Self-Imposed Solitary Confinement Kills Confidence

We continue today with my series, Confident in God's Hands. As survivors of abuse and trauma, we frequently create a form of self-imposed solitary confinement. Social anxiety can make us so fearful or uncomfortable that we barricade ourselves in our homes for days, weeks, months, or even years at a time. This is a sure-fire way to slowly drive ourselves crazy.

Research shows that we need other people.
Researchers found in 2009 that one's social environment can modify the biology of breast cancer and lead to significant differences in outcome. Female mice stressed because they were separated from their mothers developed more and larger mammary gland tumours than more contented animals. (The University of Chicago study appears in the Journal for Cancer Prevention Research.)

Researcher S. Grassian studied the effects of solitary confinement on prison inmates. He described psychiatric symptoms that appeared in 14 inmates exposed to periods of increased social isolation and sensory restriction in solitary confinement. The author asserts that these symptoms form a major, clinically distinguishable psychiatric syndrome. (Am J Psychiatry 1983; 140:1450-1454)

Psychologist Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is an expert on long-term solitary confinement. He explained why solitary confinement is typically used in prisons.

He said, "It’s a very painful experience. People experience isolation panic. They have a difficult time psychologically coping with the experience of being completely alone."

"In addition," he said, "solitary confinement imposes conditions of social and perceptual stimulus deprivation. Often it’s the deprivation of activity, the deprivation of cognitive stimulation, that some people find to be painful and frightening."

"Some of them lose their grasp of their identity. Who we are, and how we function in the world around us, is very much nested in our relation to other people. Over a long period of time, solitary confinement undermines one’s sense of self. It undermines your ability to register and regulate emotion. The appropriateness of what you’re thinking and feeling is difficult to index, because we’re so dependent on contact with others for that feedback. And for some people, it becomes a struggle to maintain sanity."

Go out into the world every day and talk to at least one person.
The social isolation that often results from abuse or trauma can be disabling. We must fight this downward spiral into depression and ever-greater anxiety by going out into the world every single day to find someone to talk to.

Talking on the phone, texting, and emailing don't count as much as real, one-on-one interactions with others. We need to be around other people, because it helps us to measure how we are doing. Social interaction helps us to monitor and adjust our behavior. It gives us confidence, because other people validate who we are and why we're here.

We're a lot like dogs in a pack.
My poodle, Zibby, is frequently as isolated as I am. She doesn't get very many opportunities to go out into the world, particularly when MS slows me down. When she was a puppy, our trainer told us that it was imperative for Zibby to meet at least 5 new people every week if we wanted her to become socially mature.

For the past several months, I've been so busy, Zibby has had to stay at home more often than she or I would like her to. After a number of days of isolation, I took Zibby to a friend's house. My poor dog went completely bonkers. She raced around the living room like an Indy driver, banking off of the sofa and barking her head off. My friend's dog just sat on the sofa, staring at my insane little dog.

Without other dogs to help her self-monitor her behavior, Zibby is having a difficult time learning how to adjust her emotions. We're not much different. Like dogs who learn best in a pack, we thrive when we can mirror others' behaviors. We learn how to adjust ourselves by checking in with other people.

God designed us to live in community with others.
After God made Adam, he said, "It's not good for the Man to be alone; I'll make him a helper, a companion." (Gen 2:18 MSG) Even though Adam had the companionship of every animal God had created, he was still lonely.

Like Adam, it is not good for us to be alone. My dog may provide me with some companionship, but she is certainly no subsitute for the company of other people.

If we find ourselves isolated from others as a result of our home's location, our work environment, or our own self-imposed prison of loneliness, we must make changes as soon as possible. If, for some reason, we can't get out of our house, we need to make sure that someone visits us regularly.

As we can see by the research above, social isolation leads to a documented form of mental illness. Unless we take steps to interact with other human beings daily, we are at high risk of losing our sanity. And there's no better way to destroy our confidence than to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world.

Today's Challenge
Have you been isolating yourself because it is so painful for you to go out into the world? The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes to change. Open the door today and step out into the world. Find someone, anyone, to say hello to. Do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. If you want to thrive and restore your confidence, you need other people to help you self-monitor and adjust.