Loneliness

A persistent feeling of loneliness can have a major impact on your quality of life. For example, it can lead to health problems, less participation in society and feelings of gloom and depression.

Emotional loneliness occurs when you lack a close, intimate connection with one or more people in your life. Usually it is about the life partner. You feel alone despite having enough people around you. There is an emotional need.

Social loneliness is about having less contact with other people than you wish, such as missing friends, acquaintances or colleagues. The social network falls short, there is a social need.

Loneliness is often accompanied by, for example, feelings of emptiness, boredom, gloom and sadness, fear, isolation and separation. In addition, it can cause (unexplained) physical complaints, such as neck, back and shoulder complaints.

More than 1 million Dutch people feel very lonely.

Watch the video in which Ingeborg Bosch explains how PRI looks at loneliness.

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As horrible as it is to feel lonely; the good news is that there is a way out

The key lies in realizing that when you feel lonely and isolated, you are being held hostage by a certain part of your brain.

Strong feelings of loneliness generally stem from that part of your brain. This contains painful experiences from your first years of life (which we all have) that you could not process at the time. Experiences from the period when you could do nothing yourself were at the mercy of others for the fulfilment of your needs and had no sense of time.

All thoughts where you recognize words like everything, nothing, always, never, everyone, nobody, and have any influence yourself, originates from that part of your brain. All feelings and thoughts are very present when you feel loneliness.

How can PRI help you?

With the help of PRI, you learn to recognize that certain situations in your daily life make you feel lonely. Next, you and your therapist will discover what old, repressed painfully feelings lie beneath. In this way, step by step you separate your past from the present.

Step by step you learn to place feelings of loneliness and the burdensome emotions that go with it where they belong, and there is more and more contact with the reality of the here and now.

The result is that you come into contact more and more with your life energy and from there you can also make connections with people around you.

the continuous heavy feeling of being alone is terrible, even in the company it bothered me. Now that I understand where that lonely feeling comes from, I can really enjoy myself more and more.