Loosing a relationship

How can a man be surrounded by people he loves and who love him and yet feel lonely? It is a question that has my attention.



I think every personality is made up of various facets, each the product of one or more relationships past, reacting within the confines of biological predisposition, to form parts of the self. Particularly in our formative years, when our personalities are growing and most plastic, it is our interactions with others that inspire the development of the various elements of our personalities. Parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, and even the school bully trigger interest, reactions, values, and traits. Once developed, each element of a self requires a continued social connection for sustenance and full expression. It follows that no single person can provide for all a person's needs for companionship, as our personalities were not formed by a single relationship. None of us can or do share all of ourselves with any single person; the necessary receptors are not all there.

When we are young, like everything else about us, we are more flexible. Not yet fully defined, our personalities are still in the stem cell phase, pliable, formative, and exploratory. Relationships are dynamic, and we can easily find companionship and growth in a large diversity of people. Relationships come and go with hardly a notice on a college campus. A heart might be broken for a few weeks, but the cure is known to all and easily resorted to.

In maturity, though, we have built out our personalities constructed upon a smaller set of stable relationships. New friendships don’t come so easily, and our personalities have worked their way toward the fundamental self, achieving alignment with those things that are biologically defined in us. The loss of a long-standing relationship can be profoundly painful and emotionally destabilizing. That portion of one’s person, previously supported by the lost relationship, becomes like the stump of a severed limb dangling uselessly from one's being, serving only as a source of pain and a reminder of what has been lost.

I think there is often a temptation to draw upon other friends and try to close the gap in that manner, but it is rare that an existing relationship can go very far in that regard, having already found its proper niche, its highest and best use, as it were. Healing I am afraid more often requires at least a partial removal of the vestigial self that has lost its support, cutting back to vital personality tissue so to speak, that is less formed and more flexible - finding some new focus, location or activity in life where new relationships can be attached, ideally developing something heretofore latent, not yet cultivated, where a personality T-cell may yet be found.

Healing has begun when the obsession with the lost is replaced with a sense of adventure about the future and what it might bring. All of that, though, is a lot easier to find at twenty than at sixty. A sense of freedom is a good sign; however, freedom is only a short-term antidote. In the long run, most of us prefer being enslaved to a warm heart than free to ponder our own empty one.

Obviously, you and I are sharing a similar painful transition. Yours is all lumped into the loss of a single relationship - primarily - mine is perhaps not quite so focused but the effect is the same. We both have large portions of ourselves with whom there is no one to share that self, no one who needs or understands that self.

It is too bad there is not an analgesic for the pain of carving off part of one’s soul, but alas, it just has to burn itself out.

I prefer tea to non-alcoholic beer or coffee earlier in the day. I will holler in a few days and see when you can spare an afternoon or so to show me how all this blog stuff works.

Dr. Bruce