Isolation: When Pain Has Nowhere to Go
We all carry parts of ourselves that feel too complicated, too intense, or too unacceptable to share. Most of us have learned, in some way, that certain feelings should stay hidden. We tuck them away quietly and hope they’ll fade on their own.
But pain doesn’t fade in isolation. It grows louder.
Irvin Yalom, an existential psychiatrist and writer whose work has deeply impacted me, includes isolation as one of the four ultimate concerns of existence. Along with death, freedom, and meaning, it shapes much of what we wrestle with as human beings. It’s so much more than loneliness. Loneliness is feeling the absence of others. Isolation is knowing that nobody can ever fully understand what it’s like to be me.
It’s easy to overlook loneliness as a serious cause of suffering, but it’s one of the strongest amplifiers of psychological pain. Have you ever been in a room full of people and still felt completely alone? That’s isolation. It’s not just an emotion; it’s an echo chamber for pain. Whatever hurts becomes harder to bear when we have no one to connect with about it, no one who seems to understand, no one who can sit with us in it.
When someone is depressed, they often withdraw, and that withdrawal deepens the depression. The spiral grows tighter, darker, harder to reach.
Being seen, understood, or simply sat with right where we are doesn’t make the pain vanish. But it does keep us within a range of experience we can survive and eventually move through. It reminds us that even when we feel separate, connection is still possible.
We also live in a time when fear keeps pushing us further apart. We’re dealing with lingering isolation from the pandemic, the separating distance created by our screens and devices, and avoidance of others fueled by fear and division. It’s as important as ever to push back against isolation with connection. To keep showing up for one another, even when it feels uncomfortable or uncertain.
That connection can take many forms. A friend who listens. A loved one who stays close. Or the steady presence of a therapist who helps make sense of what feels unbearable. Being met in the middle of a crisis doesn’t fix everything at once, but it begins the process of grounding. It helps steady what feels overwhelming so that healing, in whatever form it takes, can begin to grow.
We heal through connection. Not by erasing what hurts, but by sharing the weight of it.
