Understanding Loneliness

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Loneliness can be triggered by present events, but it often has its roots in earlier life experiences.

Attachment patterns help explain why some people feel lonely even when surrounded by others.

Healing unresolved emotional wounds can reduce feelings of loneliness in adulthood.

Learning to validate others and provide a secure base can help them feel less alone.

The fact that people are lonely isn’t new, despite the U.S. Surgeon General proclaiming in 2023 that loneliness and isolation are a national epidemic. People have always been lonely, even when they are surrounded by people. If you are old enough, you might remember a line from the Beatles' 1966 song Eleanor Rigby: "... All the lonely people... Where do they all come from?"

You might be one of those lonely people. Or you might be struggling to understand someone you are in a relationship with. In either case, this article should help by giving you concrete ideas about what you can do.

Loneliness as a Product of Attachment Styles

Attachment styles are personality characteristics that develop in childhood and provide us with roadmaps for understanding and navigating the social world as adults. There are four basic attachment styles.

Secure. If our early family relationships were with parents who were consistently warm, available, and responsive, we probably would have developed a secure attachment style. In this case, your parents would have been emotionally perceptive and understanding of your emotional needs. If you were upset or frightened, they would have 1) accurately perceived your experience, 2) shown you in their words and facial expressions that they understood what you were experiencing, and then, after having validated your perceptions and joined you in your emotional experiences, they may have 3) attempted to comfort you or given you another way of looking at things. In this context, you would not have felt alone in your struggles. By extension, relative to those with insecure attachment styles, people with secure styles are the least likely to feel lonely in adulthood (Shorter et al., 2022).

Avoidant/Dismissing. If your parents took the approach that children should not be coddled, they may........

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