Can we be truly alone in order to be together?
a reflection on the difference of being alone vs lonely
I accidentally started to watch a show called Alone. Apparently it has been around for a while (I don’t watch much tv!) and I say accidentally because my husband was really the one watching it. However, my curiosity would peek into the stories from time to time. If you haven’t watched it, the premise is very simple: 10 participants are dropped off in a very (verryyy) remote area with just a few items and they have to figure out their survival (build shelters, find food, water etc). Participants go on for weeks in extreme weather conditions, exhaustion, and hunger - all alone. They are required to record themselves throughout their experience. Apart from the physical survival aspects, understanding people’s strategies and picking out my favorites, what really kept me hooked was the psychological aspect. It was very interesting to see how many participants gave up mid way due to feeling very lonely, even though their bodies were still up for the challenge; while other participants could go on forever in that experience but their bodies shut down. I’ve been thinking of the difference between being alone and being lonely. How we are, collectively and individually, navigating it.
If we go back to our strongest fears, as a child, it was the fear of being alone. Being alone in the dark, being alone with the monster hidden inside the closet, being alone with the unknown. Freud pointed out that this is our first phobia and linked solitude with anxiety. Winnicott, a British Psychoanalyst, later said about our “capacity to be alone”. In his view, this capacity is one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development. The capacity to be alone for Winnicott, implies a comfortable acceptance of one’s personal impulses and sensations, the capacity to be alone should correlate to a sense of self, which goes beyond a reactive or other-dictated definition of self.
He also complements this idea with another very important thought, in psychoanalytic theory, called the existence of a good internal object. In essence, the term ‘internal object’ means a mental and emotional image of an external object that has been taken inside the self. The most important internal objects are those derived from the parents. These objects, when taken into the self, are thought to be experienced by the infant concretely as physically present within the body, causing pleasure or pain. This theory states that the internal object is considered to be of prime importance to the development and mental health of the individual. The introjection of and identification with a stable good object is crucial to the ego’s capacity to cohere and integrate experience. Damaged or dead internal objects cause enormous anxiety and can lead to personality disintegration, whereas objects felt to be in a good state promote confidence and well-being.
In other words, without being too theoretical, object relation theory it’s the capacity to form an integrated, realistic, and relatively stable image of ourselves and other people that simultaneously includes both liked and disliked aspects and also strengths and flaws. If we lack whole object relations, we only see ourselves and other people in a kind of slipt and un-nuanced way, either all good or all bad.
Circling back with this thought of being lonely vs alone, I keep thinking about how it’s very difficult nowadays to develop our capacity to be alone in a genuine, expansive way that privileges insight, silence, and reflection because we are in a delusional relationship with our phones. The amount of people we watch doing things on the internet all day long, the pursuit for likes, validation, and aligning with people who think, look, talk like us - it all gives a distorted perception that we are close, we are together, we are not alone. However, it’s a disconnected experience. Tressie McMillan Cotton, a sociologist and professor, says we keep insisting on having deep conversations in very narrow platforms, like social media.
When our daily experiences are so disconnected with what is actually happening inside of ourselves and we don’t pause to name, acknowledge, and process it we are missing the chance to explore our “capacity to be alone” in an emotionally mature way. We are quickly folded into this delusional idea of being together when we are, in fact, apart, distracted, polarized, and not nourishing our immediate real community (which takes on much more work than engaging in the virtual world, let’s be honest!).
It seems to me that we are trying to fill up a cup but with the wrong liquid or totally missing the cup altogether and at the end of the day, we keep finding ourselves empty.
While it’s very difficult to grow up without this good internal object, the great news is that as adults we can develop it on our own. However, for it to happen we must find ourselves in a space of pause, of reflection, of quietness for us to be able to cultivate what it means to each of us: how, when, and with whom we can develop this good internal object. It feels to me we keep prematurely interrupting this cycle. Bell Hooks said “Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” I truly believe in this, in our capacity to sustain our solitude in order to engage with the world, like a dance of going inside ourselves and then going out and back again, and again.
When my daughter went through the monster phase, as so many kids do, at around 3, 4 years old. I sat down with her and proposed: how about if we draw the monster? Her face lit up. Yes! We drew probably ten different colorful versions and by the time we were done, the scary monster wasn’t so scary anymore.
Are we allowing ourselves the space to even say what we are scared of when we’re alone? Are we allowing the space to draw our own monsters? Are we allowing ourselves to let these monsters live within us?
with love,
Mariana
1- A new playlist with one musician I absolutely love + meditation recordings
2- What greek tragedies can teach us about grief? A piece from Teju Cole.
4- This meditative story was so beautiful to hear, from Martha Beck
5- Our internal ladder: Sonya Renee Taylor and Permits Hemphill
6- A tarot reading for grief with the very best Anna Toonk
7- I’ve turned to Baiko Akomolafe’s brilliant mind lately, here’s two conversations with him: here and here
8- The war within is a war of becoming - An art film inspired by Freud’s The Ego & The Id
9- I appreciated this reflection and reframe on ambition
10- As so many, I’ve spent the last weeks grieving, reading, researching, talking to friends, listening and grieving, grieving, grieving and I still feel I don’t have words. What I will say, though is this: it’s interesting to observe our tendencies to centralize one group’s pain in detriment of other group’s pain. As I wrote in other letters, regarding other wars, the world keeps asking of us to hold complexity, hold ambiguity, hold multiple truths with compassion and this is perhaps our biggest challenge as a collective. If we are still unable to do this with our own selves, how can we do this with others?
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My work is dynamic, present and unique to individual needs. Together, we will create the conditions for a safe and connected space that makes expansive self-exploration possible. Together we’ll find stillness and awareness to help meet yourself where you are and with inquiry and acceptance begin a process of self-compassion and integration, through a combination of the following:
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Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
- Magge Smith
I am FASCINATED by Alone. It made me laugh to read your musings stumbling upon it.