Understanding your feelings of loneliness; loneliness vs solitude

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

This week Toronto, I want to do something different. On my show Hear 2 Help You on MyTCNTV Network (Tuesdays at 5:00 pm EST), Dave and I tackled the topic of loneliness and solitude. We received some very interesting feedback, and since this article is all about helping the community and highlighting mental health development, I thought it might be interesting to follow up this show with some reflective questions that could be helpful if you are personally dealing with loneliness. First, let’s start with having a discussion on the difference between loneliness and solitude.

Loneliness: Implies unhappiness over our separateness from others.

To be lonely is to feel: excluded from a group, unloved by those around us, unable to share our private concerns, feeling alienated from those in our surroundings.

Solitude: Denotes the positive experience of having time to oneself for recuperation or reflection.

During the show, we took some time to highlight ways in which people busy themselves so that they don’t feel those pangs of loneliness. Ways in which we busy ourselves to avoid feelings of loneliness are:

Busy ourselves in work, and activities

• We schedule every moment
• We drink, smoke, overeat
• We immerse ourselves in helping others and in our responsibilities
• We numb ourselves with social media
• We numb ourselves with television, loud music, drugs, radio talk shows, other people’s drama, compulsive shopping, sex, and even video games

What many of us end up realizing is that regardless of how much we busy ourselves, the initial feeling can still remain. The rest of this article is going to be providing direct questions that you must ask yourself; these questions are supposed to provide clarity, and allow you to dig a little deeper into your life and how you experience the world. Take the time to really think about how you exist within your immediate world, and around others. All right Toronto, are you ready?

Think of the time in your life when you were the loneliest; relate when that was, how it felt to you, and what you did to cope.

List here some specific ways in which you sometimes try to avoid loneliness.

Would you like to change any of these patterns you’ve just identified? If so, what are those patterns? What might you do to change them?

Complete the following sentences:

• “The time in my life when I most enjoyed being alone was when…..”
• “I usually deal with my loneliness by…..”
• “I escape from loneliness by…..”
• “If I were to be left and abandoned by all those who love me…”
• “One value I see in experiencing loneliness is…”
• “My greatest fear of loneliness is….”
• “I have felt lonely in a crowd when….”
• “I feel loneliest when….”
• “For me, being with others…..”
• “The thought of living alone for the rest of my life….”

For some of the readers, these questions might seem terrifying to ask, and rightfully so. Even though the majority of us are born alone (excluding identical twins), there is a need in all of us to form relationships, and we depend on these relationships in many different ways. What must be understood is that in order to build lasting relationships, we must first have a strong and powerful relationship with ourselves. If you are interested in diving into this topic more, you can research the book “Adjustment and Human Relations – A Lamp Along the Way” by Tricia Alexander. It is where I drew some of these questions from for this article. I want to congratulate you in advance for wanting to take on this journey; the journey of self-discovery is not easy, and anyone who tells you it is, well, they have led you astray. One thing I will say, it will be one of the most rewarding experiences of of your life.