I’ve struggled with feelings of loneliness throughout my life. This webinar explores the topic better than anything I’ve heard before.
Alexandra Katehakis: * What does it feel like in my body to be alone now? Am I lonely because there is nobody out there to reflect back to me? Addicts tend to have a difficult time being alone. People grow up with the TV as a babysitter because being alone with loneliness and despair is untenable. Part of recovery is learning to tolerate that feeling of loneliness.
* Human being are sexually gregarious. We’re wired for connection. When that does not happen early on, certain brain-body connections are not made in a robust way and that will leave a person chronically depressed and lonely. We then try to get into relationships and we hope that we will find that one person who will put their finger in the dam of that loneliness. Initially in love, that works. We find the one person who saves us because they are reflecting what we did or did not get in infancy. We’re constantly seeking to repair in relationship what we did not get as children. This is embedded in our most primitive brain, the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for emotions. Because our brains are encoded in a particular way, we’ll choose someone who can’t come through for us.
* Being alone and enjoying your own company is a sign of mental health.
* When you are alone, do you need distraction? Can you tolerate silence or does it raise your anxiety?
* When loneliness is constant, it hearkens back to childhood when neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life. When the child looks for attunement from the mother, and doesn’t get it, the child’s brain is encoded that it is alone. When the infant is neglected, that can lead to a lifelong depression and feelings of abandonment, neglect and loneliness.
After a divorce, some children complain they could never figure out who they were because they did not have a father reflecting back to them with any regularity.
If your parents abandoned you, you are likely to have problems with loneliness.
How do you deal with that hollow feeling of emptiness you have all the time?
That creates a personal identity when we internalize the parent and we can go out into the world and feel we’re ok because we were told we were ok. That attunement with a parent emotionally regulates a child and let’s him know he’s ok.
* Some people say they’re fine when they’re alone. Their insecurities get kicked up when they date. None of us have issues when we’re alone. When we start communicating with another and we’re not getting our needs met and we don’t communicate explicitly what our needs, we’ll feel we’ll never get our needs met. It’s infantile desire to have your mind read. Part of being an adult is communicating your needs. If someone ignores your needs and has no interest in meeting your needs, you probably should not date them.
LUKE: * I remember this one woman I dated in 1995, she was a few years older than me. I took her to Stephen S. Wise temple one Shabbos morning but did not drop her off at her apartment. Instead, I dropped her off on Wilshire Blvd, a few blocks away, because I wanted to get to Aish Ha Torah for mincha. She later complained and used that as the reason why she wouldn’t go out with me again. I ran into her about 17 years later. My God, she was scary. She’d not just hit the wall, she’d been destroyed. I never treated her like a treasure and I dodged a bullet. In those halcyon years, I messed around with many women older than me, women I had no intentions of marrying, but the break-ups did at times rip my heart out when they did the breaking up, and I shed tears.
* There’s something in my childhood, in my early wounding, that I sometimes fear may never get repaired. It’s part of the structure of my autonomic nervous system.
