Why Do I Feel Most Like Myself Alone?
The Pattern
You close the door behind the guests and your shoulders drop two inches. You drive home from the family event and the air in the car is the first air you have breathed all day. You love the people you love. You also know that the version of you who walks among them is a slightly compressed version, and the full version is only allowed out when no one else is in the room.
Origins & Context
Carl Jung wrote about the introverted orientation as a legitimate temperament. Contemporary trauma-informed work adds the dimension that, for people raised in environments where being a self around others was unsafe or required performance, solitude becomes the only place the original self has ever been free to take up space.
Donald Winnicott, in his short essay The Capacity to Be Alone, wrote that healthy aloneness is built in the presence of a safe other in childhood. When the safe other was not safe, the adult develops the inverse: aloneness becomes the only place where self can exist, because the presence of others activates the old performance.
She is the original person, finally given the conditions under which she was always supposed to live.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You make coffee differently when no one is watching. You move through the apartment with a different rhythm. You sing in a voice you would not use if anyone were home. The you that emerges is not a different person. She is the original person, finally given the conditions under which she was always supposed to live.
It shows up in the way you sometimes resent the moments other people enter your space, even people you love. The resentment is not about them. It is about the cost of switching from the original self back to the performing self, which is small per occurrence and large over a lifetime.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Capacity to Be Alone (Donald Winnicott) and the inversion that occurs when early relational safety was missing. It is also named through Jung's work on Introversion as a legitimate energetic orientation. Contemporary trauma therapists describe it as the Fawn Response in remission, where solitude is the only environment in which the fawn does not need to deploy.
Related entries in this library include the Fawn Response, the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, and Self-Abandonment.
Nikita's Note
I used to feel guilty for how much I loved being alone. I thought it meant I was broken at intimacy. I was not broken at intimacy. I had simply learned to perform around almost everyone, and the only place I had ever been allowed to be the original me was when no one was looking.
The work was not learning to love being around people more. The work was building the small number of relationships in which I could be the alone-version of myself out loud. Those relationships are rare. They are also the only ones that have ever felt like home.
From the work
She is the original person, finally given the conditions under which she was always supposed to live.From When You're Ready by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready — available on Amazon.