed or awkward in front of other people - and you want to avoid that feeling.
Maybe it’s the pressure of “small talk” and not knowing what to say to other people.
Maybe it’s the dislike of small talk, which may feel like a prerequisite in a lot of the social situations you could pursue or find yourself in, and you have difficulty finding a way past all that chit chat to topics that are meaningful to you?
You like to have stirring, creative, or existential, or provocative, or intimate conversations and since those are harder to come by, you just hang back. Or don’t put out the effort. Or, you might confine yourself–Heaven forbid– in ways that might put you on the border of loneliness at some point?
Yikes! It’s hard to balance the tension sometimes between your desire to be alone and your desire to be NOT LONELY AT ALL, but truly spiritually (or emotionally or, perhaps physically or even erotically) connected.
Conversely, how does it HURT you? How is it holding you back?
In any event, feelings of loneliness are important to distinguish as symptoms or signs that you can do something about.
Your loneliness limits are different: they are not the same as somebody else's.
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***Personal example warning (I usually try to relate the topic to something in my life; skip this part if it makes you uncomfortable!)***
I remember the first time my boyfriend said to me “I don’t feel the need to be together as much as you do,” and not only was I shocked when he said it, then felt a little bit hurt, but then felt amazed that he knew himself so well. He was really saying that he really enjoys his alone time...a lot! He knows how much he needs that, how to get it, and where, and why it's important to him and his feelings of wholeness.
I had been struggling with my own feelings of loneliness, myself, having moved across country from California where my children are, to explore new relationships and connections in Arkansas.
While I was amazed that my boyfriend could spend so much time alone and not feel lonely, I also felt like he was devaluing the time he spends with me. My go-to at the time was to wonder “Well, if you like being alone so much, why spend any time with me at all? I can find someone who enjoys my company more because they want to spend more time WITH ME!”
Here I am thinking: “Why don’t you just stay ‘single,’ then? Why try to have an intimate relationship at all?”
I had been stuck in this “all or none” type thinking, well, most of my life. If I’m honest.
I thought that if he really loved me, he’d want to commit to spending as much time with me as he possibly can. Well, he is: he is spending as much time as he can or wants to!
The truth is, at our age (our 60s), we treasure our alone time, as much as our together time.
And here’s perhaps the most enlightening truth of all: our relationship is better because we ARE able to spend some time apart, enjoying and refreshing from our ALONE time.
I’ve been divorced for 10 years. It has taken me a lot of that time, and maybe more years before I was married, to understand how much I enjoy my own alone time.
One of the reasons I enjoy the current boyfriend is because he and I both know how to balance that in a satisfying way with the connected time we truly treasure with one another because of our love for each other and our unique, and spiritual/emotional intimate life together.
I think we both live in dread that we would RUIN that, if we spent more time together.
He is struggling with an impending move, where he has to decide if he is moving on to his own, solitary life where the majority of his time would be spent enjoying his ALONE time.
Meanwhile, I know this would force me back to even MORE solitary life enjoying my ALONE time, but craving the spiritual/emotional/physical intimate life I had enjoyed with him thus far. I don’t have a problem being ALONE but how much more of that intimate life with him will I sacrifice…before I feel truly LONELY? We are the not the only people dealing with these type of questions! It is kind of a trend, these days, to try to balance such valued relationships in a way where each person truly gets what they need—and balance these tensions with care.
As Dr. Floyd and others in the Positive Communication Network suggest we SHOULD do, I express my affection in a myriad of ways: my motivation for not wanting to feel lonely fuels my actions and decisions sometimes minute-by-minute!
I’m sure others of our listeners or readers have experienced something similar.
It’s truly human to think and feel and communicate these things.
Let me part with some encouraging words (thanks, Dr. Mirivel) and a way to connect with like-minded communicators/coaches/teachers:
Join the Positive Communication Network community by visiting www.positivecommunication.net.
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The podcast conversation continued...my host and former grad student Linda McShan of Los Angeles provides the opportunity for me to unpack these ideas, is a patient and good listener, and always has nuggets of personal wisdom and her own experiences that illuminate the topic for listeners/readers:
Think about sharing your own positive communication "helps," these are some of Ms. Linda's:
“Think not what you HAVE TO DO, but think what YOU GET to do!”
It’s empowering for yourself.
“I don’t exactly know how you feel but I know you are going through a lot. It will change. And YOU will change.”
“When you change, it changes. It’s not about changing the other person, that’s THEIR responsibility.”