Our Need for Solitude

"Solitude"

I posted a while back about my discovery that I am a Solitary Personality Type. I knew that I needed more solitude than others, but I didn't have a name for it. Because it was unnamed, it felt like a pathology. It was good to be able to name it and know that it's not a pathology, but just one way of many that human beings relate to each other.

For me, this means that I need a lot more alone time than most other people, and that interpersonal relationships are not high on my list of priorities. You can see how this might create problems for any hope of an intimate relationship. I've spent a lot of time in my life learning how to be more social and how to deal with the demands of interpersonal interaction, so I'm not a total recluse.

My case --- and others like me -- is an extreme need for solitude that is not too common. But it appears that most of us need more solitude -- meaningful alone time -- than we get, this according to Ester Buchholz, writing for Psychology Today.

In The Call of Solitude: How spending time alone can enhance intimacy, Buchholz argues that when we consider all the ways that modern culture places demands on our time and attention, we need a break from this more than ever. Moreover, if we make time for solitude, it will enhance the level of intimacy we share with loved ones because we will have more attention and energy for the relationships.

We live in a society that worships independence yet deeply fears alienation: our era is sped-up and overconnected. The earth's population has doubled since the 1950s, and in cities across the world, urban crowding and the new global economy have revolutionized social relationships. Cellular phones now extend the domain of the workplace into every part of our lives; religion no longer provides a place for quiet retreat but instead offers "megachurches" of social and secular amusement; and climbers on the top of Mt. McKinley whip out hand-held radios to call home. We are heading toward a time when, according to the New York Times, "portable phones, pagers, and data transmission devices of every sort will keep us terminally in touch." Yet in another, more profound way, we are terminally out of touch. The need for genuine and constructive aloneness has gotten utterly lost, and, in the process, so have we.

Now, more than ever, we need our solitude. Being alone gives us the power to regulate and adjust our lives. It can teach us fortitude and the ability to satisfy our own needs. A restorer of energy, the stillness of alone experiences provides us with much-needed rest. It brings forth our longing to explore, our curiosity about the unknown, our will to be an individual, our hopes for freedom. Alonetime is fuel for life.

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Both the need to be alone and to engage others are essential to human happiness and survival, with equally provocative claims. Mother nature gives aloneness a high priority: sleep is nature's way of ensuring solitude. But given the rise in the number of sleep-disorder clinics and the sale of soporific drugs, even this one fundamental outlet for aloneness is in trouble.

Our error is in presuming that aloneness and attachment are either/or conditions. They are at odds only when they are pitted against each other. The healing aspects of solitude have not gone wholly unnoticed in current psychology; "time out" has been heralded as a coping strategy, as an emotional breather. However, the phrase "time out" suggests that, in the theatre of life, relating and stimulation are the important dramas and alonetime merely intermission. In truth, each profoundly enriches the other. So, let's discover the joys of solitude.

Read the whole article.

The author makes meaningful distinctions between being alone and feeling lonely. She also provides some history. For example, solitude originally meant an experience of oneness with God. Not so anymore -- most connotations of alone imply a lack of something, not a filling up with something (which is how it feels to me).

Anyway, I found this to be a good article -- and like most things in Psychology Today, it's psych lite -- but still useful.

Tags: solitude, meaningful alone time, alone, Psychology Today, Ester Buchholz, The Call of Solitude