We spend a lot of time trying hard not to be alone, perhaps not to feel the pain of being alone.  Tanya Davis turns this logic on its head.  She suggests that the path away from the pain of being alone – is by embracing our aloneness.  And when we learn to be comfortable with ourselves, then the world can begin to open up to us.

You are, after all, the most important person for you to be in relationship with.

The promotion your boss told you that you were in line for goes to another colleague. “I will never get anywhere,” you tell yourself.

“I look around and see nothing but happy people,” you say to a friend over coffee. “Why doesn’t anything good ever happen to me?”

Its not just the telling ourselves that nothing good ever happens to us, but often these types of events bring up strong, uncomfortable feelings of real loss. We don’t just roll our eyes and say to ourselves “Oh I will NEVER get a date…,” we actually, genuinely, feel that way. The logic is incontrovertible: we have yet to have a relationship, this guy is ignoring us, we’re getting older, therefore…we are most likely headed to a life of loneliness. All the work we have done on ourselves (or for our career, whatever…) is futile. FEELS futile. From every possible angle of looking at it, actually IS futile.

I call this particular pattern of thinking and the accompanying feelings of hurt and loss “jumping to the loss.” We take one look at a disappointing situation, and the next thing we do is jump down into an uncomfortable pit with steep sides and quite likely something smelly at the bottom. Rationally, we know we’re not in a pit – but unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to help. The felt body/mind experience is in fact that of REALLY being in a deep, dark pit.

Jumping to the loss really can interfere with genuine progress. Jumping to the loss after not getting that job promotion could very well lead to not recognizing the next opportunity that rolls around. Giving up on that boy who didn’t call you back sets you up for not being open to his legitimate excuse (ok, if there is one!).

So what to do? During experiences of jumping to the loss, the traditional therapy dictum of “getting in touch with your feelings” doesn’t really help. The feelings are TOO real. At this point, you need to get out of them. Here are some techniques for getting out of that exaggerated sense of loss:

~ Remind yourself of past times when you have felt this way, and then ALSO remind yourself of the times that you have felt better. For example, it really is good to remember the painful nights of not sleeping after that guy dumped you – and then, just as importantly, remember the month after when you couldn’t remember his name.

~ Get out of your head. So often, jumping to the loss is a result of getting caught up in our head with our own story lines. “I should NEVER have done this. I was so stupid to get my hopes up. What the hell was I thinking?” Don’t go there – it’s not worth it. Drop out of your head and check in with your body – what does it feel? How is your chest? Your neck and shoulders? Your tummy?

~ Do something generative. Call a friend, update your profile on Match.com, or re-do your resume. Knit something. Cook a meal. Take a hike. These simple generative acts often sooth those strong feelings that nothing good will ever happen.

~ Finally, recognize this for the pattern that it is. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will go away on its own naturally if we don’t hold on to the negative feelings. Really. It will go away.

Many people interpret the word “accept” to mean something that involves loss. There’s a definite sense that to accept inherently implies defeat – that accepting involves giving in to feeling worse.  On the one hand, this is quite reasonable – if one is depressed, even just admitting we are depressed can further open the floodgates of sadness. On the other hand, without acceptance change never happens.  Without acceptance, we’re just expending energy pushing something away, not actually changing it.

Acceptance does not mean giving up.  It is much more dynamic than that.  It involves precision, clarity, courage – the willingness to look honestly at what is.  Acceptance is active, and in that sense, provides momentum for change to happen. The precision, clarity, and courage of acceptance, actually empowers us to make change happen, but first we have to do the work necessary to accept our current reality exactly as it is—without denial, exaggeration or hesitation.

Let me give an example.  If you wanted to cross a busy street (and stay alive), you first would stand on the sidewalk, watching, waiting, and seeing what the traffic patterns are, where the crosswalk is, and what the signals say.  When the traffic has cleared or come to a stop, then you cross safely to the other side.

Acceptance is that first piece – waiting, looking, seeing what the traffic patterns are, putting together a strategy to get to the other side of the street without getting hit by a taxi cab or a hockey mom.  Acceptance is NOT going out into the middle of the road, lying down and saying, “Go ahead, traffic.  You might as well run over me.”  That’s something very different from acceptance.  Nor is acceptance refusing to stop at the curb, rushing blindly out into the road, praying to your Higher Power to keep you safe while you madly dodge the oncoming cars and truck and busses.

Acceptance may appear to involve some sense of loss: “I want to cross the street right now but I have to wait until the traffic stops,” or, “I want to get over this failed relationship but to do so I have to admit that I’m alone again.”  Pushing away the alone-ness doesn’t actually help.  Looking at the alone-ness, accepting the alone-ness, provides the very ground whereupon change can take place.  It focuses our energy on the one spot where change can really begin to effect change—the present moment and our life as it truly is right now.

Pema Chodron puts this very well in her book The Places that Scare You (Shambhala Classics, 2002):

“Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die?  This is a reasonable question.  Trying to change ourselves doesn’t work in the long run because we’re resisting our own energy.  Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion.  Right here in what we’d like to throw away, in what we find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of awakened heart.”   p. 24, The Places that Scare You, by Pema Chodron

One of the most interesting things that I’ve noticed in the years I’ve been doing therapy is how each of us has a tendency to recreate that which we are trying to avoid altogether. In trying to avoid what we fear, we back into it, and find our actions have somehow recreated the very scenario we were trying to avoid. Like a bad dream, we see our fear up ahead on the road, and start backing away from it, only to back right into it:

• People with addictions are sometimes so terrified of being thought of as an addict that they won’t seek treatment – and the addiction grows
• Someone who is unhappily employed may be afraid of not being able to find a satisfying job – so they stay in their current position, dissatisfied.
• A person afraid of their angry feelings vows to be peaceful at any cost, and ends up seething with resentment.

Backing away from fear doesn’t seem to work. Standing still doesn’t seem to work either. Fear grows in proportion to how much energy we put into ignoring it. The more we side step our fear, the more it grows, and as it grows, so does our desire to ignore it until – wham! – we back right into it, and can no longer avoid it.

Counseling is an opportunity to slowly move towards the fear, to explore it, to develop a healthy curiosity about it. Just as ignoring fear somehow gives the fear energy, moving towards the fear eventually leads to a lessening of its power over us, and confidence – fearlessness – begins to grow. Not only does the fear dissipate, we may actually discover that underneath it there is wisdom.