Isolation Isn’t Safe
By: Benjamin Sledge
Tags: Mental Health, Loneliness, Life Lessons, Isolation, Life

Most of us aren’t attuned to the to the idea that loneliness is a symptom reminding us something’s wrong. A broken bone will alert you to an injury, but we seem to ignore what loneliness tries to communicate. Instead, we expect it to resolve itself with enough time or hope people are mind readers who know we’re lonely. It’s a weird concept. I don’t sit down at my kitchen table and hope for food to magically appear when I’m hungry. Instead, I move to the pantry, pull the items needed to make a meal, and begin cooking. To avoid becoming our own self-fulfilling prophecy of isolation, it’ll take action steps much like cooking a meal does to satisfy hunger.

I was lucky enough to have my friend from college point this out as he watched me spiral further into depression and substance abuse. He couldn’t be my sole source of support and knew I needed community and help, so he suggested attending a church. Much to my chagrin, he was an atheist, and I was… whatever, at best. However, inside the church I found community, friends, and people willing to walk with me through my pain. I explored purpose, meaning, and the point of suffering, and soon found I wasn’t alone in my problems. While church or religion might not be your bag of tea, there’s an essential truth about human beings — we need community and other people when we experience isolation. It’s the way we’re wired, even according to science. At current, however, we’re wiring ourselves to technology and while connected, it’s superficial. It’s why there’s Zoom burnout and people are longing for the day when they can return to an office.

Of course, community and connection sound great in theory, but many people know the loneliest place you can be is in a crowd of people. That’s why the depths of relationships matter. Superficial relationships can never fulfill our deep longings. We’ll trail deeper off the reservation and isolate, because deep down we know the relationships are unfulfilling. In Joyce Vincent’s case, that’s what happened. All her relationships were surface level and when they moved past anything skin deep, she fled.

Often when we isolate from relationship with others, it’s because there’s underlying trauma left unaddressed. It’s believed that Joyce Vincent was a victim of domestic abuse by an old boyfriend, and why she had no deep relationships besides flighty ones and romantic flings.

A friend of mine experienced something similar to Joyce. She lives in an apartment alone and goes to work each day. She sleeps when she’s not working and has grown isolated like Joyce. The reason, however, is that like Joyce, she’s a victim of domestic violence, went through a nasty divorce, and kept toxic friends that abandoned her. When we spoke the other day, I explained that the isolation wasn’t safe, and that in order to move forward, she’d have to heal from the trauma. I connected her with some family friends, a counselor who had also been a victim of domestic violence, gave her lists of specific actions relevant to her life, and resources that would help. By the end of the call, she had a plan and healthy people to meet with.

So often, that’s the piece we forget when we find ourselves lonely and disconnected — something under the surface is growing gangrenous. If we ignore it, the pain compounds, and pushes us away from the very connection we need to heal.

We can’t continue to limp through life. We must set the broken pieces, step into healthy community, and above all remind ourselves of a simple truth: isolation isn’t safe.