“Lonely Together”

Many, many years ago, when I was out in a club with my boyfriend of back then and with friends, a song started and the lyrics “Where Is The Love?” were coming in a loop. 

I remember my heart sank and I suddenly realised that that had been my question for some time. 

At that time, our relationship was a bit older than two years. And the love, which had been there in the beginning, had gotten lost on the way… At that point I was feeling not seen, not appreciated, not interesting for my partner and sooo disappointed. 

I know I’m not the only person in the world who ever felt that. I know that sometimes this feeling comes after many years of being in a relationship. 

From outside it might look like we are “the perfect couple”. But inside we know there’s a feeling of emptiness, a nagging sensation of not being met and a deep resentment for giving a lot and receiving little. 

Our relationship ended one year later.

Fast forward a few years, some months into the relationship I am in now, I had a similar feeling of not being met, not being seen, not being loved. 

This time though, things unfolded in a different way and that was not by chance. 

As you know I spent years unraveling what makes some relationships work and some not and that helped me deal with the situation in a different way. 

Here is the understanding that made that possible. 
 

It takes TWO to come to such an impasse

but ONE can turn it around

You may know by now that I am a Connection Lover, which means I need connection. Not only that I need it, but I hunger for it. I act a lot under the influence of my abandonment wound, which is the hurt we harbour for not having felt loved as much as we needed as children.

I tend to get together with a Freedom Lover, someone under the influence of their engulfment wound. Having felt restricted, manipulated, smothered as a child, they hunger for Freedom. 

It’s an irony of life that we tend to get together (opposites attract, right?).

In the beginning we are both so excited by the new-found connection, that we are open and loving and things flow. 

But as we get closer, our wounds get touched and our sensitivities awaken. And they clash!

I (the Connection Lover) start feeling there is not enough love, not enough connection, I am not seen and understood, supported and appreciated enough. I feel “lonely together”.

They (the Freedom Lovers) feel stifled, suffocated, demanded upon, often judged. 

And this is a dynamic that so many of us get into…

The tricky thing is that we feed each other’s pain… The more I ask for connection, the more the other feels restricted; the more he feels restricted, the more he takes distance; the more that happens, the more I ask for connection. The circle of pain. 

We co-create our impasse. 

However it has been my experience that if one stops, the whole circle can be reversed. 

As one becomes aware of what they are doing, what they are bringing in the relationship, and deals with it, the other one relaxes. It is in this relaxation that connection and intimacy are again possible, and even more than before. 

The way our abandonment wound 

contributes to our relationship impasse

I learned about this dynamic a long time ago and I also understood that once I stopped pining for connection, the other would stop running. 

But coming out of the spinning wheel was a different story. 

I had to learn about my abandonment wound and become really intimate with it, before I could turn things around. 

Here’s what I discovered about how this wound shows up in our relationships:

1. We overgive and overfunction

In my relationship many years ago, soon after we got together, I became the one who took on the biggest part of the shared tasks. I was doing grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, planning vacations and even doctor appointments. 

Looking back it’s not even that he expected this, I kind of offered it in the beginning and then it became the normal. 

I don’t have kids, but I hear that the arrival of a baby in the family is another moment when one takes more tasks than the other. 

For someone driven by an abandonment wound, it is "clear" that they need to work to prove their place in the relationship, to earn the love, to be worthy of the other’s presence. As children, when we missed the love and attention we would have needed, we learned to do and give to earn it. 

How is this contributing to the impasse?

It is through the pressure we subtly put on the other. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see that we are over giving in an attempt to secure that we’ll not be left, that love will come back in some shape or form, that the connection is always there. 

And guess what, that fits right into the other’s fear of engulfment.

So what we do, thinking it contributes to keeping the connection, works exactly in the opposite direction.

2. We compromise

This is merely an extension of the point above. It still comes from the need to prove we deserve, and one other way to do it is by accommodating our partner. 

Because of this, many times we:

- don’t take the space we need (in the house, in the bed, in our lives).

- we might put our passions or seeing friends on hold indefinitely for our relationship.

- we might put up with unloving language and tone of voice (because it’s “normal” in a couple).

- we might visit parents, friends, go to parties we don’t want to, thinking that that’s what partners do.

- we (and this is such a big one) compromise in sex: giving in to making love in ways (or at a pace) that is not what we’d like, or even making love when we don’t want to.

- we, many times, are so busy guessing the other’s needs and fulfil them, that we don’t even notice we have needs of our own.

I am working on this, but to this day, when I am asked by my man “What should we watch tonight?”, I still have a tendency to first think of what he would like.

I am not preaching that we should always get it our way. What I am saying is that whenever our needs conflict with the other’s, a conversation is to be had. And this is what, when we act from our abandonment wound, doesn’t happen. 

How is this contributing to the impasse?

Well, not only that it adds to the pressure, but it also gives the other the feeling that we are not there – if we don’t express ourselves, our needs and our “no”s, we don’t have a weight in the relationship, we are a ghost. Funnily (and sadly at the same time), that makes them feel “lonely together” too sometimes. 

3. We are super-sensitive to love coming in in a certain way

Not all abandonment wounds look the same. Some of us missed the presence of the adults, some – their support, some – being seen in their talents and gifts, some – a warm touch. 

When we grow up it is that thing (or those things) which we missed as children that we want the most in our relationships – we hunger for them and we are more inclined to notice their absence vs others’.

As a child, I always had my parents’ support in what I did and, as an adult, I’ve never missed that in my relationships. But what I did miss was for my feelings to be received, seen, listened to. So I craved for this and, in my relationships, I’ve almost always missed that. 

Alex, a client of mine, on the other hand, is super-sensitive to the times when he is not responded to when he talks. His girlfriend takes some time to process what he says, but he becomes all worked up about it and incredibly impatient with her. It turns out, as one of 3 children, he was often ignored and felt like he didn’t exist for his family. 

Diana is being told she’s loved and she's offered gifts, but what she experience more strongly is that, when she feels overwhelmed by life’s difficulties, her partner is not there. With her parents working long hours, she grew up parenting herself at a time when she was too small for that. Now, she is longing for the support that was never there for her.

How is this all contributing to the impasse?

You might have guessed already… us seeing the love that is not there and overlooking the love that is will make the other feel not seen and often not good enough. 

What can we do about it?

I’m not going to say that there’s a quick solution for the abandonment wound. 

It is a journey (and sometimes a lifelong one). But my experience is that things change in our relationships the exact moment we start that journey.

It is partly about making a conscious effort to change our behaviours – like stopping overgiving and overdoing and instead learning to ask directly for what we need and state what we don’t need (boundaries).
 

But above everything, for me it is about noticing the moments when we feel not-loved in that relationship and then doing things differently.

Here’s one situation that comes to my mind, something I had to face at the beginning of the relationship I am in now.

At some point, I noticed that my loneliness was highest when him and I were taking a hike in the mountains, just the two of us. Sometimes, he is deep in his thoughts and I used to feel rejected (I thought “why don’t you talk to me? It’s just the two of us?”). 

I would normally engage him in some chat but he would participate half-heartedly, and that was even more painful for me. A few times, even driving back home was gloomy because of all that. 

Slowly I stopped pulling at him and turned my attention on me. As we were walking through the woods, I came back to me. It felt scary in the beginning, as I was feeling not good enough, panicky that our connection was broken forever and really pained. But as I learned to be with these uncomfortable feelings, something started to loosen up inside.

When we allow for these unpleasant feelings to be and we put our attention on the body experience (instead of the story in our heads) in the beginning the feelings get more intense and that can be scary. But if we have patience, and allow for that to happen, slowly things start to shift. 

Something relaxes inside slowly. The pain of feeling lonely recedes, the panic too. 

We slowly calm down and at the same time become full. A weird thing happens, that we slowly start feeling content with no reason. 

It is a sort of coming home. 

The funny thing was that once I was starting to feel at home, connected, full, soon out of the blue he would start talking, and engaging and connecting.

That for me is healing our abandonment wound. Somebody once told me that we get hurt with people (as children) and we heal with people. And that has definitely been a healing experience.

As there have been many in our relationship. 

To sum it up, here is what needs to happen when loneliness strikes:

* we put more precise words on what we experience (like “I feel ignored”, “I feel not understood”, “I feel rejected”)

* we stop our attempts to get it from the other (and we know our little strategies to do that, part of which are complaining, playing the helpless card, or the victim card, overgiving or straight out demanding)

* we come back to ourselves: making a connection with the ways we weren’t loved as children (the similarity between then and now will be striking) and then allowing for the feeling of loneliness to BE.

What changes if we do this

As we learn to deal with our loneliness moments in a different way, something changes in our energy. We feel different – happier within ourselves, more content, more independent. And we are perceived differently, more spacious (as in “giving more space to the other”), more confident, more loving.

These two are amazing ingredients for the love and connection to start flowing again. The intimacy deepens and much of what created problems before (bickering, complaining, or fighting) is gone. 

Love,

Radha

PS If you know someone who could use this reading, I'd feel grateful if you share it with them.
PPS If you’d like to explore how this applies to your life situation, feel welcome to check my Relationship Impasse session package.