The Loneliness of Self-Sufficiency

The dating app is open again. You scroll for a few minutes, feel nothing, close it. Maybe you'll try again tomorrow. You're not sure what you're looking for, exactly, only that you never seem to find it. The faces blur together. Everyone's profile sounds the same. You tell yourself the problem is the platform, the algorithm, the particular city you live in, the dating pool at your age.

Or: Plans get canceled and the relief is immediate, physical. Your shoulders drop. The evening opens up. You tell yourself you needed the quiet anyway, and maybe you did.

But later, sometimes, there's something else. Lying in bed, a hollow feeling you don't quite have language for. You're not unhappy, exactly. You're just aware of an absence.

The same week can hold both: the certainty that you're fine alone and the longing that catches you off guard in the grocery store checkout line. You want connection. You also find it exhausting. These two things coexist, pulling against each other in ways that are hard to explain even to yourself.

The logic of self-protection

If you grew up learning that closeness came with conditions, or that expressing need invited rejection, or that the people who were supposed to be safe were unpredictable or simply not there, your nervous system adapted. It got good at not needing. At managing alone. At maintaining a surface that didn't ask too much of anyone.

This wasn't a choice you made. It was a survival strategy, and it worked. The child who learns not to burden others, who learns to get by without comfort, who keeps things easy, that child often does well. They get praised for being independent, mature for their age. They build impressive lives. They become adults who function well on the outside and wonder, privately, when the life they actually wanted is supposed to begin.

But the adaptation that protected you then can cost you now. The walls that kept danger out also keep intimacy at a distance.

Not always the easy child

Not everyone with this pattern was quiet and compliant. Some people have plenty of access to their anger. They can be impatient, short-fused, quick to find fault. The distance still gets maintained, just through a different door.

If this was you, you weren't the one who disappeared into the background. Maybe you protested when something was unfair. Maybe you got sent to your room until you could behave yourself, or sat in the hall for speaking up in class. The anger didn't get you what you needed either. It wasn't met with curiosity. No one wondered what was underneath. So you learned that nothing, not compliance and not protest, would bring the connection you were looking for.

The anger may still come easily now. What's harder to access is what lives beneath it. When someone stays with anger long enough in the body, really stays with it, something often shifts. The clenched fist softens. What comes next, quietly, is grief. A feeling of being very small. And alone.

That's what the anger has been protecting. Sadness asks to be met in a way that anger doesn't.

A particular kind of constriction

There's a pattern that often shows up in people who learned early that their needs wouldn't be met reliably. It's a kind of tightening, a pulling inward. Not dramatic, not visible to most people who know them. But persistent.

It looks like having standards that no one ever quite meets. Like scrolling past profile after profile and finding something wrong with each one. Like leaving a date relieved it's over and telling yourself they just weren't right, without examining the relief too closely. Like being hungry and sitting in front of a full plate and finding none of it appealing.

The constriction isn't about being picky. It's protective. If you never let yourself want what's available, you never have to risk being disappointed again. The nervous system learned long ago that wanting leads to hurt, so it narrows the aperture. It finds reasons to say no before vulnerability can get in.

Why you might feel like you're speaking a different language

There's another dimension to this pattern that rarely gets named. Connection doesn't happen primarily through words. It happens through tone, facial expression, timing, the micro-adjustments two nervous systems make in each other's presence. It's mediated by the parts of us that read faces, sense shifts in the room, feel our way toward or away from another person.

But if you grew up with caregivers who were emotionally unavailable or dismissing, those capacities may not have been nurtured the way they needed to be. The relational circuits that help us feel our way into connection didn't get the same development as the circuits for thinking, analyzing, achieving.

So you may have developed extraordinary capacities for logic, language, problem-solving. You're articulate. You're good at your job. You can think your way through most things. But when it comes to the nonverbal, felt-sense territory of intimacy, you're working with less. Not because something is wrong with you, but because those neural pathways need relationship to develop, and the early relationships didn't provide it.

This is part of why connection can feel like operating in a foreign country. Other people seem to navigate social situations with an ease that mystifies you. What looks effortless to them requires conscious effort from you, and even then you're not sure you're getting it right.

The body keeps the truth

Here's the part that makes this a somatic issue, not just a psychological one. People with this pattern often say they're fine. They believe it. They've built lives that look fine. But physiological research tells a different story. Their bodies register distress they're not consciously feeling. Heart rate, stress hormones, muscle tension: these tell the truth even when the mind has learned to override it.

That hollow feeling after the canceled plans? That's the body telling the truth the mind has learned to dismiss.

What can shift

Attachment patterns aren't fixed. This is one of the more hopeful findings from decades of research. People who learned early that closeness was dangerous, that needing others was a vulnerability to be managed, can learn something different later. Researchers call this earned security. It's real, and it changes not just how people relate to others but how they feel inside their own skin.

But it doesn't happen through willpower. It doesn't happen by forcing yourself to be more social, or by swiping more aggressively, or by deciding to just put yourself out there. Those approaches ignore the body, which is where the original learning lives. The constriction pattern isn't a thinking problem. It's a nervous system problem. The mind may want connection, but the body braces against it.

What shifts this is slower and less dramatic than insight. It involves noticing what happens in your body when closeness approaches. The subtle tightening. The urge to pull back. Building tolerance for the discomfort of being seen without immediately finding a way to manage or minimize it. Finding relationships, including therapeutic ones, where connection doesn't require you to abandon yourself, where someone else's presence doesn't feel like a demand.

The protective strategies that served you once can soften when they're no longer necessary. The nervous system can learn that what was true then is not true now. This takes time and patience and a willingness to feel things that got pushed aside long ago. It takes the body, not just the mind.

If this sounds familiar, somatic therapy might be worth exploring.

Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.