Is this a new or prevalent issue?
“ in one recent national study by Psychology Today magazine, more than 50 percent of the 40,000 people surveyed reported they sometimes or often felt lonely. This suggests that loneliness afflicts more than 100 million Americans. “
I discovered this statistic while reading “Intimate Connections” by David Burns.
If you’re like me, a YouTube aficionado, then you’ve most likely come across content pieces addressing loneliness, male loneliness, Gen Z & loneliness…the list goes on.
And 47 years later and we are still discussing loneliness.
Why is that?
I got the time to ponder about this topic while on a trip to San Diego visiting a friend.
During which I hypothesized-
You are not lonely because you are alone.
You are lonely because you keep abandoning yourself to prove you are worth loving.
Why such a bold claim? I’ve been there as well.
My childhood is an unusual dynamic for the typical American but if you identify as a diaspora (of west african origin) then you may relate in some ways.
Father moves to America in the 80’s at the age of 26 thanks to a government scholarship. Siblings soon move months after my birth in Sept of 97. This would’ve been early winter of 98. 08, mother receives her green card to the U.S after years of failed attempts.
For the next 7 months I lived with family and family friends. I was surrounded by people constantly and still felt something missing. Not sadness exactly. Something quieter. A gap between me and everyone in the room that I couldn't name and didn't know how to close
Spring of 09 I’m seated in class when I get a message from one of the school’s hall monitors - a student or staff member assigned to watch the school hallways. Informing me that my mother was here to get me. As much as I was surprised, I was confused..
To get me? How, when, why, now? Lady I’m in class.
African parent’s have a unique gift of not informing their kids of any major life changes. You’re thrown into the deep end and questioned why you’re 4 and cannot breast stroke.
The problem isn’t coming to America, I consider myself extremely fortunate compared to other family members.
The gap I mentioned followed me to America. Into classrooms where I couldn't connect. Friendships I held at a distance. Relationships I exhausted myself trying to make work — chasing people who weren’t truly aligned. All signs of a weakened self esteem.
“If being alone does not cause loneliness, and if having someone to love is not the cure, then what is the difference between people who feel lonely and people who don't? The crucial difference is self-esteem.”
Somewhere beneath everything you believe that if you could just prove you’re worth staying for — the gap would finally close.
It never does.
you might have grown up being sold the “Ideal blueprint”.
Get a great education, a spouse, a “good” job, a family, live the “good” life, the white picket fence.
The accolades, for most, are the destination. If I could just arrive, the feeling would stop.
But here is what nobody tells you.
All these things are additions to a wonderful life you are curating for yourself. Not the cure. They cannot be. Because they didn't create the gap and they don't have access to it.
Only you do.
Burns identifys 15 attitudes that may be affecting our self-esteem, which make it harder to develop friendship and intimate relationships.
1. Low self-esteem 2. Romantic perfectionism 3. Emotional perfectionism 4. Shyness and social anxiety 5. Hopelessness 6. Alienation and isolation 7. Rejection sensitivity 8. Fear of being alone 9. Desperation 10. Disclosure phobia 11. Inassertiveness 12. Resentment and bitterness 13. Defensiveness and fear of criticism 14. Depression 15. The trapped factor
Do you identify with 1 or more of them?
If you answered yes, that’s okay. There’s hope.
We will be drilling into the fear of being alone, as well as looking into one important cognitive behavioral Therapy technique that could be applied to of the attitudes listed above.
Burns' Intimate Connections
How can you curate a life- when you are fixated on the idea of being alone? When the fear of that silence is louder than the question of what you actually want?
You can't. So instead you attach. You hold on longer than you should. You give more than is being returned. You stay in rooms that don't fit you because at least you are not in an empty one.
That is not connection. That is the avoidance of a feeling you were never taught how to sit with.
I landed in San Diego on a bone chilling Sunday night with an idea in my mind of what the week would look like. It didn’t entirely pan out the way I imagined but it gave opportunity to some deep introspection.
Dependency.
Burns' Intimate Connections
Your travel destination is someone’s home town.
I expected my friend to fully remodel his schedule as if he was on vacation as well. Forgetting every individual has a different life set up. You cannot depend on other’s time or presence but if the opportunity presents itself; carpe diem!
The only thing stopping you is you. And the excuses YOU choose to believe.
Go on a walk. No destination. No plan. Just movement.
Play something inspirational. For me, it was Lil Wayne's Nightmares of the Bottom.
Stop at a gas station. Rehydrate. Discover life.
Get lost in Balboa park.
Stumble onto high school students playing jazz in a ballroom like they have something to prove. Maybe they do.
A magician performing for strangers on a street corner. Sit in a restaurant alone with a book, order the hors d'oeuvres, people watch.
Photographed the birds, sunset, the patterns in the waves.
No longer feeding the loop. Stop waiting.
Burns' Intimate Connections
I was there. In a city that didn't know my name. Completely alone. And for the first time in a long time — that was enough.
Sitting in the airport waiting for my flight back to Columbus I came across a talk by Krishnamurti — a philosopher who spent sixty years asking questions most of us never think to ask.
He has a name for what you and I had been doing most of our lives.
Deep isolation.
The condition of being so uncomfortable with yourself that you attach to anything — a person, a belief, a plan, an idea — just to escape the feeling of being alone with it.
The attachment never resolves the loneliness. You take it with you. Because the motive behind wanting to escape determines the direction you move.
And if your motive is simply I don't want to feel this anymore — every move you make will be away from something rather than toward something. You cannot build a life running from a feeling.
Observe it. Not analyse it, not explain it, not immediately replace it with something else.
Just watch it.
“Observation is not thinking. Thinking follows words, expands the ego, refers everything back to me and my pain and my history. Observation has none of that. It simply watches without agenda, without demand, without needing what it sees to become something else.”
That is what San Diego gave me.
Not answers. Not resolution. Just enough stillness to stop thinking about the feeling and start watching it.
The ocean didn't answer anything. But they didn't need to. When you stop demanding that every noun and verb resolve your loneliness — the moments become livable. More than livable. Something close to full.
I boarded that flight back to Columbus quieter than I arrived.
The more time you spend with yourself — genuinely, curiously, without needing to rush toward being loved or accepted — the sooner you’ll start to love what you’re building.
Find your way to that.
As promised, the most important CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) technique that Burns stressed practicing is “The Daily Mood Log”.
In order to understand the importance and utility of this technique we must first learn to identify the 10 forms of twisted thinking.
1. All-or-nothing thinking 2. Overgeneralization 3. Mental filter: You dwell on one negative detail 4. Discounting the positive 5. Jumping to conclusions 6. Magnification or minimization You blow things up out of proportion or shrink their importance 7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel 8. "Should" statements: You criticize yourself or other people with "shoulds" or "shouldn'ts 9. Labeling 10. Personalization and blame
Burns' Intimate Connections
Example:
