Healing the Deep Sense of Aloneness and Separateness in the World
By, Chantelle Willows, MS
Synergy eTherapy Guest Blogger
Allowing Abandoned Aspects of Self to be Seen, Heard, and Felt.
Do you always feel alone, even when surrounded by other people? You “know” people care, but it never seems to penetrate deeply to the core of your being in a sustainable, integrated way. There is a hunger and thirst for love and connection, and not because you don’t love and connect with yourself…it is as if you have no ability to truly feel, sense, and be connected with another human being.
They can be present. They can love and care about you. They can support you. Yet, you feel utterly and deeply alone.
Your body yearns for an integrated connection. You reach out, you try to connect, you share your thoughts and feelings, and yet you are left feeling so disconnected. You are doing the right things, the people that love and care about you are doing the right things…and simply there is this void.
A void of despair. A void of infinite isolation. A void of deep sense of separateness from all that is. A void of nothingness. A void of emptiness.
Your body literally screams for connection, yet is so lost and disoriented in knowing how. It feels like crazy making. It feels like everything you do ends up in another seemingly hopeless attempt to feel as one with another, leaving you feeling more alone than when you began.
The truth is, we are all one. We are all connected. Lay close to another and you will sense that two heartbeats beating in their own rhythm when united in physical contact will begin beating to the same rhythm as one. Two souls aligned deeply can experience a profound connection beyond the finite human mind comprehension. Synchronicities align. Unimaginable events of miracles occur.
We have all, to one degree or another, bought into the illusion of separateness.
In a culture that promotes rugged individualism and has detached from tribal communities, we are all in a race to outrun one another in competition. We focus on how we are different, what makes us unique, what we can contribute to the world…and have left the primal needs of human connection, community, and belonging. Some of us may still have those experiences integrated in our family units, for others of us we do not. For those of us that don’t have that experience in family, we are often crushed by the outside influences of the collective at large that is so far detached from unity, oneness, community, and belonging. We are left feeling very alone in a world surrounded by people. For those that do have families, there is an overidentification of biological family being the one and only important value of connection. It is almost like there is a world of the haves and have knots. You are either blessed and fortunate to have a family of love, belonging, and connection or not. And if you are in the category of not, you are left flailing for yourself in murky waters where you will always be in the category of exclude.
For those of us that often experience feeling alone, detached, and disconnected…I am here to remind you that you aren’t alone.
Your life experiences may have mirrored to you an illusion of separateness, but that is not yours to own. I know that for me, spending decades of my life in significant relationships with others who literally had the inability to care about another person’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences mirrored to me that I was alone in all that I was experiencing. Not only was I alone, but I was manipulated, threatened, gaslighted, and deeply discredited for everything that I was. Everything I thought, felt, believed, and experienced was wrong, inaccurate, and delusional. I was left feeling profoundly confused and disoriented, utterly lost in existence…and clearly of no significance or value to another person.
The only way I was able to detach from those relationships to get any footing on who I truly was, was to actually buy into the illusion of separateness. I had to believe that I was not them and what they had to say, think, and believe about me was not me. In order to survive living in those circumstances, I had to keep my thoughts, feelings, and experiences to myself or I was significantly hurt. I had to learn to keep the truth of who I was to myself and be alone, because if I exposed myself I was injured. To survive, I separated myself. I disconnected. I detached. To preserve any sense of self and safety, I had to isolate from human connection.
We all have our journeys. We all have our experiences.
We all have our experiences. We all have significant relationships that impact us. We all have pain. We all have events in life that mirror to us many lessons and truths. We all do the best we can in any given moment to endure life as it arrives.
But, oftentimes we learn coping strategies to survive circumstances that make complete sense in the moment, that later no longer are effective and simply maladaptive. What helped you to survive may later be the very thing that prevents you from thriving.
All of us (or the majority of us), to one degree or another, have learned to isolate aspects of ourselves out of self-protection. We shut down parts of ourselves and disconnect with others the parts of ourselves we learned from experiences in relationships that were not accepted or valued, or worse yet punished or actively attacked for being. These are the wounds that left unhealed create a sense of isolation within and disconnection in our outer reality. We feel like fragmented pieces of ourselves and we feel detached in relationships and alone where aspects of us are not seen, felt, and heard.
The journey, my friends, is leaning into those wounds.
Where are the parts of yourself you isolated? Shut off from? Ignored? Disconnected from? Learned were unacceptable? Where did you abandon yourself in a desperate attempt to maintain any sense of connection with another? For it is in these spaces…these hidden aspects of self where deep healing occur as we see, feel, hear, and bear witness to the parts of us that we lost. The parts of us that are so organic to the essence of who we are, but were taught to dismiss and ignore.
The next time you feel alone and disconnected. The next time when you feel like you are in the space of other people and yet simply don’t feel connected, I want you to ask yourself this question, “what is the part of me right now in this moment that is longing to be seen, heard, and felt?” Allow it to arise with no judgment. Allow the emotions to be as the are with no need to shift or change them. Allow ALL of you to be experienced.
As we continue to hold space for all that we are, allowing the parts of us to live again that we disconnected from, we can heal. We pay attention to all the deep truths within our being and awaken more deeply into the authentic expression of who we truly are that is no longer hindered and blocked based on conditioning that was never ours to own. When we allow ourselves to witness the parts of self we isolated within to maintain the hard wired connection with others we needed for survival, we begin to become whole. We begin to transform. We begin to heal. We begin to step into a more authentic expression of who we are. We begin to show up in the world in all that we truly are authentically and not as a mere reflection of all the conditioning that was never ours to begin with. We begin to be able to project outwardly our pure essence and in turn see a world around us, including relationships, that mirror back who you truly are in all that you are. We begin to experience and create life in alignment to our truth.
