Loneliness has been described and poeticized since time is time Human beings are social animals by nature, but they do not have to want to adhere to their social norms.
Therefore, loneliness can mean the freedom to seek one’s own path, but also the exclusion from outside that a person suffers by not complying with social regulations.
In this sense, we understand loneliness as what happens when people live alone voluntarily or involuntarily, but we will focus more on the feeling of loneliness or helplessness , that is, those who do not voluntarily choose to be or feel isolated. The question that we in the world of mental health ask ourselves is: to what extent can loneliness affect the disease?
According to 2019 data, In Spain there are 4.7 million single-person households, of which 2 million are people over 65 years of age Furthermore, different studies confirm that one of the greatest psychological conditions suffered by this population is the feeling of loneliness.
On the other hand, Many adolescents with suicidal ideation or attempts have expressed feeling alone and misunderstood as part of the problem Likewise, according to psychiatrist Diego Figuera, poverty and loneliness are the main psychosocial causes that favor the appearance of mental illnesses.
With all this, we also want to point out what poets have written in a thousand and one ways: that being alone implies pain, and prolonged and inconsolable pain leads to the deepest madness. Relationship with the development of a mental disorder? All of the world.
Absence is night, dark night. How did we offend the sky one day, which thus denies us its warm light? Nublos, by Fernando Celada,
The different forms of loneliness
Next, we will explain the different ways this feeling of loneliness manifests itself and how it affects us psychologically. In addition, we will relate how society reinforces loneliness in its different messages.
Being or feeling alone
This difference shines when we serve some people with emotional deficiencies in consultation Money, social and professional success, stable partners, physical and aesthetic health… and yet, they are people who bow their heads and shrink when they express how they feel.
They may have learned to relate and capture the attention of others in a very effective way, but their problem with being vulnerable or allowing themselves spaces of intimacy turns this great skill into a shell that, contradictorily, causes a devastating feeling of loneliness to persist.
Although team or collaborative work is encouraged in schools, a message from society continues to persist along the lines of “solve your problems alone, because otherwise you are weak”, “to pair up is to tie one another”, “image is the most important thing”. , learn to dress and go to the gym”… The only thing you achieve in this way is to continue associating success and strength with your own loneliness Once again, a complete contradiction with our social nature.
To this we can add the false illusion of community that is generated on social networks, with emoticons and likes as a symbol of admiration. Both the social skills to bond with others and the tolerance for frustration from being alone are ingredients that are lost if we base social interaction on these digital platforms.
In the end, Instead of being a community that watches a person on a screen (television 20 years ago), we are a person who feels watched by the community when there is only one camera. Yes, technology gives us facilities in our daily lives, but there are battles that we are losing, and we fall in the form of selfies.
On the other hand is the world of video games. Teenagers spend more and more time playing games in their rooms, connecting with virtual friends to overcome the challenges that these games pose. The risk here is to instrumentalize these relationships for leisure and not create close security ties in which to trust the deepest secrets. Playing is healthy and entertaining, but the real world will always be the biggest challenge, living, and we need allies to overcome it.
When a person recognizes in themselves this difference between being or feeling alone, that is when the feeling of freedom is generated, since they can choose the companies, and they can do so according to their needs, without confusing social networks as a true meeting space and privacy. Adolescents need their adult role models to teach them and remind them how to do it, look them in the eye, make a phone call, meet for a walk, in short, learn to be present analogically, not so much virtually.
Loneliness as an element that worsens with other pathologies
If we add the loneliness felt as rejection, abandonment and helplessness by the support network to the need for regulation and emotional balance, the result is physiological-emotional management problems that are closely related to different mental disorders both to directly cause its appearance and to drastically worsen it.
Such is the case of anxiety and depression, disorders that are very similar to a feeling of incomprehension that makes communication difficult. It is difficult to know what came first, whether “the chicken or the egg”, in the sense that misunderstanding can produce frustration, and this affects when it comes to asking for help, generating a feeling of invasion or excessive demands on those who try to help, intensifying that feeling of incomprehension and, therefore, loneliness felt, over and over again, like a vicious circle without end
In other cases, such as grief or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the lack of social support is one of the risk factors for the chronicification of the disease. This means that if after a traumatic event or loss of someone loved there is no support present, both in the form of messages and visits, the brain, mind and person end up falling apart.
Continued isolation may be seen in that context as a way to protect oneself from harm although it can also be seen as a way to accommodate a personal coffin.
Final reflection
It is totally true that loneliness provides opportunities to test oneself, to discover oneself outside the comfort zone, to listen to oneself, to relax, to expand one’s limits… But We will always need a comfort zone to return to, for someone to listen to us and look at us, to challenge us, to understand us Paraphrasing the movie Into the Wild“Happiness is only real when shared”.
