Understanding Loneliness

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Friction and disconnection are essential ingredients to healthy development and relationships.

People need to embrace opportunities for unexpected connection with those who are different from them.

Professionals can look to mutual recognition for a detailed framework on how difference promotes good therapy.

We are living in an age of widespread loneliness and disconnection. To make matters more complicated, encountering difference very often quickly transforms into fear, threat, and various self-protective responses which, by definition, increase distance rather than foster connection.

Such fear responses have their place, and there are many scenarios where distancing ourselves from perceived threat is indeed the appropriate and adaptive response. The problem is when these responses are activated at such a low threshold that any whiff of difference or friction is experienced the same as real danger, creating a different kind of danger—isolation and quietly devastating loneliness.

Although I am quick to point out the limitations of insight, in this case, a bit of grounded education may be an entryway to softening some automatic reactions to encountering difference.

In short: Learning to relate with others who are experienced as different from ourselves is an essential ingredient to feeling deeply connected.

Leaders in attachment and mentalization research have conducted incredible studies on infant-caregiver interactions and learned that optimally safe, secure, caring, and growth-producing relationships are those which are not perfectly attuned with flawless mirroring at all times, but rather, relationships that engage a dance of connection, disconnection, and reconnection. The tolerable flaws, empathic “misses,” and moments of discomfort or inattention which are followed by the joy and relief of restored connection are what promote the development of self-esteem, self-agency, and trust in oneself and others.

Alternatively, those who have not been fortunate to experience this dance in early development may find everyday moments of disconnection, difference, or disagreement intolerable, and even minor conflicts can escalate into all-out arguments or cut-off relationships. The solution is in the problem. If this resonates, ultimately, what is needed is to........

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