Startled Aloneness

In therapy, we have been discussing sympathetic nervous system responses:  in other words, fight or flight kinds of reactions.  Specifically, the discussion has been to clarify that there are more than just those two responses.  Adding to fight or flight, freeze I think is the easiest to accept on the list.  When faced with a significant stressor--something traumatizing--freezing in place is a very real response, whether it's physical or mental.  This can be momentary or last for a bit longer, depending on the circumstance and the individual.  Another is a fawn response.  A fawn response is the individual becomes much more of a people pleaser in order to protect themselves.  I've seen this response toward doctors, where a patient confronted with some startling news becomes almost overly considerate and receptive to anything the doctor has to say.  Persons who are threatened either verbally or physically might make themselves smaller, figuratively or literally by changing their body positioning or backing down from a stronger stance than they'd previously had.  As a hypothetical, a confrontation with someone becomes more heated and interpreted as dangerous because the confronted individual has raised their voice or, in an extreme version, thrown a bottle at the wall; the person bringing up the charge in question begins to back down, walk back some of their verbiage, not because they think that they were wrong but in order to keep themselves safe.  

The one that I want to discuss today is a startled aloneness.  

Without knowing it, I was referring to this feeling almost exactly in a previous post.  Something happens.  And then in that moment, all that is present is an acute sting, a feeling of being deeply, deeply alone.  As though one were in the bottom of a deep well with barely a shaft of light to see an inch out.  Suddenly and wholly alone.  The feeling is both the suddenness as well as the isolation, the shock as well as the despair in one clean bolt.  It's jarring.  And the shock can linger, even with the adrenaline ebbs away.  Remembering that sense of being alone, that can stick.  

My interpretation of the pit

I find places where this kind of response hits tend to be moments of significant pain, be that emotional or physical.  Pain has a way of making us feel very, very alone.  Pain is so subjective--we know that we are the only ones that can feel that depth and breadth of it, hence that particular kind of alone.  The internal black pit of alone, the one that has a gravity-inducing ache, that's the one I mean.  That's the alone that lingers after.  And when it hits suddenly, transported to that pit in a moment, that's it.  That's the feeling. The shock and the impossible weight in the same moment.  

It's reassuring to know that I am not the only one to experience this, that someone else knew it enough that it had a burgeoning clinical category.  Oddly enough, it makes one feel less alone.  And it's nice to have a name for it.