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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
generally I take the western approach, seeing loneliness as a "disease" that can only be cured through the application of friends and family (who, as stated in the article, often make things worse).
So how magical it is when one experiences a brief respite from loneliness by de-emphasizing the self.
"Loneliness" is just another "want".
At nearly 40, divorced since around 30, no kids, no real career, I have found the good fortune of 20 years of daily journals that I've arduously kept & have been going through & organizing where I've been & done. Not only myself, but family & some friends & then have been mapping out on calendars how events have unfolded. I had no idea the richness all this stuff would have, but no doubt without them, I would be incredibly lonely & despondent. I feel that I know myself & others I know with much more depth.
Ya'll just laid
Some heavy eastern on me
But it don't explain how...
I would agree, John Anderson (at least to a degree :). In my experience, the root of loneliness is not about other people, but is about accepting and appreciating ourselves. The times I have felt the most lonely is when I've been the hardest on myself; and when I've been accepting of myself the way I would others, other people seem to enjoy my company. Many aspects of our culture, in my opinion, romanticize self-hatred, or regard it as amusing. It's not. It's really destructive. And if you enjoy your own company, genuinely and sincerely (as opposed to artificially inflating one's ego), loneliness doesn't seem to visit so heavily. In my experience, loneliness has a lot to do with comparing ourselves to others or looking outside ourselves for fulfillment or approval.
In a book about mindfulness I read recently it stated that for most people 80%-90% of their thinking was repetitive, useless, dysfunctional and negative-even harmful.
I find myself having internal conversations with people about things that haven't come up yet and may never come up. A friend calls this "writing scripts."
Watch yourself! Observe your thinking and you will see where your problems come from. Live in the now. It's all you have.
That ya thought you was
In all the world
The one and only?
I do appreciate solitude; I enjoy reading, cooking, and all forms of exercising on my own. Yet I do also need to have meaningful connections and conversations in my life, and I've found that those have started to disappear.
I'm unsure if their gradual disappearance is due to my age (39), or to the fact that I'm still single (and thus have lost social viability), or to fundamental changes in society (cell phones, internet, and so on). I used to have quite a full and vibrant social life (up through my early thirties), but these days I repeatedly encounter the following: people who respond to emails or phone calls weeks or months after receiving them; people who only contact me when they need audience members for performances or are otherwise trying to sell something; women who seem quite interested in getting together until a potential boyfriend appears on the scene. There is one particular "friend" who starts every phone conversation with the phrase "I only have ten minutes because," which makes me want to punch her. I had an extremely close friend cut off all contact for two years with a vague reference to "things she was going through" only to suddenly reappear two years later, expecting the friendship to resume where it had left off without a hitch. This is on top of a brutal dating scene in which a lot of men communicate their disinterest by completely vanishing (okay, that one may be somewhat unique to Los Angeles, but I've encountered the other behaviors in different areas of the country).
I really have to wonder if anyone is interested in having friendships of any depth any more, or if we have become a totally mercenary culture, where meaningful conversation is worthless because there's no cash value associated with it and it can't "get you ahead."
Dumm is not wrong, and praise be to god on high for a feminist writer who has no apparent fear of evolutionary psychology.
In children the same psychological/physiological/behavioral need, distress, and somewhat different set of reactions gets constructed as “insecure attachment”, “overanxious disorder of childhood”, later “ADHD” and other disorders. The dependence on others for safety and psychological security is even more profound and its failure potentially more damaging in early childhood (it is a dependence for survival) and sets attachment-injured children up at greater vulnerability to anxiety-related disorders as adults.
The medical solution? – astonishingly, to chalk it up to biology, “disease” model, dose them with medicalized speed (er . . . stimulant medication) and not worry about lack of evidence for long-term benefits, potential side effects, or prevention. At least articles like Ms. Mieszkowski’s can help move us past medical models of distress and toward better understanding, prevention, and treatment.
Clinically distressing loneliness in adults is related to early experiences and the internal templates they generate. Learning to tolerate solitude and create relatedness paradoxically depends initially on secure attachment to, then its opposite - separation, independence, and differentiation from family. Retained need for connections with family of origin is a developmental failure, representing lack of capacity to independently choose and create new relationships with other adults, and as such will be experienced as a form of aloneness. Western cultural norms, medical models, and parenting advice have tended to work against these basic developmental needs.
Just to watch him die.
Just because I felt the itch.
His quote was a great way to end the article -- then you threw in some snark to distance yourself and all of us from the harshness but reality and healthfulness of what he was saying. In fact you demonstrated his exact point -- we live in a culture that just can't bear to be serious and thoughtful at the right time. Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon thing -- British phlegm -- or just the good ol bread and circuses.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
