What Is The Phobia Of Being Alone

Reach Out To Your Support System So You Dont Feel Socially Isolated

This could look like:

• Brainstorming a list of people who care about you
• Going for a walk around the neighborhood and saying hi to familiar faces
• Joining a support group, online or offline
• Making plans to meet up with a friend
• Taking your dog to the dog park

That said, avoiding anxiety triggers can sometimes exacerbate the problem over the long-term. Therefore, its important to balance these distractions with practicing the art of being alone.

If your fear of loneliness might be related to childhood attachment issues, trauma, or inter-relational issues then it can be immensely helpful to seek therapeutic support to work through those challenges. Addressing those underlying issues can help resolve the fear of loneliness.

How Fear Of Being Alone Affects Relationships

Worrying about ending up alone can actually help to ensure that you do end up alone the exact outcome you dont want. Thats because of thelaw of attraction: whatever you focus on, you get. If youreconsumed by fear of being alone, that negative energy will spill over into your relationships. You may throw yourself into a relationship even if it isnt healthy. Youre also putting a lot of pressure on your partner. When you bring this energy to relationships, they often dont end well.

The truth is that when you overcome your fear of being alone forever, youre able todevelop who you are as a person more fully. Youll bringpurpose, passion and personality to your relationships, instead of fear. And that, in turn, will increase your attractiveness to others the law of attraction in action.

How To Make Peace With Being Alone

Theres nothing like jumping in and trying it so be alone, be still and do nothing see what happens. Try not to think or solve problems whilst you are doing nothing as this is actually doing something dont prepare a meal or go for a walk do nothing. Time your self, how long can you be like this?When you can do this for just a few minutes on a regular basis start to separate yourself from your thoughts. Be still and watch your thoughts go past learn to recognize your thoughts as distinctly separate to YOU. Get to the state of mind where you can consciously stop yourself from following the thoughts that you have. In other words you can see that you are apart from them. For some of you this will be easy and for others it will be difficult. It takes a lot of practice and repetition its an exercise and you are strengthening a faculty.

Now its time to form the intent to connect intend to connect to your higher self, God, an Angel, a guide, Eric the Alien it doesnt matter who, ;its all just energy and you are learning to personify it.

When it takes a long time to develop and achieve a result on one particular impression it means that its about something that is buried deep within you and you dont want to face it or you are not ready in this stage of your life to see it. You are getting teasers to keep you going.

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Figure Out Where The Fear Is Coming From

Children may experience real losses or traumas that lead to insecure feelings as adults. These traumas may be dramatic, such as the death of a parent, neglect, or abuse.

However, they can also be subtle and occur in everyday interactions between parents and children.

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For children to feel secure, they have to feel safe, seen, and soothed when theyre upset. Parents are not always fully attuned to their childrens fears, so exploring early attachment patterns can provide insight into fears regarding abandonment.

A childs early attachment history greatly influences how they view relationships as adults. People may bring their childhood insecurities into their adulthood.

Adults who have a fear of abandonment may have a preoccupied attachment style, which causes them to anticipate rejection.

They may be triggered by even imagined signs of rejection from a partner based on the rejections they experienced as children. These triggers are based on events from the past, so resolving these emotions is paramount to feeling more secure in themselves and having healthier relationships.

But How Do You Know If It’s A Phobia

You know you have a serious fear of being alone when you always feel like you need another person or other people around in order to feel safeeven in a place that’s supposed to be comforting, like your home. As soon as you’re by yourself, you “may feel intensely lonely, bored, or anxious,” says Squyres.

If this happens a few times, that’s totally normal. But if you start to notice a pattern of fear, panic, or intense sadness every time youre alone, then, she says, your discomfort is severe. And it might even cause you physical discomfort, like stomach aches, headaches, sore back or muscles, or even sleepiness, she adds.

So, yeah, it’s way more than just being bummed you’re single. Believe it or not, you can have this fear even when you’re in a relationship .

You may also have trouble concentrating or getting tasks done, which can affect your professional life. “Fear of being alone can hold you back from success in many professions because working alone might be required for good job performance or advancement,” says Squyres.

Your fear could also hold you back from doing things you want to, just because you’re flying solo. Granted, some things are no fun if youre by yourself, like karaoke or eating out alone on Valentines Day .

But “there’s a difference between avoiding things that no one likes to do alone versus avoiding things that are perfectly normal to do alonegrocery shopping, getting a haircut,” says Squyres.

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What Is The Treatment For Autophobia

Before we get into the treatment, it is important to note that this phobia is a fear-based disorder. If you think you have this type of phobia you must visit a general practitioner immediately. They will be able to refer you to someone who is a mental healthcare specialist.

The healthcare specialist will usually start off by performing a psychological evaluation. You will have to provide your medical history in order to consider whether any physical ailment might be causing mental health issues.

Soon after this, the psychological evaluation will be performed. You will be asked a lot of questions involving all of your daily activities and the feelings you experience.

Autophobia is also considered to be a situational phobia. What this means is that in a situation where one has to be alone or feels lonely, they feel overwhelming amounts of distress.

In order to be diagnosed with a phobia of being alone, the fear of finding yourself alone has to have caused so much anxiety that it interferes with daily routines and normal functioning.

Sometimes people could have more than one phobia. In these cases, it could mean that the individual is dealing with more than just one phobia, which might make the phobia of being alone even harder to deal with. You will need to really open up to your doctor to discuss this further and come to an appropriate conclusion.

Prepare Yourself Mentally And Physically

According to experts, were built to display anxiety and to recognize it in others. If your body and mind are anxious, your audience will notice. Hence, its important to prepare yourself before the big show so that you arrive on stage confident, collected and ready.

Your outside world is a reflection of your inside world. What goes on in the inside, shows on the outside. Bob Proctor

Exercising lightly before a presentation helps get your blood circulating and sends oxygen to the brain. Mental exercises, on the other hand, can help calm the mind and nerves. Here are some useful ways to calm your racing heart when you start to feel the butterflies in your stomach:

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Coping With The Fear Of Loneliness

Since we know that the fear of loneliness has similarities to anxiety, that gives us some clues for coping with the condition.

Deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness meditation, moving and other activities that get you into your body and into the present moment can all help you cope when the fear of loneliness arises.

Finding something to shift your attention and focus to can also help. Playing music, watching a movie that you love, or cooking a favorite meal can help.

Causes & Risk Factors For Monophobia

There is still much to learn about the causes of specific phobias. It is believed that a variety of factors contribute to their development. These factors include genetics, brain function, learned behavior and trauma. Additional risk factors are age, temperament, and behavior of family members in similar situations.2

Common risk factors for monophobia include:

• Age: Specific phobias usually appear by age 10 .
• Traumatic experiences: A frightening negative experience associated with being alone is a risk factor for development of monophobia.
• Genes: Having an immediate family member with a phobia increases the chances of developing a phobia by 3 times.1
• Brain function: Changes in brain functioning due to mood disorders, substance abuse, or other lifestyle habits may contribute to the development of a phobia.
• Learned behavior/family members behavior: Children sometimes learn to fear being alone by watching a family members reaction to being left alone.
• Learning about a bad experience of someone left alone:; Hearing or reading about another persons negative experience of being alone can lead to development of monophobia.
• Temperament: An individual who is more sensitive than average has a higher risk of developing a phobia.

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Being Alone Well Is An Art Form It’s Time To Start Enjoying Your Own Company

• Find a therapist to combat fear and anxiety

In my work as a clinical psychologist, Ive seen countless patients over the years with a similar presenting concern the fear of being alone. They tell me about the discomfort they feel when spending time by themselves and their strategies for avoiding being alone. They describe spending time with people they dont actually enjoy, compulsively talking on the phone to fill the silence, and reflexively turning on the TV when they enter their apartment, just to not have to experience being alone with themselves. Years ago, one patient even admitted that the primary reason she decided to become a mother was to protect herself from being alone.

This fear of aloneness is a problem we dont talk enough about. And in these hyper-connected times, this problem is only getting worse. Texting throughout the day and spending hours and hours online in the virtual presence of others disables our capacity to be alone. In his now classic 2009 article The End of Solitude, literary critic and essayist William Deresiewicz explains our contemporary dilemma clearly: The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less we are able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.

The good news is that we can cultivate the capacity to be alone well. We can cultivate it as adults even if we failed to receive certain crucial elements during our early years that support the capacity to be alone well.

Prevention Of Monophobia Or Fear Of Being Alone

In case of any symptoms of monophobia or fear of being alone, it is important to refer to a psychologist as soon as possible, especially if you have children. Your family members may not cause monophobia or fear of being alone genetically, but watching someone having phobia can create phobia in children. Thus, it becomes even more important to get treatment for phobia and avoid it from passing to children. Even a doctor cannot define a fixed recovery initially, but it can be predicted based on the rate of recovery.

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Causes Of The Fear Of Loneliness

What causes the fear of loneliness? For one thing, we often fear re-experiencing something painful that weve already experienced in the past. We dont want to go through that again. Many of us have experienced loneliness and dont want to have to go through it again.

Other common causes include:

• Excessive screen time might be linked with fear of loneliness or an inability to be alone
• Insecure attachment from childhood that makes you feel like when people arent around you that they dont still love you
• Unprocessed trauma; you may not want to be alone in your home because something bad has happened to you in a home previously, for example.

Monophobia may also be linked with other mental health conditions including borderline personality disorder and agoraphobia.

How To Cope With A Fear Of Loneliness

Sometimes we have a problem that we have to cope with.

Other times, we have a fear of the problem thats even worse than the problem itself.

For example, loneliness is an epidemic that affects many people. Its hard to deal with. But whats often overlooked is the fear of loneliness, which can be just as challenging for many people. Its a real issue and if youre coping with it, you are definitely not alone.

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Social Impacts Of Autophobia

When a person has the phobia of being alone, it may greatly affect professional, social, and intimate relationships. Here are the social impacts of autophobia:;

• Unhealthy intimate relationships, like constantly fixating on the thought that your partner is having an affair, even when its not true, and theres no reason to suspect. This also includes checking up on your partner all the time.;
• Parents who have a fear of being lonely do not like their kids to form intimate relationships with friends or a partner because they are afraid their kids might leave them.;
• Attends social gatherings even when not invited.;
• Stalks an ex-spouse and unable to move on from the relationship.;

Wean Yourself Off Constant Company

Constantly eating takes the edge off the enjoyment of eating. But when we eat after we have given ourselves a chance to get a little peckish, the experience of eating means more and is more enjoyable. So too with socializing; when we take time out to be by ourselves sometimes, the quality of interaction when we do see others improves.

Yet, like any overwhelming need, craving constant company can start to feel addictive. One young woman I helped overcome her fear of being alone started, at my request, to take walks around the block with her mother. Halfway around, she would walk home and her mother would continue the walk. She would wait 5 minutes for her mother and we increased that time to the point where, eventually, her mother could go out for days at a time.

Start off small and gently increase your periods of ‘independence time’. Take a fifteen-minute walk and sit in a park, ask people to leave you for ten minutes. Bit by bit, you’ll find you can increase the time span and thereby increase your confidence and self-reliance.

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Recovery Period/healing Time For Monophobia Or Fear Of Being Alone

A person suffering from monophobia or fear of being alone can always recover from his or her fear with proper treatment from experts. Time for recovery depends on the level of anxiety. If the level of anxiety is low or moderate, a person can be treated by adopting a well designed recovery program. In case of high anxiety levels, therapies may not be enough and you would need to take help of medicines for overcoming your fears. Anxiety can be treated by letting an individual face his fears and not running away from them. The time period cannot be defined and can depend on individualâs ability to take up treatment and come out of his fear.

Monophobiathe Fear Of Being Alone

The fear of being alone can make a person feel very insecure, anxious and depressed. If you fear being alone you may become over needy of other people and feel as if you must be around people at all times.;While we all, to varying degrees, need people in our life, if you feel you must have people around all the time then this need is controlling you.

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Strategies To Calm Down When You Experience Fear Of Abandonment

Every one of us has fears about being left alone. Most of us struggle with some fundamental feelings that we are unlovable or wont be accepted for who we are. We all have a critical inner voice, a negative internal dialogue that chronically criticizes us or gives us bad advice. This voice often perpetuates our fear of abandonment: Hes gonna leave you, it warns. Shes probably cheating, it cries. Because we all have voices and alarms that are set off when we feel triggered, its helpful to have tools and strategies to calm ourselves down when we notice our fears amp up. One useful resource is this;toolkit to help people cope with anxiety,;which lists exercises and practices that are beneficial for anyone to utilize when they feel stirred up.

Another general practice to adopt is that of self-compassion. Researcher Dr. Kristin Neff has done studies, revealing countless benefits of self-compassion. Enhancing self-compassion is actually favorable to building self-esteem, because self-compassion doesnt focus as much on judgment and evaluation. Rather, it involves three main elements: