Often a couple, no matter the gender configuration or whether it’s still in a dating or marital arrangement, comes to couple’s therapy with a problem, each other! This one’s depression and that one’s dominance; the dismissive tone of one and the overly sensitive reading into things of the other. Sometimes it is to the point where there is a stance; victim vs. perpetrator, and that one partner caused a trauma like betrayal, deception, or emotional neglect and the other is the victim of it. Before anything is done to dive into individual profiles, their attachment injuries before each other, or the collective narrative of the couple’s problems from both sides, there is one starting introduction that needs to be stated:
"You are each other's problem, therapy won't change that, it will help you realize you chose that problem from the start, that's the deal with partnership, it's a choice you made. Neither of you became someone else, both of you were always you, now you just know more about the person you chose. To get anywhere you may need to face you chose this person. How will you keep making that choice? That is why you are here, it got harder, so this therapeutic intervention will help you each start being better as individuals, so you are not a problem internally and therefore not as much a partner’s problem externally. Then, you can enter the last step, becoming each other's solution WAY MORE often than each other’s problem."
So, how is this landing in you as you read (or listen)? Like the truth, right? Annoying right? Well, there is also a way to look at this couple’s therapy truth as a self-help tool, are you interested? Read/listen on!
Knowing Your Aloneness
In the journey towards wholeness, I have had to sort through all the mistakes I made. I had to look at how they broke down my character and also revealed it back to me. I had to realize that looking at my past for helpful lessons was a choice, dwelling on it subconsciously was repression. No matter who you are, you just don’t know you are repressing things. You don’t know you are doing it unless things get bad. Bad, is relative to the individual. Subconscious carrying and holding things that come out as triggered behavior, statements or attitudes; as well as injuries, physical health problems, or body tension and sleep decline, is not a choice. You are not alone in there, inside yourself, making mistakes and failing at connection to your body, yourself, or other people repeatedly, no matter if you are in a relationship or not. The couple’s therapy we all need is a partnering with the present to look at your unique relationship with aloneness. When you feel alone, what version of it rises up? That’s the intervention.
Partnering with the present to look at aloneness, was something I realized had to be the solution. This happened when I realized that with all the healing I have done, the opening up, and the relating with others as myself and not just as a personal guide to your healing, I was still in a heartbreaking saga with aloneness. I would date and I would feel it, I would reconnect with new and former peers and feel it, I would join things and start things and still it would be there. Partnering with your unique forms of aloneness in the present is like going to couples therapy alone. When you have to use a tool to partner with the present and realize you chose all the things that got you here in this relationship with aloneness, you become a solution. You don’t fix this but know it and internally have less of a conflict. Being less of a problem internally is an external solution for relating.
Many of you reading/listening know I promote The Toolbox Approach and have a book coming out this October 2025. The author’s website is a place for you right now to scroll through and at the bottom you can contact me to get on the pre-sale list, to live reading events and pop-up healings, and to book signings. This location invites you to the phases of healing and while the book introduces a structure for your invitation to inner work with a phase called Narrative Healing, this tool for partnering with the present aloneness is a Relational Healing Phase Tool. Relational Healing, as a phase, is where you meet with various parts of yourself that are hard to know, the way you have viewed relationships by telling yourself certain scripted things, and clearing out some blinders from the subconscious places you have so you can relate to yourself and others with a solid you-ness that is less afraid to be seen for some way they are in another’s eyes. When you know you more, people can’t find you ugly or bad, you will realize they just don’t understand, don’t want to invest, and that’s their choice, but you do understand, invest and chose you!
Honor Aloneness
First, I want to honor the individuals coming to therapy or reflection right now who have decided that their break-up or need for heart wrenching distance with a marital partner, dating partner, friendship partner or a relative is a redirection. This is a new trend people are inviting themselves to take for a spin. They are trendsetters in many ways, redirecting their minds from what was done to them to what all this could be for in terms of if they are to grow from it. It’s not fashionable yet to honor aloneness, it’s more common to suffer it and fill the space with something that seems decisive enough, but without the pregnant pause of aloneness, there is no real choice being made.
This weekend, my crisis lines, voice mail and messaging, were filled with the struggle to face aloneness, and I thought, as I often do with these tools inside The Toolbox Approach, “We need a tool for this”. Whenever the toolbox needs to expand, it will, if you want to face things. I felt it this weekend. Something my therapy goers, and myself, were ready to face, it is the aloneness we suffered verses the aloneness we could choose and discover. That is how the types of aloneness as a tool for accepting your couple’s therapy session is about learning how you have always been you, you just have more time with you now, and it’s time to look at your aloneness.
The four types I am going to highlight were determined by the brave therapy goers and my own experience. Future posts may explore other forms of aloneness; however, this set forms the invitation to use this concept, and I trust you will give yourself a good start with these. Each type will look at the origins, core experiences, emotional wounds, and the healing path.
Types of Aloneness
Emotional Aloneness: This can be defined by the absence of felt emotional connection, even when people are physically present. This can be in one very specific setting such as in your family of origin, in a work group, a romantic partner or a group of friends, and the feeling is like being outside of something in a way the present situation reveals only the tip of. Often the feeling can come later and start to act like a deterrent to joining and cause behaviors that make it worse. The individual comes to realize that and analyzes often how others leave them out and then cycles back to how they do it to themselves.
COMMON ORIGINS
Caregivers who couldn’t attune to your feelings (“You are fine”, “Don’t be so sensitive”, or a sense we don’t talk about this, and it should just pass)
Environments where emotional expression was discouraged or unsafe, such as if toughness was a priority and personalized feelings were a weakness that others would target like a threat, punishing with silence, dismissal or neglect.
Repeated experiences of opening up and being dismissed, minimized, or misunderstood.
CORE EXPERIENCE
A sense that no one really gets you.
Feeling like you have to manage your pain alone.
Deep yearning to be emotionally held or mirrored.
EMOTIONAL WOUND
You may have internalized that your feelings are “too much” or not valid, leading to self-silencing or constantly seeking connection that never quite satisfies you.
THE COURSE TO HEALING
Emotional attunement through a therapeutic relationship from a guide of some type or safe others, people who can sit with you in your emotional truth.
Inner re-parenting, which involves learning to notice what needs soothing and attention and giving it in small ways. This can involve remembering to love your voice and sing more, giving yourself a better-quality shampoo and not just wait till one is on sale, signing up for some activity and budgeting time and money for it consistently like a good parent would do for a child’s talent or interest.
Creative expression such as art, writing poetry or creatively, music, dance, fluid stretches to meditation music and no structured guide, or creative dress or hairstyles. These things can bridge the gap when words fail. For example, merely putting on a love song and dancing your own way can honor the way love feels regardless of a partner.
Existential Aloneness: This can be defined by a deep and sometimes painful awareness that we are ultimately alone in our subjective experience.
COMMON ORIGINS
This can arise in moments of loss, trauma, awakening, or transitions such as impending death, illness or when an identity shift is profoundly coming or needed.
Sometimes this can be triggered by a crisis of meaning such as questioning why you are here and if anything matters.
Often this can be intensified for deep thinkers, artists, healers, or spiritually sensitive people.
CORE EXPERIENCE
A feeling of profound separateness that is different from isolation from people but more from meaning and purpose in life as a whole or a lack of a source connectedness between all things.
A sort of spiritual homesickness, as if no one else can quite reach the unique experience you have in this life and never will see your value.
EMOTIONAL WOUND
This can be linked to early betrayals of trust in life or spiritually somehow that led to a sense of feeling unsafe in the world or abandoned by something larger.
THE COURSE TO HEALING
Things that can have almost a spiritual quality that connect you to something beyond just yourself like found in nature such as the ocean, sunset or scenic walks. The sense of a ritual that is sacred and calm like meditation or using sound and vibration, humming or a pet placed near your heart or core.
Finding kindred “folk” who also feel deeply and think existentially and accept they cannot solve aloneness but are willing to witness it with you.
Learning to journal to hold space for mystery and paradox and to live with the unanswerable questions without fixing them.
Developmental Aloneness: This can be defined as a form of aloneness that begins in childhood, when key emotional needs went unmet during critical stages of development.
COMMON ORIGINS
Being a highly sensitive or intuitive child in a family that didn’t reflect openly, had private closed off conversations without you, or did not nurture talk about the day in a sacred daily way to honor each other has different experiences.
When a child has taken on an adult role, parentification, too early and therefore experiences it like an emotional neglect because the role is never reversed back and childhood is never restored.
Attachment figures that have overt or hidden emotional dysregulation such that the child’s co-regulation to a calm figure does not occur so repeatedly the dysregulation becomes internalized.
CORE EXPERIENCE
A frozen-like aloneness can develop and the ache of the child that knows or experiences too much too soon lingers. Everything could be taken from them, including the small sense of self they might have, they help others often but die inside.
Often unconscious, over-responsibility and over-responsiveness develops subconsciously. There is a hyper-independence or fear of closeness.
EMOTIONAL WOUND
There may be a split between the inner child and the adult self that is a tug of war between wanting to be rescued and the adult sense that there is a heavy burden they have to take on without feeling it (numbness).
THE COURSE TO HEALING
Consider inner child work in the form of finding an image or picture (or several) that symbolizes the child versions of alone and writing to them to validate the experience with strength and clarity. For example, “no one saw you were sensitive and wanted to help your family, you cared, and it was very hard to hold back those tears when they did not seem to. I can help you now, I understand you completely and we can grow from this together”.
Letting others into your tenderness now and risking vulnerability in small, safe ways like asking someone for a small favor without giving anything in return, thanking them in a basic simple way, and keeping away thoughts you need to find a way to return the favor.
Therapy with a trauma-informed or attachment-aware therapist can help rewire the nervous system toward connection.
Chronic Aloneness: A persistent, long-term experience of loneliness, often regardless of the circumstances or relationship status.
COMMON ORIGINS
A culmination of emotional, developmental, or existential loneliness that hasn’t been named or healed
Long-term relational trauma or abandonment.
Repeated experiences of failed connection that lead to learned helplessness such as thinking, “why bother"?”.
CORE EXPERIENCE
A dull or aching sense that connection is always just out of your grasp.
A feeling like you are undeserving or not even capable of being loved, even if a small part of your logically knows otherwise.
This can occasionally lead to withdrawal socially, shame and depression.
EMOTIONAL WOUND
The nervous system and psyche may have adapted to loneliness as a default state, making connection feel foreign, dangerous, or fleeting.
THE COURSE TO HEALING
Even the smallest, consistent connections, however short can form meaningful moments over time that build a sense you matter. We felt this in the pandemic, the loss of seeing the same barista each morning, that small chat with the mail carrier, etc., these connections form meaning over time.
What you are doing right now, naming the forms of aloneness and considering if it has become chronic in some way only you can define begins to break the spell of painful invisibility.
Somatic or body-based healing that works with the body to slowly expand the capacity for safety in connection. The methods of orienting to your own safety through light tapping called The Butterfly Hug over your heart or a soft hand on your forehead and the other on the belly and breathing gently into one hand up to the other and exhaling tells the body it is safe now. Slowly, feeling safer with yourself becomes restored trust to venture into connection again.
A Final Reflection
All these forms of aloneness are not flaws that anyone possesses, they are your partnership with the present that you need to see what you have done to make adaptations to unmet needs and unspoken pain. Reading (or listening) this shows you are curious and reflective about aloneness and will add to your capacity to heal. The Toolbox Approach is my connection back to myself found in the phases of healing. My author’s website, linked here, will showcase this approach and a way I faced aloneness to become real again, more than a therapist or a writer, but a regular old person with an urgency to heal towards the core authenticity underneath all the pain.
Please venture to the author’s website to explore the first book. It will be released this October 2025 and you can message me about presale events, live book readings, signed copies and pop-up healing experiences there. Please consider sharing this post with someone if it landed with you, you never know who might need a simple reflection to meet with old pain and change their mindset on it.
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