It’s really interesting that as I prepare to hold a retreat experience called VILLAGE, I am being called deep into my wound of aloneness.
From the outside, I’m not sure I look like someone who has a core wound of aloneness.
I have community, family, friends and, for the most part, function quite well socially.
However, for some of us who have the wound of aloneness being socially adept has been a developed coping mechanism.
I believe some of the most charming, magnetic, and likeable people probably have a significant “I am alone” wound.
Developing the skills of charm, magnetism, and having people feel comfortable in your presence is a beautiful survival skill. You could think of it as “fawning.”
Personally, I am not a fawner exactly, but I do know that because of my core wound of “I am alone” developed social skills so that people couldn’t see just how alone I felt and experienced life to be.
The “I am alone” wound is one of, “No one has got me, so I’ve got to get myself.” “No one has my back.” “No one can really be trusted.”
When you have this programming, you compensate a need for connection by not needing people. You may become very self sufficient and very capable. It’s not a “bad” thing; although it is a disconnecting thing.
Our core wounds tend to be pre-verbal. They were inflicted before we could speak or had language, so there really isn’t a story when we experience the wound arising in the current day.
Typically, a pre verbal core wound would feel like unexplainable terror around something that doesn’t seem like it should be that terrifying.
It could be that you were ripped away from your mother’s body at birth. It could be that you were left alone for what was deemed too long by your primal body as an infant.
It could be a lot of things, subtle to completely unthinkable and awful, and it doesn’t really matter exactly what it was. It just matters that the wound probably started there, at the primal layer of your animal body.
Just because we can’t cognitively remember the experience doesn’t mean it didn’t create a program that continues to run in us far into adulthood.
As you grow, you have experiences that highlight this wound. Until you are willing to feel the pain that lives in that original wound in a way that integrates it into your being, it will continue to resurface in all different locations and situations.
Maybe your caregivers were aloof and self obsessed and you were alone a lot. Maybe you were treated like an adult far before you were, or expected to do adult tasks. Maybe you experienced bullying or rejection in adolescence. Maybe you experienced heart break or professional rejection or isolation. Maybe you’ve had far more serious and terrible things happen to you. Again, it could be a lot things that highlight and reopen this wound of aloneness for you again and again.
It isn’t really the details or the story that matters, because the only way you overcome a wound like this is to feel the pain of it from an integrated conscious place. Eg, you allow yourself to feel what you were incapable of feeling when the wound happened and process the pain.
I feel this wound of aloneness right in the center of my sternum. It’s a tender, shaky, wobbly spot that is activated anytime I have a perception of: ‘I am alone. I can’t trust people. I’m on my own in this life. I have to figure life out all by myself.’
If I scan back through my life; there are many experiences that brought up this sensation/wound, this feeling of deep isolation, being misunderstood or unseen, feeling rejected for the way I exist.
And the skills I developed to cope with this pain (notice: I’m not saying feel this pain. I’m saying cope with this pain. Those are very different things) are:
1) To put a wall up around my heart and internal world. A protective barrier.
2) Understand social games. It’s not in my make up to be a people pleaser in the traditional sense, but I did learn how to “play the social game,” in a way that made people comfortable at the expense of my true expression. The goal of this was to make me “popular”, cool and superior (a safer position).
The problem with both of these skills is that they completely cut me off from the nutrients of true human connection.
We all need to be witnessed and seen. We all need to feel heard and cared for. We all need to feel like we can let all of ourselves out and we will still be loved. We all need to feel connected to other humans without feeling like we have to change who we are.
As I said in another article, we need each other.
When we put protective barriers that have zero permeability all around us we get into a place where we don’t actually have access to the nutrients of true connection.
A barrier may be protective on one level, and was quite possibly a necessary survival strategy at one point in our lives, but it’s also extremely isolating and can end up feeling like we’ve put ourselves into a prison of aloneness.
Having social skills isn’t a bad thing, but when we lose the ability to actually share openly about the truth of our lives or how we feel from an authentic place; it’s all just being fake and superficial and we feel that. It’s like junk food connection. It might feel good to gossip or collude with our friends, but it isn’t actually what we are starving for.
Fake, superficial, gossipy, victmized, complain-y conversations with people we are close to, will always leave us hungry for the real thing in the long run.
We may even be so convinced we could never be our true selves around others or share our most vulnerable stories; that we don’t even try to anymore and keep it all inside. Where it pressurizes and festers; making it seem even more inane and toxic in our minds.
A snowballing of all the reasons you’re too different, too stupid, too bad or too crazy to be considered a good person worthy of sharing their feelings or desires.
I have been working on revealing myself more to those I love and love me for many years now. I have long ago given up the compulsion toward overly superfulous social niceties or the urge to gossip and opted for honest relating. This is not always comfortable, easy or fun. But it is wildly more nourishing.
I don’t lie. I don’t have secrets or things about myself I’m trying to keep hidden. I don’t spend energy trying to be someone I’m not. Can you see how much less energy social interaction takes when you relate like this?
When there is real conflict I address it in a way that’s honest and willing and I have the energy for it because I’m not wasting my energy on lots of inauthentic pseudo-connections. When I hang out with people I am just me, not some version of me that I have keep up the facade of or remember.
Getting the shadows out of the closet and into the light is something that is terrifying but ultimately always feels like the best kind of relief and release.
As Gabor Maté says, “Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.”
I have deconstructed the barriers and implemented boundaries, which are loving layers of protection that do not block all flow but simply set up gates and specific channels where connective nutrients can be offered and received between myself and other humans.
I feel deeply devoted to being a fully expressed Clara in the world. Nothing to hide. Nothing to keep hidden. All parts of myself integrated and integral and in integrity is the ultimate intention.
And yet, in the past 3 weeks I have been so hit by this I am alone wound.
In the process of promoting and transmitting VILLAGE, a family embodiment retreat, I am feeling the everyday rejection that comes with “selling” things on the internet, as if it were a dagger to my personal heart.
I am seeing all the places I still use things like “likes” and numbers to validate myself and the worth of my work. I am seeing all the ways I still operate with the idea that creations are only worthwhile if other people like them too.
The dark side of community is indeed rejection and betrayal. This is one of the reasons why we don’t cultivate the community we say we want; we are afraid they will reject us and we will end up feeling alone and bad, once again.
The obvious downside of opening our hearts is if we do open them they could very well be shattered.
I am seeing all the places these fears still have a hold on me. Better to be alone. Better to self isolate and disengage. Better to just do what I can alone and not invite people to join me.
I am seeing where my instinct is to wall up and disconnect. I see where I have a sneaky voice that runs in my head always keeping score of who is “worse” and who is “better” than me so as to not be blindsided by rejection or judgment.
I am seeing all the places I still believe I am alone and that I can’t have the connection I want or need.
I am seeing all the ways that when I believe I can’t have the connection I want or need; I don’t get it. I am seeing all the ways I am the creator of my own experience with this wound.
When I expect people to be untrustworthy; they are. When I expect people to not be able to hold me, they can’t. When I expect people to not get me, they don’t.
The wound of “I am alone” is self perpetuating.
We unconsciously create from our wounds until we are willing to feel the pain in them from a conscious and integrated place.
The only way I have found to start to dissolve this wound is to start to lean into the ways I am not actually alone and open my heart. And a big part of this is actually feeling the pain of rejection.
It’s feeling the pain of the aloneness I’ve experienced in my life and also the greif of how I’ve subjected myself to a lot of it in the interest of safety.
It’s feeling the pain of being laughed at, ridiculed, bullied, misunderstood, betrayed, and left behind and then choosing to open my heart again.
If I’m going to receive the nourishment of true community; I have to open my heart and to open my heart I have to feel all the times my heart has been broken, from a conscious place. I have to hold myself as I lean deeper into that shaky, wobbly, raw place in my solar plexus and feel it. This has been the deepest lesson the frequency of VILLAGE has taught me so far.
Community brings up these spots and wounds in us. It reflects back to us all the places we don’t trust ourselves or don’t have firm boundaries (not barriers), or don’t feel worthy of attention, expression, or connection.
True community requires us to open and receive and reception is inherently defenseless.
But the thing is, the more I have opened and felt the pain of my wounds from an integrated conscious place, the more I notice opportunities for genuine connection all around me.
When I don’t have to believe the lie that I am alone, I can receive my life and the people who love me and see me and want the best for me that are actually all around me.
When I trust myself I can appreciate the ways people are available to me and not need them to available in ways they are not. When I trust my own discernment I don’t need people to always agree with me or eat the same way I do or wear the same type of clothes to connect with them.
When I am connected to my humanity I am more connected to other peoples’ humanity and there is beauty all around me.
As Michael Singer says, “Nothing is worth closing your heart over.” And I am truly a believer in this. Open heart and open pussy, connected, this is where true nourishment comes from.
The Wound of "I Am Alone"