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The Lonely Blog

Manifesto of Loneliness

11/30/2013

4 Comments

 

By Ben Mijuskovic

And God stepped out on space,

And he looked around and said,

“I’m lonely--

I’ll make me a world.”

 

Then God walked around,

And God looked around,

On all that he had made,

He looked at his sun,

And he looked at his moon,

And he looked at His little stars;

He looked at His world

With all its living things,

And God said, “I’m lonely still.”

 

And God thought and thought,

Till he thought, “I’ll make me a man.”

 

This great God,

Like a mammy bending over her baby,

Kneeled down in the dust,

Toiling over a lump of clay,

Till he shaped it in his own image:

Then into it He blew the breath of life,

And man became a living soul.

The Creation, A Negro Spiritual (J.W. Johnston)

Man emerges in the realm of Being in God’s image as the being which is essentially lonely. The essence of Man is loneliness. Ever since the Old Testament; the Greek myths of Prometheus, Sisyphus, and Deucalion and Pyrhha; the dialogues of Plato; the treatises of Aristotle; the novels of the eighteenth-century; and on to the Existentialist writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre, Man has expressed his intrinsic and universal situation of unfathomable loneliness. “We are lonely from the cradle to the grave and perhaps beyond,” declares Joseph Conrad. We find the mirror of our loneliness everywhere, in the arts, in the social sciences, and in philosophy.

Where we were to inquire what is the most serious, the most intense, the most dangerous medical condition facing human beings, we would probably generate some disagreement surrounding a number of viable candidates: heart failures; cancer; diabetes; etc. But if we were to ask what is the most intense and terrifying mental condition facing each of us, alone, we would, I believe, invariably all reply that it is loneliness.

I have argued in books, articles, and lectures that the soul and mind of Man is permeated by loneliness; the greatest estrangement is to be separated from God (Kierkegaard); the greatest alienation is to be separated from our fellows (Marx); and the greatest anguish is to be separated from the mutual intimacy of the other self.

Why this is so has been a special concern of mine for four decades. Our natural narcissism from the beginning craves and depends on the physical nourishment and the emotional nurturance provided by our first caretaker and we subsequently seek the latter in a lifelong struggle to find it, retrieve it, and secure it.

The cure for loneliness has two prongs: Insight and human connection. The first is strongly intellectual. For example, it stresses that like death, loneliness is universal and inevitable. We fight against it with varying degrees of success just as we battle with disease and illness with different outcomes. The second efforts for success lie in forging mutual bonds of trust and developing a strong sense of empathy with the other self.

The opposite, the conquest of loneliness is intimacy. The Web of Loneliness offers the two most powerful strategies available in our intellectual and emotional arsenals for transcending and vanquishing loneliness: Insight and Social Support.

4 Comments

Loneliness and the Martyr Complex

11/22/2013

25 Comments

 
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Do you have a Martyr Complex (MC)? Someone who has a MC tends to "willfully suffer in the name of love or duty". People with MC tend to go out of their way to help others, see themselves as helpers, consider it their moral obligation to put others in front of themselves, and view self-sacrifice as a duty. Normally it is okay to be helpful to others, the problem is that those with MC, tend to do it at the detriment of themselves, and in the process may even harm themselves to the point where they are not even being helpful to others anymore. The problem though is that if you have MC, you are a compulsive helper, you get anxious if you see someone in need and do not do something about it. You can see yourself helping others to the point where you are really harming yourself, but find yourself unable to stop or feel incredibly guilty if you do.

There's another problem with folks with MC - they tend to also experience loneliness as well. But why is that? I think one of the beliefs underlying someone with MC is that the best way to establish friendships is to become a helper to others. Who does not like someone who is willing to help them? It is usually an easy way to win people's initial trust and open communication. If you like to be a good listener and help people with their problems, it gives those people a great opportunity to talk about themselves. The initial set of interactions feel great to both parties, the person being help feels like they are supported, get help, are listened to, and has someone that care about them. Our helper with MC, also feels great as well, they are doing what they feel compelled to do, to help others. It brings them a sense of joy that they have made a meaningful connection by providing help.

As the relationship develops between the helper and the person being helped, it also continues to develop in one direction. For those of us with MC, we continue to provide help all the time, and for those who are getting help, there is never the opportunity to provide help. The helper may learn a lot about the person being helped, but the reverse is not true. Eventually two things happen. The helper, the person with MC, eventually gets tired of providing help all the time and the relationship no longer becomes as rewarding as it used to be. And for the person being helped, they may feel disconnected from the helper and only contact the helper when they need help. Otherwise there is little motivation for contacting them otherwise.

You often hear lonely folk comment that they often feel used, that people only reach out to them when they need something, otherwise you never hear from them. Part of the reason for that could be because the relationship was set up that way. Initially the helper may have provided help in the hopes that the other person would reciprocate at some point. However, there is one dirty, little secret about helpers. Being a helper allows you to to hide behind your help, it allows you to connect with someone else, without you having to become vulnerable, and truly emotionally invest into the relationship. If, all you are doing is focusing on the other person and never on yourself, then you never have to reveal your own secrets, your own wants and desires, your own pain and hurt. You get to hide behind your help, and the result is that the person being helped can never truly establish a close connection to the helper. So, the end result is a one way relationship, where the person there is always a helper and a person being helped.

To break the cycle, and to make the relationship more equitable, requires letting go of some of the dysfunctional beliefs associated with the Martyr Complex. You can successfully establish a great, meaningful relationship with other person by both providing help and asking for help. If you try to establish the relationship where both people get to play both roles and the other person is not interested, then perhaps that other person is not worth having a relationship with. Truly meaningful relationships require that you ask for help in addition to providing it, it requires learning about other's vulnerabilities as well as sharing about your own. Without a two-way street, the relationship will eventually hit a wall and slowly die.

25 Comments

Progress

11/5/2013

1 Comment

 

Moving forward with the Web of Loneliness Institute, Inc.

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Anyone who has known me for any length of time can easily associate me with the word "loneliness." It is apparently the only thing I have been consistently interested in since graduating with my undergraduate degree in Sociology eons ago back in 1997 (it seems like eons anyways). My interest in loneliness has shaped my general direction forward since that time, and can be attested from my very early days back at the University of the West Indies where I did a guest lecture in Social Psychology, discussing loneliness and my own theories on it, to my graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to the publication of my first book, The Lonely Screams, and now to the incorporation of an institute known as the Web of Loneliness Institute, Inc.

So yes, I have been a bit single minded about my interest in loneliness. I guess because in part I believe that while we all may be good at many different things, there is probably only one thing in which we are exceptional in, one thing which no one else on this planet can do as well as you can. For me, that "thing" is loneliness and doing something about it. There have been times in my life when I have done something which I feel would have a larger impact on my life later on, an impact that is connected to my own personal destiny. One of those things has been the Web of Loneliness website. I created this website back in 2001 as part of my Master's thesis project to collect data from Internet users about how they coped with loneliness both online and offline. At the time, the Internet was now bursting onto the scene, there were still questions about the validity of collecting data online, and there was lots of debates about the effects of the Internet on loneliness. But also, unlike today, creating a website meant having some knowledge of HTML, and collecting survey data online also meant understanding how to use a web creation software like MS FrontPage or Dreamweaver to create an online survey and collect data. Unlike today where you can go to SurveyMonkey or other such tool, there was no tool back then and everything had to be built from the ground up. Over the summer of 2001, I bought a book on programming in HTML, taught myself the language, and set about creating a website and survey in MS Frontpage to collect some data about Internet users.

What shocked me most after creating the website was the response from the Internet. My strategy at the time was to provide some information about loneliness in order to entice visitors to fill out the survey. I knew creating the website was important, but I did not realize just how much of an impact it would have on the Internet. It shot up the ranks on search engines and constantly received considerable traffic. In addition, I had visitors reaching out to me, sharing their stories of loneliness, asking me questions, looking for help, and wanting support. Even after I had finished collecting my data for the survey, I continued on with the site because it became clear to me that the Web of Loneliness was indeed just that, a collection of individuals connecting around the issue of loneliness. It expanded into having an online support group, originally hosted on Yahoo! Groups, and a collection of numerous artwork and poems from visitors about their loneliness experiences.

My intention has always been to make an impact on individuals who feel lonely, to expand the work of the Web of Loneliness (which was affectionately reduced to WOL by a group member) , and take things to the next level. Life got in the way and slowed down my progress tremendously, almost to the point where I was considering shutting down the website. But I decided a change in my life was necessary, I needed to refocus and claim this dream I created for myself. So I pushed forward. Over the past few years, I've spent my energies redesigning the website (abandoning a very old MS Frontpage template design!), shifting the support group to a more interactive platform, transitioning over 200 poems on loneliness into a blog so that they are more searchable, and launching a social media campaign. The results are notable, including now being ranked as the #1 resource on loneliness in Google. After many years, the Web of Loneliness currently claims that #1 spot. Being in that spot also means a great influx of new visitors and new members joining the support group, over 2,200 members and counting.

All that growth made one thing increasingly clear, what I was doing online on the WOL was not enough. It isn't even a drop in the bucket, it is minuscule. I needed to do more and, in part that was where my idea for the Web of Loneliness Institute was born. The Institute was not going to be something that just existed in cyberspace, it is going to have a very real offline existence (even a building at some point!), and reach many, many more folks. Envisioned right now, the Institute has one big objecive: To Reduce Loneliness Globally. It will accomplish this objective through four main goals:
  1. To increase awareness of loneliness and its negative effects
  2. To conduct cutting edge research to improve our understanding of loneliness
  3. To develop and disseminate effective loneliness intervention programs
  4. To serve as a consulting/clearinghouse for resources targeted to organizations that work with lonely people

We have already begun the preliminary steps for getting the Institute together, officially creating a company recognized by the State of Connecticut, setting up a Board of Directors, and working on filing with the IRS to obtain a non-profit status - 501(c)(3).

What has been truly great recently though is a planning session that was just completed with a number of very seasoned business executives, psychotherapists and others who work with lonely individuals, and members of the WOL to think about how to take the Institute to the next level. Inevitably part of that discussion involves raising funds for activities that can garner attention on the national stage. I have no doubt that this will happen and the Institute will in the near future take-off to amazing heights. I can see it much more clearly now that I have completed this very monumental planning session. It is very much like the initial birth of the WOL website, a feeling that something great has happened that will have a larger impact on my life later on.

I wrote this blog post to share with others my hope and my successes thus far and to thank those who believe in me. But I also wrote it as an appeal for help, if you are interested, I am always looking for others to journey with me along the way.

Sean Seepersad
President/CEO
Web of Loneliness Institute, Inc.
sean.seepersad@webofloneliness.org

1 Comment

    Sean Seepersad

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