About Suffering From Loneliness - Self-development, Society

Often people come to me with the suspicion that they have some undiagnosed painful conditions. They admit that from a certain moment they can no longer work as before. They know that their education is bad for development. They may talk about concentration problems. Collecting all this, they come to the conclusion that they always had some kind of disorder

Putting history together

Much of my work is about helping people make connections between the symptoms they experience:

• concentration;
• anxiety;
• stress;
• poor sleep;
• obsessive behavior;
• events that coincided with the development of these symptoms.

There are many people who live with depression and end up receiving antidepressants. It often turns out that their depression may be the result of older and deeper traumatic experiences or loneliness.

Loneliness of childhood

Loneliness is often part of childhood experiences that is ignored. For many of us, the idea that we are suffering from an unhealthy degree of loneliness can be quickly dismissed as a kind of experience that can be viewed as a moral issue.

Rather than taking it seriously as something that was a heavy burden on the child's mind and psyche, loneliness can be presented as the guilt of individuals. People will look at the detached child and come to the conclusion that they are looking at an inability to join society, rather than evidence of misery or suffering. They think, "He wants to be alone." Instead of realizing that loneliness can be caused by problems with others, difficulties in the family.

Alone, all alone

Loneliness can be very difficult to live with. We get used to it, we adapt. We can even, as they say, “prefer our own company”. Yet loneliness weakens us.

An only child in a single parent family experiences emotional isolation. This is not to say that brothers and sisters will necessarily make you stronger, I well know that sibling relationships tend to be difficult. But growing up together can relieve you of an existential sense of loneliness.

Traumatic experience

Sometimes loneliness is combined with traumatic experiences. Perhaps the child grew up with an abusive parent. The person then develops hypervigilant defenses designed to monitor the environment for threats. All of this reduces the ability to concentrate and emphasizes the feeling of isolation.

Such experiences place a heavy burden on the person, and often painful symptoms arise from these types of stressful experiences. Loss of concentration leads to poor school performance. Teenagers growing up in such conditions are unlikely to find work to their liking. They find it easier to slip through the system without proper care and interest in them.

A spiral is created in which further symptoms develop:

• sleep problems;
• stress;
• bodily symptoms such as irritable bowel syndrome;
• obsessive behavior.

Everything begins to develop and move the person further along the continuum into a poor mental state. The person receives diagnoses and medications, but the underlying experience of loneliness and trauma is not recognized. When I am asked if I think someone has an undiagnosed condition, I first try to understand how the person entered that state.

Everyone has the right not to be left alone with their experiences. Psychotherapy exists as one of the tools to support you at any stage of your life

Based on article: blogs.psychcentral.com/psychotherapy-matters/2018/05/do-you-suffer-from-undiagnosed-loneliness/

Author: Toby Ingham