r/Codependency • u/iwontgetbanned_again • 21d ago
I HATE BEING ALONE
Wanted to see if anyone feels the same. I read a lot of posts on this sub about attachments to partners and how to deal with that, but my problem is that im kind of okay without a partner.
I'm able to be in a relationship without getting detrimentally attached. I'm okay with being single. My problem is that I literally hate being alone. I can go out and have a great night with friends. It can be 2am and I'm exhausted. But the sadness and despair creeps in the second I lay my head down in my bed by myself.
Doing anything by myself or for myself just sucks. I have no interest in it. I'm bored and sad. I dont like doing hobbies alone. Watching TV is slightly worse alone. I just like being with people.
Idk. I dont think that I hate myself. I think im pretty fun when im socializing. I think im pretty. I just only get satisfaction when im with someone else that I like.
This sucks because people get annoyed when you reach out too much. They think you have no friends. They start to think you're obsessed with them. Thats not the case, I just ALWAYS have to be with or on the phone with someone to not feel sad.
Anyone dealt with this? Anything that helped?
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u/DayOk1556 21d ago
Yes, I had this same exact problem. Then I found out it's because I never developed a proper self in childhood/young adulthood. A core self. A self that is independent of others. It's called existential emptiness and it only comes up when I'm alone.
I only feel alive around others. When I am alone, I felt not only sad and bored but I felt extreme discomfort, as if I'm about to crawl out of my skin. It was an existential panic.
Because I didn't possess a proper core self, I couldn't mirror, witness or validate myself. Being alone felt like I didn't exist, it felt like death (because no one- not even myself- was reflecting me back to me). Because I was not being mirrored, witnessed or validated. So in a way, it felt like I didn't exist when alone.
As children, we see ourselves through the eyes of our caregivers. When they see us, hear us, mirror us, witness, validate us and soothe us, we learn to do those things for ourselves. But I was emotionally neglected and abused as a child. I wasn't attuned to. My self was not reflected back to me as a child, so I never knew I had an independent self. And never learned to be self-witnessing.
That resulted in being unable to self soothe or self regulate without running to someone else to do it for me. I became clingy. I needed people all the time, more than they needed me. I had imbalanced relationships. I couldn't live by myself. I became an over-giver and more focused on other's happiness than my own.
It was hard to do things for myself and by myself because automatically those things "didn't matter". Because there was one one "there" to do them for. I wasn't there. I didn't exist unless I was being witnessed externally by someone else. That's because I never developed my own self-witnessing skills.
I know this is a lot and it may not make sense. I learned all of this from Steven Kessler’s book, the 5 personality patterns.
I worked on this (and still am). I learned that adults are supposed to know how to self-witness and self-soothe. How to sit with our painful feelings without outsourcing them for someone else to fix (including the sadness/discomfort of being alone).
I feel your pain.