You can be an emotionally lonely person even in the midst of friends and relatives. Emotional loneliness results from the inability to make meaningful emotional relationships in life. It can begin from your childhood and may be due to limited emotional conversations you had as a child with your parents or your loved ones. As an adult, you might experience the same if you are having frequent failures in maintaining emotionally intimate relationships.
As you grow up, your emotional needs might not have been met by parents struggling to meet the financial needs of the family.Knowingly or unknowingly, they might have been avoiding deep emotional conversations as they could have felt awkward to discuss such things.
They might not even have the feeling that they are missing out on something very crucial.They work hard for family.They provide their children with timely meals.They educate their children. They keep them safe.They buy things for their children.They may even try to be happy around their children. But they never share their emotional vulnerabilities with their children. They never open up about the hurtful,embarrassing,negative experiences in life to their children.They never convey that its ok to have such negative feelings and emotions.
So when the growing child finally start to experience the wave of negativity,they feel that they are the only ones experiencing such strange feelings and they might feel unfortunate/cursed. As they don’t feel safe to open up, it leads to the genesis of an emotionally lonely person.
As a child if you aren’t able to label your emotional experiences correctly, you might not even identify the feelings that you have as an adult . A child might start crying due to frustration when his toy is taken away, or cry due to loneliness when his father is going away. In both the situations, if the child is not made aware of his/her feelings, he/she might grow to become an adult who cries at psychological stressors without even knowing what caused the sudden crying spell.
When a child is teased or scolded for expressing his/her emotions, he/she might not cry as an adult, but would certainly become a person who would be known for indifference towards others feelings
If feeling of emotional loneliness persists throughout your life ,you might even consider the possibility that there is something wrong with you. You might even think that this feeling of emptiness is the thing that makes you different from others. You will never know that this emptiness is shared by all who had inadequate emotional connection as a child.
The number of people having the same feeling is as huge as our society.Everyone gets to be in a crowd, but at the same time feels lonely and weirdly different all the time in their minds. This leads to more social isolation and depressive episodes and most probably, a long lasting sense of rejection and low mood . Slowly the person or the people around the person starts normalising such negative experiences in their life. They start labelling themselves as an introvert/emotionally numb and soforth.,
If being emotional lonely is as painful as having a external physical injury, then it is very essential that you treat the gaping wound in your mind with the same importance as you treat a wound of the body.
It doesn’t matter where you come from, who your parents are, why they treated the way you were, what the untold traumas of your parents were. The only thing that matters is that for you to realize the incorrect ways of dealing your emotions,you had as a child. After this realization,it’s your responsibility to unlearn such bad coping mechanisms in life. It is to be emphasized that its your responsibility alone because its only after this realization that you start looking for alternative scientific ways of connecting with your emotional self like therapy, meditation and mindfulness practices.
After this cathartic process,you get to know that there are beautiful ways of living your life just by expressing your emotions or emotional vulnerabilities to people who are there to understand you better . Yes, its a long journey to heal yourself, but if you don’t unlearn and inculcate better ways of finding your peace of mind, you can never impart peace of mind or happiness to people around you.
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