On Feeling Lonely Again

There is a news story today about a writer who says he has always felt lonely, and no one has been able to solve it:  he is at wits end.  I will try to help understand it.

I have to take him at his word and believe what he means to say by lonely is feeling all alone.    But feeling all alone, lonely, is not just a temporary state.  It is something that never seems to stop, no matter what he does.    So, I say to myself, “what makes someone feel lonely all of their lives?”  Since  I have been down to the lowest level of brain function, I have a good idea, and I shall share it.  Left alone a lot during infancy and childhood certainly more deeply embeds the feeling and compounds the pain. But it is not always what makes it linger.  It makes the feeling worst and more unbearable but the provenance is earlier, often much earlier.  I know this from experience, as well as from observation.

So what could it be?  What could make us feel so alone?  It could be just after birth.  When we enter this world, we are all alone, terrified in such a strange place, and no one is there; no one comes to soothe us.  We feel isolated and ALONE.    When you need a loving hand, when it is basically life and death; when it is as urgent as life itself.    The baby cannot see a kind, caring face because he is being weighed, and “handled” by white coats done too often with a slight indifference.  All is cold, unfeeling.  He needs his mother’s closeness NOW!

But mother is sick and cannot attend to him.  Or hospital rules demand that the baby not be placed right away on momma.  They have to perform all sorts of ablutions first.  Or that baby is soon put in some sort of basket or “holding cell.”  When he needs touch and kisses.  So what do we have?  A room full of crying babies.  And why do they cry? Because they are lonely and/or in pain.  Babies are humans. Do we cry for no reason?  Neither to they.
It is like asking if a crying baby should be picked up?  If a friend were in pain would you hug and hold him?  Of course.

I mention life and death because if the baby is immediately taken away for a time after birth, and placed by himself, the terror he may feel from the birth experience can be overwhelming.    Then at 6 months of life he is put to bed, left alone in the dark with no parents around and the “all alone” terror mounts again.  It is the compounding: feeling alone and terrified at birth reawakens the terror, and the system can’t take it.    Death sometimes follows; it is all far too much…….  Crib Death.  Crib death tells us the power of terror inside.  Or if he is placed  in an incubator, again all alone and terrified, he will carry the terror and aloneness for a lifetime.  Why for a lifetime?

Won’t he get over it?  No.  The feeling went on for so long and unrelenting, is so great and devastating that it cannot be fully repressed.  It lingers as a pure state, gaining heft later on due to missing parents who work or party all of the time.  He runs from being alone and makes up reasons why he needs to be with people and to keep busy.  He needs distraction.  He phones all of the time.  He needs connection to others, and this again, comes from the continual lack of connection early on to himself and to parents.  I mention “to himself” because terror during gestation already lays down the basis for disconnection from aspects of oneself.  That means alienation from the pain.  Those defenses are already in place in gestation.  He no longer has all of himself.

The critical period for fulfillment is the neuro-biologic time frame when needs must be fulfilled.  It is biologically circumscribed and allows for no deviation.    Fulfillment is urgent to calm and soothe the newborn child.  If not, then the feeling is imprinted for life because the child is becoming overwhelmed with the need for and lack of, hugs and kisses: but no one comes.

All the mélange of feelings involved in the imprint remain thrusting  toward the  top level consciousness for connection.  Why do they move forwards and upwards?  Connection means ultimate surcease and resolution.  The brain knows that.  Why don’t we?  Alas, it is not to be because the pain/terror is so great that it cannot be repressed. Nor can it be felt, integrated and be done with.

We carry it along for a lifetime; even in a crowd one feels lonely and all alone.  We find ways to handle it, and what does it involve?  Pushing it back and down.  The person often feels alienated, and distant.  He looks and acts as if he lives in another world.  He does, only he doesn’t know it.  He lives in a world of aloneness and loneliness.  He is dogged by those unrelenting feelings.  The feeling, so devastating is unyielding.  It is imprinted and embedded and has a life all of its own. It has hegemony even over what  is going on in current life.  So even in a happy feast he feels down.  He cannot feel happy until he really feels.  What? What is dragging him down: the imprint.

Why hegemony? (Hey if I never use good, big words, I will be dumbing down everyone, including me).  Because it is so purely gated due to its load of pain that it is ever-present, even when no one knows what “IT” is.

We need to know about one of my primary concepts; that once the brief critical period is over, no fulfillment can fill the gap.  No jollying him.  Every single fulfillment becomes symbolic and unfulfilling. And hence requires more and more attempts.  And then the person goes to therapy and gets hugs from groups members and feels soooo goood.  Alas, sadly,  it cannot last.  The system allows no substitutes.  It is either the real thing, a warm hug at the critical time, or nothing.

Yet, wow,  hugs to stop the aloneness feels so good; it is addicting.  Oh yes, so are drugs that ease the pain.  I reported on one of my patients who needed constant sex; nymphomania.  Only it was not that all.  She was not sex-crazed.  She was “being held” crazed.  She was obsessed as she should have been because she desperately needed touch. Not a cause for opprobrium.  (Oh my, those big words).  It was all compounded and made urgent because in her childhood she was never held or touched.

So years in therapy this woman was trying to feel loved.  Holy Sh…., is that the job of therapy?  The warm and fuzzy doctor is to no avail because he deals in ideas not emotions.  Besides, no one can love neurosis away.  Why? Because we can never abrogate the critical period. (Jesus,  Janov. stop with the big words!!    OK,  aj).
You see, biology knows little of compassion.  It says, “I know you need hugs but it is far too late.  Sorry.”  The critical period is attached to and depends on, the duration of the critical need.  It is often a short time.  A newborn does not have a great margin of error.  He needs love right away.  When he is hungry he needs to eat, and when he is lonely he needs love.  It cannot be given on our timetable; only on his.

We have found that any lingering feeling may have the same origin, or often, deeper.  Some patients feel empty or unfulfilled as a chronic state.  Look again at early life.  Because unlike most other feelings, those occurring so, so early stay with us for life.  That is to say, the memories are there to remind us what lies deeper, and needs to be resolved.  They are poorly gated, and therefore haunt us.

You know about my concept of resonance; how there is a linkage among all strata of levels of consciousness that ties similar memories  together and ties the ensemble to higher levels of brain function.  That is why feeling down and lonely in therapy, over time, can drag the person back to the times when it was traumatic.  Then begins the process of Primal Therapy; the voyage to the deep interior….where freedom and surcease lie.

What seems to rise for connection in therapy is the raw unadulterated feeling, bereft of its context and origin,  That is why it is such a constant mystery.  It has no adorned accouterments loaded with key information as to what it really is.  “I feel so alone all of the time.”  This is what I mean; no idea of where it all comes from.  And that  is why with connection the whole panoply of the feeling arises and helps us know what the feeling is all about and how it got started.  So what does connection mean?  As the patient descends to deep levels of consciousness over months in therapy he will arrive (add “she” if you want), at a weird sensation of being all alone, especially if he came in depressed and feeling all alone.  That feeling, when he has deeper access, will  carry him back to origins and will be resolving.  That takes time.  But the feeling is finally felt and is integrated; no longer hanging out there like some alien force cause damage.    Remember,  feelings carry us back, not admonishments from a therapist.  If we obey the doctor we are done for.  He can never know what is our unconscious.  He is not a fount of wisdom despite the warm and fuzzy demeanor, drenched with a security of his knowledge which too often is absolute.

Why resolving?  Because it is the raw feeling that climbs the chain of pain to bug us incessantly for life.  Feeling it fully over time, months, finally lays it bare, and puts an end to and depression.  Remember, it lingered because it could never be successfully repressed due to its load of pain.  Its time has come. Aah!

We need to dredge up the original trauma and all of its original reactions within the early time frame and within the critical period, and then we find resolution.  There is no other solution except to go back in time;  back to our early history where feelings will come up raw again, but now we know what it is and can make the final connection.  It needs conscious awareness, at last.