Loneliness is an issue that people often come to therapy for without having identified it as such. There are different possible explanations for this blind spot; here are a couple that strike me as significant ones.

Firstly, we’re not very good at noticing when we’re lonely, or when we have a lack in daily life of meaningful contact with other people. We don’t have a physiological or psychological system that kicks in like we do when, for example, we’re hungry or cold. Something in us that says, “I need food now,” or “I need warmth now“.

That doesn’t really happen in the same way with social contact. You don’t have this sort of sudden craving to go out and just spend time with people. Nothing in us says, “I need social contact now.”

Isolation can accumulate, insidiously, in the background of our awareness. You might instead feel something like a down mood, a depression, a feeling of inadequacy, or just something vague and off-colour. But there isn’t just a simple alarm bell that compels you to spend more time with other people.

There’s another thing which is also relatively hard to notice and identify within yourself. You might well be spending a lot of time with people; you might often be in large social groups or at work with colleagues, for example. Yet you still feel lonely. And that’s something to do with who you are in your relationships with these people.

Are you actually connecting with them as you, or are you connecting with them as some kind of slightly mask-like you, a false you? In other words, it’s not a problem with lack of people; it’s a problem with lack of you, in that moment, with those people. You’re not really being you.

And that’s surely a lonely experience. Because you are not actually connecting. It’s somebody not-you that’s connecting with them – and that’s going to feel lonely.

(And especially so, if the other people you’re connecting with are operating in some equivalent way, as not them.)