How Living Alone and Being Single Build Emotional Health

Evelyn Ryan, Yourlifelifter

“Living alone kicks us into self-benefiting actions that build the personal stamina and skills, knowledge, and abilities that allow us to become resilient, self-sufficient and self-assured, self-reliant on ourselves to bring us joy, optimal health, and the relationships that nurture our soul. Living alone allows us to have ‘skin in the game’ of our lives and to develop character through our successes we create and our mistakes that we correct. It frees us to heal and upshift our thinking so our beliefs that we are worthy of joy drive our choices not our avoidance of pain!”

Learning to enjoy living alone and being single is one of the most effective ways to build and sustain your emotional health.

th-15 Learning to do so is tough. However, you are well worth the effort and here’s why.

Most of us were raised in unhealthy environments that lead to our emotional unhealthiness, neuroses, and low self-worth. We have not developed our abilities to tap fully into our personal strength. Many of us are used to not having our personal boundaries honored or our emotions validated. We may have learned to be reactive to whatever or whomever triggers pain-based emotions that we believe we are powerless to. We may be notorious boundary violators ourselves.

So living alone can provide an opportunity to heal our childhood wounds without harmful distractions, burdens, fears, and obstacles. It allows us, unhindered, to care for, love and nurture ourselves. For some, it may be their only opportunity to learn to rely comfortably on themselves for what they need to live, adapt to stress, learn from mistakes, become the best and authentic versions of themselves, sustain their joy and happiness, and to establish a sustainable base to maintain healthy relationships.

What Makes Being Liked, Loved, Desired, and Valued Possible?

13244612_828677967287034_6775760096160161795_n Let’s look at these amazing and not so obvious healing benefits a bit closer.

Why Do We Need Healing?

Most of us are codependent to varying degrees. We have been taught in power imbalanced families to rely predominantly on others, many who are self-serving, rather than ourselves to soothe our pain and validate worthiness of our actions and our beliefs and even our lovability. Many of us learned as children to depend on caretakers who abused and exploited us rather than nurturing and validating our emotions and teaching us how to problem solve, self-soothe and self-regulate our pain-based emotions, bounce back from misfortunes, and to use our compassion responsibly. The roots of family dysfunctions and intergenerational abuse can be traced far back in history. The results?

As we move into adulthood, we choose friends, lovers, spouses whose reliability as “validators” of our worth is questionable. We maladapt. We get into toxic but familiar relationships and jobs that are unfulfilling to us, continue to invalidate us, trigger our fears, and emotionally deplete us rather than energize and nurture us. While we rely on these “less than reliable” sources, we continue to not develop the unique set of skills, knowledge and abilities we need to support our basic needs and our self-worth such as attaining the knowledge or competencies for setting and attaining goals and confidently taking action to course or thought correct when we are not feeling 100% or we get off track. We remain emotionally fatigued or worse, become depressed from having to be strong for too long. We end up letting fears drive our decisions and power us rather than our will power fueled by a clear understanding of our worthiness and lovability and personal power that we source internally. We can choose staying with abusers, for example, that we fear less than living alone or staying single that trigger our fear of abandonment.

Self-care and self-compassion may also be foreign and even painful to many of us if we were not encouraged to take care of our personal needs and perhaps were punished for doing so. We may have been rewarded for taking care of other people and supporting their joy at our expense. This especially is a vulnerability for empaths, highly sensitive people who are born with an abundance of compassion and who run a higher risk of becoming codependents.

What is Authentic Human Power?

We are all members of the human race and the rules of humanity, peace, and harmony do not change because of logistics or our religions or our sex or being in the presence of toxic power hungry persons, the glittered turds who hold authority positions in our family, school, work, church, government, neighborhood, or who clean our teeth. The core to what makes us all human is the same for all because our human needs, regardless of our roots or our titles or social status, are the same and those are basic, simple:

Self-actualization
Self-esteem
Love/Belonging
Safety
Physiological

And we surely cannot satisfy these needs if we are accustomed to not having these needs supplied, believing falsely we are unworthy, or mistaking instant gratification for true joy.

What is Personal Power and What It’s Not?

People with authentic power not only are able to sufficiently ensure these needs are met but they also set and achieve goals to sustain them in the long term and pay it forward to help others achieve their needs and sustain their power as well.

Benefits of Living Alone

Living alone kicks us into self-benefiting actions that build the personal stamina and skills, knowledge, and abilities that allow us to become resilient, self-sufficient and self-assured, self-reliant on ourselves to bring us joy, optimal health, and the relationships that nurture our soul. Living alone allows us to have “skin in the game” of our lives and to develop character through our successes we create and our mistakes that we correct. It frees us to heal and upshift our thinking so our beliefs that we are worthy of joy drive our choices not our avoidance of pain!

13524453_10154246566948838_9118243702284834405_n So living alone and being single allow us to learn to rely comfortably on ourselves and learn what we are “good” at. They allow us the freedom to develop self-care and self-compassion abilities that feed our self-worth, self-assuredness, and emotional health. They help us understand what our worth is, our true authentic value through untainted filters and without depending on others to tell us whether what we do or think are worthy or not. They help us learn stamina and resilience and to rely on our personal power and regulate our own emotions including our pain-based and fear fueled ones that build confidence in ourselves. They teach us obligation and commitment to our own selves and help build integrity of character by earning that which brings us joy and what we know we are worthy of attaining. And as we heal, our children heal through us.

And in so doing, we learn to love ourselves and understand what qualities and personal truth we should be looking for in others that align with ours. We can also look forward to be single by choice.

Acting on our freedom of choice to be single does not indicate we have closed our lives to love. It does indicate, however, we can source our power internally, are emotionally resilient and wise. We are free, then, to choose what makes us happy including who is able to treat us in a manner we are worthy of or not. We choose. Our need for validation of our worth or lovability does not.

What Makes Being Liked, Loved, Desired, and Valued Possible?