umans are social animals. At the same time, it is also important to be comfortable with your own company and being alone with yourself. Especially at a time like this, when most of us are forced to be isolated
Many of us crave constant companionship. We need to be in the company of one or many and are not comfortable with our time alone.
Being alone feels scary, you feel afraid, you are lonely, and you crave to be with someone. The need to always have companionship could have its roots in experiences of loneliness when you were little.
As a child you craved for an absent mother, who was busy with work or a father who was never around Even if they were physically present, they may have been emotionally unavailable. For a child, this is a terrifying experience because our parents are our universe, and imagine being all alone in the universe. It’s a scary feeling. As an adult, your loneliness brings up the fear of your child part who felt alone and it creates the same scary feeling. Since we cannot consciously remember our experiences of very early childhood, but the emotions get stored in our subconscious mind, these can get triggered by an environment where we feel the same loneliness. Being alone triggers in us the fears of an empty universe that we had in our childhood and we have a constant craving to fill it up with someone.
The first step is awareness, that I am craving company, I’m uncomfortable, scared, terrified, etc of being on my own. Identify what you are feeling. You also need to be a little patient with yourself in this process. There will be many survival mechanisms that come up in your mind. Your mind will convince you that it is normal to want to be around people, that you are overthinking it etc. This is a part of you which is protecting you from going back into the feelings of the past. This part is ensuring that you go on with life, pretending everything is OK. This is our survival part. At one point in life, this part was very important for our survival. But as an adult, we should become aware of it, so we can heal ourselves and the survival part is no longer needed.
So identify what you are feeling. Be honest with yourself. Remember you are doing it only for yourself. The acknowledgment of the feeling is an important first step. Can you allow yourself to drop into that feeling and experience it fully? Feel the fear, loneliness, whatever it is that you are trying to unconsciously deal with by always surrounding yourself with people. It does not matter what event or incident the feelings are connected to. Only when you have fully allowed yourself to experience the feelings/emotions of fear, loneliness, etc. you will develop an ability to not be affected by them because you are not avoiding the feelings but are acknowledging them fully. This acknowledgment will bring you in touch with your inner resources. The act of feeling and acknowledging frees up a lot of energy that was being spent in avoiding the feeling. You now have access to this freed-up energy. This process will also enable you to have more energy available which is needed for you to focus on what is important for you.
You may have to do this process a few times, for you to come to a place of being very comfortable and maybe even loving being with yourself.
Our need for constant company is like an addiction. It’s to fill a void. That void comes from an unresolved trauma in the past. This process will help to heal that trauma.