Why is loneliness so difficult?
Strong, supportive connections are an important part of a life worth living. Having rewarding friendships, family, neighbors, coworkers, and community members helps us feel accepted, cared for, purposeful, and connected.
Loneliness is, in essence, feeling like the connections in your life aren’t enough to feel fully supported and connected. You might feel lonely because you’re separated from people you care about, you might feel lonely because you struggle to make or keep friends in your life, or you might feel lonely because symptoms from mental health conditions like BPD or depression are making it harder to feel connected to anyone, even if your life is full of supportive people.
Loneliness impacts your physical and mental health, and it’s just hard. It’s a lack in your life that can be felt daily for many people. So what can you do when loneliness is weighing on you?
Dialectical behavior therapy, a therapy that helps people live more fulfilling lives even when dealing with intense emotions, can help you push back against the intensity of loneliness. You can use DBT skills to make it through the experience of loneliness, and it can even help you find people who get you, who connect with you in ways that mean something specifically to you. How? Let’s explore.
How to use DBT to deal with loneliness during separation from loved ones
We can’t always be around the people we love, and that can feel especially lonely. DBT gives you a roadmap to making it through these separations, with skills that help those of us who are sensitive to distance and time apart to make it through.
Self-Soothe skill
When you’re missing loved ones and feeling particularly distressed about it, DBT encourages you to use your five senses to self-soothe. Sights that make you happy, sounds that comfort you, smells that feel familiar and safe, textures that feel calming and comforting, and enjoyable flavors of food or drink can all help you make it through the sadness and pain of loneliness.
If it feels right, consider using your senses to enjoy reminders of the people you care about, like the taste of the gum your grandma kept in her purse, or the feel of a homemade blanket someone gave you as a baby. That can feel emotionally overwhelming for some, however, so focusing on what feels right to you (literally and figuratively) is the best way to use your senses to self-soothe.
Cope Ahead
When you know you are about to be separated from loved ones, maybe due to deployment, going to college, camp, or a coparent’s house, hospitalization, travel, divorce, or incarceration, it can fill you with deep dread and extreme anxiety. The anticipatory grief of the separation can make you feel lonely and sad even before it happens.
The Cope Ahead DBT skill can help you validate your feelings and plan out how you’ll cope, making it easier to face the emotions you experience during the upcoming separation. Here’s how to Cope Ahead with loneliness due to separation:
- Describe the future separation in detail. What will happen? What might that feel like?
- Decide what you want to do in the moment to cope with the loneliness. Who do you want to reach out to? What DBT skills can you use in the moment to help yourself? What can you do to make it through the loneliest moments in a way that aligns with your values and needs?
- Visualize the separation and the loneliness that will happen from it, from the easiest to the worst case scenario, and walk through exactly what you’ll do. As you visualize, imagine your coping skills are successful, even in the toughest moments.
- Take a break, and be kind to yourself. When you want to dwell on the separation, remember how you’ll cope. Use Cope Ahead when your mind is trying to ruminate, to keep you on track mentally.
How to deal with loneliness without friends
Friends are the people who often understand us more than anyone else, and are people we can enjoy in both good times and bad, so lacking that understanding connection can feel very lonely and discouraging. DBT offers you ways to cope with not having the friendships you want and need in your life, and skills to build healthy, rewarding connections, too.
Opposite Action
Loneliness can reinforce itself, making you want to avoid people, because the loneliness is familiar and feels safer (even when it’s painful) instead of putting yourself out there. The Opposite Action DBT skill can help you pursue friendships even when discouragement is trying to keep you from making changes.
If you find yourself wanting to stay home and not talk to people out of fear of rejection or looking silly, take the opposite action. Look at local groups, like book clubs, dance classes, hiking groups, whatever your interests are (or even things you haven’t tried before!), and take a chance by going to a meetup. Even when your loneliness is telling you, “Don’t go!”, try anyway. You’ll likely be surprised by how willing people are to get to know you!
Build Mastery skill
The goal of this DBT skill is to develop your self-confidence and help you recognize what you’re capable of. It’s also a great opportunity to connect with people, from teachers to fellow learners, to people who enjoy or benefit from whatever you build mastery in.
The skill is simple. Try something new, maybe something that you’ve always wanted to do, like singing, sailing, or cooking. You can even pick an activity you’ve always liked the idea of, like joining a board game group or a book club. Learn everything you can about what you choose, practice it, prioritize it, and focus. Learn from the failures that are part of the process, and give yourself credit for taking on something totally new and challenging!
Why build mastery as a way to combat loneliness? Meaningful connections and work that feels purposeful are two major contributors to life satisfaction. They are key to a life worth living. Building mastery as a DBT skill helps you find both with the same pursuit. It builds up your patience, your resilience, and your ability to connect with others.
How to deal with loneliness from depression (especially at night)
When you’re dealing with depression, insomnia, racing thoughts, and negative self-beliefs can combine to make your nights especially lonely. The world can feel especially narrow, lonely, and difficult at 2:30 a.m., but DBT gives you a few options to help you cope during especially lonely nights.
IMPROVE skill
When you’re lying awake at night, dwelling on the ache of loneliness, the IMPROVE DBT distress tolerance skill gives you guidance on how to make these moments a little less painful and a little easier to get through.
Try improving the moment through:
- Imagery: beautiful sights, pictures of things that cheer you up, or visualizations of calm, welcoming, safe spaces.
- Meaning: try to find purpose in the moment. You can pat yourself on the back for being resilient when in pain, or you can recognize that across the world, you’re one of many people awake right now, making you part of humanity in a meaningful way.
- Prayer: Ask for strength from a supreme being, or just the universe, in this moment of suffering.
- Relaxation: Take a warm shower or bath, use lavender oil as aromatherapy, drink chamomile tea, or massage your neck. Find a way to physically relax.
- One thing in the moment: Find one thing that is good in the moment.
- Vacation: Take a break from lying in bed in the dark. Go watch a video of a place you’d like to visit, go for a walk, stretch, give yourself somewhere to be for the moment.
- Encouragement: Encourage yourself. Say positive things that cheer you on to make it through this tough moment.
Radical Acceptance
It’s hard to shake off depression, especially in lonely times like the middle of the night. Radical acceptance is a helpful way to reduce suffering, especially in a situation you can’t change, like those times when you can’t sleep because the ache of loneliness is emphasizing your depression symptoms in a painful way.
Radical acceptance sounds simple, but it takes a lot of practice. It is accepting that things are the way they are right now, without trying to resist or change them. You don’t have to approve, you don’t have to be comfortable. You stop resisting, you stop making yourself miserable by trying to argue or bargain or judge your inner voices. You accept whatever you feel in the moment; you accept what’s happening. You turn your mind, again and again, away from struggling with the truth, toward “this is what is happening”.
You don’t have to be passive; if you can change things or take action, like seeking DBT therapy or reaching out to friends, go for it! But in the meantime, it’s the middle of the night, you’re struggling with depression, you’re lonely. Instead of beating yourself up, accept. This is your now. Time will pass. Things will change. But right now, you don’t have to change them, you don’t have to change yourself, you can simply be.
Suffolk DBT can help you let go of loneliness and build meaningful connections, both in therapy and out in everyday life
While DBT skills offer you ways to combat loneliness, DBT also has built-in connections to its structure that help people manage loneliness and cultivate healthy connections. Your connection to your Suffolk DBT individual therapist, both in the therapy room and on-call between sessions, will help you see how trust and vulnerability with someone who is on your side can empower you to change your life, starting by helping you feel less alone.
You’ll also find support in DBT skills groups, where fellow participants are all there to work on the same sensitivities and mental health struggles you’re there to tackle. It’s hard to feel lonely in a group where people understand where you’re coming from and are working on the same goals you are.
Support and connection are available to you, from your therapist and DBT skills group members, throughout your time at Suffolk DBT, and with your new approach to loneliness through DBT, you can find new avenues of support and connection in everyday life, too.
You aren’t alone in this, even in your loneliest moments. Contact us, and get started today on building emotional resilience and creating rewarding connections that make life worth living.