Befriending Loneliness II

This quote I offer you this week is from an article by therapist Natalie Baker, published in Elephant Journal on Apr 8, 2016, about Conquering Loneliness.

The words in brackets are my suggestion for a more compassionate approach.

Conquering [I would say ‘Befriending’] our loneliness requires bravery.

Here’s where we need to get practical and think about change as a practice. We are going to interrupt a habitual pattern and do something different.

We have to be willing to:

• Stop being focused on the story and feel the feelings of loneliness and badness.
• Suspend our 100 percent certainty that there is something fundamentally wrong with us that would make it so we feel lonely.
• Cultivate some reason why we deserve a little protection from the constant inner talk that is putting us down.
• When the lonely or bad feeling comes up, interrupt its flow with this more accurate information.
  

How do we do this? The easiest way is to start by thinking of a child. I have found that, while we all will have strong ambivalence around why we don’t deserve kindness and care, it’s almost impossible for us to find a reason why a child doesn’t deserve those things.

Here is a practice to help conquer [befriend] our loneliness:

Stop reading and ask yourself to find that lonely or bad feeling as a felt experience in your body.

It’s usually not far from our awareness if we stop and attend to it. If need be, think of a recent experience when you felt misunderstood or alone.

Now think of a kid you like, or one you know or see regularly. Imagine that this child has that feeling. If you were the adult in the room and could see that child was feeling this way, would you say with an aggressive tone, “Clearly they did something wrong and deserve to feel this way.” Of course not!

But this is exactly what we say to ourselves.

So our third step is to notice that protective feeling and mental certainly we have that the child will not be helped by judgment and aggression in response to their pain. Try to notice where that certainty is as a feeling in your body. Practice saying to yourself, “This certainty I have that this child deserves protection and kindness, I have to remember to apply to myself when I have these feelings. And to do so without bias. It is to be a non-negotiable response that’s practiced.”

Conquering [Befriending] loneliness has little to do with whether we have friends or not—we all know the feeling of loneliness even when we’re surrounded by others.

It has everything to do with examining and ultimately rejecting [befriending & accepting] the bad feeling within us, and its companion belief that we somehow deserve aggression and being kept from companionship and community.

Be mindful of your self-talk and don’t believe everything you think.