The Loneliness Epidemic

When we talk about the current epidemic of loneliness and the isolation a lot of people feel in their lives, we often talk about the difficulty of meeting people, of living in big cities, of living in the middle of nowhere, of the effects of online culture, of the effects of being offline in an online world, of the Covid pandemic which kept us all apart etc etc. What we don't talk about is isolation from the self and how this is a major contributor to loneliness. We may not identify our malaise as being cut off from ourselves because, if you think about it, real isolation from the self means that we don't know that we aren't connected with ourselves. We may know that we are unhappy but not really know why. We may feel lost or distant, flat, numb, unenthusiastic, as though life is passing us by. We may feel we haven't found our thing in life, our path. We may not know what we want or what we don't want, or what is good for us and what isn't. We may be stuck in damaging patterns of behaviour that sabotage our well-being or happiness but we aren't aware that they are damaging. We may accuse others of not understanding us when actually it is we who are not understanding ourselves. We may think everyone has a better, happier life than we have because we're not seeing them clearly - because actually, we're not seeing ourselves clearly. It is one of the paradoxes of life that the more we understand ourselves the more we understand others - and the more we understand others, the more we understand ourselves.

So if we are feeling lonely - and everyone is lonely sometimes - we can start by trying to get to know ourselves a little more.

So how do we know ourselves? Well, mostly by trial and error and through the experience of living with ourselves but we can also make an effort to learn. We are all born a mystery to ourselves and so we have to embark on a journey of discovery and internal reflection. This is where the Enneagram comes in. It doesn't reveal who we are. It reveals who we think we are. And in helping us to understand who we think we are, it helps us to move on from our idea of self to bring an understanding that who we think we are is only a fraction of who we really are. We are all much bigger than our idea of ourselves. Once we understand that we embark on a journey of more profound understanding - of why we behave as we do, of our potential and our challenges, of what suits us and what doesn't, of how we can best develop ourselves. The Enneagram provides a kind of road map of all of that.