What is loneliness?
Define loneliness:
Loneliness – A state of being Lonely – Alone and not enjoying being alone, wishing to spend time with somebody else with a sense of positive connection.
The lonelier you feel, the more you desire to have good company.
The most common cases when a person can feel lonely is when they don’t have a romantic relationship with another person, or when they have no friends to spend time with regularly.
A lonely person often feels not loved, not appreciated enough by someone else, or they feel they don’t fit in, or are not good enough.
Loneliness or being lonely is a feeling. It is a very common feeling. You perceive lack of something (for example love), and dissatisfaction with something (often also with yourself, how you perceive yourself and your life). In some way, you feel incomplete just all by yourself. You wish to bond, to communicate, to share physical presence with another human being.
Feeling lonely may present itself also as feeling disconnected from something, such as disconnected from: yourself, others, the social norm, nature.
Feeling of being on your own/alone, nobody to talk to, nobody to connect with, nobody to exchange presence, opinions, nobody to share something with that person.
It’s about a connection to somebody else. You can be in a room full with people and still feel same alone, if you don’t interact with anyone and don’t enjoy it. You can be in a relationship, but if it is bad company, if it is a toxic relationship, you will not feel positive emotions most of the time. We seek connection to others combined with goodness, love, joy.
Ideally we don’t seek completeness through others, but we wish to share our unique completeness with others and enjoy the dynamics and natural flow of meeting other people and enjoy the spontaneous interactions, which emerge out of it.
If a person has certain views about life, certain beliefs, thoughts, attitude towards life, which is not mainstream, then it is harder to find like-minded people, connect, and feel understood.
You may feel also bored spending time alone. They go hand in hand. If you are having a good time alone by whatever you are doing, you are not feeling lonely at that moment. Only once there are no more activities and when you start to feel bored and you have nobody to call, nobody to meet with, then you can start to feel lonely.
If you do many, most, or all of your activities almost exclusively just alone, then a feeling or loneliness may start to emerge in your body, also some thoughts perhaps of not being a social person, not enjoying interacting or talking to others.
Loneliness can be a result of lacking verbal communication skills to easily start and maintain conversations, which leads to avoiding talking with people, or when talking to them not feeling comfortable doing it. By not spending much time with others, over time the feeling of loneliness may emerge. To some people the feeling of loneliness might be a more comfortable feeling (they choose it as the lesser bad out of two unpleasant choices) then the feeling/challenge of having to talk to people perhaps about topics they are not interested about at all, and they wish to spend their precious time differently.
Some people with insecurities and low self-confidence avoid approaching and connecting with others also as a way of self-protection from some form of rejection or criticism, and feeling awkward.
You can look at suffering as an opportunity for change and transformation. Every challenge is an opportunity to rise above it, learn something new and grow. Suffering can act as motivation (desire to escape from suffering, desire to end suffering) to finally go out from certain comfort zones, face the unknown, the uncertainty, face insecurities and fears, and do something you have never done before.
We as human beings are capable of learning and adapting. We can learn skills not only as children, but also as adults. Different types of communication skills can be learned and they can make life easier. You usually don’t learn certain skills alone, but with a qualified experienced teacher, who already mastered that topic and is capable of teaching others.
In case it is a big step to do certain new activities, you may consider trying out getting some boost by changing the way you think by using some professional self-hypnosis audio recordings first.
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