Why Emotional Loneliness Runs So Deep in Complex Trauma

So you have friends, maybe you have a partner, maybe you even have a calendar filled to the brim and group chats with multiple different folks, and you still feel really alone.

And it's the kind of loneliness where it's like someone is talking to you and you're nodding along and you're saying all the right things, but somewhere inside, somewhere underneath all of it, you're, you're like thinking or maybe reflecting afterwards like, "Oh my gosh, no one really actually knows me." That kind of loneliness, it doesn't just show up in your relationship status, right? If you're partnered or unpartnered.

It shows up in the fact that you can have perfectly good conversations with people and walk away feeling more empty maybe than before it even started.

It shows up in the exhaustion after being around people because performing being okay for a couple of hours at a time, it actually really does take something out of you.

It can show up when someone asks you how you're doing, and you say, "Fine," and like actually kind of mean it in the moment because the real answer is so far buried that you don't even know what it is anymore.

A lot of people with complex trauma describe loneliness not as, "Oh, I'm so lonely," but more kind of like, "No one actually knows me.

I can be in a room full of people who love me and still feel completely, like, unreachable.

I'm always a little bit outside of things, even when I'm in the middle of them." As always, I'm gonna frame this as a nervous system story, and we're gonna dive into that today.

[upbeat music] Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to the Complex Trauma Podcast.

Today, we're diving into emotional loneliness.

I've mentioned this on the podcast in different episodes in the past, and I thought that it would be a good time to maybe just do an entire episode around emotional loneliness and where it comes from, what it can feel like, and give you a handful of strategies to kind of use to be with this.

I think a lot of people who experience this kind of loneliness, emotional loneliness, they don't even really call it loneliness at first.

They can start to call it being independent or being selective or that they're just kind of like tired and exhausted with people.

And underneath that, it can be a learned response.

It can be a nervous system that learned that somewhere along the way that being fully present with people carries a significant risk.

And the thing about that, the, the nervous system story, how the nervous system adapts, is that it happens below the level of conscious awareness.

Like, you're not sitting around thinking, "Oh, connection with my neighbor feels unsafe," or, "Connection with whoever feels unsafe." It's just these little cues, right? This, this vague hollowness maybe after social interactions that you feel just always a little bit outside of things, even when you're kind of like in the mix of them, and that other people seem to move through relationships with this level of ease that feels kind of foreign to you, and you're not really sure why.

There are actually two types of loneliness for the context of this episode, and they're pretty different.

Social isolation is about the quantity of connection, people who have fewer relationships, less contact, more time physically alone.

And with social isolation, you can add more people in to be less isolated, right? We know this.

Emotional loneliness, on the other hand, is different.

It can feel like being unseen and unknown, disconnected from people even when they're right in front of you.

You can't really fix it by adding in more people because the problem isn't the number of people in your life.

It's whether your nervous system has learned to actually, like, let them in.