In this article we will tell you:
- 8 reasons that lead to loneliness
- Ways to stop being afraid of loneliness
- Recommendations on how not to be left alone after divorce
- 4 life hacks on how to avoid being alone and find a mate
After various life problems, every woman may have a fear of loneliness, and she will look for ways not to be left alone. Many will immediately begin searching for a new partner, and will be ready to grab the first one they come across, as long as there is at least someone nearby. Others, on the contrary, withdraw into themselves and put an end to normal relationships.
Obviously, both ways are not the best and are unlikely to bring anything positive. After all, in order to find a normal life partner, you need to love and respect yourself. In our article we will tell you what to do in order not to be left alone, we will analyze the reasons for such fears and give recommendations on how to find a worthy life partner.
Ways to stop being afraid of loneliness
In this case, the source of fear is not in loneliness itself, as in the prospect of being left without a partner, but in the fear of being alone with oneself. How much confidence, motivation and vitality lies within the woman herself?
The fear of being left alone, alone with your experiences and failures, forces you to look for a partner who will take on the role of a protector, a deliverer from difficulties and all sorts of troubles. However, to implement this scenario, constant difficulties and incidents are necessary, but this obviously leads to failure.
Identifying your own fears and experiences can also push you towards a positive outcome of events, namely the desire to set a goal and work through all your fears. For example, if a girl is afraid of being left alone and without financial support, she should direct her efforts to obtain a new profession that generates income. If a young woman is generally dissatisfied with herself and is afraid of being left alone because no one will be able to please her, this is a good reason to work through all her internal fears and complexes and spend her energy fighting them.
A love union will never be happy if the starting point for its creation was the fear of being lonely.
This is similar to the panic of a drowning man who grabs everything in sight and waves his arms, but his actions do not bring a positive effect.
What needs to be done to make the fear of loneliness go away? The answer is simple - nothing. Allow your fear to exist, don't try to pretend it doesn't exist. Awareness of the problem is the first successful step towards solving it.
Ask yourself:
- Am I comfortable staying in this state for a long time?
- What benefits does fear bring me?
- What do my fears say?
- Do I want to work on myself so that my fears leave me? Or am I happy with everything that’s happening? The more honest the answers, the more effective the work on yourself will be.
Don't try to find salvation in others, it is in you.
Rest assured, when you strengthen your strong-willed qualities and work on your weak character traits, changes in your attitude and even in your appearance will not take long to arrive. The desire to be afraid and feel sorry for yourself will no longer arise. Continuing self-development, you will move in the right direction, and there is no doubt that on your way you will meet an equally confident and harmoniously developed partner.
Consequences of the “at least someone” syndrome for a woman
Psychologists are convinced that the “at least someone” syndrome can negatively affect a woman’s emotional and psychological state.
In her new relationship she will try:
- Imagine relationships where there are none;
- Forcing a man to start a relationship, even if he does not want it;
- Accept disrespect and humiliation from a man;
- Justify the actions of an unloved man;
- Adapt to your companion.
Recommendations on how not to be left alone after divorce
- Life goes on
For many representatives of the fairer sex, the main goal in life is to create a family. This is expressed not just in the form of a stamp in a passport, but in a friendly, love-filled common home and created comfort. If there are disagreements in the family and things are heading towards divorce, this often seems like a complete collapse for the woman, she loses self-control and the will to live disappears. This is a fundamentally wrong position. Life doesn't end after divorce. A completely new period begins, and what it is like will depend entirely on the attitude towards it and the measures taken by the woman herself.
- Accept the situation
During and after a divorce, it is extremely important to maintain common sense and not let negative emotions get the better of you. Allow yourself to understand and accept the thought: if you are unhappy in your marriage, then a miracle most likely will not happen, and a breakup is the surest and best way out of the current situation.
- Don't go to extremes
To make the right decision, you should pause and weigh the pros and cons. Being alone for some time after a divorce is necessary in order to rethink what is happening and analyze your mistakes. You should not rush into the arms of the first person you meet, this is guaranteed to lead to repeated disappointments.
- Don't be afraid of gossip
Most likely, your divorce will provide food for discussion for gossip lovers. It is unlikely that you will be able to avoid this, so there is no point in fighting it. Be wiser, ignore and do not pay attention to the whisperings of ill-mannered people. Know one thing, that after talking about you enough, this incident will be forgotten forever and you will no longer be disturbed.
- Love yourself
Any woman going through a divorce is puzzled by what is happening. But in this situation, it is very important not to go too far and not to start reproaching yourself for everything that happened. Being negative, blaming and morally humiliating yourself is not the answer. Using these methods, you can earn depression and plunge into the muddy swamp of your fears and worries for a long time. Know that the outcome of any event depends solely on your attitude. Look at everything from a positive perspective - the glass is always half full.
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- Communicate
After a breakup, do not stay alone for a long time, do not protect yourself from communicating with friends and acquaintances, maintain contact with relatives, and share news with work colleagues. The more people you surround yourself with, the faster your moral recovery will take place after a divorce has occurred.
- Alone or lonely?
Not every marriage can be called happy. The feeling of being alone can also be present if you are in a couple. Ask yourself, are you familiar with the following conditions?
- you hardly talk;
- you have no common interests, the two of you are bored;
- you feel like a black hole of indifference is absorbing all your dreams and aspirations.
Think about what exactly you expect from marriage. Probably, printing in documents is not the main goal. Every woman would like to be loved and love in return. And this is a matter of human relations, not bureaucratic formalities. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the distinction between concepts such as “being alone” and “being lonely.”
- Take care of the children
If you have children, you will never be lonely. You can find entertainment and enjoy life with your children, surprise them and surprise yourself. Also communicate with other parents and do not refuse joint activities.
- Look for hobbies
Allow yourself to take a break from your worries and find something you love, get creative, find hobbies that will benefit you and lift your spirits. When you have an activity that brings you joy, people who share your interests will appear around you.
- Go on a trip
It is necessary to let go of the past and leave all the grievances in it. To do this, the situation must radically change. The best solution would be to travel. Get ready and go to a new city, or maybe to a country, switch all your emotions to exploring a new area. And then it will become easier for you to overcome the disappointment of an unhappy marriage.
- Look to the future with optimism
After a difficult divorce or separation, it is important not to plunge into depression, but to maintain positive thoughts and tune in to a new stage in your life. You should change your attitude towards your ex-marriage and realize all the mistakes you have made so that the negative experience does not happen again.
Three Factors of Loneliness
Feelings of loneliness are determined by a combination of three factors. The first is the level of vulnerability to social isolation. Every person has a common genetic need for social inclusion, and your personal level of this need will be different from that of any other person. If the need for connection is high, it may be difficult to meet it.
The second factor in feelings of loneliness is the ability to self-regulate emotions associated with feelings of isolation (not only externally, but also deep within oneself). Every person experiences suffering when their need for companionship is not met, and if loneliness continues for some time, it can become a source of chronic distress. How well you deal with these feelings affects the amount of mental pain you experience. If you're chronically upset, it makes it impossible for you to accurately judge other people's intentions—you may begin to perceive them as rejecting you when in fact they are not.
Learning to accept and effectively cope with feelings of abandonment, manage feelings without judging yourself or others, and find ways to solve problems will help reduce the damage that loneliness can cause.
The third factor is mental representations and expectations, as well as reasoning about others. Feeling lonely doesn't mean your social skills are underdeveloped, but it does impair your ability to use them. People who feel lonely often feel like they are doing everything they can to form a connection and find a sense of belonging, but simply no one reciprocates. Naturally, such feelings turn into huge disappointment, which after a while begins to affect a person’s mood and behavior when he is around others. Chronic loneliness can manifest itself in anger or resentment, which often leads to further withdrawal from others. Sometimes single people struggle because they feel inadequate or unworthy. Feeling ashamed of who you are will also make it difficult to connect with others.
People who have been single for a long time may also experience fear. Fear of rejection from others leads to the fact that a person strives to step aside and not share his true essence with anyone - naturally, such behavior does not contribute to establishing contacts and only aggravates loneliness, introducing a person into a vicious circle. The body language of such people may reflect the insecurity and distress they are experiencing, although they may not be aware of it. Just when they seem to be able to form a bond, their manner of communicating with others may inadvertently convey nothing more than a message to “stay away,” which naturally alienates those around them.
When people become emotionally disturbed, they lose a sense of security, may see danger everywhere, and are less likely to acknowledge someone else's point of view. It is important to remember that the vast majority of people feel lonely from time to time. Many single people believe that they are unique in their situation and that it is not normal to feel this way. However, temporary loneliness is a part of life because humans are social creatures and overwhelmingly consider love, intimacy and social connections to be far more important factors in happiness than wealth, success or reputation.
Loneliness is a deep, destructive pain that can become chronic and cannot be overcome by simply going outside and talking to someone you know.
Just as physical pain protects people from physical dangers, loneliness can serve as a social pain that protects people from the dangers of isolation—it can motivate behavioral changes and greater emphasis on the relationships that are essential to survival. The emotional area of the brain that is activated when a person experiences social rejection is the same area of the brain that registers emotional reactions to physical pain.
Fear of loneliness in children
In children, the fear of loneliness can be explained quite simply if there have been no serious psychological traumas. The child’s brain is developing very actively and at this moment needs active communication and receiving new information.
If a developing person does not receive the necessary and constant contact, he feels an emptiness that frightens him. Because by studying life, his personality and relationships with the outside world are formed. And he needs support and a “guide”.
Moreover, being left alone with himself, the child begins to feel unprotected in the face of something new and unknown. The self-esteem of this little person is formed from communication and the experience he gains.
In the process of forming a child’s personality, his personal achievements and attitude towards him, his self-esteem is also formed. This is either healthy self-esteem and he will choose and determine what, when and how to do. Or low self-esteem, in which he will become dependent on the opinions, assessments and recognition of close, authoritative, significant people and those around him.
Over time, having acquired a base of knowledge and skills, with wise upbringing and the attitude of relatives, a child with healthy self-esteem ceases to need constant guardianship and unnecessary care. He is comfortable living in his new world and joyfully realizing his healthy self-esteem. Which begins to be clearly expressed in adolescence.
And in the case of low self-esteem, in adolescence the child tries to free himself from dependence on parental assessment, which leads to dependence on the assessment of the new society into which he strives. And in the end he is afraid of becoming an outcast.
They can come and take everything away at any moment.
The October Revolution and the Civil War entailed the exile of the intelligentsia, the destruction or emigration of the nobility, and the expropriation of property. Families were separated, siblings found themselves on opposite sides of the front line. People whose purpose in life was to increase the well-being of their family were accused of crime.
People were evicted from their own homes, deprived of everything they valued. The convicts did not understand how and why they suddenly turned from respectable citizens into criminals. Entire families were punished: the wives and children of those convicted were sent to prison and exile. In Stalin's camps, in addition to exhausting physical labor, one had to face humiliation.
The psychological trauma of the descendants of nobles, merchants and priests, dispossessed wealthy peasants of that time is passed on from generation to generation. Many people still do not believe in the guarantee of property rights or the reliability of investing in business or real estate. It seems that at any moment they can come and take everything away.
The popular wisdom “you can’t trust anyone” may have been born in those days when a neighbor, colleague or friend could write a denunciation, and it was impossible to justify himself. Under torture in the dungeons of the NKVD, any confession could be beaten out of a person.
Do you have an uncryed family story?
In the history of every second Russian family you can find one or two tragedies that living generations have no idea about. Of course, not all descendants are affected by those terrible events. If families were able to cry, experience their grief well, find support and consolation from relatives, friends, neighbors, then the long-standing tragedy will not lead to serious consequences.
For Anya, unfortunately, it happened differently. Her great-great-grandmother, after her husband’s arrest, lost her sense of family and trust in people. I can imagine how great her fear was of losing both her children and her only remaining room. After all, she could have been declared “the wife of an enemy of the people,” sent into exile, and her children sent to an orphanage. And those who killed her husband still lived next door. That’s why, apparently, I wasn’t able to cry, throw out my anger, or show my grief to the world.
Anya grew up and had no idea what could be the reason for her family’s isolation. More precisely, she did not consider her family to be closed. For her, this was the norm until problems in the relationship became apparent. If she had met a man for whom emotional closeness was also the norm, then the matter would not have come to a psychologist. Anya would never have known the origin of the family motto: “Trust no one!” Don't tell anyone anything."
The reasons for feelings of loneliness can be different, and each story needs to be dealt with individually. Try and find out how your grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers lived. Perhaps it is family history that will shed light on your life today.
Hold on to any husband - just avoid being a lonely woman
Before the country had time to recover from the revolution, the Civil War, and Stalinist repressions, the Second World War came.
Wives lost husbands, mothers of sons, daughters of fathers. Children had to grow up early, help their parents, go hungry, care for the wounded, and see death or the occupation of their native land. Even if men returned from the war alive, many were shell-shocked and with deep psychological trauma. Former soldiers could not cope with the horrors they saw and flooded their memories with alcohol. After the Victory, many veterans never fully told their loved ones what they had to endure.
After 1945, many families consisted of children and single mothers. Until now, the pain, despair and loneliness of that time have not been overcome by the citizens of the country. We are still psychologically dependent on those events. The readiness of our women to hold on to any husband, even a boor and an alcoholic, with all their might, comes from there. The demographic skew towards women and the shortage of men is only just beginning to be corrected.
Decades of a totalitarian system, the dominance of state interests over the interests of the individual, and the devaluation of individuality led to a psychotic state of society during perestroika. The long-awaited freedom has finally arrived. People lost their fear, they had the opportunity to openly express their opinions, have their own political position, engage in business, and profess any faith.
But with democracy came chaos. The state was losing its former power and authority, abandoning its social obligations to citizens. The feeling of freedom was accompanied by a hint of overwhelming anxiety: what will happen next?
The 1990s were the years of the collapse of previous foundations, the loss of the psychological foundation. People are losing their jobs, their savings, and their usual stability. Parents have nothing to feed their children. Directors of government agencies earn extra money as janitors, loaders, and salespeople. Trying to survive, people pawn and re-pawn gold jewelry.
Those who are more flexible join cooperatives and try their hand at entrepreneurship. Money is rapidly depreciating. Enterprises work on barter, paying suppliers with manufactured products. The era of banditry is coming - the impunity of the “brothers”, the insecurity of ordinary people whose lives are not worth a penny.
A century so full of trials could not pass without a trace for Russian society. From our great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and further to our daughters, we will pass on the remnants of unlived painful feelings, including those leading to the fear of loneliness.
So many modern women, clinging to men unworthy of them, shouldering responsibility for parents, relatives, friends, carry an unprocessed family history. For now they simply cannot do otherwise.
Fear of loneliness in women
The fear of loneliness in women has a different nature in each case. This different nature can be present in one woman.
Fear of not being realized as a woman. A woman depends on the attention and assessment of men and women regarding her appearance, beauty, behavior, and attractiveness. This is often associated with her self-esteem. In the end, it's the fear of being alone.
Fear of not being able to fulfill yourself as a mother. This is where many participants in the process come into play, with whom this fear is associated. Parents, spouse, children, surrounding people. Which also affects self-esteem. In the end, it's the fear of being alone.
Fear of not being fulfilled as a wife. In this case, the spouse comes first, of course. Or rather, his attitude and behavior towards the woman. And if the husband’s attitude is not what the woman expects, she feels unnecessary and lonely. Well, and the rest of the set of life participants with whom her assessment as a wife is connected. In the end, it's the fear of being alone.
Fear of not being realized as a daughter. In this case, the censors of implementation are both the parents and the woman herself. The people around you also influence your assessment, but to a lesser extent. In the end, it's the fear of being alone.
Fear of not being realized as a person. In society, the concept of a woman as a person also plays an important role. And the fulfillment of a woman as a person is quite important. Her actions, behavior, and communication with people are assessed both by people and by herself, depending on the human norms, values and morals laid down in her. In the end, it's the fear of being alone.
Fear of not realizing yourself as a specialist or professional. An interesting position in the above list in modern society is occupied by the position of a woman’s realization in some specialty, which did not exist a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago. In the end, it's the fear of being alone.
With age, the fear of loneliness associated with old age appears , in which many of the fears listed above are expressed.
All these points are very closely related to each other, affect a woman’s self-esteem and are created in the family and social environment.
If a woman does not meet the necessary standards of a woman, mother, daughter, wife, person or specialist, her circle of contacts narrows and she suffers from this. It seems to her that everyone will turn away from her or is already turning away. And lack of communication is loneliness.
For this reason, some women try to do everything to meet the standards and be, if not in the center of events and communication, then at least somewhere nearby.
A woman needs a lot of communication due to the large number of interhemispheric connections. And if these connections are not active, she experiences loneliness, uselessness, unfulfillment, despondency, dullness of life and disappointment.
At the root of a woman’s actions, behavior, thinking, and outlook on life is not only a woman’s desire to conform, but also the fear of falling out of conformity according to some of the parameters.
But if for a long time it is not possible to implement standards in something, shame, fear and low self-esteem appear. Some women come to terms with this and compensate with something else, but some live through their tragedy until the end of their days.
The root cause of all of the above is dependence on society. Rather, from the opinions, assessments and recognition of close, authoritative, significant and surrounding people raised in childhood.
✅ Read even more about people’s fears and how to overcome them for free in my book “Intuition and Fears”
