Why Do We Languish in Existential Loneliness?

Awakening and self-comfort make loneliness bearable

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

It's a quiet Saturday morning with early morning sun lighting up my front window. I should be relishing all the things I could do on a blue-sky late spring day, but all I can do is sit and stare. That lost, alone, languishing feeling is back… again… with the usual nausea and the feeling of being near tears. In fact, the tears fill my lower eyelids but no actual tears flow. I feel choked with anguish but unable to express it outwardly.

Am I depressed? No, not really. I have mostly good days, and life has precious moments. I enjoy deep friendships online and in person, almost daily hikes solo and with friends through pine-studded local forests, pleasant day trips with my wife to picturesque nearby towns, and playing in the front yard with my three rambunctious and raucous grandkids. I practice daily meditation, write on Medium, read books on spirituality, psychology, progressive and Socialist politics. I have a reasonably active outer and inner life.

So what's the problem? Why the loneliness when I'm so often surrounded by people and engaged in activities?

The simple answer is I had a lot of trauma in childhood. The not so simple part is that it took me decades and entry into therapy to discover my inner issues and to start healing them. Repetitive emotional and physical harm in childhood results in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), the symptoms of which can vary widely. Generally CPTSD is characterized by struggles with sensitive emotions, anger, self-esteem issues, dissociation (feeling separated from one's body or one's thoughts, memories or other parts of the mind), struggling with emotional attachment to others (finding it difficult to attach, becoming too attached, or both), and for me, existential loneliness.

Let me back up to my childhood and explain how existential loneliness came about for me. I was not an abused child, a common cause of CPTSD. But I had three traumatic circumstances going on in childhood: my mom was very anxious and edgy, I had life-threatening asthma from the ages of one to about 9 years old, and my parents divorced when I was five. All of these things added up to a very unhappy emotional life for a small child who does not know how to deal with so many traumatic life events. We don't have any coping skills at that age, you know?

Recently, my therapist helped me regress back to those early years, and I was able to reconnect with the thoughts and emotions I felt during that time.

When I was struggling to breathe, focusing on every breath to get life-giving air in and out of my blocked airways, I stared straight ahead blankly for hours or even days until the asthma subsided.

It was a form of dissociation. My focused mind was tuned to my airways while other thoughts were mostly shut off, but my emotions were still busy. I felt anguished, afraid, frustrated, and above all lonely. No one had the power to help me, not my mom, my dad, or God. It was me all on my own battling my illness. In this struggle, and in life, I was utterly alone — at the age of three or four, barely old enough to think or to be self-aware.

There were many times when my anxious mom was emotionally absent, not able to deal with her own life, let alone mine. She also worked full-time. I remember simultaneously longing for her love, care, and attention, and also steeling my emotions against the fact that she wasn't there, either physically or emotionally. It was the beginning of my attachment issues.

In many ways she was a good mom, and saved my life many times. Often she held my small body heaving for breath over her shoulder in a rocking chair all night so I could breathe, or rushed me to the hospital because I was turning blue. Her anguish came from her own challenging childhood and probably from seeing her tiny little boy at death's door over and over again. And, of course, children quickly pick up on their parent's emotions and absorb them. I was already a highly sensitive child, and I became emotionally much more so.

Then my parents divorced when I was five. My sister and I were devastated. We had a relatively happy family life and a good father who now left us. We both grew up feeling abandoned and longing for our dad to return. That never happened, but the feelings, thoughts and fears of abandonment became lifelong habits.

The emotional consequences were devastating.

I recall sitting in the back of the first grade classroom sobbing uncontrollably while Mrs. White, the teacher tried to carry on. I had no ability to control the grief, loss, abandonment, and loneliness I felt.

All of those factors added up to a lifelong struggle with deep emotions, including alternating between standoffishness with people and a kind of clinging insecurity in the rare instances when I found a friend who I really clicked with. There were also inner sadness, repressed anger, and of course, loneliness.

Loneliness and dissociation kind of go together for me. The staring dissociation I do comes from all those hours and days as a child just staring ahead trying to breathe. Loneliness for me comes from that same place.

It's called existential loneliness because it hearkens back to the fact that each of us lives a solitary existence.

We enter the world as a separate being, our thoughts take place in the loneliness inside our own heads, and we leave the planet alone when this solitary body falls into entropy and death. There is no denying we are alone in our particular personal experience. No one else has exactly the same life experience we do. This realization can be deeply distressing.

But what about solutions? What can we do to cope? There is no denying the existential fact that we are solitary bodies, but there are constructive ways to help heal or at least soothe the emotions that make us feel alone.

Here's a partial list of constructive, activities that will help you recognize, acknowledge, and cope with existential loneliness:

• Find a therapist — if your feelings cause you a lot of pain, psychotherapy can help tremendously. When you dig down to where and when your feelings started, you can speak to them in a higher-self-to-inner-child dialog that soothes those painful memories. I have been doing this and found some relief, and I also identified some early thoughts I’ve carried throughout adulthood, undercutting my self-esteem and causing inner pain. You may need a therapist who recognizes and knows how to deal with CPTSD.
• Analyze yourself — if you can’t find or afford a therapist, you can still read up on CPTSD and methods for treating it. Google it and start reading. One of the best and easiest methods for me is letting my higher self speak to my emotional self (sometimes called “inner child”). Search for “inner child meditations” to find resources that will guide you in soothing that wounded little one within.
• Mindfulness — you can either do full meditation in which you sit still and focus on your breathing, which is very relaxing, or you can just show special attention to your breathing and your surroundings while you are walking or otherwise active. Focusing on what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch while also breathing deeply and gently pushing away any thoughts helps you experience the present moment fully and deeply.
• Recognizing Oneness — mindfulness and reading about mindfulness often lead to recognizing spiritual Oneness. Even as we are physically separate, spirituality teaches us that on a spiritual or soul level, there are inexplicable interconnections. Mindfulness and reading on this subject can help us recognize the interconnections, actually feel them in some deep inner place that is difficult to explain but beautiful to experience. I sometimes come to joyful tears recognizing this Oneness with a few people I'm closest to or with creatures and creation.
• Ground yourself — there are many forms of grounding, as Katrina Stone describes. A quick, simple way to ground yourself: look around and identify 5 things you see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, and something pleasant to smell (or imagine a smell such as roses). Grounding pulls you away from anxious or lonely thoughts and focuses your mind in the moment.
• Walking in nature or any exercise — this is a primary emotional pain reliever for me. Walking releases endorphins, which make you feel good! Any kind of exercise does this, so do whatever exercise you like best, but walking is easy for most of us. Also, nature is a natural healing balm for the human soul. Being out in a park or forest, especially near water with those gurgling, rippling sounds, just makes you feel better.
• Find something satisfying and rewarding to do. A hobby, music, gardening, anything hands-on will focus your attention and tend to alleviate loneliness.
• Engage with real or virtual friends — do things with friends or chat with online friends if they are available. For me the loneliness happens often when friends are not available, so this is a double-edged sword. Additionally, too much computer time is dissociating for me, so I try not to spend too much time on apps like Facebook, especially if nobody is around to chat. It just pulls you in and makes you feel more lonely, looking for something or someone who isn't there.
• Write something — do what I'm doing. Write an article about your feelings that will help others. Or journal about it to at least get the feelings out where you can look at them and maybe begin to assuage the pain.

I hope any or all of these things will help you if you feel lonely. Our society tends to favor excessive activity to avoid feeling lonely. That's an unproductive approach because it leaves the pain hidden within where it never heals. Take time to look within, find the sources of your pain, and work on healing those wounds.

Then when those inevitable moments of existential loneliness do show up, you'll know where they come from. Sit with them a while, acknowledge and speak to that hurt inner child. Let the feelings be there for a bit.

Then pick one of your favorite ways to recover from the list above or create your own, and start moving forward toward a better day.