Traumatic Loneliness

Isolation I Friendlessness I Lack of Companions I Forsaken I Abandoned

Surrounded by people ... never felt so alone

We may never have felt a sense of belonging or had it and lost it. We may be living with deep insecurity and feeling very ashamed about it. You may be in a couple and never felt so lonely. Long term chronic aloneness is traumatic, distressing and excruiating.

Living with complex post traumatic stress disorder, we long for company but also don;t want it. We fear intrusion into our lives, and any over stimulation can be very triggering. The safety of aloneness is welcome yet at the same time deeply distressing. We may feel like no-one really understands or 'gets me'. Relationships end up being too much work or we feel we are too much which sets up a spiral of shame, guilt and deep distress.

Sometimes we feel alone because we feel we cannot get heard, seen or seen. We feel visibly invisible. Other times we live in deep frustration of not being able to be understood, and this drives us into more loneliness.

Sometimes we also have no boundaries, don't know what they are or even believe we have any rights to them. So including others in our lives is very tricky for us. We can become easily enmeshed, caring for one or two others, eventually we may not know where we end and the other starts.

Understanding that we have, like others, our own subjective experience, opinions, thoughs and feelings can be very hard. We believe if we were just like others or others were just like us, all would be ok.

Before long its been weeks, months or years of being 'alone'. We may go out with friends, distracting ourselves, but we are not really present in our lives, just going through the motions.

We need to come back home to ourselves, reconnect with our deepest selves, our heart, mind and soul.

We can do this by expression in a safe space, learning trust rather than a nieve trust built on very little. In this kind of trust we begin to come home, understand ourselves, make sense of 'me'.

The world can become less scary, you can learn to trust again. Then we can reach out to others from a new place, a place where 'I am ok' and 'you are ok' versus 'you are not ok', 'I am not ok'.

Join me in doing 'the work'.