106: why do I always feel alone? healing from the feeling of loneliness

Travel

Oct 2

Why do so many of us feel alone? Why do we feel alone even when we are with other people? Where does this feeling of loneliness come from? In this episode, I answer a question from a listener who is wondering why they always feel lonely. I discuss the feeling of loneliness, how it is present for so many of us, and how we can begin to heal, feel, and process feeling lonely. My intention for this episode is to offer you a new view on feeling lonely as well as help you to feel less alone, no matter where you are on your own healing journey. I also give a life update and discuss my own healing journey.

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Book Recommendations 📚

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

Recommended Episodes 🎙️

Helpful Resources ✨

self love affirmations

Timestamps ⏱️

Introduction: 0:15
Life Update: 4:07
Listener Question: 16:54
Outro: 41:27

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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Castmagic. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:01]:
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started. Hi there, beautiful soul. My name is Amanda Durocher, and this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the healing journey. I don't believe I have all the answers you seek. I believe you have the answers.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:26]:
You just may need a new view and a little help along the way. Welcome back to new view advice. This is the first episode of season 5. I've decided to call this season 5. My seasons are a little sporadic. They go with my own healing journey. Honestly, I tend to end seasons when I need a break from the podcast because I need some time to go internal. This was my longest break yet.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:46]:
If you're listening to this in the present, I took 3 months off. If you just found the podcast a year from now, you wouldn't even have known that I took 3 months off the podcast. But I'm sharing that with you here anyways because I'm gonna give a life update at the beginning of the episode. And I don't always give life updates. I occasionally do. But I've decided to give a life update because I am sorry for anybody who felt like I ghosted you this summer. I felt like I ghosted my own community. I felt like I dropped an episode, and then I never said, hey.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:14]:
This is the end of season 4. Usually, I give a little heads up that I'm taking a break. Usually, I'll post something on my Instagram. This time, I posted nothing. I just sort of fell off the grid. And that was what my summer was. It was very internal. I'll talk more about it.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:29]:
But I do wanna apologize. I received so many emails and messages from people just being like, hey. Hope you're okay. And I didn't respond to those. So I just wanna thank everybody who sent them because it really did mean a lot to me to receive those messages, and it was really encouraging for me to keep moving forward. And it did mean a lot. I just didn't respond because I honestly didn't speak to many people this summer. It was a very, very internal summer for me.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:51]:
I was processing 3 very difficult things, which, again, I will speak more of. But I just wanna thank you, and I'm sorry if anybody felt ghosted and abandoned by me. That was never the intention. So I'm just gonna give you a little life update. They always make me a little uncomfortable, but I hope it's helpful for somebody. And it'll be helpful for me too, to be honest. I think that the things I worked through, I felt a lot of secrecy around. I felt really uncomfortable speaking about for a really long time.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:16]:
And I have found having this podcast that truly speaking these things I've survived is a helpful part of my own healing journey. So thank you for witnessing me. Thank you for allowing me to heal right alongside with you with this podcast. It's incredibly humbling and also just such an honor to be here with you and to connect with you. I connected with just a few people this summer who reached out via email and wanted to connect, and it was always so encouraging for my heart to be right alongside you on this healing journey. We really are not alone even though we feel alone, which is a great intro for today's topic, which is I am answering a question from a listener about the feeling of loneliness. This question is about feeling lonely no matter where you are. And I think so many of us relate to the feeling of always feeling lonely.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:01]:
You could be in a room with a 100 people and still feel lonely. You could be in a room with your significant other and still feel lonely. Feeling like you don't belong anywhere. And so if you relate to this feeling of loneliness, feeling lonely no matter where you are, just carrying this feeling of feeling alone, today's a great episode for you because we're gonna be talking about where does that come from, why do we feel that way, and how do we begin to heal that feeling of separation? That's how I view it. It's really feeling separate from others and from yourself really is what I found is that the more lonely I feel, it really reflects a separation within myself and my own heart. So today I hope to offer you a new view on the feeling of feeling alone and helping you to feel less alone and also to know there's nothing wrong with you if you've found you feel this way throughout your own life. So as I mentioned, I'm going to give a quick life update. If you're not interested, if you're new here, if you just don't care, no worries.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:54]:
Check the time stamps and it'll pinpoint you to where the question begins. So let's jump on in to today's episode. I wanted to share a life update with all of you because I like to share my own healing journey. I often get the feedback that sharing my own journey and being vulnerable with you about what I'm navigating is actually the most helpful thing I do on the podcast, so I do like to be honest about my own healing journey. This summer I was navigating an identity crisis. In the spring I reached a new point in my healing journey where I felt at peace with a lot of things I hadn't felt at peace with before. And a lot of that did with being raped and sexually assaulted in my youth. I felt more at peace with that than ever before.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:39]:
And what that means for me is that I've really struggled with PTSD and suicidal thoughts. Those are 2 things that have been very present with me for the last 5 years. The PTSD flashbacks of reliving what happened to me and getting images of what I survived and also having the thoughts of killing myself when those images would arise. And that has not happened since March of this year. Right around the spring equinox, I entered a new chapter of my life. And when this happened, I felt so good, obviously. I felt like there was all this brain space I had never had before, all this space for new thoughts, which was so beautiful. But then it led to an identity crisis of, wait, now I have to live and I have all these years, what am I gonna do my life? What am I doing? Do I like what I'm doing? Do I like anything about myself? And a lot of negative self talk began to arise.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:32]:
A lot of being hard on myself, self doubt, a lot of negativity began to arise in this new place that I was in which I didn't expect. But, again, life is a journey and so this was part of my journey. And so this summer, I had to look at 3 difficult things that were plaguing me and that I finally felt like I had the strength to look at. There are things that have arisen before, but I just wasn't ready. You know? Anybody on the journey can relate to, oh, yeah. I wasn't ready to look at that yet. When you are ready, you'll know. Your body will tell you.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:02]:
Your soul will tell you. Your heart will tell you when you're ready. And these are things I had kind of been running from. And I view them like a braid where these three things were braided together and they needed to be looked at together. And they were 3 things that I view them at the bottom of my barrel of the past. Right? So I have been sifting through the past and cleaning out this barrel within my body and these three things were, like, caked on the bottom and needed to be looked at together. And these three things were, 1, the way my family did not support me throughout my trauma and how they were unable to support me and how I was treated as a child. There was a lot to be looked at there.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:43]:
That was braided with the suicidal thoughts and having to forgive myself for being suicidal and seeing the times that I had actually come close to taking my own life and forgiving myself for that. As I was navigating suicidal thoughts, I couldn't actually look at how close I came to taking my own life. And it breaks my heart talking about it right now. I am not devoid of feeling as I talk about this. I want you to know this is very hard for me and my heart hurts as I speak these things. And then the third thing was I don't know if I've talked about it on the podcast, but part of my gang rape was being strangled. So I was strangled by one of my peers. He was 2 years older than me so sometimes I don't know what to call him.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:25]:
Wasn't quite a classmate, but he was in school with me for 2 years that were excruciatingly painful. And so the strangulation was something I had really, really avoided. And so how did I know I had to look at these three things? I began to feel suffocated in my life. The words I kept using are I can't breathe in my life. I can't speak. I can't function. I'm suffocating. I am trapped.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:49]:
These were these feelings that were arising and at first I didn't quite realize why. And then the PTSD flashback started again. And so I've talked a lot about on the podcast how I suffered from repressed memories. So the trauma I experienced in my youth, I repressed, and it started coming back in my twenties. It was the craziest thing I've ever experienced. I am so sorry if you've experienced repressed memories or any trauma at all. Honestly, I'm very sorry. It's a very painful journey being a trauma survivor.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:15]:
But as I was navigating this identity crisis, I was coming to terms with being a trauma survivor, that everything I survived is very real, that I am a very honest person, and that this journey was just as hard as it felt a lot of times because so much of my youth was negated and was said to be untrue. So when I'd have a negative emotion in my childhood, somebody would say to me, that's not real or you're overreacting or you're being too dramatic or your feeling isn't valid. And because of that, it's been hard for me to validate myself throughout my journey because I've had those voices of my past in my head as I've been healing. So I bring this up only because the last memory to come back was of being strangled. It came back in pieces. I've talked about this a lot in therapy, and it is what happens when you survive extreme trauma is oftentimes you're given a piece of it at a time because the whole thing itself is overwhelming. So for me, at first, I would wake up from naps suffocating like I couldn't breathe. Then I would experience being suffocated in my sleep.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:17]:
And then the image of somebody's hands around my neck and the look of extreme hatred was the last thing to come back, and it is scarred in my brain. Painful, painful image. So I share this here because, as you can imagine, I lost my voice this summer. I didn't have anything to say as I navigated this. This experience of being strangled was really in my body. If anyone's read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, he talks about how the body holds onto the trauma. And this book was so validating on my experience because I saw myself for the first time when I read this book many years ago and the experience of surviving extreme trauma. But the experience of being strangled was stuck in my body, and I needed to look at it.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:03]:
I needed to heal it. I needed to process it. I can tell you right now I can see my own healing because when I brought it up to my therapist couple months ago, I could barely utter the words. I couldn't even get it out without crying. I couldn't talk about it. I felt crazy, And this did with the first person I told about it, invalidated me, told me that it wasn't true, that they didn't remember anything like that happening to me. So I buried it. So I didn't look at it because one thing to know about trauma survivors or if you are a trauma survivor, you understand that that first time you get the courage to tell somebody is so vulnerable.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:36]:
And I've found when people are able to see me in that moment, it's healing and the shame can be lifted and healing can begin. Or if somebody invalidates me in that moment, it sends me right into like a hole and it'll take time for me to come back out of that hole again. And that's kind of what happened with this trauma of being strangled. And, anyways, it was extremely painful to look at. It required a lot of different types of self care I hadn't really dived into before. It involved a lot of chanting and involved a lot of somatic releasing through my voice And working with trauma professionals, it involved a lot of yoga, and it just involved a lot. I've been working with 2 therapists because it's been important for me to talk about it and to talk about my experience and to be validated in my experience instead of invalidated. And it took a lot of time.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:25]:
Honestly, I'm really proud of myself as in I look back and I'm like, wow. I did a lot of work in 3 months, but the summer felt excruciating. It was so painful. Honestly, I kept being like, what do I wish for my community? And my hope is that you had a more enjoyable summer, but just as transformative because I do wanna honor myself. And the truth is, as I talk about this, I can feel I'm probably not speaking from the right place. I'm probably speaking a little throaty and chesty, but I'm uncomfortable. I'm just gonna call myself out. So if you're like, oh, she sounds uncomfortable.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:54]:
I am uncomfortable talking about this. But it's just important for me to speak this because it's just part of my own healing. So as I mentioned, it was strangulation, family, and feeling invalidated throughout my journey and how much that actually impacted me. 1 week this summer, I watched 9 documentaries on sexual assault and rape, and I was struck by how many people had family members who supported them and got on these documentaries and talked. My family would never do that. And it was this moment where I really realized what I had been lacking on my own healing journey and that was the support of family and unconditional love and support, acceptance. All those things we talk about here, I think it's been so important for me to find those within and I've felt such a pressure to because I have not had it outside of me in my immediate family. As you know, my long term partner Evan has been so supportive throughout this entire process.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:45]:
So when I speak of this I'm really talking about the family I grew up with, not my current family, who I consider Evan my family. And so much of this process felt really lonely. I felt really alone. I felt like the only person who had ever had to go through this process, which is not true. So many people have families who don't support them. Makes me so sad. So many people have experienced extreme violent trauma and so many people have unfortunately struggled with suicidal thoughts. I'm actually not alone in all these things, but part of the healing journey I think is a bit lonely.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:19]:
And we'll talk more about that in today's question. But I really navigated these feelings of loneliness and why I felt lonely. And the more I healed and the more I leaned into supportive environments the less lonely I felt. In the past I've just leaned on the wrong people. I've leaned on people who don't support me and the more I sought support from places where I couldn't be supported the more lonely I felt. And this summer I really leaned into supportive environments. With my therapists. I found different healers to help me.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:50]:
Evan's been so supportive throughout this process. I let go of friendships that no longer served me because I clearly saw they weren't supporting me, and this made room for new friendships in my life of people who totally understand me and understand the experiences I've been through. And so this summer was challenging. I lost my voice for a period of time. I just couldn't speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn't create. Another thing that left me feeling suffocated and just continued to push me, lovingly push me towards processing being strangled.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:19]:
And I will say it's one of those things I thought I'd never get over. And I don't know if I'm quote unquote over it but I'm processing it. I feel better about it. I accept it. Right? Part of the healing journey is accepting that unacceptable things have happened. I can't go back in the past. I can't go back and change what happened. I have to learn how to live with it.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:39]:
And for me, learning to live with it has been healing from it, has been feeling all the feelings I wasn't able to feel then because it wasn't safe back then. It wasn't safe when I was 14 to feel all those feelings that she had. And with the suicidal thoughts, those started for me when I was 14 after being gang raped, after being strangled, after the trauma that came from that experience, which I've talked about throughout the podcast, which I will continue to talk about because it's a big part of my healing journey. But that entire experience led to suicidal thoughts, and that's a common symptom of trauma. And I'm so sorry if you also have struggled with suicidal thoughts. Your life is worthy. Life is worth living. We are all here to experience life and to feel alive.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:21]:
Part of what led to this identity crisis was that in the spring when I finally felt like I let go of suicidal thoughts, I realized how numb I had been living. I realized how much in fear I had been living. And I wanted to feel alive. And I kept asking myself, how can I feel alive? And these are the 3 things that came up for me to process in order to feel alive. Because at this point in my life, I feel life in a way I've never felt it before. I don't quite have the words to articulate it, but it finally feels like my life. I'm an adult. This is my life.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:50]:
I get to live it how I want to live it. Every decision I make is a choice that I'm making. And the more we bring conscious awareness to our thoughts and our behaviors and why we act the way we do, the more our life gets to be ours because we're living from a conscious place instead of an unconscious place. So that's my life update. I wanted to share because I know people here understand. Many people in the world would not understand what I just shared and they'd be very confused by it. Maybe that's a few of you. And if that's you, I apologize.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:20]:
I'll learn how to articulate it a bit better. This is like a new chapter I'm entering so I'm just getting the words for it. But thank you for being here. Thank you for witnessing me. It's healing to share the things we've kept inside us. And so I have found throughout my own journey all the things that have been shamed into secrecy are the things that really need to be spoken the most because when we speak them we free ourselves and there's nothing as beautiful as freedom. So with that let's jump on into today's listener question. Dear Amanda, I feel like I don't belong anywhere.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:57]:
I just realized that I've felt this way all my life. I see people belong in different places. Some are so talented, rich, educated, beautiful, famous, or so good at something. Or people belong to particular groups like religious or something else or even they're so good at their jobs so they have something they belong to. But I just don't belong anywhere. I'm just a nobody. No matter where I go or what I do, I'm always left alone. Thousands of people will be there, but I just feel invisible.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:21]:
All alone. It makes me feel so sad that I don't belong anywhere, and I don't know how to accept the fact that I don't belong anywhere. Can you please help me understand, is it okay not to belong anywhere? Thank you so much for this question. Oof. I felt my heart as I read this question. I actually read this question to Evan when I was deciding where to start the podcast this season, and we both felt it in our hearts and we both can relate to this question. It's funny that a question about being alone, you are not alone in feeling this alone. And I just wanna honor that because so many people can relate to this question and this feeling of feeling alone.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:56]:
I've actually had this conversation a few times in the past week about feeling alone or feeling different or feeling like you're the only one who's seeing a problem in the world or seeing life differently or the only one who feels certain ways. This feeling of aloneness is a very present feeling in 2024. I'm so sorry you feel this way. I'm so sorry for anybody who feels this way. I'm so sorry that I've felt this way. You know? I think a big part of beginning to look at this loneliness is recognizing the way you speak to yourself. So I invite everybody who's felt this way to take a moment and just say I'm sorry heart. I'm sorry self that I've felt this way.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:37]:
That must be incredibly painful. It is incredibly painful. It is so painful to feel alone. As humans we're meant to connect with one another. We're meant to feel connection. It's part of life. It's part of what makes us feel alive. And feeling alone and feeling isolated from others is painful.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:56]:
You know? I talked about in the intro how this summer the feeling of aloneness definitely came up for me. I think that when we feel alone, we can even begin to feel more alone because we start thinking we're the only ones who feel alone. So, again, I just wanna reiterate you're definitely not alone in feeling alone. It feels funny to say that, but it's true. So I wanna honor your self awareness here. It sounds like you're really self aware and are really practicing self awareness because not only have you noticed this feeling, we've also noticed that you've felt this way your whole life. So the first step to healing anything is awareness. We can't change how we feel if we aren't even aware of how we feel.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:32]:
So I wanna honor that though this is difficult, it's an important first step. You know, for me, this aloneness, I felt this the most in my twenties. I just wanna mention that here because I know a lot of my audience is in their twenties. I know not everybody is, so if you're not in your twenties, this is for the people in their twenties. But when I was in my twenties, like, dang, I could not figure out where I belonged, and I felt so alone. And my twenties was, like, this decade of trying on different roles. Like, I was trying to be different people that I thought other people would like. Like, oh, you want me to be funny or, oh, you want me to be, like, creative or, oh, you like this version of me.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:10]:
But that was never truthful to myself. Right? When I'm trying to be something for someone else, that would always leave me feeling lonely. So eventually, I recognized that by always trying to be someone else or playing a role that was assigned to me or playing a role that even I had taken on because I thought it would bring me friends or happiness or love by playing something other than just Amanda. I was always gonna end up feeling lonely because people weren't seeing me. And the wound of feeling unseen leads to loneliness. So many of us just desire to be seen in our authentic selves, but to be seen in our authenticity it requires us to connect back to our authenticity and that requires us to look at why we disconnected from our authenticity in the first place. Why did we start playing roles? When did we think that being something other than ourselves was what was necessary? Or when were we rejected for being ourselves? You know, so many of us change ourselves to fit in or we're afraid to be ourselves because we're afraid of not being accepted. We're afraid of rejection.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:15]:
We change ourselves in social situations or we are shy and we don't speak in social situations so nobody can see us. We don't share our point of views. We don't share our opinions or we conform. I see so many people who conform today. You know? I go on the Internet and I just see a lot of people saying the same thing over and over again. And not that people are wrong with what they're saying, but everybody has a different voice. And when you're hearing the same message in the same way over and over again, there's something inauthentic about it because we don't all sound the same. We're all different.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:46]:
We all have a unique way of seeing the world because we've all had unique experiences and a unique way of living. But that also requires us living and getting out of our comfort zones and connecting to ourselves and taking those risks, which I think helps us to feel less alone, is by being vulnerable. And it can feel really risky and scary to be vulnerable. But before we jump into being vulnerable and embracing the unique you, I do wanna say that one, you do belong here my love. I just wanna really stress that because your question was actually, is it okay not to belong? And you belong here. You do belong. You have people who are going to love you if they're not already in your life or you have people who do love you and you're struggling to see that. Both can be true at the same time.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:29]:
Like I mentioned this summer, I had to let some people go. I had to cut some ties with some people in my life who were never gonna see me. They were non empathetic people. And they were never gonna see me. They were never gonna love me. I think they struggle to love themselves. I've chosen not to judge it. I just knew what was best for me.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:43]:
But also the more I began to see myself and why I was feeling lonely and all these difficult things, the more I accepted the love that was in my life. The more the relationships that were good for me deepened in my life. I share that because you do belong. And it's also okay to feel like you don't belong. Because, as I mentioned, I felt that way so much throughout my twenties that I didn't belong anywhere. But I kept looking in the wrong places. And the truth is, some of us are a little different. I'm a funky person.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:13]:
I am not everybody's cup of tea. And, I used to want to be normal so bad. All I wanted to be was normal. I don't even know what normal is. Because the truth is I think we're all crazy unique in, like, the most beautiful way. I really think we're like Rihanna says, we're all a diamond in the sky. And it's our journey as humans to embrace that diamond. And the more we embrace the diamond that we are, the more we will attract the people who can see us as the unique, beautiful diamond that we are.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:43]:
But so much of society, and what I think is normal, is hiding our diamond. It's hiding our shine. It's lowering ourselves. It's hiding behind these personas and these roles that either we've assigned ourselves or that society or our family structures or our community we grew up in have given us. And when we hide our diamond, it's so easy to feel alone because we're not connected to the truth of who we are. And we wonder why people can't see the truth of who we are, and it's like because we're hiding. And so in order to not feel so lonely, it often requires us embracing vulnerability and embracing the uniqueness of who we are. And so a big part of healing loneliness is you embracing you, you loving you, you accepting you.
Amanda Durocher [00:24:28]:
And the more you do that, the more you really will attract people who see you. And with this, as you embrace your uniqueness, you're gonna find that triggers people. That's what's normal. Normal people, whatever that is, conform to societal standards that don't serve some of us. I'm a creative person. I'm also a trauma survivor. I'm also an artist, and I'm also a woman of faith. Those are the identities I've gone with recently.
Amanda Durocher [00:24:56]:
As I said, I've been navigating an identity crisis and I've been like, who am I? Those are 4 things that I know that I am. And not every environment is conducive to those 4 things. Living in a culture that is go go go and wants me to be consistent is not helpful for my creative side, for my artist side, or my trauma survivor side. Living in a world disconnected from faith is not the world I choose to live in for my woman of faith. And I only mention this because I used to engage in environments and feel very alone because I was engaging with people who were not aligned with me. If I surround myself with people who don't have faith in a higher power, that's okay and I can do that, but I can't be looking for them to have faith in a higher power. I need to see the truth of the situation I'm in. If these people do not believe in God, that's fine, but I can't be looking for them to see that part of me.
Amanda Durocher [00:25:50]:
They aren't going to. And in the past, I would look to the wrong people to see me, people who couldn't see certain things. And a big part of this for me was I'm a very empathic person and I think many people who listen to this podcast are, which is why I'm sharing this. When you are seeking empathy and you go to non empathetic people, they will not ever give you that empathy. We have to begin understanding as empathetic people that not everybody on planet Earth is empathetic. Some people really only see through their own eyes. They're actually very self centered and they only see what's best for them and they expect everybody to mirror them and they see you through them. So they're like, well, I can do this, why can't you? They're not open to seeing your point of view.
Amanda Durocher [00:26:31]:
Now knowing which people have the capacity for empathy, which people don't, is a practice of discernment. It is a trust exercise, really listening to people when you speak to them, really listening to what they are saying and how you feel when you are with these people. So my first piece of advice for this loneliness is to begin embracing the diamond within. The diamond of who you are. The diamond that Rihanna sings about in her song, Everyone is a Diamond in the Sky. This leads me into the 2nd piece of advice which is if you are struggling to embrace this diamond, if you feel triggered by your own diamond, if you don't even know what the diamond within is, I invite you to begin bringing awareness to your childhood. We talk about this a lot, but I think the feeling of loneliness, as you mentioned here, goes back to your childhood because you said you have felt this way your whole life. And many of us developed this feeling of loneliness within our families because we were not seen by our families.
Amanda Durocher [00:27:26]:
We were not unconditionally loved by our families, and our families were not capable of embracing the truth of who we are. And oftentimes in our family structures, we're assigned a role. So in my family structure, as the youngest, I was the scapegoat but I was also the emotional one. I was the one who just was always in trouble. I always did something wrong and oftentimes that wrong thing I did was have a feeling. In many of my family's problems, when somebody else felt a feeling were blamed on me. So if somebody got angry it was somehow my fault. So I took on the belief that I was responsible for other people's feelings, which is not true.
Amanda Durocher [00:28:02]:
We are each individuals and we are each responsible for our own feelings. Remember that. If so many people pleasersas I am still healing from being a people pleasertry to change other people's feelings and feel responsible for other people's feelings? No. Somebody may have a difficult emotion in front of you or even project it at you, you are still not responsible for that emotion. So I share that because if you have felt lonely since childhood, it might be that you need to look at your family structure. You may need to look at the role you were assigned in your family, how you felt with your family, how you feel with your family today, and how, maybe, the way you act in your family was not who you truly are. Right? Like, me being a troublemaker, I carried that on throughout my life. It's actually not who I am.
Amanda Durocher [00:28:47]:
I'm not really a troublemaker. I'm not a troublemaker at heart. I'm an honest person. I'm truthful and people can interpret that as being a troublemaker. But I'm not a troublemaker and I'm also not responsible for everybody's feelings. That's a belief I took on from my childhood as well. And that would leave me feeling really lonely when I would take on somebody else's feelings and I would change myself to try and make them happy, which I can do that pretty well. I can show up in a room and be something that somebody else wants to be, but that leaves me feeling so freaking alone.
Amanda Durocher [00:29:19]:
That makes me feel awful at this point. When I change myself to be what you want me to be, oh my god. It hurts me at this point. I can't do it anymore, and so as I change, other people don't like that I change. But it's because I was left feeling like shit. The other person might have felt great being in a conversation with who they wanted to be in a conversation with, but I felt awful. And this is something I specifically would do with my family, with my immediate family. I would just play the role they wanted me to play, and I would mute myself down and I wouldn't talk about my trauma because I knew they couldn't talk about my trauma.
Amanda Durocher [00:29:53]:
I would tell everybody I was okay when I wasn't okay. I played this role that just felt awful, and I was always the one who was left feeling alone. And I share that because I think so many of us that aloneness stems from childhood. This could be your family structure. This could be that you felt alone in school. Maybe you had trouble making friends. Maybe you were a little different. You know, I submerged my creative self because she wasn't what the other kids at my school were like.
Amanda Durocher [00:30:21]:
I wanted to live in a make believe place forever. I still live in a make believe place. I have characters that run through my head and I love them. I write about them. I bring them to life through writing and it's one of my greatest qualities. And I can go out and I can sit on a bench and I can see people walk by and I can create entire backstories for them. And I enjoy it and I think about them and I create these stories in my head. That's my imaginative nature and I love it.
Amanda Durocher [00:30:50]:
It feels good and it makes me laugh and it makes me happy. But that isn't something everybody does. That's my diamond. My diamond is that my imagination runs wild when I let it. It is a place that has brought me such comfort during some of my darkest times. The fact that I have this ability to connect to something magical. It's a gift. But, it was very much punished when I was younger.
Amanda Durocher [00:31:15]:
It was made to feel childish. And I lived in one of those families that when I was a child, I was being told I was childish. And as a child, I took that to mean I needed to quote unquote grow up. And throughout my life, I've continued to think I need to quote unquote grow up. And I look back and I'm like, I was a child. And even now I'm like, the world is too grown up. The world has disconnected from its childlike nature. Our childlike nature is beautiful.
Amanda Durocher [00:31:40]:
Our innocence is beautiful. Our playful nature is beautiful. And I mention that because I have a feeling a lot of your diamonds is connected to your childhood nature. Those beautiful qualities that you embraced in childhood or that are so authentic to you often live in our child selves. Our child selves know who we truly are. That's where our loving self is, our innocent nature. Those pieces of us that came in with us when we were born, that's our authenticity. And part of mine is my imagination.
Amanda Durocher [00:32:08]:
Another part is my empathy. I came out of the womb an empathetic person. It's just part of who I am. I love empathizing with others. I love seeing people fully. It's one of my best gifts that I can sit with somebody, and I get it even if I haven't experienced it. My heart just feels it. I understand it.
Amanda Durocher [00:32:25]:
And also surviving all the trauma I've been through has also made me empathetic. The more I sit with my own pain the more I can sit with somebody else's. And so I invite you to look at your own authentic nature. Look at your childhood. How you can do this is through journaling, meditation, walks in nature, working with a professional, a therapist, or someone else. Maybe you're close with your family and you can ask them what was I like as a child? You know not everybody listening is gonna relate to my story of having a traumatic childhood, but some of you do. But if you don't and you're close to your family, your family might be able to help you remember that part of yourself, and you might have changed when you entered the working world. So many people when they enter, you know, those quote, unquote adult years, they feel like they have to grow up.
Amanda Durocher [00:33:06]:
They have to take on responsibility because life has a lot of responsibility. You know? A lot of people are out there hustling, trying to survive. Crazy times we're living through. But it's important to find balance in your life between being responsible, going to work, getting up in the morning, brushing your teeth, and embracing life, living life, having fun. We're not meant to live in one place or the other. It's really about finding balance. A book I recommend for childhood is a book called Running on Empty by Jonas Webb, and this book is about healing from emotional neglect. And I read this book this summer, and I love this book, and I highly recommend this book because this is a book about what you may have been missing in your childhood.
Amanda Durocher [00:33:52]:
So it's about the things that are harder to articulate. So you may be somebody who's like, I think I had, like, the perfect family, but you feel like maybe something was missing or you feel really sad or you think about your child and like, I don't know why I was depressed. My parents were great. They were perfect. This is the book for people who maybe felt emotionally neglected or you felt like your emotions weren't met. Right? Your parents did everything right, but maybe they weren't able to see you emotionally. Anybody who liked the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, I think you'll also like this book Running on Empty because I love how this book really talks about the things that so many people were missing because it's things that we often don't know how to articulate. This author really articulates well because not everybody relates to being emotionally abused, physically abused or sexually abused as children, but they still feel like something may have been missing and this book will really help you connect and maybe see yourself.
Amanda Durocher [00:34:42]:
So I highly recommend it. I'll link it in the show notes at newbieadvice.com/106. The second thing I wanted to talk about when bringing awareness to this feeling of loneliness is really beginning to intentionally ask yourself if there was a moment in your past where you felt alone. And I think this one's important to mention here especially for trauma survivors because when we survive trauma, it can feel very lonely in the moment. There's often a moment when we're surviving trauma like sexual assault, rape, violence, and more Where all of a sudden we realize no one is coming. No one's coming. It's just us. Oh my god.
Amanda Durocher [00:35:21]:
And this is something that came up for me this summer as I mentioned with processing being strangled was that when I was being strangled it's funny with trauma, a million thoughts go through your head in a single moment, and you'll later have to untangle them 1 by 1. And one of mine was that I couldn't breathe. I was suffocating. I was dying. I was dying in the present. And it hit me with a 1,000 bricks of terror that no one was gonna step in. No one was gonna save me. I was surrounded by people.
Amanda Durocher [00:35:52]:
I was raped in the woods at I don't know if it's a party but a get together? I guess you could consider it a party. I don't know what you ever call those things in the woods. But I was raped and there were plenty of people there. There were plenty of people who could have stepped in. I I was also gang raped. There were people who raped me but it didn't get as violent as strangling me and they could've stepped in. And there was a moment when I was losing my life when I couldn't breathe that I realized no one was gonna step in. And I felt so alone.
Amanda Durocher [00:36:23]:
And this summer I had to feel that aloneness. I felt it in the bathtub for about 3 days. That's how I processed it. It's gonna be different for everybody. But that aloneness came up for me in a meditation and I just had to feel all the feelings that also went with how alone I felt. And I share that here because I know people who listen to this podcast have also experienced trauma. Not everybody, but some people have. And I invite you to think about if maybe you have an experience from your past where you felt extreme loneliness.
Amanda Durocher [00:36:51]:
You know? I spoke to somebody else who had a violent parent, and they talked about how the loneliness for them stemmed from nobody stepping in when they would be beaten by their parent. That story breaks my heart. But this loneliness can be tied to a specific event. Or, for example, say you were bullied at school and everybody joined in. Everybody bullied you and pointed at you in a certain situation. You may have felt so alone in that moment, and that aloneness may have continued to live with you because I think part of the aloneness some of us feel, not everybody, is also a safety mechanism. I know for me of healing from being gang raped and strangled that things that came from that experience, such as that feeling of aloneness as well as my mistrust of humans, were actually safety mechanisms. It was safer for me to feel alone, that's how my body felt, than to connect with others because of how scary, traumatizing, and vulnerable that moment was for me.
Amanda Durocher [00:37:48]:
So much of what my body did and the unconscious things that developed from my traumas were ways that my body was trying to protect me. And I share that because part of healing and processing from so much of trauma is forgiving ourselves for the safety mechanisms is seeing how some of these things such as my mistrust of humans. I see how that served me for a really long time. It doesn't serve me now but it did for a long time that I had troubles trusting people. I didn't trust people so that I wouldn't experience it again. Again, it had negative side effects, but that's how a 14 year old decided to deal with what she went through. She learned to not trust people. It's just understanding that healing from anything is really nuanced, complicated in an individual journey.
Amanda Durocher [00:38:32]:
So that leads me into my last thing I wanna mention here with this aloneness is that if you're on the healing journey, part of it is lonely. I don't know if you can go through the healing journey and never feel lonely because it's a journey of seeing you. And when you're healing it's because you've become disconnected from yourself in some way or another. You've experienced something or you believe something about yourself or you're playing a role that no longer serves you and you're ready to let it go. And sometimes it's a lonely process and you just have to learn how to be with your own heart. And it's through those moments of aloneness that we're able to show up for ourselves and connect back to ourselves. And I know for me so much of my healing journey has been lonely and people haven't understood me and it's been hard for me to share things because I don't know a lot of people who have experienced the same amount of trauma as I have. I met some this summer and that was really healing for me.
Amanda Durocher [00:39:26]:
It was really healing for me to meet people who understood what gang rape was like, what extreme violence was like. It was really healing for my heart. It's the reason I share here about my journey. It's not easy for me to talk about these things, but I hope that throughout this episode you feel less alone. That's really my intention. I don't know the answers for you. I wish I did. I wish I could wave a magic wand.
Amanda Durocher [00:39:49]:
But at the same time, I don't wish that because healing from my trauma over the past 9 years has been the thing that brought me home to myself. It's the thing that's connected me the most to something greater than myself. It's the thing that reminds me of what it's really like to be human. And 9 years ago I was extremely disconnected from myself. I was numb and I was never myself. And my healing journey started with the death of a close friend, Michael Dolan. RIP, sending you lots of love. And when he died, I realized it was my first identity crisis.
Amanda Durocher [00:40:21]:
Who am I? What am I doing? How did I get here? And it's been over the last 9 years that there's been a lot of alone moments, but those are the moments that I get to see my own strength. I get to pick myself back up. I get to get to know myself. I get to validate myself. I get to see how beautiful I am. And the more beauty I see in myself, the more beauty I see in others, and the more that I connect with beautiful people, and the more that I develop discernment and see that the people who can't see me are the people who I no longer wanna surround myself with. It doesn't have to be personal. Everybody's somewhere else on their journey.
Amanda Durocher [00:40:52]:
And the last thing I wanna say before I wrap this question up is just please be kind to yourself. The kinder you are to yourself, the more it really will help that feeling of loneliness. When you're lonely, recognize the words you're saying to yourself.
I hope something in this answer was helpful. You are a beautiful soul.
Thank you so much for asking this question. You are not alone. So many people who listen to this podcast can relate to this question. So you belong right here. And I'm sending you so much love.
Amanda Durocher [00:42:40]:
Thank you for this question. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of New View Advice. As always, I'm so grateful to have these conversations with you each week and to continue to have these conversations. If you haven't already, I invite you to rate and subscribe to the podcast. Ratings and subscriptions help to bring more people to the podcast and help to grow the community. I currently don't make any money doing this, so ratings and subscriptions are the best way to support the podcast. I'm hoping to find a way to make money over the next year, but my focus has really been healing and I haven't really been able to focus on that. So I give a lot for free.
Amanda Durocher [00:43:19]:
So if you could rate and subscribe, it means the world to me. It really does help the podcast. So thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I hope I was able offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love. See you next time.