10 Reasons We Isolate Ourselves From Others

Many of you have tried again and again to connect with safe people, only to find pain and failure. And now you’ve simply given up. You’ve given up the attempt and the search. It’s just not worth it anymore. As a client of mine explained, “I really can survive on my own. It’s much less messy than taking another risk to be hurt again.”

In this article, we’ll explain some of the dynamics of withdrawal and isolation. Here, I’ll help you understand the most important reasons you might have given up the fight to find the right kinds of friends, churches, and loved ones.

A Broken Heart

When our heart is broken, we often will not reach out for relational help. We learn to avoid those longings and needs, to stuff them deep inside our heart, and attempt to merely cope with our broken hearts.

However, sometimes a broken heart will send us clinical signs that there is a problem, such as depression, and then we may finally decide to do something about it.

Our hearts aren’t all that strong. God has constructed us with certain needs and certain limitations. Our most basic and primary need is to be loved by God and people. We can put that need off, we can meet it in crazy ways, and we can try not to feel it, but it’s simply a spiritual reality. Paul illustrated that need well when he wrote, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21).

When our need to internalize, or take in, others for sustenance, is thwarted, we are injured. Part of our heart goes hungry. Just as internal organs begin to break down when we don’t have enough food, our hearts start to break down when we do not receive love. Enough of this, and we enter the condition the Bible calls broken-heartedness. God has a special tenderness for this difficult condition: “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).

The brokenhearted person has–literally in the Hebrew–a “burst” heart. She has lost the ability to trust, to need, and to reach out for attachment. Many times she has been set up to be connected and receive love from people important to her. And each time something has broken down. Her deprivation is so great that she can no longer function relationally. The relationship breakdown happens in several ways: through abandonment, inconsistent attachment, and attack.

Abandonment

Some people are left emotionally by a significant person. This may be a parent, a spouse, or a friend. Find people that understand self-sufficiency. They’ll know you can’t “feel your need” for them. But they’ll help you state your isolation, talk about the reasons you’re disconnected, and discuss how hard it is to give up your independence. As you confess this problem to safe people, a wonderful miracle happens: over time, self-sufficiency melts and gives way to need. You are then reconciled not only to God and others, but also to yourself.

Whatever the situation, if the relationship is significant enough to us, we attempt to reach out for the lost person for a while. Then part of us despairs and loses hope, sinking deep inside us as a man sinks into quicksand. We lose our sense of expectation of love, and eventually we lose our sense of need. This is the brokenhearted condition: “I looked for sympathy, but there was none, for comforters, but I found none” (Ps. 69:20). The aching heart simply turns itself off.

Inconsistent Attachment

A second cause of brokenheartedness comes from being loved in an unpredictable manner. You may have someone in your background who was a roller coaster. It was feast or famine for you. And you never knew what to expect. They were close, then either not there or enraged.

Inconsistent connections break the heart in a different way than abandonment. Instead of longing for lost love, the person in relationship with an inconsistent person is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He thinks, It’s good now, but for how long? He always worries that the love given will be snatched away. How different inconsistent love is from the love of God, who shines the warm light of his love on us steadily and forever: “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:29).

Attack

We are never more vulnerable than when we need relationship. By its very nature, love means putting yourself out to someone and giving them the opportunity to hurt you. Love doesn’t exist outside of risk.

But there are those who deliberately hurt the hurting. You may have someone in your life who criticized or even abused you for having the need for love. Some people, projecting their self-hatred on others, have a deep contempt for the needy. Some are self-centered. Some are sadistic, gaining pleasure in pain: “For he never thought of doing a kindness, but hounded to death the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted” (Ps. 109:16).

If your need for love has been attacked, you probably learned very quickly how to shun relationship and find other ways to pass the time. Like a beaten dog scurries away from a hand that wants to pet it, the broken heart sounds an alarm of danger at any semblance of closeness.

If you qualify as brokenhearted in any or all of these three categories—in your past or in your present remember that God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3). Realize that your isolation isn’t really working for you. And begin searching for people who have enough constant, safe love inside to understand how hard this is for you—people that we will describe in part 3. Safe people are out there. You just have to find them.

Self-sufficiency

As children, most of us experience an “I can do it!” stage of life. You might experience this with a child who wants to put on his own shoes. Sometimes that pesky velcro just does not want to cooperate with those three-year-old hands.

Being the helpful parent that you are (or, actually, the hurried parent), you may bend down to fasten his shoes for him. Then, like clockwork, they quickly push away your hands, protesting, “I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” And they mean it. So, you negotiate. You put them in the car and let them put the shoes on while you are driving to the restaurant. It is a win-win.

Children are in love with autonomy, task mastery, individuation, and a lot of other developmental aspects of their growth. They are working on self-sufficiency, especially in the functional, “doing” parts of life. But their self-sufficiency is a little different in the relational, “loving” areas of life. Instead of task mastery exhilaration (“Look, Ma! No hands!”), they are still dependent on attachment. They need snuggles, holding, soothing, and comforting. They disagree a lot more, and like to spend more time away from their parents, but the need for connection is still there.

That need for attachment will keep changing over time, and eventually, if things work out, they will have enough of us inside them (literally, they’ll have “had enough of us”). Then they will get their emotional needs met by peers and finally, by their own family. But they’ll continue to grow in their functional self-sufficiency.

People who avoid relationships have problems not with functional self-sufficiency, but with relational self-sufficiency. The problem with the relationally self-sufficient person is that they operate in their own relational world. They run their emotional affairs like a one-person business. Their emotional philosophy is the following:

I take care of my problems.

I don’t burden others with my problems.

I can handle my problems myself, thank you.

I’m fine, really.

No, really, I’m fine.

What’s wrong here? God doesn’t create us to be relationally self-sufficient. He loves us to need each other. Our needs teach us about love and keep us humble. True self-sufficiency is a product of the Fall.

If you’ve got the disease of self-sufficiency, you’ve probably had it a long time. And you’ve probably described it in positive terms like responsible, independent, and grown-up. Indeed, self-sufficiency has lots of advantages, because you get to avoid all the uncontrollable problems and risks that needy people can’t get away from.

Here are a few examples:

• You don’t have to experience your incompleteness, which is painful.
• You don’t have to go to the trouble of finding people to love you.
• You don’t have to show other people the hurting, imperfect parts of yourself.
• You don’t have to look anyone in the eye and say, “I need you.”
• You don’t have to risk asking others to comfort and support you.
• You don’t have to humbly receive what they offer, in gratitude.
• And you don’t have to do it again and again and again.

No wonder giving up self-sufficiency is so difficult. Life seems to have many more problems when your needs start leaking out.
What to do? If your self-sufficiency is driving you away from relationship and into isolation, begin the process of confession. Confession is telling the truth, and the truth is, you need people. The reason people say confession is good for the soul is because it brings unloved parts of our character to places of love.

Find people that understand self-sufficiency. They’ll know you can’t “feel your need” for them. But they’ll help you state your isolation, talk about the reasons you’re disconnected, and discuss how hard it is to give up your independence. As you confess this problem to safe people, a wonderful miracle happens: over time, self-sufficiency melts and gives way to need. You are then reconciled not only to God and others, but also to yourself.

Let the love God has provided begin to melt the cold, hard ice of your self-sufficiency.

An Inability to Experience Hunger

Call this problem “spiritual anorexia.” You’ve most likely read about the clinical condition anorexia nervosa, in which the individual starves herself for psychological reasons. The word anorexia actually means "no appetite." If you talk to an anorexic about why she's not eating, she’ll report, "I’m just not hungry." And she means it. There are several causes for this condition, but it's obviously a dangerous one. 

Likewise, in the spiritual and relational arena, some people literally cannot feel their hunger for relationship. They starve themselves when they should be connecting with others, because often they aren't aware of their need. They are numb to their emptiness. 

Yet God created within us a hunger, a longing to be known and loved. This hunger functions exactly like physical hunger. It's a signal. It causes discomfort, a warning saying, "Get up and get connected. Your tank's empty." Hunger keeps us aware of our needs, and God responds to that: "God sets the lonely in families" (Ps. 68:6). 

Generally, this numbness develops over time as a protective measure. Spiritual anorexia occurs when the heart has been let down, disappointed, or hurt so many times that our "need neurons" simply stop firing. It's as if that part of our character is saying, "Why feel hunger? No one will be there anyway." And so part of us cuts off the sensation of need.

It’s easy to tell if you have this condition. Here are some of the classic hallmarks:

• I am uncomfortable with people and relaxed when alone.
• I don’t get “lonely,” whatever people mean by that.
• I spend time with people out of obligation, or for functional reasons (tennis partner, commuting to work, etc.).
• My fantasies of vacation always involve my doing something fun by myself.

Now, God also created us to spend time alone. We need to get away. But spiritual anorexia dulls the senses so much that we can be in real emotional trouble–depressed, ready to act out compulsively, or worse–and the idea that “I might need to call someone” will not even occur to the spiritual anorexic. For them, relationship isn’t a hunger–it’s an unneeded option.

If this is your condition, God wants to waken a sleeping part of you. He wants you to hunger and thirst for righteous and loving people (Matt. 5:6). Beg now to work on experiencing your need for relationship.

Devaluation

Devaluation destroys the love that could save us. It protects us from the pain of reaching out. It’s the “sour grapes” mentality: “Those grapes I wanted probably weren’t any good anyway.” Translated, this means, “I really wanted those grapes. Since I can’t have them, it hurts inside, and I don’t like that sort of pain. Making the grapes bad makes me hurt less.”

If you tend toward devaluation, here are some traits you might have:

• When I have a loss, I quickly find reasons that the loss didn’t matter.
• When I lose a relationship, I think of that person’s negative qualities to help get me over it.
• When people talk about wanting something (new house, to see a movie, a relationship), my mind moves immediately to what’s wrong about what they want (house isn’t well constructed, movie was hated by critics, that person isn’t good for you).
• When I anticipate receiving something, I keep from getting excited by devaluing it (it probably won’t work, I won’t get the promotion, he’d never go out with me).

Devaluation robs us of our excitement, our needs, our wishes, and our desires. It protects us from risk–by keeping us dead inside. You aren’t alive if you aren’t in need. As a popular song title says, “I Do Not Want What I Do Not Have.” That is devaluation: making ourselves not want what we don’t have.

Where does devaluation come from? Devaluation is a coping device which we use when love has not worked for us. Reaching out for connection is work. It's risky and humbling enough, even with safe people. But if you’ve been around unresponsive people for a while, it’s more than work. It can be torture.

There are few things more painful than asking for love and finding no one there. Like an exposed nerve ending in your body, your need waits, naked and unprotected, feeling all its hunger. And with no relationship on the other end to soothe, comfort, and care, the pain of reaching out is intolerable.

To compensate for this sort of emotional agony, we devalue what we need. Finding all sorts of creative reasons why we wouldn’t want him or her anyway helps us make it another day. Job understood the risks of unrequited love: “For the despairing man there should be kindness from his friend; Lest he forsake the fear of the Almighty” (Job 6:14 NASB). In other words, if my human relationships are devoid of love, I may even turn away from my divine attachment.

What can a devaluer do? Do you make good people bad? Do you avoid taking risks by devaluing? If so, there are several things you can do to help yourself get over that pattern:

1. Realize you were created to need, and that even God himself experiences longings, as Christ did when he mourned over his unrepentant people: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under wings, but you were not willing’” (Matt. 23:37). Need is a good part of you.
2. Begin to observe the devaluing things you say and think. Ask friends for feedback on your devaluing. You may be surprised!
3. Observe the patterns. Do you devalue more when you really want something? A friend of mine recently was auditioning for a part in a church play. He loved acting and had an intense desire to be in the program. Yet when he told me about it, he said, “Well, it’s just a church play.” Often the intensity of our devaluation is a marker of the intensity of our need.
4. Work on bringing your needs to relationship. Most “devaluers” have tremendously deep fears of being without and impoverished. Find safe people who can help you experiences your needs without being hurt.

Perfectionism

Mark is a walking dilemma, one of those people who's hard to figure out. He is an unmarried Christian professional man with no "horrible" problems like drugs, sex, or compulsive addictions. He's intelligent, athletic, and good-looking. He's responsible and loves God.

Mark is forty-five years old. And he has no friends, safe or otherwise. He is very, very alone.

How does that picture come together? On the outside, it doesn’t make sense. A guy with Mark's qualities should have a rich, active relational life. But when you understand the power of perfectionism, it makes "perfect" sense. For Mark is a perfectionist and has only recently seen the devastating consequences of this trait.

Sometimes we make jokes about our perfectionism: “I looked in the mirror and got depressed about being three pounds overweight." The genuine article, however, can be much more serious. Perfectionism can be a major cause of depression, destructive behaviors, and divorce.

What is perfectionism? Simply put, it's an inability to tolerate faults. Perfectionists have a phobia about imperfections and blemishes in themselves, in other people, and in the world. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to create a perfect world, running in futility from the realities of sin, age, loss, and cellulite. 

The perfectionist tries to live in the land of ideals. He sees life the way "it should be." People should treat each other right. I should be a productive, successful person. Fairness and equality should rule. Then he sees the huge chasm between the land of ideals and the land of the real. For example, he cannot live up to his expectations of himself. Or he is let down by someone important to him. And he has great difficulty accepting where he lives--the land of the real. So he tries to change his permanent address to ideal-land again.

On a deeper level, the perfectionist lives under the Law. He is in bondage to a demand that says, "If you do it right, you'll be loved. And that is exactly what the Law does say: "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it" James 2:10). It's a terrible tightrope to walk, knowing that one slip-just one-brings condemnation and hatred on yourself. While having ideals and goals is good, when our goals become demands-minimum standards-were being perfectionistic. 

There are two ways that perfectionism can cut us off from safe relationships. First, perfectionism disqualifies us from connection, The impossible standard of who I "should" be towers over me like a threatening cloud. I am constantly and acutely reminded of my failings, sins, and weaknesses. I see all of my badness in all of its badness.

And I understand the condemnation of the Law. I feel utterly unloved and alone, knowing my badness cuts me off. At this point the perfectionist begins to develop a grandiose view of his failures, and a minimal view of God's love. He thinks, at some levels, No one could love the real me. It is too negative, too ugly, too bad. And he isolates, protecting himself from his deep conviction that anyone who saw the "real" him would turn and walk away from him.

Second, perfectionism disqualifies others from connection. Sometimes the condemning, judging spotlight of the perfectionist gets turned from himself to his relationships. And it is just as stark and unforgiving. He will see others' blemishes and be blinded to any other, lovable parts of them. He will obsess on fixing the other person to make her right, or he will simply leave the relationship. The perfectionist is often critical of others, though he doesn't mean to be. Often, he is simply projecting his own deep self-hatred on others and attempting to relieve the pressure a little.

Often, the perfectionist feels entitlement-the need to be treated specially, not as another ordinary person. When you are entitled, you may refuse to reach out because the other person doesn't meet your expectations of "specialness."

Here are some things you might do if you have this bent:

• You might disqualify a friend before really getting to know her.
• You might be enormously hurt and disappointed when someone fails you, and withdraw.
• You might have impossible standards for people to meet.
• You might become so self-condemning that you avoid connections.
• You might have a string of failed friendships behind you and simply give up because the failures hurt so much. 

If we’re playing "This is Your Life in this section, there are several things you can do:

1. Understand that you've turned ideals from goals into demands.
2. Begin to study what the Cross actually accomplished: we can be both loved and flawed at the same time.
3. Find out where you learned to be a perfectionist. It could have been a conditional relationship, a perfectionistic parent, or a legalistic religious background.
4. Seek out people to confess your faults to. Note: these must be people who also admit their faults and have no need to judge you.
5. Begin to allow others to both know and love you. Most perfectionists can’t do both: they either feel loved and unknown–or known and unloved. Remember that the antidote to perfectionism isn’t being good–it’s being loved.
6. Give up your sense of entitlement.
7. Begin to do what God does with these issues: take your needs off the cross–and nail your perfectionism and isolation up there.

Merger Wishes

A merger wish is basically love minus boundaries. When someone else possesses a trait that we don’t have, we are inclined to blur our identity with theirs in order to help us feel better about ourselves and to gain access to that trait. Merging also keeps us from feeling alone.

Many people fall in love, get married, develop platonic friendships, and go into business arrangements, all fueled by merger wishes. They will see a creative quality, a loving quality, or an aggressive quality in the other, and do anything to be with that person.

Sometimes the “merger” will feel so excited to be with the “mergee” that she seems intoxicated, swimming in the pool of love with the beloved. Now, in new relationships this is common, and there’s nothing wrong with it. That is, as long as you don’t make character decisions based on it.

How does this relate to choosing nobody? It does sound strange, because you would think that a merger wish would drive people to “meld” with one person after another. And it does. Some people spend their entire lives trying to fulffill their addictive urge to be totally enmeshed with another person. But there are also times when just the opposite happens.

People who struggle with merger wishes are sometimes terrified and discouraged by the realities of separateness. People disagree with us, dont’ understand us, have to call us back because they’re driving their hair. And the “merging” person basically comes to the conclusion: It’s better to be without than to risk the reality of feeling separate. If I’m going to feel abandoned, I don’t need the added pain of being with someone.”

This is a problem in separateness. To the “merger,” separateness doesn’t feel like freedom but total abandonment. Separateness becomes the worst kind of isolation to the merger. That’s why they frequently try to think up things to say when there’s a silence in a conversation: the separateness is too painful. Back to the merge.

If this is a struggle of yours, you may have given up on relationships. You may have been disappointed too many times and felt abandoned. Here are some action steps to take, to get you back on the road to choosing connections:

Realize your trait is probably the result of a relationship in which you were abandoned and made helpless. People who struggle with merger wishes often have been punished for being aggressive and reinforced for being compliant.

Begin to make separateness your friend. Distinguish separateness from abandonment, and aloneness from loneliness. Understand how letting others be separate frees you up to make choices yourself.

Find people with whom you can practice setting boundaries. Quite often, boundary work helps us love separateness, choices, and our own power to take care of ourselves and do God’s work.

Be honest with safe people about the merger wish. Unsafe people will move away from you or exploit your needs. Safe people have good boundaries and will stay connected to you, helping you reach out for the love you need. And, as you are nurtured by separate relationships, you will outgrow the need to constantly “swim in love.” Separateness will no longer feel like abandonment. 

Passivity

To be passive is to avoid action, for various reasons. Passive people are patient. THey don’t mind waiting for things. They belive that “good things happen for those who wait.” And they do that better than anyone.

There can be several causes for passivity, such as:

A wish to be rescued from their problems by a caring person

A fear of loss if they reach out to someone

A fear of punishment if they take action

A fear of failure

A fear of success

Sometimes passive people spiritualize their condition. They call it “handing over to God.” They’ll “wait for God” to do things to help them, such as

Find them a job

Find them a mate

Solve relational problems

Find them a support group

Heal their emotional pain.

This is an unbiblical view. God never reinforces passivity. He always presents our growth as a partnership with him. He does what only God can do, and we do our job: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). To avoid responsibility is never a spiritual act.

Warning: passivity is hazardous to your health. If you’re passive, you may find that it’s hard to reach out and take initiative in relationships. You may wait by the phone, hoping someone will call. You may wait for someone at work to befriend you. You may wait for a church member to greet and welcome you.

There’s nothing wrong with desiring these kinds of encounters. But remember that you’ll need to do your part, too. “And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him” (Heb. 10:38).

Don’t let life pass you by as you shrink back. Don’t let passivity create a mummylike, survival-type existence for you. Find people who want to help you enter the world, encourage you to take action, and support your attempts to regain control over your life and relationships.