I think you really hit the nail on the head with the first sentence “Feelings of loneliness occur when there is a mismatch between the amount of meaningful social connection we want and the amount we have”
What does loneliness look like for you?
I’ve always felt disconnected and out of step with the world, including my family. I always craved that connection from as young as I can remember and often tried to get it in destructive ways.
It was at its worst when I had been a single mum for a few years, my MH really flared when I became single. I developed some new friends - other single parent friends but like so much in my life the group and the friendships disintegrated at the same time as my kids father moving away with no plans to see the kids. I kept trying to build the connections but it never worked. It never filled the void.
I kept thinking if only I could meet the right person. That special someone.
How does loneliness feel and how does it impact your wellbeing?
It feels like a void. A hole in my being. A complete emptiness. That matched in and fed the depression, triggered my BPD, which I didn’t know at the time and later contributed to creating anxiety.
The effect of it all was various strategies to fill the hole - sex, food and alcohol.
Are the periods of the day or year when loneliness is harder to manage?
Bedtime, Birthday, Christmas!
What have you done to manage loneliness, do you have tips for others?
When I was diagnosed with BPD I completed DBT. DBT taught me skills and strategies to manage life.
One strategy is Radical Acceptance. One of my favourites. It’s about literally “Radically” accepting. Accepting whatever is causing you pain whether that be a person, a situation, a feeling, who you are, anything. With the knowledge that you can only control yourself.
One of the many things that I accepted was that I was who I was and I could work on changing the things I did not like about myself and my situation or did not work for me. Part of that was then accepting that I may never find that one special person which meant I had to accept being alone. To accept being alone meant I had to accept feeling lonely. So I embraced it. I embrace being alone. That meant I had to learn to be comfortable with myself, comfortable doing things on my own. I worked towards that goal. I self analysed. Picked out things I didn’t like or didn’t work for me and made changes. Picked out things I liked and did work for me and focused on improving, enhancing them.
I accepted that people would leave. It hurt but I had to accept that too. I couldn’t stop them leaving, I couldn’t stop being hurt. All I could do was accept it and keep working on me, building a life that I would be happy with. Piece by piece. Many small steps, many failures and falls but also many successes, even just getting up after every failure and continuing I measured as a success.
At some point of self reflection, I checked in with myself and realised I hadn’t felt lonely for some time. It was so incredibly empowering with all the other work I did at the same time. It comes under the umbrella of ‘loving yourself’ but it was a long journey of to achieve through many smaller goals. I always hated when people would tell me “you just have to love yourself” and I would respond “how” they never had an answer but I figured it out on my own!
Then my mom passed away (mid 2023) and that sense of loneliness was so much bigger than before that I defined it as “absolute loneliness” to distinguish it from what I had felt before. It was because no matter what, my mum had stood by me. She was the only person that had stood by me through it all. Everyone else left, with no exception.
That feeling sent me into a tail spin back into the abyss of depression and anxiety. It was terrifying to be thrown back after 15 plus years of hard work. I turned to grief counselling to help me separate the grief from Depression/anxiety and to help me work through it all. I also turned to Sane, these forums and the counselling support. It’s helping. I’m no longer in the darkness. I’m further down the path than what I was before losing my mum. The loneliness is still there but smaller. It will take time and work to accept and work through all my feelings but I’m getting there and I know that I will be even better as I continue this journey
