People who have had complex or difficult lives often find themselves feeling alone even when things are going well. Here are some thoughts about why, and a simple procedure that might help. Unless, that is, you like feeling alone. Some people do.

1.     At the really bad end of life you can experience extreme social, economic and emotional pressure. Your focus narrows to what you perceive as immediate threats. Thoughts of the future become unbelievable or unreal (which sometimes protects them): your sense of time contracts. The past seems to merge with the present. There is no luxury of deliberation because there can’t be. You need to be like this.

2.     At the amazing end, things are different. Your sense of time opens out. Play, care, and curiosity become more possible. Plans can be made. Relationships can be tended. Faith, hope, and trust return as ways of being in relation to a future that has not yet arrived and that feels worth moving toward.

3.     People occupy different bands of this scale. Someone who has moved from very bad conditions to generally good ones carries the full width of that range in their neurobiology. The bandwidth is wide. Someone who has lived near the good end throughout operates within a much narrower band. Neither can fully see how much the other’s range is shaping the way they respond. 

4.     Pockets of care, play, and bonding exist at every point on the scale, including the really bad end. They are not exclusive to safety and comfort. But at the bad end they are can be more compressed, harder to access, shorter, more easily disrupted and unlikely to feel predictably available. 

5.     Someone who works their way from the bad end to the good end may still, under pressure, find themselves responding from the bad end. For example, something unexpected happens, or someone you love needs help. You decide what to do quickly, without telling anyone. Your nervous system, weighted towards appreiating life as it played out many times while it was forming, when you were young, misreads the present situation as needing emergency action. There's nothing irrational going on: just something out of synch. 

6.     Fast problem-solving was necessary when life was consistently difficult. Acting quickly, deciding alone, not waiting, not consulting — all of that was crucial. Bringing tall of this into a relationship at the good end disrupts communication and bonding. The speed that once provided protection now gets in the way: it isolates and disrupts. What is needed is the capacity to slow down when the danger is not, in fact, real.

7.     Saying "I’m not sure" or "I don’t know" is your ticket out of this kind of trouble. It creates a holding pattern. It heads off the fast-response loop learned in the past and makes space to include someone else in whatever decisions get made.