Loneliness & social belonging
Social Belonging May Not Save You: A Lifelesson from Freud
We often perceive loneliness as the antithesis of belonging or connection.
Read on my website / Reading time 6 min.
Our social relationships are typically built on shared values, such as having a partner, working in an office, or being part of community groups. However, the reality is stark.
Data from the nationally representative U.S. Health and Retirement study, as cited by Perissinotto et al., reveals that a staggering 43 % of people aged 60 and older reported feeling lonely. Similarly, a survey by the AARP Foundation, as reported by Donovan and Blazer, found that 35% of adults aged 45+ in the United States admitted to feeling lonely.
These numbers underscore the prevalence and seriousness of loneliness in our society.
𝐐𝐮𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲: However, I was not alone. Science pointed to a new trend in which people with many friends and who live with families still feel lonely, and the case is significant.
According to the National Institute of Ageing, loneliness and social isolation, while often used interchangeably, are not the same. Social isolation refers to a lack of contact with others, a physical state. On the other hand, loneliness is an emotional state, a feeling of being disconnected from others. It’s a paradox that one can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely.
This is emotional or existential loneliness, a state that many of us may have experienced at some point in our lives.
Once we encounter loneliness, being it social, emotional, or existential, we may delve into knowledge sources on how to deal with it and often find some recipes such as:
- Stay connected with others,
- Join a group,
- Share your feelings,
- Connect with others or offer to assist,
- Invite someone to join you in nearby activities.
Yet it all sounds artificial to those who don’t want to connect with others and are tired of their empty social metabolism.
Still, experts at the University of Minnesota have predicted that loneliness kills more people than obesity and alcohol, which has been said to be vastly underestimated. Loneliness increases the likelihood of mortality by 26 percent, according to a 2015 study published in the Association for Psychological Science.
The future of loneliness, scientists and scholars predict, is a type of layoff unless one learns to reconnect with oneself, each other, and the outside world on a new level.
I understand that this sense is not social loneliness but detachment from self and loss of belonging center, so healing starts with reconnection within the self.
My artificial happiness didn’t leave me much time to think about myself or how I felt, switching my attention to the outside world. My career had jumped at an unpresidential pace, and I had never lived a better material life. However, I started to notice something.
I would meet many people who would say, “I’m good,” with difficulty explaining what “good” meant.
In other words, many around us find themselves in an emotional state where they don’t feel emotions and, therefore, don’t have access to vitality, the flow of energy. There is no flow in this automatic “I feel good”; it is like a stagnant lake.
Any recharge sources, such as fitness, special dietary supplements or vitamins, nature trips, stress relief by gatherings, or entertainment, support the steady-state vital energy level.
Stop all this, and one will feel very hard without an external dosage of energy. Such a stressful life becomes the norm for us, where we believe a moderate stress level means that we feel good and are “in control.”
However, all these very useful activities have nothing to do with emotions.
Emotional disconnections result from an inability to feel self and others, the state I call “energy lethargy” or emotional numbness, which directly results from emotional suppression. Many of us have been taught to suppress our emotions, especially the negative ones, leading to numbness and self-disconnections as a direct result of emotional suppression.
Therefore, everybody lives in the myth of experiences … of“their self,” acting from their traumas in full disconnection from self instead. On top of that, we lost the ability to connect; nobody is prepared to delve into someone else’s Universe, busy keeping emotional walls of their own.
People have reported that after near-death experiences, plant medicine travels, or surviving a severe physical illness, they experienced a change that transformed their lives thereafter to such an extent that they felt as though they were privy to a miracle of love, starting a life of service, and enjoying the reality of every day.
However, it is not the experience itself that changes perception. A switch of emotional engagement, which happens during such an experience, has changed the lives of many. Life sometimes needs a significant jolt to rouse us. How else can the dormant be awakened?
Suppressing emotions may seem like a coping mechanism, but it can do more harm than good.
Should pain be viewed as a positive experience instead? Feeling vulnerable signifies being alive. Disconnecting from pain leads to a complete loss of sensitivity, yet only fools want to live in pain: we need to go through it and heal our vulnerability.
Embrace your pain as a welcomed guest. Share your best self with her, accepting her with love. Become a tender, caring lover to her. Let her pass through you, carrying away the remnants of your ego; you no longer require them.
Our emotions, both positive and negative, are what make us human. Our ability to feel deeply allows us to connect with ourselves and others, experiencing life in all its complexity.
Instead of suppressing emotions to avoid destruction, embracing our human capacity to feel profound allows us to feel and share rich sensory experiences, fostering re-connections and a sense of belonging essential for our well-being.
Your emotions are your treasure, an innate gift that leads to emotional engagements.
Being sensitive allows you to feel others, nature, and yourself with all their subtle, tiny nuances. The same ability to share those feelings or empathy connects you with creativity, intuition, and higher blissful states. These states require emotional liberation, which will soon become the new norm.
Reconnection starts with one question: “How can I start to feel myself?”
When I read Freud’s life story, I had a eureka moment: I understood what caused my constant sadness and loneliness.
We don’t feel connected unless we are emotionally engaged, which isn’t about others but our emotional numbness and capacity for engagement.
I paid serious attention to the fact that Freud experienced the same situation with sciences, where he could not find the one to belong.
Sense of belonging is vitally essential for us, and it doesn’t matter if we belong to the social domain, such as family, community, society, or country.
We need to belong somewhere, which could also be a life passion or a natural domain, such as forests and rivers, or friends from other species, such as cats, dogs, or stars of the Universe.
Freud found an elegant solution to his situation by starting a new discipline called “psychology,” failing to find the one that could best accommodate his knowledge.
Thus, Freud pointed out that if we could not find where to belong, it could be a situation where we could start something by ourselves. In other words, if we don’t feel at home anywhere, we might need to build one. If we don’t feel right with any community members, we may need to start our own community.
This excellent lesson was my guiding light in the dark times of the shutdown.
Let me know if loneliness becomes a bit easier once you read this.
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