Loneliness can create overwhelming anxiety, and anxiety can reinforce loneliness. Ultimately we are on our own in life, and much of the perceived emptiness we can feel when alone can drive our struggle to be relevant in life or, perhaps, to deny that we will die alone.
Its extreme form is the avoidant personality, a person who wishes deeply to be connected to the world around him but just as deeply fears rejection. Another common loneliness is that of depression, where a feeling of not being lovable can breed a toxic isolation. This brand of loneliness further reinforces feelings of inadequacy, thus reinforcing the isolation.
We can also feel emotionally lonely despite physical connection with someone. A couple may be together in a relationship but the individuals might still experience profound anxiety and yearnings to feel more understood and less lonely. Loneliness can range from simple sadness to a kind of empty, desperate, soul-searching, frenetic feeling to a deep sense of worthlessness. This loneliness can prompt impulsive, desperate maneuvers to manage one’s internal state.
Filling one’s self with illegal sub-stances, sex, food, people, or material goods can reflect panic over one’s sense of emptiness, thus illustrating the basic connection between internal loneliness and manipulation of the external environment.
Treatment of anxiety can help you to feel less alone with your anxiety; to restructure your internal world so that you can feel more comfortable being alone; to appeal less to the outside world as a way of regulating these feelings of loneliness; and to accept this loneliness as you go through it as a fundamental condition of humanity.
Rick’s comments:
While I have been fortunate enough through my work to be much less alone than I used to be, my most powerful urge is still to isolate. A weekend spent by myself, which by Sunday night has me feeling depressed and useless, doesn’t seem to prevent my arranging things so that I’m just as alone the following weekend.
Part of it is my refusal to overeat when others are around. The wiser voice in my head whispers “Good! So be around other people and don’t overeat—kill two birds with one stone.” Who can heed that voice, though, when another one is shouting “Good! So let go of other people and dig in!” The fact that I still listen to that voice so often is not a source of pride to me.
Another part is self-consciousness. Because of my OCD and the sense of being an outsider it causes, of not being one of the—to use a great phrase by the late, great advocate known as Howie the Harp—“chronically normal,” I know it’s not unusual for anybody to think at times “if they only knew the real me.” The anxiety, however, definitely makes that feeling more intense.