How I Stopped Feeling Alone
I overcame feelings of being alone and empty which stemmed from a lack of emotional guidance from my parents
“If you start feeling overwhelmed, just call me and we’ll arrange something. You are not alone.” It was my last session with my therapist before I returned home for the holidays. I was excited to be going home, but I was also anxious because I found my parents’ household stressful. Although we had a session scheduled during the last week of my trip home, my therapist insisted that I could call her if I ever reached a point when it was becoming too much for me at home. She assured me she genuinely wanted to make sure I’d be fine during my visit home. I didn’t have to deal with everything on my own. I had support. I had backup. Tears started falling when my therapist told me that. Why was I crying? It took me a second to figure it out. Then it hit me.
As a child, I felt alone quite a lot.
I didn’t realize I felt this way growing up until I heard the phrase being vocalized by someone else. Once the realization struck me though, the floodgates opened and I reconnected with what is an old and buried feeling for me. It made perfect sense. I already acknowledged that I suffered some degree of emotional neglect in my childhood. Feeling alone is a common symptom of emotional neglect, according to Dr. Jonice Webb. Kids who do not have attuned parents tend to feel like their emotions are being ignored. If this feeling of being unseen is left unaddressed, it stays with these children into adulthood. The feelings get triggered when situations remind the now-adult children of their previous distress.
I have one particularly bad memory of feeling dreadfully alone and overwhelmed. I was in my difficult mid-teen years. I found out I was near-sighted and needed glasses. This isn’t a particularly negative thing, but my father scared me with overly foreboding statements about how being near-sighted was a terrible handicap. Based on what he said, being near-sighted was the worst thing possible. It made me develop a big fear of going blind. His comments made every one of my appointments with the optometrist stressful. Over the years, my ocular prescription progressed to stronger degrees and annual optometrist appointments with my father continued to be tense affairs for me. My father was dismayed when my prescriptions got heavier and tried to give me tips on reducing my prescription.
As a teenager lacking adequate coping skills at that time, I felt like my father was asking me for impossible things which was very nerve-wracking. I can’t control my near-sightedness. His statements caused me to feel there was something wrong with me and that I was a criminal for the very act of being near-sighted. I felt that there was a chance the world would end during every optometrist appointment. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my fears and anxieties at that point so I felt very alone and isolated. I didn’t even realize that it was something to be talked about. My father was emotionally dysregulated; he didn’t know how to stop his fears from spiraling and I got sucked into the fear vortex. What I needed during those times though was emotional support with high school and being a teenager going through physical and emotional changes. Unfortunately, no one in my household could provide that for me.
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Things got worse when it came time for me to learn to drive. Driving as an amateur with my father in the car was an extremely emotionally taxing experience for me. My father essentially panicked throughout the entire sixty hours, yelling critical comments constantly at me at every tiny mistake I made because he couldn’t control his fears of me dying at the wheel. I imagine he had images in his head of my corpse lying in the middle of a car wreck and he wasn’t able to calm himself down or divert his anxieties into something less destructive than screaming at his daughter. I can sympathize that he was worried I would get into such a situation and I know all the yelling had more to do with his issues than my driving skills. Still, those lessons ended with me in tears on several occasions. For this reason, I consider the whole thing an unnecessarily stressful experience for me. After all, teen drivers shouldn’t end up crying while learning to drive.
It all came to a head one day when my two stressors combined. I was headed to an optometrist appointment in the middle of one of my driving lessons with my father. He barked some harsh words about my parking skills as we headed to see my optometrist. The pressure reached a breaking point for me that morning and I started crying in front of my optometrist in the middle of our appointment (my father wasn’t in the room). The poor man was bewildered and gave me a tissue. I made up some excuse and he wrapped up the rest of my check-up without further comment. This was a publicly embarrassing moment for me.
This incident stands out as a particularly traumatic and dysfunctional moment for me because it was the culmination of pressure my father was putting on me and a lack of emotional support which eventually pushed me to a breaking point. Because the adults who I was supposed to rely on were the ones putting me through this pressure, I felt like I had no one else to go to for support. The relatives who were around didn’t intervene or were not aware of my situation. It never occurred to me to go to high school guidance counselors about private matters at home. I wasn’t brave enough to defend myself very much at that point. For me, these personal difficult moments are an example of what happens when parents have the best intentions but not the emotional intelligence to guide their children through the challenges of growing up.
The feeling of not being heard as a child has consequences for how I act in relationships as an adult. Because I was unconsciously used to feeling alone, I tended to avoid commitments and shut people out. In my senior year in college, I realized that I had more empty evenings than I preferred. After college, I moved out of my parents’ house to new cities. While I enjoyed the newfound personal space, there were also some weekends when I realized I had some empty spots in my calendar which I felt should have been devoted to family. I felt compelled to put up walls but also felt empty after realizing I had put up too many walls. The empty feeling followed me through many evenings and weekends until I identified the pattern in my behavior that led to that situation. I slowly started to lower my walls and let people in.
In romantic relationships, the feelings of being unseen as a child led me to feel unconfident that my needs were as important as my partner’s. As an anxiously attached individual, I once dated an avoidantly attached individual who made me feel that I was asking for too much attention and needing responses to my text messages too often. He made me feel like my needs were illegitimate. After reading Attached, I understood that someone else’s opinion of whether my relationship needs are legitimate is beside the point. What it comes down to is my relationship needs are essential to my happiness so I must find someone who respects them and can meet them.
I remember the moment I decided that I should withhold information from my parents. I had just moved from Los Angeles to Seattle. I needed to buy a new mattress and my father suggested I ask my aunt to help me with it. So I did. She helped me pick one out, I bought it, and we got it delivered to my house. Then my father asked me how much it cost — and proceeded to blow up over the price. I remember thinking to myself at that moment, “Wow, he’s the one that tried to tell me what to do. Then he turns around and yells at me for following his instructions because something happened that he didn’t anticipate.”
My father tried his best to advise me but reacted badly when it did not go as he expected. The consequence was I received yet another lecture. When I hung up the phone that evening, I realized my parents wouldn’t know anything that was going on with me unless I told them because I now lived three hours away by plane. There were also no relatives around privy to my life and able to give updates to my parents. Since sharing the details of my life with them often led to the judgement of my choices, I decided I’d stick to very surface-level updates of my life from then on. I felt quite capable of handling many situations at that point and only reached out for advice when I genuinely needed it. I felt this decision saved me from many lectures.
Unfortunately, this decision had negative consequences that I didn’t anticipate until years later. By not sharing my life happenings with my parents, I became increasingly isolated from them. Our relationship became more and more strained as the years progressed and I made decisions that drove my life in directions that my parents didn’t understand. Because we didn’t have clear communications about what was going on with each other in the day-to-day, the reasons for many of my decisions were not clear to my parents and they made inaccurate assumptions about why I made choices they didn’t agree with. Once these repercussions dawned on me, I started moving back in the opposite direction and sharing more with my parents.
I will never receive from my parents all the emotional support I need. Nothing can ever change that. By now, I understand that my parents gave me all that they could and emotional comfort is just not something they have and can give. It’s a scary thought. It’s a notion that contributes to my feeling of aloneness. One’s parents are supposed to be a safe haven, a place anyone can return to whenever life gets tough. If my parents cannot be that emotional safe haven, where else can I go? The answer is I can go to my significant other, my support network of friends, and my therapist. Although these people do not have the same level of obligation to take care of me (at least not until I’m married), I can feel safe enough to rely on them and let them fill the void which was left by my parents. I’m not alone after all. I am wounded, but wounds can be healed.
Facing these challenges in childhood, while not ideal from people who are supposed to be the ones to nurture and love me, taught me to be resilient. Those who know me would argue that the quality of resilience has allowed me to take more risks in life than the average person can bear and thus lead a more satisfying, stimulating, and more authentic life. Furthermore, as part of my healing process, I am learning to take down some of my walls built by my child self and begin to use my newfound understanding to connect to others in new ways. I can start feeling comfortable depending on my partner and friends (be vulnerable) instead of guarding against what they can offer me. I can let go of my perfectionist expectations created by the feeling of being flawed. I could make emotional investments in relationships and form strong, healthy bonds with others. I can stop feeling alone.
“The deepest work is usually the darkest. A brave woman, a wisening woman, will develop the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is. So don’t be afraid to investigate the worst. It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visiting one’s life and self anew.
“It is in this psychic kind of land development that Wild Woman shines. She is not afraid of the darkest dark, in fact, she can see in the dark. She is not afraid of the offal, refuse, decay, stink, blood, cold bones, dying girls, or murderous husbands. She can see it, she can take it, she can help. It comes back to life through the young woman…who ultimately are able to break the old patterns of ignorance, by being able to behold a horror and not look away. They are able to see, and to stand what they see.
“If a woman does not look into these issues of her own deadness and murder, she remains obedient to the dictates of the predator. Once she opens the room in the psyche that shows how dead, how slaughtered she is, she sees how various parts of her feminine nature and her instinctual psyche have been killed off and died a lonely death behind a façade of wealth. Now that she sees this, now that she registers how captured she is, and how much psychic life is at stake, now she can assert herself in a more powerful manner.” — Women Who Run With Wolves
