Loneliness as a socio-psychological problem

3 2452 November 20, 2020 at 05:20 Author of the publication: Marina Golomolzina, journalist

Every person knows the feeling of loneliness, and it is different for everyone. This could be the loneliness of a woman or a man waiting for a relationship. Or the loneliness of a person who finds himself in an unusual place, far from his family and friends. Or there may be a constant state of loneliness, when even among people and surrounded by loved ones a person feels lonely. This is loneliness, from which neither friendship, nor marriage, nor teamwork can save you.

As a rule, the feeling of loneliness is a source of discomfort for a person. He may experience melancholy, despair from the feeling of being useless, and even depression.

Why is this so? Why doesn't a person enjoy life alone? What is loneliness? What are the types of loneliness? System-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan answers these and many other questions, and also helps to get rid of the oppressive feeling of loneliness forever.

What is loneliness

The emotional state of a person, characterized by the absence of social connections, is called loneliness. The prerequisites for this state can be both social (circumstances) and internal (personal characteristics). A person plunges into a kind of self-isolation, often voluntarily. This state may be forced, but we will talk about the psychology of loneliness.

Types of loneliness

The psychological sphere is very complex for each person, it can be determined by various factors, the reasons are always individual. States of loneliness are distinguished by personality type and by the mechanism of perception.

According to the mechanism of perception, loneliness can be

• alienating;
• diffuse;
• dissociated;
• manageable.

Alienating loneliness is a special mechanism for separating oneself from the outside world. A person is aware of his condition, the extreme degree of manifestation - hermitism, withdrawal from the world or a separate social group entirely.

Diffuse loneliness is a violation of the self-identification mechanism. A person is not aware of his personal boundaries and completely merges with society. Sometimes such a process is conscious, but sometimes a person cannot understand his condition.

The dissociated state is an acute form that turns into pathology. Characterized by the features of the first two types in extreme manifestations. The perception of people or phenomena changes dramatically.

Managed loneliness is the norm to which we should strive. A person is separated from society, aware of his “I”, uniqueness, while remaining included in communication and public life.

By personality type, loneliness is divided based on subjective assessments. Highlight

• hopelessly lonely people
• periodically lonely,
• passively-sustainably lonely.

1. Hopelessly lonely people do not have any constant social circle. Not only are there no family and close friends, but they also do not maintain permanent relationships with colleagues or casual acquaintances. Such people experience a feeling of worthlessness, uselessness, emptiness. It happens that they blame others for their condition.
2. From time to time, lonely people have a social circle. They have family and close friends, but they experience a feeling of loneliness in the absence of intimate relationships. They feel useless, suffer from this condition, and strive to fill the void as quickly as possible.
3. Passive and stable people feel loneliness all the time. They may suffer from that feeling but not try to change anything. They often hide their condition from others and pretend that everything is fine.

There is also a separate state - existential loneliness . This is not so much a psychological as a philosophical characteristic. Philosophers, studying existence as a whole, highlight the existence of global, cosmic abandonment, separateness. This is the difference between ourselves as a unit and the world as a whole.

Many people are faced with a feeling of finitude of their own existence, this makes them experience feelings of melancholy and endless sadness. They realize that complete mutual understanding cannot be achieved even with the closest people. A person begins to think that he will be forever alone simply because this is the very nature of life, because each person represents a unique set of thoughts and experiences.

Levels of Loneliness

Loneliness is divided according to methods of implementation, human conditions and the degree of existing relationships.

The first concept divides loneliness into

• isolation, which can be forced (imprisonment, etc.) or voluntary (hermitage);
• Solitude is a voluntary temporary refusal to communicate.

Psychological loneliness is characterized by a person’s personal characteristics, due to which he cannot fulfill the existing need for communication.

Physical – the absence of another person nearby.

Social – the absence of relationships within any group in which a person is located. It can be initiated by the person himself (reluctance to integrate into the team) and society (rejection for some reason).

Situational loneliness occurs when a person is forced to temporarily refuse communication for objective reasons (temporary self-isolation, quarantine, moving to another country).

In chronic cases, a person cannot establish connections with other people for a long time.

In personal relationships, loneliness can manifest itself at different stages.

• Living alone. A person has resigned himself to fate and does not consider options for forming relationships. As a rule, it is accompanied by a feeling of sadness, depression, and passivity.
• Casual relationships are typical for periodically lonely people . This is the desire to fill the spiritual emptiness in the absence of a loved one. They develop self-doubt and fear of not being liked by another person.
• Mutual self-disclosure. At this stage, a person decides not to share his problems, because he considers it impossible to burden others. Leads to distance in relationships.
• Finding a possible life partner. If you have a close relationship, doubts arise that this is the same person, and there is a fear of being rejected or misunderstood.
• Deepening close relationships. Here problems with intimate life and avoidance of sexual contacts may arise. Usually there is a feeling of guilt and disappointment in the partner.
• Long-term liabilities . Living together means mutual trust, stability and comfort, but a person may begin to experience a feeling of being “trapped,” “a bird in a cage.”

Research by psychologists: factors of loneliness.

The assessment of loneliness has subjective cognitive distortions associated with thinking errors - both towards exaggeration and understatement and even denial of the problem of loneliness. About 50% of people report situational or chronic loneliness. In large cities, men feel more lonely than women and single people.

Everyone suffers in their own way from loneliness in the family.

In Russian families, people are more likely to feel lonely in their families, experiencing an urgent need for affection and support, but cannot satisfy it. Teenage students living with their families suffer more from loneliness, while teenagers tend to overestimate and exaggerate their loneliness. Elderly parents are not satisfied with their position in their families and the weakening of their leading positions. Men are more likely to acknowledge their loneliness, while simultaneously accepting and coming to terms with it. Women are more lonely in families where husbands are often on the road and work in shifts.

In relatively prosperous families with children, where the marriage is about 15-18 years old, family members tend to underestimate and deny the problem of loneliness, especially characteristic of women who do not have the opportunity to openly express their feelings.

The more unreliable and unstable the relationship with a partner (jealousy, mistrust, dependence, fear of losing), the greater the suffering from loneliness and its overestimation.

Not without reason, it is generally accepted that marriage protects against loneliness, but in Russian families this does not save from stress and tension in interpersonal relationships, and as a result, the experience of loneliness. And as paradoxical as it may seem, married people feel more lonely than single people.

The subjectively experienced feeling of loneliness is in no way related to the number of social contacts. Those. no matter how many people are around, a person can still feel the problem of loneliness. Moreover, people who cannot name one or two close friends and who do not have the concept of a “best friend” consider themselves the most lonely. They treat all the people with whom they “just communicate” contradictory, often with a negative slant.

Young men and teenagers most often seek support in situations of acute loneliness in social networks, Internet contacts and the construction of virtual reality.

Signs of a Lonely Person

To understand how to get rid of loneliness, you need to analyze its causes and understand what a person looks like from the outside.

A person who constantly feels lonely usually:

• sad, anxious, gloomy, can be aggressive;
• distrustful of happy people;
• focused on himself, can attract attention, interrupt;
• may show excessive attention to the interlocutor or, conversely, show complete indifference;
• may be hypocritical, suspicious;
• does not fully control his behavior;
• experiences a feeling of uselessness, uselessness, failure in love, which he may hide from himself;
• feels awkward in a large company, cannot relax, has fun only under the influence of large doses of alcohol;
• constantly criticizes his behavior and is prone to self-flagellation.

Ways to overcome feelings of loneliness.

Research shows that about half of people in romantic relationships are actively trying to cope with a difficult situation. The other half of the ways to overcome the situation includes: ventilation of emotions, humor, positive reappraisal, acceptance. That. the former prefer active coping or reappraisal, the latter prefer self-blame.

Lonelier people are in a “vicious circle” of their loneliness, choosing negative strategies: escape, avoidance, withdrawal, and sometimes plunge into depression and thoughts of suicide; they often need social support and professional psychological help. Being in a difficult and crisis situation for oneself, such as the problem of loneliness, it is difficult for a person to make a choice of productive strategies for coping with both the feeling of loneliness and the reasons leading to it. And the higher the social isolation of a person, which is widespread in modern society, the higher the risk of developing feelings of loneliness.

I prepared the article based on materials from the journal “Psychological Research”

Loneliness gives you the opportunity to deal with your emotions

Learning to deal with your own emotions is not the same as thinking about life in general. Because many of us spend most of our time around other people

, constant communication and emotional exchange does not give us the opportunity to understand our emotional state.

We very often pass through the emotions of other people, who create a background that does not allow us to “meet” our own emotions

. Only our most vivid emotional manifestations appear on the surface - great joy, intense grief, irritability.

Rido

This becomes so habitual for us that we often risk losing our emotional connection with ourselves. Once you manage to learn to have fun

from being alone, great prospects will open up for you in terms of understanding your own emotional state.

More specifically, you will learn to understand what in your life makes you a truly happy person, what makes you often sad, why you get upset. These skills will make it easier for you to manage your emotions.

. However, it all starts with the analysis of deeper, rather than superficial emotions, which can only be carried out when you are alone with yourself.

We have the opportunity to reflect on life

The life of the modern average person passes at an incredibly frantic pace. For some, this rhythm is so crazy that not only do they not have enough time to think about some philosophical things

, give yourself time for deep and important thoughts, but you can’t even find a moment to be alone.

Moose

If there is a period in your life when you often find yourself alone, you can only rejoice at the opportunity to reflect on your life in complete peace

. You don't waste your energy analyzing other people's thoughts, you deal with your own thoughts.

You can focus completely on what is happening personally within you. A calm atmosphere allows you not only to tune in to a philosophical mood, but also to analyze many aspects of life

. Loneliness gives us the opportunity to get to know ourselves better and, having made certain conclusions, choose the right direction to move forward in life more confidently.

Where did the idea that “a man needs a man” come from?

Krylov wrote that “not everyone can live alone,” Nekrasov cited: “Oh, the loneliness is all around! I won’t promise it to anyone!” Is this situation so frightening?! What is this - a sentence, a heavy burden or a lifestyle of strong people?

Let's look from the perspective of the past. A person needs a person... to survive. At first, the main instinct that ruled over others was the instinct of survival. People united into tribes to make it easier to get food. In the Middle Ages, there was a high mortality rate from hostility, illness and hunger. In order to survive, they began to introduce the concept of family value. Each social unit usually had up to 15 children, as extra hands helped with housework.

But what are we seeing today? There is no longer a need to unite to kill a mammoth or grow wheat. Therefore, social contacts have lost their vital function and have become more of a mental function.

Being alone makes us more productive

There are a huge number of activities in which it is simply impossible to complete your work alone. If we talk about those types of activities where one person bears full responsibility

for the result, then loneliness is rather a blessing, but not an undesirable factor.

Working in a large company (meaning a group of people, for example, an office with a large number of employees), few people manage to resist the temptation

distract yourself, joke around with colleagues, entertain yourself with conversation. Such behavior undoubtedly has a negative impact on work performance.

Jacob Lund

It is no secret that there are situations when a large number of people, forced to perform various types of work in one room, do nothing but entertain themselves with empty talk

! Hence the disdainful attitude of working people and businessmen towards the so-called white collar workers, that is, office workers.

And this situation (along with the desire to reduce overhead costs) has become the reason that many employers are hiring employees to work remotely, although they previously maintained entire offices

. Thus, the time you spend alone can be the most productive time in your life.

Do something useful. What you have been planning to do for a long time, what you should do, but what you never had enough time for. Enjoy the process from a creative point of view, feel like an artist

, who retired so that he would not be distracted from his work. In many cases, only loneliness makes it possible to completely immerse oneself in work and do it quickly and very efficiently.

Living solo is a protest to society

Everything that is going on outside is extra external noise. The truly meaningful essence is hidden within us. Society is so immersed in the outside world that sometimes it goes beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Living in the flow of majority opinion and acting as a slave to virtual reality, many absolutely do not see what is going on inside them. They believe that by withdrawing from Internet communications, they will lose something important, which is a delusion. That is why it is understandable that some people to whom such an existence is alien are ready to live “not in breadth, but in depth.”

This is reasonable, but the image of a detached and miserable person is so entrenched in the minds of the crowd that “loneliness” as a word carries a sharply negative connotation. Therefore, let's destroy the myths.

Why strong people are lonely - reasons

How a person copes with loneliness can be judged by their level of self-sufficiency. The one who lives in harmony with his I will not ask: “Why do I need this?”, but on the contrary, will spend time usefully. Today, almost everyone accepts this condition as normal. Everyone chooses to suffer from loneliness or enjoy it.

Loneliness has its own reasons:

1. Often the environment does not understand and ridicules. Therefore, many people prefer to keep everything to themselves and give out acceptable information for society.
2. People are self-centered, not everyone can sincerely listen to the problems of another person and show empathy. Don't be upset that others are indifferent to your problems and experiences.
3. A person wants to be loved, this is due to his own selfishness. We are looking for those who share our opinions, ideas and views, but the likelihood of meeting a similar person is extremely low. Such misunderstanding leads to the fact that, even when in a relationship, a person begins to feel spiritual loneliness.
4. Urbanization - it’s easier to support yourself than to be responsible for your family.
5. The female gender is undergoing a role change. Nowadays, the “weak half of humanity” is able to take care of itself, and does not consider it its duty to stay at home with children.

We have the opportunity to accumulate energy

Socialization, communication, a wide circle of acquaintances and friends - this, of course, is very good and useful on the one hand. On the other hand, it is rare that a person is able to spend whole days

“spinning” in society all day long, like a squirrel in a wheel, without feeling tired of interacting with other people.

When we are surrounded by a large number of people throughout the day, our internal energy supply is usually not enough for everyone. This kind of interaction often requires us to do more than just carry on conversations.

, but also shared their emotions, read the emotions of other people, which can be very, very tiring.

Koldunova_Anna/Getty Images Pro

As a result, not only psychological, but also physical exhaustion may occur. You can, of course, talk for a long time about the fact that some people are energy vampires, while others are energy donors

, so the latter should be kept away from the former and all that stuff. The truth is that constant communication tires almost everyone.

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with being alone for a while. And if it happens to you personally that you have to spend quite a lot of time alone with yourself, take advantage of this situation for yourself personally

. Give yourself a long emotional and psychological reboot, accumulate energy, calm down mentally, rest physically, since at a certain moment you may need your energy again.

Loneliness gives you the opportunity to stop feeling like a victim.

Dean Drobot

Being a polite person is a very good quality. But the need to constantly please someone is hard and thankless work, which often puts us in the position of a victim.

. Telling someone "sorry" because you stepped on their foot is being polite. And constantly apologizing for not living the way someone else wants is trying to please someone, being in the role of a victim.

We often have to ask for forgiveness for what we have done or not done. This is because we constantly do things that upset other people and affect their feelings. But once you learn to have fun

from the fact that you are often alone, you will feel no need to apologize for anything to anyone (except for those whose toes you stepped on, of course, since no one has canceled basic politeness!).

The feeling of not having to constantly ask for forgiveness for anything, as well as not having to constantly feel guilty, makes it possible to feel truly free and independent.

human. Now you don’t have to constantly look around because you might accidentally offend, anger, or offend someone in some other way.

We can devote time to exactly those things that give us pleasure

Since we are constantly in the various company of other people, we almost always have to find a compromise between what we like and what others like. Otherwise, a conflict of interest

: you will be reproached for selfishness, for not taking into account the opinions of other people and for being too focused on yourself.

TAGSTOCK1/Getty Images Pro

In other words, we (many of us), unfortunately, throughout almost our entire lives are forced to do things that are not what we personally like

, but what we should do; something that satisfies (or at least does not contradict) the interests of various groups of people.

So why do we begin to anger fate because at some certain point in our lives we find ourselves alone, getting that very rare opportunity to finally do those things

, which give us the greatest pleasure personally? Loneliness in this sense is a real freedom, which it would be a shame not to take advantage of by devoting maximum time to your favorite things.