This week we share a MASSIVE LIFE UPDATE for the Emotional Physics family! We also answer a listener question about tolerating alone-ness after a breakup long enough to feel its benefits, rather than leaping into whatever new connection is most accessible to us right after relationship loss. We get extra shrinky today and bring in an old psychoanalytic text on what gives humans the "capacity to be alone" (cited below). It turns out that humans are wired for connection and no one is so good at being fully, perceptually, symbolically, and internally and externally alone. That would be dangerous for our nervous systems and loneliness is a helpful survival signal to move us into connection, as our dear friend James Ellis, The Loneliness Doctor, recently taught us (info below). Instead, the capacity to be alone seems to come from the development of strong internal representations of and connections to our important people and ourselves, as well as the types of rich, non-romantic relationships that allow us to feel witnessed in our aloneness, and able to access support if we need it.

The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment:
Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. D. W. Winnicott,
F.R.C.P.
p. 28
The Capacity to be Alone
(1958)

https://www.york.ac.uk/media/english/documents/The%20Capacity%20to%20be%20Alone.pdf

Neuronal Pruning

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6865685/

Loneliness Doctor

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPT6XFlES1s/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

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The Capacity To Be Alone

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