#41 Loneliness vs Solitude

Read the full episode transcript

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Well, hi there. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I was inspired to write this podcast episode after I read a quote by Yung Pueblo. He says, quote, it has finally started to dawn on me that if I build a home within myself, a palace of peace created with my own awareness and love, this can be the refuge I have always been seeking.

I love that quote. Early on in my life, I would say that I mostly identified with being an extrovert. I found lots of joy in being around a lot of other people, and I'm still an extrovert in many ways. Just ask my introverted husband and son, I can literally talk to anyone embarrassing them by striking up conversations with others in restaurants, elevators, hallways, you name it.

This is a trade of mine that I do not see ever going away. I enjoy engaging with humanity. I enjoy exchanging stories, telling jokes, and showing interest in other people. I do admit that this wanting and needing to be around other people most of the time had something to do with not wanting to be with myself, not wanting to be with my thoughts about me.

My brain used to be a pretty mean place to live. I am not sure if it's a function of getting older, if it's a consequence of the stay-at-home orders during Covid, or if it is mostly because I've started to be nicer to myself that I have found the introverted side of me as time has gone on. It likely is a combination of all of these things, as with most things in life and probably things that I haven't even identified yet.

These days, I definitely recharge myself by being by myself with my own thoughts, reading my books, writing in my journal, meditating, sitting out in nature, in solitude. When I was younger, I recharged by being in groups of people, getting my interactions, my energy, rather from interactions with others.

Let's start with when I was younger. When I was younger, I recharged by being in groups of people, getting my energy from the interactions with others. Now, I definitely recharge more effectively in solitude if you're anything like me. When I was younger and less self-aware, with less self-trust and less self-compassion, being by myself felt lonely.

I did not like it because, as I said earlier, being by myself forced me to be with my own thoughts, and my brain was not that kind to me that often. I had thoughts similar to many of my clients when they start working with me. Thoughts like, I will never be enough just as I am. If people knew the real me.

No one would really like me. If my kids aren't happy, I must be doing this wrong. How many more times can we have this argument, and both stay in this relationship? Maybe he or she would be better off without me. Who am I to have all this privilege? I don't deserve this. Life shouldn't be this way, or some version of life shouldn't be this hard if I don't handle life perfectly.

Some terrible fate is going to befall me. You get the idea, and maybe you have lots of thoughts like these as well. You can see why living with these thoughts in your brain makes it so that you never want to be alone with yourself. And you can see how being someone who is living with these thoughts might have some self-fulfilling prophecy going on.

No one does want to be around someone else living with these thoughts and the shitty feelings that go around them, like young says in his quote. The first step of building this palace within yourself is to look at these thoughts with awareness and love. This is exactly what we do in coaching. We find the thought that is causing you difficulty and we question it.

Is this thought true? Even if it is true, is thinking it on a regular basis going to lead me to a place where I actually want to be? Is it going to bring me more love in my life for myself and others? Or is it going to cause a disconnection with myself a dis, a disconnection with others? Once we start having an awareness of these thoughts that lead us to not want to be with ourselves, and we question them with love, we can decide which ones to keep and which ones to tweak and which ones to dismiss altogether.

So, you might be thinking, what does this look like in practice? So, I'm going to give you an example. I have a client who came to me believing that she was unlovable based on thoughts that her parents offered her as a child. She had the actual thought; I am unlovable as a result of this thought. She was single and pretty lonely despite having many friends and patients and colleagues who loved her.

So, we asked if this thought was true, where could she find evidence? To the contrary. This woman has so many people in her life who love and adore her. Yet she was having a hard time loving and adoring herself because of these errant thoughts that were offered to her mostly by her mom. We questioned why her friends loved her.

We questioned why her colleagues loved her. We questioned why her patients loved her, and we came up with a huge list. Often, I am coaching people to be able to hold two things as true, but in this case, it made more sense to show her how it was possible that she was not lovable when she had so much external evidence.

On the contrary, she had to place at least as much value on her friend's thoughts about her as she did on her mom's. She had hundreds of people who loved her and one who probably actually did love her but suggested that she was not lovable. She started allowing herself to receive love for mothers instead of deflecting their love thinking, even when others were showing her and telling her that she was loved, that it somehow was not for her.

Once she started to look for the glimmers of love, she found them all around her and she started to believe that it might be possible that she would meet someone special to love and to be loved by her. Once she built this new relationship with herself, it was amazing to see her blossom before our very eyes.

Paradoxically, once she started to love herself just as she already was, she met and fell in love. It's incredible how brave you can be when you realize that you love yourself enough to exist in solitude. You don't need anyone to complete you. You never did. You were always complete. Let me say that again, because a lot of you don't believe that, or you've been sold the bill of goods that says the opposite.

You don't need anyone to complete you. You never did. You were always complete. I think that building this relationship where you not only love yourself, but you actually like yourself too, makes it an absolute pleasure to be with yourself in solitude and knowing that, of course, you're going to have down days and of course, Things that happen in life are going to make you angry.

Things will make you sad. Things will make you absolutely giddy. As has been said before, as long as you are alive, there is no off ramp for the human experience. But when you actually like spending time with yourself, getting to know yourself, the worst things can happen, and you still have you. It's funny because it becomes rare to feel lonely when you enjoy solitude and if you do feel lonely, you just go down the list of people that you know and love and want to spend time with, and you see if they're free to spend time with you, if they're not, you never have to make it mean anything about you.

You don't have to become clingy or needy. And even if you do, you move on pretty fast from that. It's kind of crazy. So that my friends are my take on loneliness versus solitude. If you are feeling lonely or you are noticing that you have some beliefs about yourself that you are looking to change and you want help doing that, I can't think of a better way than with a group of like-minded women with me as your guide.

My second group of Your Favorite You is starting on August 1st, and I would love to chat with you about how the group is perfect for you and what you want in life. Please go to MelissaParsonsCoaching.com/group to read all about it and to schedule a consult. The consult is basically an hour of your time with me where we discuss anything that's tripping you up on your way to living is Your Favorite You, I can't wait to chat with you. Until next week, folks, I am off to enjoy some solitude.

Thank you for listening to the podcast and loving on me all the time. Although the doors are closed for the inaugural group of women wanting to become their favorite versions of themselves. No worries. You still have the opportunity to work with me in a group setting. This group is for you since you are listening to my podcast, you will get amazing coaching plus the beauty of a community of other women who are interested in thriving as much as they can, and you also will want you to succeed at becoming your favorite you.

There is benefit that is undeniable from watching another woman being coached on an issue you've had in the past, or one that you're currently having. Our brains just see so much more possibility when we are not the ones in the hot seat. You'll also have the ability to come every week and share your vulnerability and watch others share their vulnerability.

We know that shame only grows in silence. There is power in being held by other incredible humans who are often caught in some of the same traps that you are with your thinking.

Please go right now to www.MelissaParsonsCoaching.com/group and schedule a consult with me so that I can hear how I can help you, and we can decide together if you are a great fit to join the group.

You'll need to join the waitlist. We start in August. Please join us. You will not regret it.