‘Emotional loneliness comes from not having enough emotional intimacy with other people. It may start in childhood, due to feeling emotionally unseen… If it’s been a lifelong feeling, it points to the likelihood of not being sufficiently responded to as a child.’ This is a definition taken from the book of Lindsay C. Gibson.
When I think back to the many people I met in my practice suffering from emotional loneliness I feel that the most important messages needs to be:
- If you feel it, it is valid, no validation needed from others;
- If you feel it, it means you have the capacity to feel it so , not that there is something wrong with you;
- If you feel it, is because you need to feel it in some way, honor it;
Emotions exists and are present in everybody, either they admit it or not. Emotions affects our body, our thinking and our behaviour. The more acquainted you are with emotions, the easier you can navigate your life and your contact with other people.
There is a rather large group of people that has emotional discomfort, often in the form of emotional loneliness. The poisonous core of emotional loneliness and emotional discomfort in general is the vote to silence. The more we feel that the only defence against our emotional discomfort is keeping silence about it, the lonelier that emotional discomfort becomes.
Silence if the most used strategy to protect ourselves from the pain of emotional discomfort, followed by lying about it, denying having any emotional discomfort at all. This second is a favourite of men. The idea behind these strategies is that emotions are a sign of weakness and show a lack of elegance and decency.
What surely happens is that the more you put aside your emotions, the less graceful they will appear once they get expressed. When daily attention is given to one's own emotional wellbeing, elegance, grace and decency can be maintained in the face of the most intense emotions.
As per the weakness being related to emotional display, things have fortunately changed in the last few years. It is more and more accepted that the real weakness is the hiding of relevant emotions. When we hide emotions, we make ourselves vulnerable for others to find out a secret we are trying to hide and that is a much more dangerous form of weakness that expressing emotions can possibly be.
When we have the expression of our emotions in our own hand, we can choose, when and how to do it. We can, on porpouse, deliver information about ourselves, being really aware of the intention we have and the goal we want to achieve.
It may sound really difficult to achieve this if you have experienced emotional discomfort all your life, I understand that you cannot go from deep emotional discomfort to expressing emotions as I describe above just by reading this blog. This description of what is possible is meant as a beam of life you can point your effort towards.
How to move in this direction? How to become more and more at ease with your own emotions?
WRITE THEM DOWN
Take a journal, make sure no one else has access to it, and pour daily your emotions into it. What you are actually doing as you do that, it acknowledging your emotions, welcoming them, giving them a place in your life, feeling them, honour their presence. Embracing more of yourself.
This will bring you relief, the creation of space, the letting go of tensions.
It could take a lifetime of writing every day in your journal and every day will feel a bit better.
When I think back to the many people I met in my practice suffering from emotional loneliness I feel that the most important messages needs to be:
- If you feel it, it is valid, no validation needed from others;
- If you feel it, it means you have the capacity to feel it so , not that there is something wrong with you;
- If you feel it, is because you need to feel it in some way, honor it;
Emotions exists and are present in everybody, either they admit it or not. Emotions affects our body, our thinking and our behaviour. The more acquainted you are with emotions, the easier you can navigate your life and your contact with other people.
There is a rather large group of people that has emotional discomfort, often in the form of emotional loneliness. The poisonous core of emotional loneliness and emotional discomfort in general is the vote to silence. The more we feel that the only defence against our emotional discomfort is keeping silence about it, the lonelier that emotional discomfort becomes.
Silence if the most used strategy to protect ourselves from the pain of emotional discomfort, followed by lying about it, denying having any emotional discomfort at all. This second is a favourite of men. The idea behind these strategies is that emotions are a sign of weakness and show a lack of elegance and decency.
What surely happens is that the more you put aside your emotions, the less graceful they will appear once they get expressed. When daily attention is given to one's own emotional wellbeing, elegance, grace and decency can be maintained in the face of the most intense emotions.
As per the weakness being related to emotional display, things have fortunately changed in the last few years. It is more and more accepted that the real weakness is the hiding of relevant emotions. When we hide emotions, we make ourselves vulnerable for others to find out a secret we are trying to hide and that is a much more dangerous form of weakness that expressing emotions can possibly be.
When we have the expression of our emotions in our own hand, we can choose, when and how to do it. We can, on porpouse, deliver information about ourselves, being really aware of the intention we have and the goal we want to achieve.
It may sound really difficult to achieve this if you have experienced emotional discomfort all your life, I understand that you cannot go from deep emotional discomfort to expressing emotions as I describe above just by reading this blog. This description of what is possible is meant as a beam of life you can point your effort towards.
How to move in this direction? How to become more and more at ease with your own emotions?
WRITE THEM DOWN
Take a journal, make sure no one else has access to it, and pour daily your emotions into it. What you are actually doing as you do that, it acknowledging your emotions, welcoming them, giving them a place in your life, feeling them, honour their presence. Embracing more of yourself.
This will bring you relief, the creation of space, the letting go of tensions.
It could take a lifetime of writing every day in your journal and every day will feel a bit better.
