Existential Therapy: Isolation
From Irvin Yalom’s Existential PsychoTherapy
Reflection Questions
Dis-identification Exercise
List answers to the question “Who am I?” on notecards. Answers might be: a father, a son, a lawyer, a reader, a Catholic, etc.
Consider each one independently and meditate on the experience of giving it up, setting it aside.
Thomas Merton reflects on the anxious fear that underneath it all there’s nothing there. He says, “[I] clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.”
Reflect on what it feels like to simply exist, independent of roles and accouterments. What comes up?
In what ways do I abandon my selfhood to regain the felt safety of connection?
Concept Overview
Yalom writes about three types of isolation: interpersonal (disconnection from others; i.e. loneliness), intrapersonal (disconnection from parts of self; i.e. dissociation), and existential.
Existential isolation refers to a stark awareness of separateness, like the feeling of being lost in the woods, where everything feels strange and you feel small. This separateness shows up relationally in the awareness of an unbridgeable gap between oneself and others. I.e. no matter how close I get to others, no one can live my life, feel my feelings, etc.
Yalom argues we try to alleviate the anxiety of existential isolation in a variety of ways, namely fusing ourselves to others or losing ourselves in crowds/causes. The existential position is that growth is found in acceptance of our separateness and leaning into self-governance, being one’s own person, etc.
But this should not be confused with unhealthy individualism or self-centeredness. Yalom, and others, argue a person who has come to terms with their separateness can relate to others with a mature “need-less love”, built on mutuality rather than anxious using and taking. Yalom goes on to say that need-less love should be “the individual’s mode of relating to the world.”
Deep Dive
Yalom speaks to the fundamental tension humans feel in becoming an individual, separate from the parents or the group or creation. “The human being’s universal conflict is that one strives to be an individual, and yet being an individual requires that one endure a frightening isolation. The most common mode of dealing with this conflict is through denial: one elaborates a delusion of fusion and proclaims in effect, “I am not alone, I am part of others.” And so one softens one’s ego boundaries and becomes part of another individual or of a group that transcends the individual.”
Yalom argues we construct a world of familiarity to insulate ourselves from the terror of isolation. He states, “Not only do we constitute ourselves but we constitute a world fashioned in such a way as to conceal that we have constituted it. Existential isolation impregnates the paste of things, the bedrock of the world. But it is so hidden by layer upon layer of worldly artifacts, each imbued with personal and collective meaning, that we experience only a world of everydayness, of routine activities, of the they. We are surrounded, at home in, a stable world of familiar objects and institutions, a world in which all objects and beings are connected and interconnected many times over. We are lulled into a sense of cozy, familiar belongingness; the primordial world of vast emptiness and isolation is buried and silenced, only to speak in brief bursts during nightmares and mythic visions.
“… Experiences where one is alone, and everyday guidelines are suddenly stripped away, have the power to evoke a sense of the uncanny—of not being at home in the world. The hiker who loses his or her way, the skier who suddenly finds himself or herself off the trail, the driver who in a dense fog can no longer see the road—the individual in these situations often experiences a rush of dread, a dread independent of the physical threat involved, a lonely dread that is a wind blowing from one’s own desert place—the nothing that is at the core of being. Uncanny are the social explosions that suddenly uproot the values, ethics, and morals that we have come to believe exist independently of ourselves. The Holocaust, mob violence, the Jonestown mass suicide, the chaos of war, all of these strike horror in us because they are evil, but they also stun us because they inform us that nothing is as we have always thought it to be, that contingency reigns, that everything could be otherwise than it is; that everything we consider fixed, precious, good can suddenly vanish; that there is no solid ground; that we are not-at-home here or there or anywhere in the world.”
Yalom argues we try to alleviate this anxiety through fusion, and the sacrificing of selfhood. He then suggests this compounds the issue, “one gains relief from isolation anxiety through immersion in some other individual, cause, or pursuit. Thus, individuals are, as Kierkegaard said, twice in despair: to begin with, in a fundamental existential despair, and then further in despair because, having sacrificed self-awareness, they do not even know they are in despair.”
Yalom says the goal is to avoid the impulse to lose ourselves and instead find differentiation, “The process of growth, as Rank knew, is a process of separation, of becoming a separate being. The words of growth imply separateness: autonomy (self-governing), self-reliance, standing on one’s own feet, individuation, being one’s own person, independence … To relinquish a state of interpersonal fusion means to encounter existential isolation with all its dread and powerlessness. The dilemma of fusion-isolation—or, as it is commonly referred to, attachment-separation—is the major existential developmental task.”
Yalom then suggests embracing our separateness helps us find right relationship to others. “There is, of course, no solution to isolation. It is part of existence, and we must face it and find a way to take it into ourselves. Communion with others is our major available resource to temper the dread of isolation. We are all lonely ships on a dark sea. We see the lights of other ships—ships that we cannot reach but whose presence and similar situation affords us much solace. We are aware of our utter loneliness and helplessness. But if we can break out of our windowless monad, we become aware of the others who face the same lonely dread. Our sense of isolation gives way to a compassion for the others, and we are no longer quite so frightened. An invisible bond unites individuals who participate in the same experience — whether it be a life experience shared in time or place (for example, attending the same school) or simply as a member of an audience at some event.”
This, he argues, helps a person become loving, in a mature way. “Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.… In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two … To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another. One must be responsive to the needs (physical and psychic) of the other. One must respect the uniqueness of the other, to see him as he is, and to help him to grow and unfold in his own ways, for his own sake and not for the purpose of serving oneself.”
And for Yalom, this need-less, self-giving love is the ultimate act of expressing one’s personhood. “For the mature productive person, giving is an expression of strength and abundance. In the act of giving, one expresses and enhances one’s aliveness.”