More people are living alone than ever. In America, 40
percent or more of all households contain a single
occupant. Many people happily live alone -- but others are tormented by the wail
of the Lonesome Blues. That oldie can echo in our ears even when we're surrounded
by friends and family.
Loneliness is a common brand of human suffering. Many
believe that loneliness is an inescapable fact of human existence, a curse we're
fated to endure from birth to death. The novelist Thomas Wolfe spoke to this idea:
"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far
from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of
human existence."
Wolfe was famous and admired during his lifetime, which
apparently offered little solace or good company for his loneliness. Even
"super-famous" Albert Einstein succumbed to the misery. " It is strange to be
known so universally and yet to be so lonely," he candidly commented. Being a rich celebrity doesn't appear to help:
"Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool," observed the actress Liv
Ullmann.
Loneliness appears to have
infiltrated if not occupied human nature. Impervious to the exhilarations of
fame, wealth, and power, it produces assorted misery, ill health, and increased risk of heart disease. Maybe we can't exterminate it, but we can see and
understand the emotional weaknesses that make loneliness more painful than it
would otherwise be. Being human is challenging enough. We don't have to endure
unnecessary suffering.
Most people who suffer with
loneliness are entangled in unresolved emotional attachments. Unwittingly, they
chose to recycle unresolved emotions from their past. Usually these are associated
with feeling unloved, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned.
Although it defies common
sense, we go looking for old hurts that are unresolved from our past. We do not do this in order to resolve the hurts. Instead, we do it to re-live the hurts. Whatever is unresolved
in our psyche produces inner conflict that has a life of its own. The conflict can
persist -- and often get worse -- until the day we die. The conflict behind
loneliness is often our wish to feel loved and connected to life versus our unconscious willingness to go
on feeling the old familiar abandonment and sense of being unloved.
We can be helpless to stop
the suffering and self-defeat produced by the conflict when we don't clearly
enough see the nature of the conflict. Instinctively, we deny the existence of
the conflict. Unconsciously, we offer up our loneliness as "proof" that we're
not colluding in our own suffering. Our unconscious defense maintains: "Are you
nuts! I don't want to feel unloved! I'm not clinging to old hurts! Can't you
see, in my loneliness, how desperately I want love and connection in my life!"
Who would have thought that
loneliness can be part of a psychological defense? The loneliness defends us
from the inner truth we hate to acknowledge because that truth is so amazing
and humbling. In other words, we produce loneliness in order to cover up our
willingness to experience again and again what's unresolved in our psyche. The
defense is offered up to our superego, the hidden master of our personality,
which protests against our indulgence in our suffering. Here's another
rendition of the defense: "How can you suggest that I'm secretly invested in
feeling unloved and abandoned! My loneliness proves how much I want to be
loved. Look how much I suffer from the feeling of not being loved! Look at how much I hate being alone! Surely that
proves that I'm not still clinging to the opposite feeling."
The individual can make this
defense more convincing by feeling more intensely the pain of loneliness. As
with most of our psychological defenses, we often have to increase the level of
suffering and self-defeat in order for the defense to continue over time to be
effective (in the sense of deluding us). This produces (when loneliness or some
other symptom such as anger is used as a defense) a stubborn determination to hold
onto the misery of it.
Other factors can be at play
on the field of loneliness. We can be fearful of not being accepted by others
and fearful of being a disappointment to them. This means we're emotionally
attached to feelings of not having value and not being worthy. In a sense, we're
abandoning our own self by not believing in our self. "It's so lonely when you
don't even know yourself," an observer once noted. It's more to the point to
say, "It's so lonely because you
don't know yourself."
A harsh super ego or inner
critic, one that mocks and harasses us at the slightest provocation, can also
create more feelings of isolation and loneliness. So can our inner passivity,
which can paralyze us in a helpless conviction that there's no escape from
loneliness.
A remedy was proposed by Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Laureate who wrote Siddartha, a novel about the spiritual journey of an Indian man at the time of Buddha. Hesse said ...
"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being."
Key words in this passage are, "But then our solitude
is overcome ..." The pain of our solitude is overcome when we're sincerely
interested in escaping this suffering and have the insight to do so. It helps
to stay conscious of our resistance to letting go of suffering.
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