Isolation – the invisible prison of shame
Isolation. This single word has been staring at me from a yellow Post-it note I scribbled during a webinar a couple of weeks ago. I can no longer remember why I wrote it down: a word without a context, no place in the world of its own.
Just like the word itself.
What is isolation?
What am I talking about when I say ‘isolation’? Wikipedia has a couple of relevant (well, sort-of relevant) entries.
The first is a Freudian concept that, as a defence mechanism against dangerous (i.e., painfully truthful) thoughts, our brain will disengage—isolate—a thought by railroading us onto a more pleasant, safer, train of thought.
This is a coping mechanism associated with our false self, a screen of fake and socially acceptable beliefs and behaviours we project to protect ourselves in what is basically a high-trauma environment.
The second is called emotional isolation and is defined as having no-one to confide in:
“Many people suffering from this kind of isolation have strong social networks but lack a significant bond with their friends. While they can build superficial friendships, they are often not able to confide in many people. People who are isolated emotionally usually feel lonely and unable to relate to others.”
This is closer, yet it describes symptoms, not causes.
True isolation is isolation from our selves.
Isolation and shame
As I write this, the Joy Division song ‘Isolation’ comes to mind:
Surrendered to self-preservation
From others who care for themselves
A blindness that touches perfection
But hurts just like anything else
Mother I tried, please believe me
I’m doing the best that I can
I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through
I’m ashamed of the person I am
Isolation is the fruit of unconscious shame. It is an unconscious withdrawal from the self and from the world, a self-imposed quarantine—in the medical sense—because we’re ashamed of ourselves.
We live in a society that’s historically been emotionally and sexually repressed. The psychological mechanism by which we repress our socially unacceptable emotional and sexual impulses is unconscious shame.
Unconscious shame is a layer of invisible ‘emotional concrete’ that overlays the whole of society. It’s so widespread that its effects are considered totally normal and generally pass completely unnoticed.
The more sensitive we are, the more we sense the shame and danger of our feminine side, the more we retreat into the prison of isolation. We may be surrounded by people yet feel completely alone; or we may withdraw from the world.
This place is bleak and blurred, like the image of a lone tree above. The tree may look strong, but it lacks the protection of the forest.
The mother wound
Ian Curtis’ lyrics accurately connect isolation to the mother wound.
The mother wound is humanity’s single point of failure, a breakdown of the mother-child bond that occurred some 6,000 years ago, giving rise to patriarchy—what we call ‘civilization’—with all its physical, emotional, and sexual devastation.
At its core, the mother wound is a failure of genuine emotional nurturing that prevents us from creating genuine, sustainable lives and communities from the micro level of the individual up to the macro level of global society and sustainable ecology.
One of the symptoms of the mother wound is a shift from relational living—where relationship comes first, creating win-win outcomes, to transactional living—where we compete in win-lose interactions, desperately trying to get the nurturing we never received but disguising our needs in searches for love, money, power, sex, etc.
The first two lines of the lyrics above reference this conflict: “self-preservation from others who care for themselves.”
Like all mother wound issues, isolation runs deep and resolving it takes years of stripping away the trappings of the false self to expose the core programming.
I’ve been doing that over the past couple of weeks, without realising. Now I know why I wrote it on that Post-it.
Photo by Branimir Balogović on Unsplash