FEAR OF BEING ALONE: ​​HOW TO OVERCOME IT IN 12 PRACTICAL STEPS - ARTE - 2024

The person who is afraid of being alone (autophobia) feels insecure and unable to take care of himself / herself. Being alone with oneself can be a pleasure for many or a storm for others, as it causes them great panic. This leads them to do a whole series of things to avoid being left alone at all costs.

To overcome any fear you have, the most important thing is to know yourself. I invite you to write a journal of "my fear" to help you in this process of how to overcome it. It is a tool that you can always have at hand and use it when you need it.

Here's how to overcome your fear of being alone in 12 steps. I hope it helps.

12 steps to overcome the fear of being alone

Steps 1 to 3. Assessment of fear

Acknowledge your fear of loneliness

The first step in overcoming the fear of being alone is to acknowledge and accept that you are afraid of being alone and that you want to overcome it.

Recognizing the fear of loneliness is the first step that can lead to change. So explore inside yourself in a sincere way, acknowledging your emotions at all times, no matter how unpleasant they are.

Once you recognize your fear is when you can begin to face it. There are different degrees of fear of being alone that goes from more to less on a continuum.

There are those people who cannot be left alone for a moment because a feeling of panic invades them that leads to an anxiety crisis.

And those people who do not panic, but do feel very insecure when they are alone.

Analyze your fear

As I said at the beginning of the article, the most important thing when facing your fears is that you know yourself, and therefore, that you know your fear well.

When you know your fear well, then stop being so afraid, because it goes from being unknown to something you know. To learn more about your fear of being alone, you have to ask yourself questions.

Analyze and write in your journal the characteristics of your fear: when I feel the greatest fear, what anxiety score I feel from 0 to 10, how long it has lasted, what I was thinking at that moment.

After this analysis, there is a fundamental question that you should ask yourself: What is it that scares me the most about being alone?

Record the answer to this question in your journal. In this way you try to specify your fear.

Take your fear to the extreme

You have recognized your fear, you have analyzed it and you have specified what scares you the most of being alone. Okay, now put yourself in the worst case:

What's the worst that could happen to me?

Write the answer to this question in your journal. Then ask yourself the following questions:

And is that really so horrible? Could I get over it if it happened to me? Write the answers back in your journal.

Read everything you have written out loud. Now that you have written it on paper in a more defined and concrete way, do you see it in a different way?

This process will help you to relativize and ridicule the consequences of your fear of being alone.

Steps 4-5. Your fear and relationship with others

Analyze how you behave with your friends

The fear that you have to stay alone marks the way you relate to others.

If you are afraid of being alone, you will act in a certain way to avoid being alone at all costs. With which it is likely that your way of relating to others is by giving yourself to your friends in body and soul.

It may be that you try to give them everything they need, take care of them, that they feel well cared for by you so that they do not leave your side. If you feel identified with this way of relating to others, you must remedy it.

In this situation I recommend that you do the following analysis:

• That friendship to which you try to offer everything and take care of her, does not really need it that much since she knows how to take care of herself.
• Based on the above, in reality you give yourself a lot to that person not because he needs it but because you are afraid that he will leave your side.
• The fear that he will leave your side makes you want to do more and more for that person. If for whatever reason that person ends up leaving, it is when you start to enter a vicious and absurd and painful cycle for you: "perhaps I have not given enough, if I had given more of myself I would not have left".
• With which, in the next friendship, you will try to give more of yourself because your fear that he will leave and stay alone will be even greater due to your previous experience.

As you can see, it is a vicious circle since your fear of staying alone is gradually feeding. After this analysis, it is when you should ask yourself the following approach:

The solution is not to do things to avoid being left alone. The solution is to learn to be alone.

Fear of being alone vs. relationship

Now analyze how it is or how your relationships have been. Surely your fear of loneliness has also left a dent in your most intimate romantic relationships.

If with your friends you have given yourself 100%, most likely with your partner you have given yourself 200%. You have given much more than you actually had.

Perhaps you have given so much that you have been left without self-esteem and security. It may also be that your fear of staying alone causes you to chain relationships.

And they are usually not very solid relationships, with which they have an expiration date; and when they run out, your fear of being alone once more increases. Entering the vicious circle again.

The point of all these steps is not that you resign yourself to being alone. It is that you learn to be independent and then you can relate to others because you want to share your life with them, and not because of the fear of being alone.

Steps 6 to 8. Take Action

Keep in mind that if you want this to work you must be convinced that you want to overcome it and you must take it very seriously.

It is a challenge and you must be persistent and fight for it. Well, fighting a fear is hard, but it is harder to always live in fear.

Stand up to your fear

After trying to convince yourself that you should and want to learn to be alone, make a list in your journal of the advantages and disadvantages of learning to be alone.

Take into account the advantages and disadvantages in terms of the relationship with your friends, in the relationship with your partner and in the relationship with yourself:

• Think about how you think you would act with your friends if you stopped having this fear.
• How do you think you would act with your partner if you stopped having this fear.
• How would you feel about yourself if you didn't have this fear. What do you think you would gain and what do you think you would lose.

Specify objectives

For example, you can make a goal of spending 30 minutes alone each day. You with yourself.

Define how you are going to spend these 30 minutes alone. You can spend 30 minutes reflecting on yourself: your tastes, your beliefs, your way of seeing life, your desires, etc. in order to know you more.

Or you can use it to do some fun activity by yourself. For example doing sports, playing a game, reading, writing, drawing, etc. Write these goals down in your journal and be sure to cross them off as you go along.

They must be clear, concrete and achievable objectives. If you write very difficult goals, it is easy to throw in the towel. You should start with something easy and gradually increase the difficulty.

Expose yourself to your fear

Once you have defined and specified your goals in your journal, you must expose yourself to each of them. (Not all on the same day but progressively).

• Start by scoring on a scale from 0 to 10 the anxiety that you think you will have at the time of, for example, spending 30 minutes alone without contacting anyone, not even on WhatsApp. Record the score in your journal.
• After achieving the goal set, rate the anxiety you have felt on a scale of 0 to 10. Write it down in your journal.
• If felt anxiety is 0, move on to the next goal. If your anxiety is greater than 0, repeat the goal until your anxiety is equal to 0.

You can also write down the resources you have used to avoid feeling fear. These resources can help you in your next goal.

Steps 9 to 10. Cultivate and develop as a person

Develop your own interests

One of the steps you must take to learn to be alone is to learn to be independent, and as an independent person, have your own interests, desires and beliefs.

Perhaps now you think that you have no hobbies or interests, but that is because until now you have not stopped to explore them. Ready to get on the wonderful train of exploring your skills?

Take your journal again and write down those things that you have ever wanted to try, those things that you have ever thought you could be good at and start trying.

It can be hundreds of things: dancing, writing, photography, drawing, painting, playing the piano, the guitar, riding a horse, playing golf, climbing, learning history, symbols, doing theater, etc.

Try yourself and discover something exciting about yourself that you did not know. This will help you to gain self-esteem and confidence in yourself.

Get feedback from other people

Talk to trusted people about this personal development you have started. Ask them to help you in this change. That they help you to have more initiative, to be more assertive and to express your requests to others.

Practice with them learning to say things in a more direct way, to express your needs, that is, to learn to ask instead of focusing only on offering.

People who know you can help you get back on track if they see you back to your old ways.

This time it is you who should ask them for help and let you help.

Steps 11 to 12. Tools to help you

Make positive visualizations

To increase your confidence when facing being alone, it can be useful to visualize the scenes that cause you anxiety.

Use your imagination to visualize what you want to get out of yourself. The visualization must always be positive. You must visualize yourself emerging victorious from the situation.

For example, if you only have to go to a party, close your eyes and try to visualize yourself going to that party with great confidence in yourself. Visualize yourself arriving at the scene firmly greeting people, smiling and confidently.

Visualizing yourself will make it easier for you to be the person you want to be.

Seek professional help

If after trying to overcome your fear of being left alone with these steps, you feel that your fear persists, it is time to consider psychological therapy. This fear of staying alone has root causes.

Sometimes it is not necessary to go to the root causes since with these steps you can overcome fear. However, there are times when it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem to nip it in the bud.

Of course, it is not necessary to wait until the last minute to seek psychological help. You can also choose to carry out this process with a professional from the beginning to give you more confidence in the process and have a greater point of support.