Loneliness: The Pull Toward Connection

Adapted from a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Edited from the original recording for readability.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd, a licensed therapist and psychologist, in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling teaches this framework with permission and gratitude.

Loneliness Is Not a Sign That Something Is Wrong

Loneliness is painful, and that pain is a prompting — but the pain does not mean something is wrong with us. Actually, Dodd says, the pain is an indication of something being right about us. Loneliness is a feeling that calls us to move toward what we are made to eat, so to speak: to grow, to become fulfilled, to become ourselves, to live in completion. It is the connection feeling, the feeling that moves us into relationship with other human beings and with God — and, secondarily, into relationship with work, though that remains secondary to the primary.

Recent research on the top ten predictors of a long life bears this out. Number one was being socially connected. Number two was close relationships. Only further down the list came things like exercise, with breathing clean air coming in at number ten — the physiological factors. It is astounding how powerful social connection is in making us healthy, and the other side of that same coin is that loneliness leads to a great deal of illness.

The Medical Consequences of Loneliness

Dodd points to James Lynch's book *The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness*. Lynch began his research in 1974, doing longitudinal work even then, and later published a second edition of the same material with another thirty-some years of research in it, around 2013.

One of the major and most exciting findings, as Dodd describes it, is that when a person tells the truth about what is happening in their heart when they speak, it can actually lower blood pressure, regulate breathing, and bring the heart rate to a rate appropriate to the circumstances being experienced. It lowers cortisol and reduces stress. What is amazing is the flip side: when a person is talking but not telling the truth of the feelings or the story of what is actually in them, it raises their blood pressure, which increases cortisol. Not telling the truth of our hearts stresses us out. And Lynch also reported that when a person doesn't talk at all, their blood pressure is likewise at risk of going up, increasing cortisol and increasing the risk of heart disease. So literally, telling the truth about your heart — which socially connects us and puts us in close relationship — is healthy. It is a supplement for health, a food that actually makes us healthy. Dodd notes there is also a newer book out simply called *Loneliness* that goes into much of the physiology, though he hasn't read it yet, and he expects this whole subject to become the next big thing.

We are created for relationship. Recovery from anything that ails us has a great deal to do with being connected relationally, because everything we use to connect as a substitute for the relationship we were made for will make us sick. We are literally created to have health in relationship with ourselves, others, and God.

This is where vulnerability — a new buzzword — comes in. Vulnerability is the risk of trying to connect in relationship, really being open to being impacted by another, telling the truth about who you are, and taking the risk of being judged.

Counterfeits and the Roots of Addiction

The substitutes we use to try to take care of our loneliness are counterfeits, and they end up making us sick. In one form or another, that sickness is always near or involved with addiction. We are created in such a way that if we don't deal with our loneliness — which is a matter of life — in a healthy way, it makes us sick.

We are so desperate to attach to something that satisfies that craving for intimacy that even if a thing only approximates it, if it comes close, we will attach to it. And that thing winds up taking us closer to dissatisfaction, disgratitude, and disgratification. Because we don't know what to do with genuine loneliness, or we're afraid of it or ashamed of it, we have to ramp up our need to mood alter on some level. So we go farther and farther away from actual loneliness, and what that reduces us to is a thing called apathy, which is impaired loneliness. But intimacy is the gift of loneliness. Loneliness means intimacy.

The connection between the origins of addiction and loneliness is profound. In the spiritual root system, we are made for relationship; it is relationship that fulfills us and relationship that completes us. So anything we insert into that place of relationship ends up being an impaired relationship — with alcohol, with drugs, with television. All of them are forms of escaping vulnerability, and vulnerability means accessibility to wounds.

Love Is a Contract for Pain

One of the most dangerous things a human being can do is love. The moment we sign a contract, or a covenant, or a loyalty to love, we have also signed a contract for pain, which means we have made ourselves available to becoming wounded. There is no such thing as love in the absence of wounds. Have a child, for example: one of the worst things you can do in your life is have a child if your goal is to avoid pain.

People run from loneliness for two reasons. One, they are ashamed of the condition because they think it is abnormal — as Facebook will often testify. And two, they run from it because it is going to cost them the experience of having to learn what to do with wounds: the wound that causes us to move toward forgiveness, the wound that causes us to move toward humility, the wound that causes us to move toward acceptance, the wound that causes us to keep caring in spite of what's happening around us. All of those things call us to a deeper courage, a deeper risk, a deeper reach. And as we persevere through it, we become more attached.

The Negative Paradox of the Highlight Reel

That is the negative paradox of Instagram and Facebook. I look online to see that I'm not alone, but I end up comparing my human experience to a Facebook moment, which is not a human experience. It's a highlight reel, one highlight after another, and it leaves people feeling more lonely.

None of which means Facebook needs to change. Nobody needs to start putting their most painful moments online — here's a picture of me crying, here's a picture of me arguing with my wife, here's a picture of her yelling back, here's a picture of me ignoring someone. That would be inappropriate. But Facebook is not a substitute for a genuine life. Those likes may make it feel like people like you, and that is a kind of connection — but it is approval. And it is interesting that the second highest predictor of a long life is close relationships.

We are lonely for intimacy

An earlier conversation about needs established that belonging and mattering are the greatest of human needs — and that loneliness is often the signal of them. Loneliness speaks to our need to belong and matter, which makes it good information. It calls us toward the place where everybody knows our name, the *Cheers* bar we all recognize.

But intimacy is not merely being authentic. It is letting ourselves be known and coming to know others. It is a process of relationship, not a technique.

There are many ways to substitute for that, or to avoid loneliness and need altogether. We try to be good so that good things will happen — though we have lived long enough to know that being good does not keep bad things away. We are told that life is unfair because bad things happen to good people, when the reality is that life happens to everyone. We are told that bad things happen to bad people, but those of us sitting in judgment never think it is bad enough, and none of us want people concluding we must be bad if something bad happens to us. And we say that life is pathetic and sickening because good things happen to bad people. Those four sayings are all ways of dodging the vulnerability of being in need and hungering to belong and matter, which is how we are actually made.

The truth is that good things happen to people who are known. Intimacy — into-me-see — makes us available to be known. And if we are actually known, then as strange as it sounds we can receive everything: the green bean casserole when we are sick, the prayer, or the ability to pick up the phone and say, "I'm in pain and I'm in tears, can you meet me?" It also means being able to call someone and say, "I can't wait to tell you what just happened for me," and trust that they want good for you rather than come after you with jealousy. Loneliness awakens us to our created form of being, to wanting and needing intimacy. We are made for it.

Compassion, despair, and celebration

Working in the world of neediness — or of its rejection — Dodd has come to see three internal conditions that seem to put us in a position to experience God, to call out to God, or to seek to be known by God. The first is compassion: identifying with another's pain, which means we ourselves are in pain. The second is despair, wondering what in the world is going on with our lives. The third is celebration. All three require that we be emotionally present in our lives every day.

Desperation is the foxhole prayer. But compassion has its own weight; if you have compassion, you put yourself where you see pain everywhere and can do nothing about it. Then the question becomes, God, what are you doing? Those questions put us in a position of having to struggle in relationship with God. Dodd cannot imagine being God, and he cannot imagine being the author of life and writing life the way life is written — the way things actually go does not make sense to him. It is frightening. But admitting that it frightens him puts him squarely in relationship with the God who is creating, whether he likes it or not.

What he notices in himself is that he loves comfort, ease, and relaxation — the moment when the list is done, even though the list is never done, and he does not have to care or worry about anything for a little while. Compassion, despair, and celebration are not on that list. What he seeks most is precisely what will not put him into intimacy with God, with himself, and with others. This does not mean there is no such thing as rest; it is simply worth noticing. We seek ways out of despair and desperation, ways out of isolation and discomfort. And we even seek to avoid celebration.

Why celebration is the scary one

Despair is manageable in its way — we have plenty of coping mechanisms for it. It is when the good happens that we do not know what to do.

Dodd recalls leading a retreat with Phil and another friend. The other two spoke first, and each went well. Then he got up, carrying a script in his head that said he was going to suck by comparison. To his surprise, it was going well. He kept scanning their faces — looking to Phil's for boredom, which was not there, looking to his friend's for disapproval, which was not there either. What he saw instead was delight. Being delighted in was so scary that, as he puts it, he emotionally lit himself on fire and poured gasoline on the rest of the room. It was a genuine disaster.

Afterward he crawled into the back of the truck in shame, and they stopped at the nearest convenience store for potato chips and snowballs — those pink coconut-dyed marshmallow cakes. He sat in the back seat laughing and crying, being known in his humiliation. His friends did not let him off the hook for a long while, and they were still telling the story fifteen years later. That, too, is celebration: a memory moment.

Celebration is frightening because it awakens us to what is not going to last. It also awakens a craving to be in a relaxed place where the celebration can continue and be expected. And it stirs the amygdala and other parts of the brain and heart with memories of when things did not go well. That is the paradox of it.

Compassion, desperation, and celebration in daily living

There is a crossing of wires that happens between delight and shame — a cost people have had to pay at the expense of their own pleasure, and at the expense of their own pain. Daily living, Dodd says, has a great deal to do with the three words compassion, desperation, and celebration, and with really and truly spending a little time every morning in gratitude, remembering that where you are sitting has hope in it. Gratitude begins with what you hope. Desperation is the legitimate recognition of how much we are powerless, so that we admit our powerlessness and our need. And compassion is the recognition that I have something to offer the world, because God has given all of us something to offer the world. So it means gratitude even for giftedness, and then the hope to apply that giftedness to people who are in need — people who are like me. That is compassion. And I like them.

Even loneliness, which we tend to think of as a terrible condition, belongs here. Compassion, celebration, and desperation are normal to daily life. They are so normal to daily life that we can actually be close to God in daily life — if we are paying attention. Which means dealing with my heart, and with all the things I really wish I didn't have to feel.

Loneliness is fundamental

Loneliness is one of those things we don't want to have to feel, and it is fundamental. There are four kinds of it. It is difficult precisely because it takes us to our neediness — more than fear, more than shame, more than hurt, it takes us to the recognition that the solution for my life is outside of me. It takes us to people and to God. Even solitude, which means by myself, takes us to relationships.

Because it is so big, and so much a part of almost everything, we seek to avoid it. It is like breathing for human beings, so much a part of us that we don't even recognize how much of it we carry. One person, talking about aloneness, put it as "all-oneness" — the common human experience, the craving for relationship and the gap we are going to find inside the craving.

What we do to stay away from loneliness

As we move away from life on life's terms and into the territories of isolation, the question becomes what people do to stay away from their loneliness. Anything that takes me away from feeling my feelings is something I do to remove myself from them. Someone wakes in the middle of the night anxious, overwhelmed, worried — and they pursue sugar before they pursue the Savior. Pornography over presence. Alcohol over acceptance. Cocaine over companionship. These are not always so much badnesses as they are not-good-enough-isms. You could have more.

Denial belongs in that same family: this isn't happening, this isn't happening, this isn't happening. And these counterfeit, temporary substitutes carry us farther and farther away, into deep isolation.

Apathy: living between five and five

Where that road ends is apathy — a-pathos, no pathos, I cannot care. The impaired expression of loneliness is to remove myself from having to be human, which means removing myself from the potential for vulnerability and also the potential for celebration. It becomes a golden mean of living between five and five: the less I care, the safer I am. If I can squeeze my whole life in between five and five on a scale of one to ten, then there is no recognition of myself as vulnerable to being human like other humans.

This is why love and hate are not opposites. Apathy is the opposite of both love and hate, because love and hate are full of feeling, full of need, full of care, full of struggle, full of vulnerability.

Stoicism as practiced apathy

There is a reawakening of stoicism going on in the culture right now — leaders doing podcasts and writing books, calling it true stoicism. It is an intellectual attempt to manage life, a philosophical move back toward strength. It is also a sliver of the dark side of mindfulness, that unattachedness. Mindfulness itself is wonderful — being present with yourself, paying attention, concentration — but mindfulness is made to take us to emotion, and instead it gets used to remove us from dealing with our lives. The rebirth of stoicism says: I can be so detached from the humanity of life that I rise above it and am not moved by it.

It is amazing how far removed we can get from our own hearts. Anybody who is doing whatever they have to do to overcome their heart and not have to experience it is practicing some form of hopelessness. And if the religion you are involved in supports that on some level, you are off base — that religion is actually there to pull you away from your need of others and of God. Stoicism is a great example. The highest point of achievement in stoicism is to arrive at being uncaring, at being strong enough to be unaffected. Plenty of people would disagree and call it balance; there are a lot of translations of it.

Dodd grew up in the world of stoicism himself, in the form of redneck aphorisms. It all comes out in the wash. That's water under the bridge, man, don't worry about it. It is what it is. If you're not the lead dog, stay on the porch. Go along to get along. It is all get over it and get with it — don't let it get to you, don't let it bother you. Stoicism and apathy are the attempt to be removed from having to experience myself as human, and that very solution takes us away from everything we could have that is fulfillment and completion.

He offers an example: a dear friend from high school, still a dear friend, whose mother was diagnosed with cancer when he was around twenty. Dodd grew up with that family — the friend and his wonderful sister — just down the street, back when they still lived in town, before his own family moved out into the country.

A marriage that didn't run from loneliness

Dodd tells the story of a couple he admired from childhood — the mother and father of a friend. He would go down to their house and find them playful together. They talked. They had their little ways with each other, and the affection between them was obvious. He remembers one time the husband said something to his wife, and she looked up at him, and he slid the sliding glass door shut real quick, as if she were going to throw something at it — but it was playful. Watching them, Dodd thought, *I want that. That is so attractive.* He would do almost anything to make that woman laugh.

When she died, she was a member of no clubs. She wasn't part of the social system that runs every small town. And yet it took Dodd an hour and a half to get up to the casket to greet the family. People were lined up out the door. She was so full-hearted that it was like a state funeral.

Before she passed away, she spoke to her husband, who was dying to save her. She told him they had had a good life. She counted it out — the children, what a blessing they had been, the good life, the years together — and then she said, *and you've got to let me go.* A friend told Dodd it just broke him, because he knew it was true. Letting her go would require that he experience a loneliness he did not want. But that very loneliness was all about their having leaned into each other for all those years, having blessed the people around them by their willingness to be vulnerable. That love cost them this pain, and the pain was worth it.

They didn't run from loneliness. They had it. They felt it. It drew them together. It made them fight through the hurts and pains. The circumstances under which they married were circumstances most people would say wouldn't last — they were married young — and it became one of the relationships Dodd admired most in his life. He knew nothing of their history, only that they dealt with loneliness and their loneliness turned into need of each other, and their intimacy was a blessing, and that intimacy spread out into good things.

The alternative is apathy

What that husband refused was apathy. He was deeply affected by the loss of his wife and by the loneliness he felt without her. He could have run early, and he didn't. What a blessing to pay that price.

Apathy is where we end up when we won't feel. And apathy is not hatred — there's a great power to it. It's cowardice. It takes an enormous amount of energy to stay apathetic. It takes a lot of mood-altering experiences: drugs and alcohol, destruction, power, removal, isolation, revenge, harming others. A lot of TV.

"That's what the lonely's for"

The invitation is not to *be* lonely so much as to be willing to *feel* lonely and let it do its work. If you're patient with it over time, if you stay in the feeling and stay connected in it, you awaken to the gift of it, which is intimacy.

Dodd points to a song by the Asheville singer-songwriter David Wilcox, "That's What the Lonely's For." Wilcox wrote it after walking through the Biltmore — the largest house in America, and only a summer home — thinking, *who would build a house like this?* So big, so empty. The song pictures the heart's desire as a castle you have to keep, splendid and drafty with lonely, and takes the feeling of an empty room as a sign by design: if I feel hollow, that's proof there's more for me to follow. That's what the lonely's for.

What the ache awakens

We are emotional, spiritual, creative creatures who find fulfillment through relationship with ourselves, others, and God — and there is a loneliness attached to each.

The first is loneliness for myself, which means head and heart connection and expression: connecting my head and my heart and then expressing that before myself and to the world. Identification of what I'm feeling. Exploration — where is this coming from, and what do I want to do with it, and who do I tell? Identification, exploration, expression.

We are clearly made for connection; the science of it now is mind-blowing. And of course we'll mess it up — Dodd promises we're going to mess it up. But we are made for the head and the heart to be connected and to find expression. The frontal lobe is in our heads in order to articulate the dreams of the heart — desire, longings, hope, needs, feelings, and the imagination that comes out of those. People get wounded early and try to find a way to stay away from the connection we're made to have, which means we fight for connection in other ways. So we have to get back to starting with ourselves, because my relationship with others and with God starts with me. I have to have something of a self in order to be vulnerable enough to connect to the presence of others.

The second is my relationship with others — intimacy as "into me see." My request for you to *into me see*, and in that, to be accepted as I am and also to matter to you.

Loneliness that leads to relationship with self and others

Relationship is dialogic — a giving and receiving in which the other person also illuminates who I am with myself. In really good marriages, and it is amazing that marriages work at all, the partner can actually open the eyes of the other person who cannot see themselves as clearly as they wish to. No one can see the back of their own head. Trust and intimacy allow a person to say that being with this other person is going to show me more about me, and it is also going to let me be in relationship with you.

So loneliness first calls a person into relationship with self, and then into relationship with others.

Loneliness for God

Loneliness also calls us into relationship with what Dodd calls the cosmos. But because we are relational, the cosmos has to translate into God, and God has to translate into relational. God has to be a relational God, or else we cannot have closeness with God except as a concept. God has to address our hearts and be in personal relationship with us for us to have an experience of God.

To be in that experience, we have to be vulnerable to it. Which means the only way to really be in relationship with God is to struggle with God — even, like the Old Testament prophets, to challenge God: where are you, when are you coming, where did you go, how come I don't see you or feel you, how could I believe in you if such and such. Those challenges lead us to the questions of life, and to saying, I want to go to Nineveh. God's presence meets us in our neediness.

Solitude and isolation

There is a difference between isolation and solitude. There are times when a person is lonely for himself — I need to be with me, to sit with me, to talk with me, to look at me, to write with me. We are so relational that solitude always leads somewhere. That is how you know the difference between the two. When I am in solitude, it is always going to lead to a conversation of wonder, and wonder always leads to a conversation of questions, and those questions are always wondering about and asking God. Solitude leads us back into relationship with God, and even into imaginative conversations with people we are concerned about, care about, wish to be with, want to know.

Isolation is what we do to get away from being in solitude. A person can be alone — with no one — in two entirely different ways: one form of aloneness leads us into relationship, the other leads us farther away from ourselves. The distance between aloneness and loneliness is a width that can turn into a chasm.

A man can sit by himself on a bench and passersby will look at him and think how alone and pitiful he looks, when in fact he has a whole crowd with him — he is truly in solitude, having conversations, in presence with himself. Or he can sit on that same bench in a multitude of people and be genuinely alone, not known. Dodd recalls a remark of Janis Joplin's shortly before she died — that she had just been applauded by twenty thousand people and had never been more alone than in that circumstance. She died of loneliness that was never addressed. The record says drug overdose, but it is loneliness.

The fourth loneliness: creative expression

Lonely for me leads to me with me. Lonely for others leads to intimacy with others. Lonely for God awakens me to my need for God. And the outcome of all of this is the need for creative expression. We have a longing to create, to make of the earth something that offers and gives, to participate in the unfolding.

You can tell when you are forcing it and when you are in the flow. The flow is getting in rhythm with the unfolding that is already happening, the expression that is already coming true. But it really has to come out of lonely me, connected with others, connected with God. Then there is a sentence that has to be spoken, a painting that has to be made, a tree house that needs to be built, a rock wall that needs to be laid. Something has to come out of it for the conversation to continue. I have to participate in the grand unfolding of the universe. I am lonely to make something, to see something, to know that I was here. And that loneliness of creation, that need to create, leads to gladness — a sense of completion or fulfillment.

When giftedness becomes a place to hide

Even our greatest gifts can be used to escape loneliness for relationships. Many physicians find their greatest gift in the operating room, and it becomes the only place they do not feel lonely. A person can become one-dimensional, lonely inside his own giftedness, and then has to work to know who he is.

This is why the fourth loneliness is the last one to be attended to. Relationship with the earth comes last, because otherwise your work and your creativity will become your worth. And your worth is made to be in relationships, not in your production. Consider parenting: a man is truly, deeply successful if he raises children who can live fully in relationship and go out upon the earth living in relationship with self, others, and God, and create upon the earth. He helped form human beings. But unless he can really see that the worth is in relationship, he will have wasted his life. We are made to work, and our greatest creative expression is the relationships we live in today.

In that sense the greatest creativity is collaborative rather than solitary. Even when the collaboration is between God and me — as the saying goes, art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the artist's job is to get out of the way, to bring himself to it without interpreting or interrupting the work of God. Let the process take over, which means something else is in charge rather than my being in charge.

All of it brings us back to the fact that we are made to live in the pain and struggle of compassion, desperation, and celebration — and we can only do that because we care so much, because we are living in relationship, and because we let the loneliness do its work.

Truth comes true in what seems opposite

Some of the deepest things arrive by way of their apparent opposites. In desperation and pain — and in celebration — we find something beautiful, more beautiful than anything we would have found by trying to avoid it. But the point is not to manufacture suffering. Go try to produce pain on purpose and you will not find what is there.

What we miss in the name of shoulds

It is easy to get trapped in the idea that work, worth, and production are what matter most: you have a gift, or an opportunity, or a responsibility — therefore you must perform, produce, get it done. One husband, looking back over his own history, recalled his wife's summary of their years together: "I've spent a lot of time missing you." For a long time he heard that as an accusation and assumed the answer was more effort — that he had to do this or that or he wasn't really caring for her. He loves to work; he loves to create. But over time he heard something different in what she said. She told him, "I will never get enough of you. I love being with you. I miss you." He had heard a *should*; it was actually a desire of her heart. That recognition is a form of completion.

It is amazing how much relationship we will let ourselves miss in the name of things we think we have to do, or because we are living under shoulds. Dodd notes that he is talking with several doctors about taking the risk of looking into what a sabbatical could mean for them. It sounds easy and it isn't — there would be a great deal of detoxification, and a good deal of stress along with it. But consider how much life gets missed that did not have to be missed. Once a man sees it, he wants to make sure he doesn't miss any more than he already has.

Loneliness, apathy, and the call to create

Loneliness, if we don't attend to it, has to be medicated, and that will lead us into a true form of apathy — which is the petri dish of evil. Apathy is where evil grows; apathy and evil are twins. Stoicism, too, is a form of leading us toward evil.

But if I will attend to my loneliness and let it inform me, it moves me into relationship with myself, relationship with others, and relationship with God. Within that relational triad I will be able to create, drawn and called to make something — and there will be great fulfillment in it, along with the awakening that this is not all there is to do. My wife missed me; I missed her.

The more that gets received, the more creativity flows in both directions. His wife now keeps a garden inside the house, including a tree with plants on it, and she told him that morning, "I love that you want me to create." Frankly, he gets more that way — more of the produce.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the loneliness module. Or explore all eight feelings.