The Bigger Picture: Isolation is one of our most deep-rooted struggles in today's modern, industrialised world. While many things continue to get better, this aspect of our lives in general seems to gain momentum. Furthermore, isolation is the cause of a great number of our health problems, from physical to social to emotional disease. Yet, we still understand very little about it.
There are many misconceptions about isolation. One of the most common is the belief that being isolated is limited to not having enough people in your life. While literally being on one's own is certainly an aspect of it, it does not in itself create the kind of stress that plagues us today. Rather, many people who are isolated indeed have a great number of people in their lives, and yet are still alone in their own experience.
It is this emotional isolation - this deep sense of loneliness - that is very painful. This is the experience that leads us to withdraw from the people who are around, or feel hopeless about making new connections. Thus, it is this more complex quality of isolation that we must understand in order to address the issue.
Isolation is not something we are born with. Rather, we have very strong instincts and desires to seek out profound connections. In fact, emotional isolation takes a long time to develop. It takes time to really surrender to a feeling of "being completely alone".
The roots of isolation set in first when we are very young. Although it is essential for adults to take charge of our own isolation, the fact that the struggle developed as a result of how people responded to us when we were much smaller causes great difficulties.
Many things can lead us to feel on our own. At their root, however, is a lack of safety or acknowledgement of one's experience. Other people's fears, judgments, criticisms, or simply lack of attention result in and nurture a quality of isolation that can hurt even more than actually having no one around.
All of us have struggles that make it difficult to be supportive at one time or another. Sometimes we've never been through that kind of trauma and, so, lack an understanding or insight as to how to respond. More often, however, our early experiences of being criticised or reprimanded when having a hard time make it difficult for us to listen without passing on this response.
The longer we struggle with isolation, the more entrenched the feelings will become. Eventually, it can seem to be easier not to trust people at all than to keep reaching out and risking blame, rejection or more hurt.
It is very important, although no doubt painful, for someone who is isolated to take steps towards challenging that isolation. Taking charge of our own liberation is an essential part of fostering empowerment and healing. However, while sometimes simply making the effort - getting up, getting ready and going out to meet people - is what's needed, other times the relationships we have might not be ones where we can feel safe with this struggle. When this happens, it may be important to consider that we will need new and different people to reach out to at the end of the day.
Having gone through a very difficult experience, many people will talk about "finding out who their friends were". While it's easy to think that perhaps our relationships are simply too superficial to sustain such hardship, the fact is that most people today lack the emotional skills necessary to be effective in very difficult circumstances.
Sometimes it is our very close friends who struggle most to have space amid our struggles. The very fact that they care so much about us can trigger their own fears and insecurities, making it painful for them to watch or listen to our struggle.
Nevertheless, as isolation gains momentum, it becomes essential to seek out and find people in our lives who have the courage and emotional space needed to stay with us while we face our pain, desperation, heartbreak and shock. Recognising these relationships when they present themselves, and mobilising them to have a strong place in our lives is an important part of our healing process.
Sitting back to assess the relationships that are in our lives - being realistic about the limits of some and strategically developing others - can seem cold and collected and be quite difficult. However, learning to develop the supports that challenge our isolation is essential to having a full life. We mustn't let things go without having those people in our lives with whom we can share painful experiences with compassion, support and safety.
It is not helpful to keep pushing ourselves to be vulnerable in places where we only receive criticism and a lack of safety in return. It is equally useless, however, to insist that there would be no one out there who could possibly understand us. Indeed, there are and we deserve to have them in our lives.
Building on this, next week's piece explores the skills we need as a society to challenge isolation.
Shalini Sinha is an independent producer/journalist. She is a counsellor on equality issues, has lectured on women's studies in UCD and presents RTÉ Television's intercultural programme, Mono.