some people grow and without tools to relate to others. Why is this feeling of loneliness installed? Many times it has to do with childhood: when parents are not prepared to care for and care for their children, they grow up in emotional loneliness and they end up feeling that way.
Feeling of loneliness: why can it come from childhood?
The human being is a social animal. We are born with a predisposition to attend to language, to calm down with our mother’s voice, and to smell and feel the people around us. From them we learn to relate and to manage ourselves in a society that, as we grow, becomes more and more complex.
To fulfill that programming, honed and reinforced over hundreds of thousands of years, we need that, in our first years of life, an essential aspect is fulfilled: the support and the guidance of balanced and caring adults.
When this does not happen, that is, when parents do not provide the essential care for their children, they grow up feeling alone.
This happens because many people have children although they are not prepared for it. Emotionally, they carry their own shortcomings, their own traumas and are too self-centered to notice the needs of their children.
They feed and clothe them because that’s what they’re told to do, but They don’t know how to care for them emotionally. They are not accompanied and the little ones grow up totally alone, helpless, learning by themselves, not always in the best way, everything that adults should have shown them.
Real testimony: Valeria’s emotional loneliness
Valeria came to my office to work on some problems in your personal relationships that he repeated regularly with his partners and friends. She had a hard time socializing.
She felt as if she had a social brake that prevented her from opening up to others. He doubted and mistrusted everyone. When he tried to deepen a relationship or friendship, he always felt like an inner voice telling him: “Don’t make an effort, it’s not worth it.”
Throughout our work in therapy, Valeria began to understand that she had not had a healthy model of socialization, quite the contrary, her family had been an anti-socializing family:
- In his house, each one went to his air, no one cared for anyone.
- They ate together and shared the space at home, but all the interactions were very mechanical and artificial.
- There were rules to be met and everyone complied with them. but there was no genuine interest in the other.
- No one was interested in his grades, or his homework. No one asked him about his worries or his problems.
As Valeria herself expressed to me in one of our sessions: “There everyone went their own way and no one took care of the others, it was like the law of the jungle. Like lonely islands.”
Consequences of growing up in emotional loneliness
Although she had a large family, she always felt lonely. Nobody paid attention to him, nobody taught him anything. She had to learn to relate and socialize on her own, with the few tools she had and with her family’s zero experience.
As a consequence of the null model that he had had, Valeria had a very hard time trusting others and opening up to socialize. “Even when I’m surrounded by people, I still feel lonely, like a child,” she told me. The patterns that she had learned as a child kept repeating to her that no one was interested in her, that she wasn’t worth opening up to because the others were doing their thing.
How to get rid of the feeling of loneliness
Our work in therapy focused on two complementary aspects: freeing yourself from your toxic patterns and looking for healthier models to relate to others.
On the one hand, Valeria had to assume, cry and free herself from the family model she had had. She had to go through the grief of recognizing that her parents had abandoned her emotionally and that they had not helped her at all. Since they had been her most important reference in childhood, Valeria internalized that this was the normal way of relating, but as an adult, she was able to understand that there may also be other alternatives.
To reprogram your old ideas, we look for other, healthier models of socialization. Valeria remembered some visits to her friends’ houses and, also, a summer that she spent living with some distant relatives. These families behaved very differently from hers. They spoke and related sincerely, they were honestly interested in others.
Even she was treated differently, which was very strange to her. They asked her, they were interested and worried about her so that she was comfortable and well cared for. With her cousins and her uncles, for the first time in her life, Valeria experienced what it meant to be treated with affection.
Thanks to all these examples that were also part of his memories, Valeria was able to understand that her family was not the norm, but the exception. Little by little, she left her mistrust behind and gradually opened up to whom she thought could be interesting. She also learned to differentiate and filter people to detect who could be trusted.
Over time, Valeria was leaving behind the harsh consequences of having grown up in emotional solitude. and he was able to have more sincere and direct relationships.