Quotes About Isolation

First, shame is the fear of disconnection.

Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance. Shame dissipated the minute I realized that I wasn't alone—that my experience was human.

I've lived my entire life on the outside.

Steve said, It's the paradox of feeling alone but also strong.

We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.

In our technology-crazed world, we've confused being communicative with feeling connected. Just because we're plugged in, doesn't mean we feel seen and heard. In fact, hyper-communication can mean we spend more time on Facebook than we do face-to-face with the people we care about.

Too many lonely and secret lives.

Belonging to ourselves means being called to stand alone - to brave the wilderness of uncertainty, vulnerability, and criticism.

Shame and self-esteem are very different issues. We feel shame. We think self-esteem. Our self-esteem is based on how we see ourselves—our strengths and limitations—over time. It is how and what we think of ourselves. Shame is an emotion. It is how we feel when we have certain experiences. When we are in shame, we don't see the big picture; we don't accurately think about our strengths and limitations. We just feel alone, exposed and deeply flawed.

High lonesome

Belonging so fully to yourself that you're willing to stand alone is a wilderness - an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared.

the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering. It

Technology, for instance, has become a kind of imposter for connection, making us believe we're connected when we're really not—at least not in the ways we need to be. In our technology-crazed world, we've confused being communicative with feeling connected. Just because we're plugged in, doesn't mean we feel seen and heard.

Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fears—the fears of being abandoned, unworthy, and unlovable.

At the same time sorting is on the rise, so is loneliness. According to Bishop, in 1976

Unchecked loneliness fuels continued loneliness by keeping us afraid to reach out.

Books were so much easier to relate to than people.

THE MIDDLE OF nowhere just got a lot more interesting!

The fact is that in two unhappy years, working in isolation except for Gosling, in a field new to her, she had come within two steps of answering the most exciting question in post-war science. What is more, she, unknowingly, had provided all the essential data for those who took the two brilliant leaps of intuition — to anti-parallel chains and base pairs — that cracked the problem.

Well, van Gogh was one of the great painters. During his life he made only 109 dollars in all on his paintings. They are now worth about two million dollars. He had a terribly hard life—loneliness, poverty, and starvation that led to insanity. And yet it was one of the greatest lives that was ever lived—the happiest, the most burningly incandescent

The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream

There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we'll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)