Lonely is so lonely, alone.

Trauma recovery can be very lonely. There’s no need to deny it. 

The experience of trauma itself tends to be really lonely. Really isolating. 

Often we just don’t have the words to convey to another human being what we went through, or what we’re going through. 

How can we convey it to someone else? We barely understand it ourselves some days. 

Why do we not remember large chunks of our past? Other people seem to remember theirs.

Why do we re-experience, sometimes in vivid detail, events and places and people that we know are years behind us? 

Why do we sometimes re-experience the consuming emotional reality of our past, but without the memories? 

The experience of trauma tends to be overwhelming; and confusing; and it often leaves us feeling more than a little “crazy.” 

Given all that: how can we possibly explain to another living soul what it’s like to be inside our head, inside our heart, even inside our body (or outside our body, if we dissociate) when we’re triggered? 

The very idea of trying to communicate any of it to another human, let alone meaningfully connect with another human being over what we’re experiencing, can itself trigger all kinds of anxiety and shame. 

So— we very often don’t even try. 

We keep it to ourselves. 

We pretend we’re, you know, “fine.” 

(It’s an old Twelve Step adage that “FINE” actually stands for “f*cked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional,” and that’s always seemed to me to be appropriate to trauma recovery as well.)

All of which leads us to feel very…alone. Which, actually, is quite okay with us, at least sometimes. 

Every trauma survivor reading this can affirm that alone is sometimes quite preferable to the alternative. 

Alone, for some of us, is the safest we ever feel. 

Alone is predicable. Alone is controllable, more or less. 

But then— sometimes alone is lonely. Very lonely. 

Sometimes people ask why I write about trauma publicly. It’s not because I think my internet presence is going to “heal” anyone, though I do hope at least some of the things I write give some survivors food for thought and/or a starting point or two. 

I mostly write about trauma on the internet to decrease this overwhelming feeling of isolation so many survivors experience. 

That feeling of isolation, of loneliness, can get in our head 

It can give Trauma Brain and the internal prosecutor ammunition for their arguments about how we are “The Exception” to all this “you are worthy” and “you can recover” stuff. 

That feeling of loneliness and isolation can chip away at our already finite bandwidth— and in recovery, we need all the bandwidth we can muster. 

You need to know you’re not alone. 

You need to know you’re not the first, or last, survivor to experience exactly what you’re experiencing. 

You need to know that you’re not “The Exception” to “everyone has worth” and “it wasn’t your fault” and “you can recover.” 

You may feel lonely at times in your recovery journey. I feel lonely at times in mine. 

But that doesn’t mean you are alone. 

And it doesn’t imply all those mean thoughts are true. 

Breathe; blink; focus.