Emotion: Loneliness

Meaning: 1) We feel disconnected socially, AND
2) We want a social connection.

Like many Emotions, Loneliness is often interpreted backwards. When someone feels lonely, they wish someone would call, they wish someone would come over, they wish someone would give them an invitation. The opposite is the case. Loneliness is an Emotion that is supposed to prompt us to take the initiative to connect socially.

What Kind of Connection Do We Really Want?

Loneliness is a feeling that tells us that we are socially disconnected and we want a social connection. The first thing we need to do is determine what kind of social connection we desire. This is where many people make a mistake. They often think that they need an intimate connection, which is probably true, but they mistake the intimacy of Soul and Spirit with the physical intimacy of the Body. Then they feel even more empty and hollow inside when they manage to find what they mistakenly thought would get them what they wanted.

Casual Company

Sometimes we just need to relax and enjoy ourselves with someone else. This sort of casual connection can be a side by side relationship with the focus elsewhere. It can be shopping with a friend, going to a sporting event, watching a movie or anything else that needs little interaction. The advantage to this type of interaction is that it’s safe and requires only a low level of social skills.

Talking

Sometimes we just need to talk. We can talk with a family member, a friend, even a coworker over a cup of coffee or lunch. We can talk with a clergyman, a counselor, even a stranger on a hot line.

Intimacy

Sometimes we need to build a more intimate friendship. That means we need to find someone with whom we have some common interests or activities, and start to build a Phileo relationship using the skills of building a Phileo Love Bank Account with someone. See the chapter on the Phileo Bank Account in the Love Stack section.

Whatever the need, Loneliness is our life prompt to take action, to do something to connect to others. The ball is in our court. We should take the initiative, make a decision, and move forward.

LONELINESS CONCERNS

There are a couple of concerns that lonely people must consider. Our sense of self worth should not depend upon others responding to us in the manner we desire. Also, we should examine our social expectations to see if they are unreasonable, either by wishing something from someone that is out of character for that person, or by wishing to relate to members of a group with which we do not have the social skills or background to relate.

Self Worth

If our sense of self-worth is based upon other people, that is potentially dangerous. People by and large are wrapped up in their own lives, and if we count on them to respond to us and our lives in a particular way for us to be feel good about ourselves, we’re setting ourselves up for a fall. No matter how much someone loves you, they aren’t mind readers and they have their own lives and their own preoccupations. Even in the best and most intimate of relationships, other people will not always respond the way you wish they would respond.

Unreasonable Expectations

In a similar vein, if we have unreasonable social expectations, we are also setting ourselves up for a fall. For example, we often wish we had a particular relationship with our parents. The fact that someone is a mother or father may cause us to wish a certain type of relationship. However, if they have issues they have never resolved, then that relationship is unlikely. If a parent is abusive, and the hurt and insecurity that lead to such actions are not adequately addressed, then the relationship is not likely to change. No matter how much an adult child might like a parent to behave in a particular way, people are who people are, and a person will continue to behave in a manner consistent with their own character and circumstances. They will be who they are, not who we wish them to be.

People’s lives are not subject to what we wish from them. They will do what we wish only if they choose. If we feel lonely and isolated from our parents because we have expectations that are not reasonable to expect from them, then we will be hurt again and again. If we can accept that they are who they are and they do what they do, then we can conduct ourselves accordingly and accept whatever sort of relationship we would like with a person like that.

Remember, it is not the job of other people to change everything in their identity to conform to our expectations. We all know that in our Mind, but we often forget to remind ourselves when Loneliness creeps up on us. We can sometimes catch ourselves when we hear ourselves say (or even jusr think) "Why can't she be more like a real mother?" That tells us that we have a definition we wish to impose on them, and therefore we are asking them to be someone different. Blood relation does not determine the other person's character.

An adult woman was constantly hurt by her mother, and her answer was fairly simple: avoid her whenever possible. However, one day after a lesson like this one, she had the realization that her mother was never a "mother" as she defined the word, and, in fact, had never really grown past the emotional maturity of a selfish, teenaged brat. When she began to realize who her mother really was, she also figured out how to have a relationship with her. Instead of treating her like a loving, warm and wise mother and grandmother, she figured out that she needed to go in with the understanding and expectations based upon Reality. Of course you don't tell a person who is immature that they are immature (it just starts fights), but you behave with an expectation of immaturity. You don't tell a selfish person that they're selfish, but you expect it. When she started to behave according to who her mother was rather than who she wanted her to be, their relationship was suddenly transformed. The mother even said that her daughter was "the only one who understands," but the daughter never said what she understood.

Another form of unreasonable social expectation has to do with what standard we maintain for who we desire to have as friends. Groucho Marx made a joke that he would not join any club that would have him. In other words, if the standards of a group were low enough to allow him in, the club was not elite enough for him. While he was joking, of course, we sometimes do the same thing on a social level. We sometimes reject those who would give us what we need in a relationship to pursue those who will not.

Do We Have the Skills We Need?

We have to consider who we are and what level and type of social skills we possess. We can effectively interact and build peer relationships with people of similar level of skill and similar type of social skills. If we are from one culture, and we wish to build intimacy with someone of a different culture, we need to learn and be able to interact according to the rules of the group we wish to join. For many, that might be a compromise of personal identity. Microcultures are not just based on ethnicity and national origin.

This can be as simple as two different groups at the same business or in overlapping social circles, or even within families. The engineers might have one culture while the managers have another. It might be difficult for an engineer to interact intimately with managers if he does not understand the manager mind set. In a similar vein, a baseball-football-basketball fan might have trouble relating to a golf-tennis-polo fan when discussing sports. A lifelong Christian might have trouble relating to an atheist. A Muslim might have trouble relating to a Jew.

These do not necessarily show a problem, just incompatibility. The two microcultures simply do not go together easily. If we continue to seek intimacy with those with whom we lack commonality, or whose rules we habitually break as a matter of our character or personality, then we will continually feel lonely and isolated from those with whom we seek to relate. We simply might have to find others that are more like minded, or we have to make the effort to more clearly understand the people with whom we want to build friendships.

FEELING LOVE

One of the strangest things about love and affection is that we feel it when we express it. If we express love to a baby, we feel connected. Even if we express love to a pet, we often feel more alive, more loved. Since pets don’t have all the issues involved in human relationships, many people find themselves treating their pets like members of the family or best friends. Almost without regard to the direction of the love, when we express it, we feel it. Even when we just think about it, dwelling on particularly nice memories, we feel it.

Looking for a way to express unconditional love can give us the connection we crave. We can even do this without taking a chance of being rejected, often a terrible fear of lonely people, by doing anonymous, loving things. Sometimes it’s the anonymity of volunteerism, helping out at a homeless shelter, joining some group activity to help some worthy cause. Sometimes it’s the anonymity of doing things for people without telling them, like giving anonymous gifts to someone in need, or giving money to a stranger.

Dr. Laura, the nationally syndicated moral principle counselor, tells women who feel disconnected from their husbands to show them love and appreciation. She said that one of the things that she learned is that the women tend to want their husbands to treat them better, but the one's who get that without treating the husbands better first tend to do nothing more than milk it for their own selfish desires. The women who consistently reported feeling more connected to their husbands were the one's that started showing love and showing appreciation - THEN their husbands started to treat them better and they were must happier in their marriage. The intense Loneliness that comes when you are together, even intimately together, but you still fee disconnected is often resolved this way. It sounds backwards to a human, fleshly Mind, but that's the way God engineered the system.

LONELINESS DUE TO REJECTION

Sometimes Loneliness is because of rejection. We are alone because others have consistently rejected our friendship. Sometimes we’re good at making friends, but bad at keeping them. Sometimes we are intimate friends with one or two people, but we move away, or they move away. Sometimes we need a particular type of relationship we can’t seem to build or maintain, such as finding someone with whom we can really talk, or someone who enjoys a particular musical style, or someone who likes to go to the Art Museum.

Fear of rejection should be addressed by looking at the section on Fear, but someone who is rather consistently rejected or consistently ostracized really needs to take a look inside. Why does rejection keep coming?

This can be a challenging and difficult question to answer, made all the more difficult because often people won’t admit the truth. A boyfriend who breaks up says “It’s not you, it’s me.” or a girlfriend says “This just really isn’t working out.” Without complete and truthful feedback, it is difficult to know what we do that seems to distance people.

However, any result we consistently produce in our lives is likely connected to our behaviors, and Loneliness is often the result of poor social skills. We sometimes don’t know what we’re doing wrong, and sometimes others can’t even quite describe it. All we know and all they feel is that the Phileo friendship is gone.

If we are willing to face the hard truths, we can talk to someone who might know. Maybe a member of our family might have some insight, or a friend, or a pastor, or maybe even an old friend we no longer see. Asking a sincere question might help you get the answer you need to make the changes that will get you the connection you want. You have to be prepared for a hard truth, and avoid the blame game - that just gives away your power to change your future.

When you learn what it is you do that consistently pushes people away, you can change. It might be as simple as running with the wrong group, trying to establish relationships with the kind of people who will not return the effort. They might be prejudiced against you for a stupid reason, or they might have a clique, or they might consider themselves out of your league. If these are the people you keep pursuing, then you are dooming yourself to failure if you don’t have the skills to break past their prejudices.

You might have subtle underlying issues that push people away. If you make friends easily but lose them over time, you might be open and friendly - which draws them to you, but also somewhat negative which whittles away at the relationship over time. You need to learn to be more positive and focus on what’s good. Remember, negative is four times stronger than positive. See the Phileo Bank Account chapter for details on how to take control of this.

If you have trouble getting past a casual friendship to someone with whom you can really talk, it might be because you talk a lot but don’t listen enough. Always make an effort to listen twice as much as you talk. Don’t hide, but wait until your friend is ready for a certain level of information before you just open up. My wife has had people talk to her about all sorts of intimate family matters in just a few conversations. It was a lot of information for a few casual chats.

Taking Control

If you want to be invited to a party, throw a party. Ask for help planning from someone you know does parties well, but try not to impose on anyone. Try to create the kind of atmosphere you enjoy and those that experience the most pleasure at your party will likely be the ones that like what you like, and they are the most likely to become friends

Be Yourself

One key is not to compromise your values as you pursue this. I remember an old song that said something like “It hard when you belong to someone else when the right one comes along.” Sometimes we’re so caught up trying to figure out who to pretend to be to keep some friends that we inadvertently miss out on the friendships that would really fulfill us.

If you are just who you are, or you are practicing the skills of who you wish to be (no matter whether you make friends because of it or not), then you will eventually attract like-minded people. There might be very few of them.

A Personal Example

Wendy and I are a team. We love, admire and respect one another and see no utility in arguing. We handle our few disagreements with calm discussion and dig behind the individual issues to find the principles by which the decisions will be made. Thus, early on, we spent a lot of time uncovering ways of thinking and establishing principles. Now, after several years practice, we have almost no problems at all. Nearly everything we run into has already been addressed in principle elsewhere.

Consequently, we get along with very few other couples. There are only a few husbands and wives we know that really, honestly like one another. Most of the time we hear criticism of spouses, little jabs that are allegedly intended to be funny, or complaint about the opposite sex in general. We've also consistently run into people who defend arguments and fighting as a virtue, and they don't understand how two people can be married and never argue - even though we do sometimes disagree. We just believe that an argument means someone wasn't listening or someone wasn't communicating, and we do both, so we don't argue. As we’ve made friends with most other couples, we found many of the common, typical problems, so we distanced ourselves from those relationships.

Sometimes you have to be willing to be alone to really be ready to be with someone else. If you believe in what you are doing strongly enough to stick with it in the face of loneliness, then you are more likely to eventually find someone who is compatible with your way of thinking. You might only have the one friend for a while, but one can be enough. In any event, if you keep changing, then they will never really be friends with you, only with the illusion you have created. If you are going to work on being someone new because you’re growing and have chosen your direction, that’s wonderful. Just don’t pretend to be something you’re not and have no intention of becoming.

Be the Right Person - For Real

My wife became the woman she is by making choices that lead to her current identity. She did not allow herself to be defined by her past circumstances. She never saw a good marriage, so it would be natural to say that whatever she did that would be destructive to marriage is "just her." She rejected that idea. She grew up without a father, so it would have been easy to simply accept the baggage and behaviors that are normal for that, too. She was educated in public school for 9 grades, and she could have just accepted whatever they taught her and become that person.

Instead, at the age of 12 she made some decisions that she was going to become an adult by intentionally choosing the directions she would go. She spent her own money on seminars and books to learn about relationships so she could learn how they worked without gaining the bad habits of ordinary experience. She became the object of desire and affection for dozens of young men in her teens, but she knew who she was and who she was becoming, and she knew what she was looking for in a man. She was willing to hold out. It did not take her many years - but she had to be willing to skip all the normal teenage perks that come with teen relationships and pursue something deeper and more fulfilling. She had to be willing to be alone for as long as it might take to make the connection she desired, and she had to become the woman that could have that relationship on purpose, rather than the woman that her life circumstances otherwise might have made her into.

She knew she would change dramatically in those years. She just decided that so long as she was going to change anyway, she may as well become someone worth being. Then she found her mate. She became the right person before she found the right person. She wasn't pretending - she really became that person. That is one of the ultimate keys to dealing with Loneliness in the long term: grow on purpose.