As we know, loneliness can kill you. Literally. Since I’m a mum and I’ve got a little one depending on me, I had to figure out a way to survive it.
As a serial monogamist and very social person, I thrive on deep, meaningful connected relationships. It’s just who I am. True connection is a must for me, it lights me up, gives me energy and makes me feel more like myself.
So having this almost completely stripped away was devastating at my core. An arduous and painful journey, a path that took me years to accept I was walking on. In the end I had to accept, there was no way out. I could only control my circumstances so much. And when you’re stripped of the things that used to give you life (including your health – more on that another time) you have to find something else.
You have to search so deep inside yourself to come through the other side. I had to learn how to be alone, without being stuck in depression, grief, bitterness, anger, resentment and desperation that my situation was something different. That I could change it.
I tried hard to change it. But the change had to come from within. And one of the places it started from was accepting I was essentially alone (aren’t we all, really, when it comes down to it?) and I had to learn to live like this. Not just survive, but find a way to still enjoy my life, or at least as best I could, under these circumstances. The more I hated it, the less I accepted it, and the deeper I pushed down the resentment and bitterness that was growing inside me. This is where my Protector Parts came in – see how all Parts of us are always trying to help us?
Luckily, over the years, I’ve had an undying determination to find peace from within myself. That journey started when I was about 21 or so (more about that in this post) .. I didn’t expect to be thrown so far in the deep-end that I’d nearly drown, many times, but I guess that was my journey to finding this strength and resilience within myself. Self-reliance.
Self-reliance came from accepting the resources that I did and didn’t have available to me. It came from needing more, and having to find it within. It came from wanting to be a better mother, wanting to have a better relationship with my child, wanting to be happier and wanting to be able to serve my community in a meaningful way.
I had to learn how to live with this aloneness. There was no choice. So I just kept searching for the answers. For the tools that I needed that would help me find these answers. The answers, of course, came from within.
They came from somatic work, from working with the felt sensation of my own feelings, my nervous system, how my body-mind-spirit experienced life. How Parts of me reacted to feeling, how afraid I was of feeling. Somatic therapy and Parts work opened me up to a whole new world – to myself – to Wholeness.
I had known for so many years that loneliness stemmed from disconnection from myself. The thing was, I had no idea how to truly connect to myself. I figured I was kinda already doing the right things – gentle yoga, attempts at mindfulness meditation, sound healing, chanting, journalling. The list goes on.
But I wasn’t truly feeling. I wasn’t fully feeling my feelings.
The aloneness triggered a deep loneliness – no one to comfort you, hold you, protect you, be with you through the pain.
No one to co-regulate with.
I was forced to learn to self-regulate – by feeling my feelings.
By learning to be less afraid of my feelings.
This meant looking at them fully. Looking at and truly feeling the rage that I had bottled up – from resentment and bitterness, anger at my situation and the people I blamed, including myself.
Every time I felt these feelings fully, what was revealed was what I had Exiled (an IFS term for the Parts of us that split from our Psyche and are made unconscious, forbidden and continue to be suppressed by our Protector Parts).
This Exile was almost always the same thing, in different forms, memories, ages, experiences..
It was Grief.
The Loss of so much.
So much. The Loss of love. Of Family. The loss of the dream and vision for the future; for motherhood and how I wanted to mother. For this world and it’s brokenness.
For separation and loss of connection. For loss of the deep and meaningful with another.
These feelings were so powerful, so huge, and yet – they were beautiful too. They held so much pain. So much memory. So much of their own depth and experience.
The more I visited these places within myself, the more self-reliant I became. The more I learnt how to be OK being alone. The more I learnt that I could rely on and trust myself to be there for myself. And really, no one else can be that reliable. Everyone is human. Humans are bound by conditions. Humans are inherently unreliable. Even I’m still unreliable to myself sometimes, but it’s different. Most the time I’m conscious of it. Most the time I don’t just abandon myself in hard times. I at least give myself and my Parts and my pain the acknowledgement and validation they need. I can’t feel it all all the time, I still have times where it’s overwhelming.
But the thing I’m finally able to do, in general, is not feel this desperate need to be SAVED by someone. This desperate need for someone or something outside of myself to make me feel better, fill a hole, validate my feelings.
Thanks to the therapeutic somatic and IFS skills that I’ve learnt, I can do this for myself. Reflecting on this, I never thought I would ever get here. I always needed someone else to rely on, to rant to, process with, get a hug from, give me the answers, provide the words of comfort, distract me from myself …
Well, that never really worked. It relieved me for a short time, made me feel loved and seen.
But if I didn’t love and see myself, by feeling my feelings, I’d soon again need another person to make me feel better.
I can’t even tell you what an absolute relief it is, and what an achievement it is that I can be alone now, and be ok. I can self-regulate and live my life. I can sort out my own problems, provide myself with validation and comfort and meet my own needs.
I still need other people, absolutely no doubt, but I no longer feel a desperate need to be saved by them. Therefore, relationships are generally more easeful and harmonious. I don’t really have expectations. I do have boundaries – loving boundaries – but because I know that the human condition is unreliable, well, I’ve stopped treating them as though they could meet my needs whenever I wanted them too. If they can, great, if they can’t, that’s ok, because I’m ok with alone.
Want to learn somatic IFS skills so you feel safe to feel? Book an appointment here 🙂
