What is “lonely”?

I read somewhere that Fritz Perls, the “father” of Gestalt therapy once said: “Lonely is alone plus bullshit.”

I think he was saying that the part of lonely that is about solitude isn’t a problem. I’m pretty certain that all people want some amount of alone time. Some more. Some less.

The problem is that, for too many of us, our hyper-vigilant internal critic, ever on the lookout for evidence of our fucked-uped-ness, kicks in. Our critic tells us we’re alone because we are less than lovable. Our critic reminds us of all the ways we are less than “perfect”. We begin to long for someone to distract us from this critical voice. We begin to believe that the fact of our “aloneness” is evidence of our flaws. And that’s the bullshit part.

I think of my internal critic as a radio station beaming directly into my head, 24/7. I call it KFUK - all criticism, all the time. No matter what I’ve tried to do to eliminate KFUK, I always fail (and then listen as KFUK assails me for failing to silence KFUK…ugh).

One day I got the bright idea that maybe instead of trying not listen, or trying to blow KFUK up, or trying to re-program it wasn’t the answer. All I needed to do was change the channel.

So I launched KLOV - all self-loving affirmations, all the time. Now when I find myself listening to the litany of what’s wrong with Chip, I just change the channel. I take a moment to say to myself “I really love you, Chip”, “I am enough, I do enough, I give enough, I have enough” , “There was never anything wrong with you.”

And, without that critic beating me up I stop feeling lonely.