Wen 丨 month month
When I was young, I had no idea what loneliness was. But when I grew up, I found that loneliness was like a shadow. Obviously, there are many people around, but I still can't let go of that loneliness.
Why is a person, the older he grows, the lonelier he becomes?
The so-called loneliness is actually a self-defense mechanism
I believe that many people have such an experience:
There are many friends around, but most of them are wine and meat friends, and there is no confidant who digs out his heart and lungs. When I encounter unhappy things in my life, I want to find someone to talk to, but before I blurt out, I swallow the words rawly.
Have friends changed? Or has the friendship gone bad? In fact, it is not, it is our psychological wall that has been built.
The so-called psychological wall is the degree of our psychological defense.
Each of us is born with a blank sheet of paper, carefully protected by our parents and family, and therefore ignorant of the dangers of human nature. When we enter the society, we meet more people and establish more relationships, including classmate relationships, friendship relationships, couple relationships, and so on. In the process of building relationships with others, we are somewhat hurt, and these injuries will increase our psychological defenses.
It's like building a wall in our hearts that protects us but also isolates the outside world from the message of love to us.
Psychological walls are a double-edged sword. Too low a psychological wall makes us too defensive, vulnerable, and deceived. Too high a psychological wall will make us away from the intimate happiness of connecting with people and feel lonely in the crowd.
Raise the height of the wall appropriately to embrace intimacy
Psychological defense mechanisms are often activated unconsciously. When interacting with people, we are often unconsciously driven by our own patterns and unable to communicate with each other normally.
For example, when you feel that your relationship with a good friend is drifting apart, she doesn't know what you're thinking, and you can't understand her, but the truth is that you haven't opened up to the other person for a long time. There is no real empathy in this world, how can the other party know what you are thinking?
For another example, you feel that your other half ignores you and does not love you as much as before, but the truth is that you suppress the emotions of missing and attaching to the other party in your heart, rarely showing it, and always hoping that the other party can guess your heart to accompany you. The other party can't guess, you feel wronged, and then fall into anger, and the opening is accusation. The other party wanted to respond in his heart, but because he was not good at dealing with anger, he had to avoid it with silence.
This creates a vicious circle of "women express attachment with anger, men love silence in relationships".
It can be seen that the psychological wall is a double-edged sword. If you raise the wall too much, you will live as an island, refuse to let people be thousands of miles away, and feel lonely yourself.
Therefore, when you feel that the more you grow up, the lonelier you are, you may wish to examine yourself, whether it is because the psychological wall is too high, to the point where no one can reach.
So, what should we do to lower the psychological wall and learn to control the wall instead of being controlled by the wall?
Learn to accept yourself
The biggest reason why many people are reluctant to take precautions and interact with people comes from themselves. They worry that their true side is not perfect, they are not willing to show people an imperfect side, and they prefer to distance themselves from others and never confide in others.
Therefore, if you want to remove the psychological wall, the most important thing is to solve your inner problems and be completely accepting of yourself.
As the psychologist Jung said, "It is useless to fantasize about light, the only way out is to accept shadows." ”
American best-selling author Debbie. Ford once told a true story of his own experience in his book Accepting the Imperfect Self:
At one point, Debbie. Ford went to a leadership training class, and while she was speaking, her lecturer suddenly said to her, "You're a shrew!" ”
Debbie was stunned, because she knew that she was indeed a shrew, so she kept trying to hide this, but she was discovered by the mentor.
After class, the inferior Debbie told the tutor that she was often ashamed of her shrew qualities and even reluctant to communicate intimately with people. But the teacher told her, "What you can't control, in turn, will limit you." ”
Isn't it necessarily bad to be a shrew? You buy things and are deceived by bad merchants, is it more conducive to solving the problem than forbearance?
The mentor's words made Debbie feel relaxed, and she realized that instead of covering her shrew side and allowing herself to live only as a promise, she chose to accept herself calmly and learn to embrace the shadow in her heart.
In fact, each of us has shortcomings, there is an imperfect side, no matter how to cover up, those shortcomings will also be seen, rather than this, it is better to let those dark sides become our strength to achieve a more complete life.
Learn to expose yourself
The term self-exposure is clearly described in Social Psychology:
It refers to speaking to others in the process of interacting with others, and sincerely expressing their inner thoughts.
Good relationships develop gradually through self-exposure. Moderate self-exposure can reduce your loneliness, increase your sense of trust, and help you understand yourself better, thus making your mental state healthier.
Moreover, self-exposure tends to initiate a "reciprocal effect of disclosure": that is, our self-exposure triggers the other person's self-exposure, and then the relationship between the two people will go further.
Therefore, when interacting with others, we can appropriately share our experiences with others, take the initiative to expose our hearts, and at the same time, we can guide the other party to share our hearts through inquiries.
If two people slowly develop common interests, then get to know each other. Then you will find that you say more and more, the other party will share more and more, and then the feelings and relationships of the two people will slowly heat up. And these friends who push their hearts are the ones who can really accompany us through loneliness.
Loneliness is the essence of life
In order to get rid of loneliness, we are eager to talk, but also long for family, friendship, love. But conversely, even if we are really fortunate enough to have a happy intimate relationship, can we really get rid of loneliness?
Lu Xun once said: "The sorrows and joys of human beings are not the same, I only think they are noisy." ”
Zhu Ziqing also said: "The bustle is theirs, I have nothing." ”
Intimate relationships, whether it's love, they're like a dose of morphine that can help us relieve the pain of loneliness, but they don't dissolve loneliness.
Because loneliness is the background of life.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" says: "Life has never existed independently without loneliness." Whether we are born, we grow, we fall in love, or we succeed or fail, until the end, loneliness exists like a shadow in a corner of life. ”
Deeply.
Since loneliness is the norm in life, learning to live with loneliness has become an important compulsory course in life.
In fact, we can look at loneliness from a different perspective. Loneliness does not have to be painful, lonely, it can also be a unique enjoyment, and it can also have a different kind of beauty.
Drinking alone under the moon, raising a glass to invite the moon, not necessarily lonely, can also be free; fishing alone, watching the river and snow, not necessarily sad, but also a kind of otherworldly far away from the world; sitting alone in the fence, playing the piano and whistling, not necessarily no one appreciates, can also be lonely and self-congratulatory.
What's more, loneliness can teach us a lot.
Zhang Xiaoyan once said: "Many people ask me how I feel when I walk on the road at night, but what I think of is not loneliness and long road, but the magnificent ocean and the stars shining in the sky." ”
You see, loneliness can also be a medicine, a weapon against worldly trivia, and not let trivial chicken feathers make life a mess.
Goethe once said: "Man can learn in society, but inspiration only emerges when he is lonely." ”
You see, only when we are lonely can we calm down and precipitate ourselves and reflect on ourselves. Those lonely days can become a value-added period in our lives.
Learn to alleviate loneliness with love, and learn to live with loneliness
Freud once said, "Man may be able to endure all kinds of suffering, such as hunger or oppression, but it is difficult to endure the most painful of all sufferings, that is, total loneliness." ”
Mencius also wrote such a sentence in the "King Hui of Liang": "The old and childless are alone, and the young and fatherless are lonely." ”
See, the pain of loneliness is just as unbearable as it spans thousands of miles and thousands of years.
Although loneliness is everywhere, it does not mean that we have nothing to do with it.
We can do:
Learn to lower your mental walls and try to build intimate relationships with people. After all, only sincere love can alleviate our loneliness among all sentient beings.
But even with love, we can't completely dissolve loneliness. This requires us to live in peace with loneliness. Learn to appreciate the beauty of loneliness, self-precipitation in lonely days, self-appreciation, wait until you survive that dark time, and then see the dawn, you will find:
It turns out that loneliness is the most expensive luxury in life, which allows us to experience the grandeur and magnificence of life and truly understand the meaning of life.
Right mind
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