A loneliness epidemic is hurting America and much of the world. It’s probably going to get worse because one of its main causes is not being addressed or even recognized.
The epidemic of loneliness is often attributed to unprecedented social and technological changes over the last century or two. These changes, including the mass movement of people from small communities to big cities, have overwhelmed us mentally and emotionally. We have lost many of the tried-and-true associations that provided a sense of belonging.
Old institutions and traditions are tottering, while new processes and procedures seem to change by the day. Artificial intelligence, as one example, is swooping in to challenge not only how we work but how we think about ourselves. One expert claims that AI “has the power to induce in us a type of self-forgetting—a selective amnesia that loosens our grip on our own human agency and clouds our self-knowledge.”
Change is accelerating, calamity is looming, and people are crumbling with future shock. We need to be emotionally strong, and being mired in loneliness doesn’t help.
In the many books and reports that address loneliness, vital knowledge concerning our inner life is overlooked. This knowledge exposes the inner conflict in our psyche between consciously wanting to feel strong versus unconsciously and compulsively being drawn into a sense of weakness. This conflict undermines our emotional strength, making us vulnerable to the symptom of loneliness.
Keep in mind that people often experience chronic loneliness even when other people are available to connect with. The problem then is not solely about connecting with others; rather, it’s about connecting with one’s stronger, better self.
In other words, chronic loneliness, to a significant degree, is a symptom of how people are compelled to feel disconnected from their better self. The pain of feeling disconnected from others is a direct result of the deep, unrecognized disconnection from one’s better self. This idea of being disconnected from one’s better self is a vague concept for many people. I try here, as this post proceeds, to bring this into focus.
Loneliness can be a legitimate problem in its own right, of course, yet the influence upon it of neurosis and inner conflict also needs its own transparency.
There are two kinds of emotional disconnection, one from an inner self and the other from other people and the outer world. Both are experienced through the unconscious compulsion to recycle, by way of inner conflict, old unresolved emotions such as self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-abandonment. If we’re prone to self-criticism, for instance, we are likely to be compulsively critical of others and society in general, there more disconnected.
Mired in inner conflict, the chronically lonely individual is blocked from connecting, in a stable manner, with inner strength. Clearing inner conflict out of our psyche is a process of refinement in which we connect with the goodness and value inherent in our better self. As the negativity generated by inner conflict is neutralized, the deeper knowing of the self is felt as inner truth and goodness, which is pleasurable to connect with. Loneliness evaporates as we deepen our connection to our self.
In this process, we begin to recognize in our psyche the manner in which self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-abandonment arise out of inner conflict. It’s easier now to see the mechanisms or dynamics of one’s inner conflict, which greatly helps to overcome it.
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This deeper perspective on loneliness is almost never mentioned in books and articles on the subject. The New York Times Magazine had a cover story on loneliness several months ago, and the article focused on the idea that society was not meeting the emotional needs of people. There was only a meager passing nod to inner weakness. This is the closest the article got to the core of the matter:
Many subjects [in a loneliness survey] cited a lack of “meaningful” connection as the primary culprit. This was true whether or not human companionship was available to them. Physical proximity wasn’t always the issue. Emotional proximity usually was. Consider the young mother who frets that her existence has been reduced to caring for her baby, or the respondent who complains that his or her “partner is only interested in the phone.” A third subject admits to having plenty of family around but to being undervalued by them. “Am surrounded,” a fourth writes, by people “who only are present in my life because am useful.”
Why are the people quoted here feeling lonely when they’re surrounded by others? The article offers no explanation, but depth psychology does: They are feeling lonely because they’re not aware of the inner conflict between the wish to feel loved versus the compulsion to feel criticized, rejected, or abandoned. They don’t recognize how this conflict plunges them into the distress of feeling disconnected from their better self.
Why aren’t people recognizing this? We haven’t appreciated the degree to which our psyche remains unevolved. This oversight is catching up with us as technology spurts ahead and our past folly races up from behind. We’re reeling in the helpless, passive sense of not knowing what to do or how to connect. Reactions to this feeling of being overwhelmed include false righteousness, animosity, and blaming.
We need to be emotionally strong, of course, but we’re caught in a deep sense of weakness, helplessness, and disconnection. This weakness arises from the dynamics of inner conflict, and this conflict can be understood and overcome. But our psyche’s inner workings are initially upsetting to see, largely because, in exposing the depths of our obliviousness, the knowledge insults our ego. We’re not stupid but we’re plenty resistant to knowing facts that undermine the assumed centrality of our ego.
Our ego feels precious, as if it’s our essence. We identify with our ego. Our ego often takes charge of our mind. Through our ego, we experience the illusion that we know all that we need to know about our inner life. Ego-identified, we can’t see beyond the ego. Our ego will accept suffering and defeat to protect itself, and loneliness is one of its ways we bear the burden.
Ego is everywhere. We have a conscious ego that feels like our mind. Both mind and ego can feel like our essence. We also have a defensive unconscious ego that tussles passively with our inner critic, our superego. All this ego is smothering our better self, our true essence.
Our ego blocks us from realizing that, unconsciously, we gravitate toward suffering. As classical psychoanalysis discovered, we have unconscious emotional attachments to unresolved negative emotions first experienced in childhood. These first hurts of childhood comprise refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal. These hurts, when unresolved, continue to be experienced unpleasantly by us. Through inner conflict, we remain prone as adults to repeatedly become entangled into these eight first hurts. This inner unrest alienates us from our better self. The first hurts most associated with loneliness are criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal. When chronically lonely, we’re entangled, mostly unconsciously, in these hurts.
Adamantly and unconsciously, we refuse to see the dynamics of inner conflict and to recognize the artificial self-centeredness that arises from it. We don’t recognize our willingness to engage with the first hurts and indulge in them because of our resistance, our unconscious refusal to disidentify from our ego and to understand its cunning self-deception. One such self-deception (a psychological defense registered unconsciously) is to claim: “I’m not looking to replay and recycle the old familiar pains of rejection and abandonment. Look at how much I suffer with loneliness.”
Our suffering is largely a result of what we don’t know about the workings of our psyche and emotional life, particularly inner conflict, psychological defenses, and the repetition compulsion. Our success in overcoming self-defeat and suffering is a matter of growing our intelligence, meaning in this context greater self-knowledge.
In growing our consciousness, we recognize a major inner conflict, the one between our conscious wish to feel emotionally strong, worthy, and lovable versus our unconscious willingness to go on experiencing ourselves as weak, unworthy, and unlovable. This conflict can heat up daily as the competing sides—defensive unconscious ego versus harsh inner critic—engage in unsettling argumentation concerning our merits. Even when entangled in this conflict, we’re often oblivious to it.
If we don’t understand the processes in our psyche through which everyday variations of inner conflict are experienced, we are likely to remain stuck in the conflict and limited in our range of capability.
As we begin to recognize the tyranny of inner conflict, our inner critic relinquishes its centrality and sense of authority. Our unconscious ego, meanwhile, is shunted aside, while our better self or best self steps in to assume command. To connect with this more evolved self is to connect with what is good and strong. Greatly aiding this process is our growing recognition of how our psyche’s passivity, with all its disconnections from our essence, has tolerated inner conflict. This conflict has enabled our menacing inner critic, the superego, to isolate us from pleasurable connections to what is good in us and beautiful in others.
