How can someone feel lonely in the midst of people who love them?

Sometimes I feel like Married people are a little spoiled. If you have someone that is willing to spend eternity with you.. why be so sad?

It just doesn’t feel fair to me. Tons of nice single people are lonely for no reason – while so many marriages don’t work out. / rant :P

Never. I can, at times, certainly isolate myself mentally and quasi-physically, while still being essentially polite. It just depends on my mood and the group. A couple glasses of wine will always loosen me up a tad!

Because sometimes you’re happier by yourself

Because they allow themselves to feel that way. I know that nobody likes to hear this but I have said time and time again that we all are solely responsible for choosing how we react (or feel) about things.

I agree with @Blondesjon %100. Create your own happiness. Reach out to people. And, if you don’t like the way that your life is, do something about it.

Physical proximity does not necessarily equal emotional or intellectual connection, therefore you can be stuck in the middle of a crowded room and still feel isolated, because noone has tapped in to your thoughts and emotions.

A wise person once said, You can feel alone in a roomful of people when that one person you need the most is not there.

That is what funeral visitations are like for the survivng spouse.

I know I have at times felt that way. But I feel it isn’t the problem of the people surrounding us, it is our own problem. I often feel alone when I am dealing with feelings of not fulfilling things I want to do with my life, like my career, hobbies, etc. It has nothing to do with being loved or being around people. You have to be satisfied with yourself I think too for those feelings not to surface. Like @jmah said, create your own happiness. Those feelings tend to fade when you are proactive about it.

@Blondesjon: I have never once chosen how I feel about something. If you think you have, then you’re not letting yourself actually feel.

I don’t fully agree with @Blondesjon. Your reactions to situations are programmed into your brain by experience. The only way to overcome this is to actively reprogram your reactions. This takes time and effort and often someone to help push you into doing it. Many people don’t have the ability to push themselves into doing this because their inhibitions disallow them to.

@MacBean and @Shuttle128 . . . I never said it was easy.

If you don’t believe that you have the ability to choose how you feel, you have effectively given yourself an excuse to not deal with how you actually feel.

@Blondesjon: Dude, if I could choose how I feel, I’d make myself be happier than a pig in shit. How I actually feel is miserable and useless and sick, and I deal with that daily.

@MacBean . . . You don’t have to and I’m not trying to be a dick (for once).

It is a very difficult and painful process to change the way you’ve trained yourself to react to things. It doesn’t happen overnight and nobody can help you with it. You just have to remember, you have spent your entire life training yourself to feel the way you do now and you were successful at that. Why not start training yourself to be happy?

@Blondesjon: Why would I train myself to be happy with this instead of trying to change my circumstances to something that makes me genuinely happy? That would just be… stupid and horrible, in a case like mine. And, I suspect, in most others, too.

@MacBean . . . It doesn’t sound like you’re trying to do either.

Trying to change the world around you to fit your mood is setting yourself up for failure. It also gives you an excuse to put the blame on others (instead of yourself) when it does fail. If you “change your circumstances” with the same mindset you have now, the same old problems are going to follow you into this new “utopia” you envision.

Like I said before, it is not easy. A lot of people get very angry when you tell them that it’s not the world around them that is to blame but themselves.

I was pretty pissed the first time I heard it.

@Blondesjon: Well, my “utopia” involves not having a brain tumor that’s causing a bajillion* health problems. In order to reach that goal, I need surgery. To get surgery, I needed health insurance. To get health insurance, I had to jump through government hoops, which was difficult because of the aforementioned health problems. But I did get insurance (yay Medicaid) and have been going through hell with doctors since last April to get my diagnosis. That finally worked out for me a couple of months ago, and now I have to wait for the neurosurgeon to be able to fit me into his schedule. Once the surgery is scheduled and performed, most of my health problems will go away by themselves, and a few others will go away with some extra work on my part. And as long as it doesn’t grow back (like it did this time), I’ll be… if not happy, then at least not miserable and useless and sick.

So kindly don’t tell me I’m not trying. I am. Desperately. And I have been for a long time. The process is long and difficult and it makes me feel worse, and sometimes I really want to give up, but I won’t and in the end I’ll feel better for it.

.
*slightly exaggerated number

@MacBean . . . You’ll have a great deal more success with your problems if you quit referring to yourself as miserable, useless, and sick. It is a proven fact that a positive outlook can help a great deal in a situation like yours.

Many of us are familiar with @cak and her problems in life and I don’t believe I ever heard the woman refer to herself or her illness in a negative way. She stayed happy despite her problems.

@Blondesjon: If I didn’t live in an environment where other people refer to me as miserable, useless and sick, then that might be a little easier for me. I’m constantly reminded of what a burden I am. I don’t have a good support system here, which (getting back to the original question) is why I feel lonely even though there are people around.

The last time I had a moment I felt lonely surrounded by people I know care about me, was at my grandfather’s funeral in August. The funeral service had just ended and I was sitting surrounded by my family, and all of the husbands and wives of the family were holding and comforting each other as we all cried, and I didn’t have that. I have never felt more alone in my life.

I agree with the above posters that it’s in how you accept and react to the love given you and also the intensity of affirmation of love you need. For someone like me, I need to believe in the love that it’s the reciprocal kind and out of choice than out of kindness, or sense of gratitude or obligation. I need to feel love intensely, I need to feel secure in it when it’s new and then like a car shifting gears, I can cruise nicely and not be an anxious, jumpy and flip flopping mess. My best friends love me but I am settled down only when they’re in front of me, even after so many years.

I don’t think there’s ever a moment I don’t feel isolated somehow. This is partly because of my introspective ‘nature’ and partly because I enjoy being isolated.

The downside is that sometimes I feel very lonely, but it’s worth it if I am able to distance myself from everyone and observe from the fringes. And, as @Blondesjon said, we are capable of controlling our emotions so it’s not as though I ever feel victimized. I am often happy to indulge sadness.

I don’t think it has anything to do with how you react or chose to react to the love given to you.
Heck, I’m married and have children and I get lonely sometimes! I sometimes have to go to parties without my husband, and I may have some fun but I sometimes just feel like a wallflower and don’t feel like I’m actually there..I’m just watching.
I think the loneliness felt when around people who love you is a symptom of depression. A person shouldn’t feel alone when they aren’t alone..but maybe other things are going on in the marriage or in the family, uncontrollable events that make the one person just feel like they are being swallowed whole instead of enjoying the party.

aren’t some of us ” lonely people”? i agree wih nxknxk.

One reason is that they are solipsists.

wow, i just googled that.

There is only one person in the entire world that any of us can “cause” to feel anything and that is ourself. It is impossible for anyone else to get in your head and turn on this switch or that one.

I made a pledge to myself a long time ago that I would be happy every single day for the rest of my life. I don’t like the alternative. Just like any other successful endeavor, it takes effort and practice, but once you are comfortable with the techniques, it works.

@MacBean I promise you that you can take control of your feelings, but it has to come from you, no one else can do it for you.

@veronasgirl now you know how an atheist feels at a religious funeral service.

macBean- your circumstances are causing you to feel miserable but you are Not useless. you’ve just given me a kick in the ass that i needed, for one. i think positive thinking does work but sometimes it’s damn well a bitch of a time.

@YARNLADY This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through this, actually. The first time, I did the whole act-like-I’m-okay thing. Why? Because people like you and @Blondesjon told me that if I kept a positive attitude, it would benefit me. All it did was make people underestimate how difficult things were, and not give help when I needed it. So this time, when people ask how I am, I don’t tell them I’m fine or that I’m keeping my chin up. I tell them I’m goddamn angry and unhappy, and when I feel like giving up, I let people know. This time I’m getting the help I need, and I have a chance of getting where I need to be in order to be actually happy, instead of fake- or forced-happy.

@MacBean If you choose to be happy (acting is only one minor technique to start with) then you will be happy. It sounds like you have chosen a different path, and if that works for you then welcome to it.

Edit I hit submit too soon Being happy does not in any way mean denying that there are difficult issues to deal with.

For me its the fatal flaw that we possess of private mental acts, our subjectivity, that creates the illusion that we are all separate. I’m told though that the illusion can be overcome and I’m working on it.

From what I understand, not everyone can choose to be happy. For some, brain chemistry is more controlling than your own will. At least, that’s what the doctors tell me.

It’s pretty confusing because I always feel like you are in control. I feel like I can think anything you want. So when I think all the negative stuff, I blame myself for fucking up, and then it gets even worse. I’m pretty sure that other things can change your brain chemistry so that your thoughts are beyond your control.

Yes, it’s possible for some people to change their brain chemistry and to become more positive in outlook using cognitive tehcniques, but that doesn’t work for everyone, and no one should beat themselves up if it doesn’t work.

CBT followers are like Reborn Christians. It worked for them, so they sell it really hard to others. However they use this very blaming language. Your happiness is under your control. The implication is that if you don’t become happy, you are a failure and must not really want to be happy.

It makes me want to let out a big, nasty swear, because it’s all so unnecessary. You don’t have to make people feel bad for not being happy; for not taking control of their own thinking.

There are other techniques. Mindfullness is another technique that does not blame the victim, and, according to scientific studies, is very effective. @MacBean, don’t buy into this stuff if it isn’t for you. If it works, I’m not going to tell you to stop, but I think everyone should be aware it’s not the only non-pharmaceutical way of working on your mood and your attitude.

It is extremely difficult to fight depression when everyone around you is telling you what a shit you are. You want to buy into that because it fits what’s going on in your mind anyway. It’s bullshit, of course, and you know it, inside, somewhere deep, but it totally fits with your feelings.

Right now, you have to fight for you life. If you focus on that, eventually your feelings about yourself will recede into the background. They become noise. But that noise truly is irrelevant to your task.

@daloon You have brought out a very important exception to the rule. Yes, there can be circumstances where medical intervention is necessary. Only a doctor can make that determination, which is why I usually advise people to see their doctor, to find out if they need treatment. Most of the time, those who would benefit most from medical treatment are afraid we are saying they are crazy and most people don’t want to be told that.

I have seen that you embrace the label, but that is very rare.

Well, I always thought craziness was a good thing. Mental illness, on the other hand, seemed like something for other people. I had no idea, really, what it was.

I first noticed that I was behaving differently maybe six months before I was diagnosed. No, it was even a year before that. I was advertising for a NSA relationship, and this was completely uncharacteristic of me. I found a therapist who worked with my wife and I for a few weeks, but it didn’t work out.

So I was keeping an eye on myself early on. Then I got involved in Askville, and met a few women online. I started relationships that usually were sexual. This became a pattern of behavior, and I was pretty sure, at the time, there was something wrong with me.

At my annual checkup, I asked my Internist about it, and he, kind of casually, said he’d give me a referral to a psychiatrist that I could use if I wanted. He said it so casually, that I thought he didn’t think it was that big a deal.

Later on, after I’d been diagnosed, I asked him about this at my next checkup. He said that he felt that if he made a big deal about it, people wouldn’t go.

My brain started racing at some point around the time I saw my first therapist. It worried me, but I thought maybe it meant I had a tumor in my brain and that my brain was racing to get a lot of thinking done before it could no longer do so.

I never thought I was mentally ill until a few days before I got diagnosed. Up until then, I thought that maybe I needed therapy, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me other than I was making some dicey decisions. Well, a lot of dicey decisions.

When I was diagnosed, I didn’t really know what it meant. By then I was depressed. I felt like I was observing myself pretty well, and that I could see everything that was happening. I believed that all I had to do was understand what was going on, and I could fix it.

When the psychiatrist and friends and my wife started telling me that it wasn’t my fault. There was something wrong with my brain chemistry, I just couldn’t get how that could be. My brain felt the same as it always did—to me, anyway. My consciousness seemed to be operating as it always did. It was hard for me to believe that brain chemistry could change who I was and what I thought.

It was only after I had been taking the meds for a while, that I started to believe brain chemistry makes a difference. The thoughts that I could think started changing so radically that it had to be the meds. And that was scary, too. Who am I if chemicals change what I think?

It never felt like I was not in control of my thoughts. They always felt like they were my thoughts. I couldn’t feel how brain chemistry could change me. This is what is so insidious about mental illness. I felt like me the whole time. And if it isn’t me, then who am I?

As the meds took effect, I began to look back on the choices I had made, and I thought I was crazy! I think that, for me, there’s a difference between mental illness and craziness. That sounds weird, I guess. But for me, crazy is a way of thinking; a way of being. My family has a motto that celebrates what we consider our weirdness. It’s about creativity, I guess. Thinking in quirky ways.

So I never minded craziness. But I do mind mental illness. I do mind this oh-so-weird state of not knowing whether my mind is thinking like me, or like me when I’m mentally ill.

We usually think of using cognitive methods to help with depression. But mania? Mania is so hard because often it feels good. It feels good, and that’s how we want to feel, right? So why would we think anything is wrong?

It’s all nuts. Some people end up paranoid and delusional and homeless. Some of us have a great deal of training and we can get through these things without too much disruption to our lives, if we get proper medical care. The experience has and continues to teach me a lot. I still do things I don’t understand. That tells me I’m getting manic.

I feel like I should be able to control my thoughts and choices. I feel I am in control of my thoughts and choices. And yet, the doctors say I’m not. It’s the weirdest thing. The last thing I want is to use this as an excuse. I don’t want to be thought of as out of my mind. But I don’t understand the difference between the two me’s. I can’t tell where one leaves off and the other begins. It’s only when things get much farther along that I can tell I’m into my other self.

It’s crazy and I don’t mind saying that because that’s how it feels to me. But also because I think craziness can be good. But I’ll do my best to take care of my little brain chemistry problem.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Exactly right!!!!