Intimacy is an important part of our human experience. We're wired for connection, but sometimes that connection can feel more fraught than if we were to just go it alone.
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How might we be able to navigate the difficulties of relationships in such a way that they stopped isolating us and instead empowered us to enter community, find safety in vulnerability, and create trust around being interdependent?
Therapy for Loneliness & Isolation
When relationships feel more taxing than they're worth
Relational wounding, codependent habits, people-pleasing, and low self-esteem can make it challenging to feel like you can even be yourself in relationship with others. Hypervigilance around rejection, fear of being seen authentically and still misunderstood, and worry that by asserting your needs you may be harming others are all dynamics that may be at the root of your struggle to relate to others.
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Exploring your early attachment relationships and how they informed these anxieties is an important part of therapy.
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And rejection, well, as much as we may all hate it, is an important and natural part of life. It's inevitable when you consider that not everyone is made for everyone.
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We may find that it is when we try to open ourselves up to love or friendship, relationships that touch our deepest selves, that we get harmed the most.
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This is true, in some sense, as vulnerability inherently assumes risks. But when we find balance between self-preservation and the beauty of merging with other, those risks can become manageable, even meaningful.
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When we get a deeper understand of the ways we attach to others, and what that means about our expectations, our fears, and our reactions, we can identify new patterns to work toward.
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This isn't easy work. It requires confronting the challenging relational moments with curiosity and the willingness to try something different. But over time, with a trusted partner, new patterns begin to emerge creating an entirely new well of evidence about what you're capable and worthy of with others.
Therapy for Times of Isolation
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Of course, recent times have had an impact on our loneliness and ability to connect.
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A collective trauma unfolded during a widespread lockdown and a pandemic that essentially taught us that humans are a danger to each other in certain proximity. We may still need to unlearn these messages and begin to feel safe engaging once again.​
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As we continue to feel the impacts of early pandemic days, widening political polarization and increased violence, AI becoming mainstream, and the decay of social media, it can feel even more impossible to find your way back to connection with others.
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Therapy can help you parse through your attachment wounds without judgment, exploring the roots of your needs, expectations, and reactions to others with care while identifying shifts that may help you get where you're trying to go. As connecting becomes more difficult, it becomes more important. Now more than ever we need each other.
