Loneliness and Its Effects
Loneliness has always been a painful and disturbing situation whereby you don’t feel connected to others and you feel the important needs in your life are not being met and you feel some emptiness. We as humans always need acquaintance and this brings about creation of relationships and friendship so, loneliness is a signal that an important basic need is not being met such as the need to develop a circle of friends or a special relationship. People need people. If you are lonely, you sometimes feel the need for warmth, understanding, and long to share your feelings and thoughts with others. Loneliness does not necessarily mean being alone. For instance, you can feel lonely when you are in a class with twenty other students, in the middle of a party, at a sports event with hundreds of screaming spectators, or surrounded by family.
Loneliness can mean:
- Feeling that you are unacceptable, unloved by those around you, not worthwhile, even if others don’t share these perceptions; feeling alienated from your surroundings: lacking the attachments that you had in the past… feeling that there is no one with whom to share your personal concerns and experiences…
- Feeling that you are alone and have no other choice. You may find it difficult to make friends or go beyond mere acquaintance… Loneliness to me means no real companionship
- There is no one close enough to touch and willing to laugh when I make a stupid joke so I can think I’m funny.
- Loneliness means eating lots of meals alone. One fork hitting one plate every night for several years is a very desolate sound, devastating and this ruins the best of culinary creations when you match it with a good long stare at the wall in front of you.
- Feeling that you are not wanted, sometimes you want to associate with others but you have this feeling which draw you back and makes you feel unwanted by others.
- It sometimes means being very afraid that you will never develop whatever it is that lets other people experience how you feel or share your ideas or feelings with other people, so they can gain or learn from your little experience