The pain of losing this connection is the deepest form of trauma that we can experience. Trauma fragments us and splits us apart. It turns symmetry into disorganization. Stillness into panic. Harmony into war. Joy into suffering.
When we encounter this trauma, it’s as if we put on greycoloured glasses and most of us wear them for the rest of our lives. We see the world through the pain of these lenses. Through them, we perceive ourselves to be separate from the people and things around us. We perceive ourselves to be... alone.
The pain of the human condition is that we walk this Earth with multiple billions of other people and yet each of us feels alone. The trauma of our own disconnection causes us to perceive ourselves as disconnected from anything we see as “other”.
It’s enough that this disconnection causes us pain. But the truth is, it doesn’t stop there. This pain bleeds out across the planet. If you are truly connected to something, you cannot cause it pain without causing yourself pain too. When we perceive ourselves to be disconnected, we no longer feel the ripple of oneness that is our fundamental truth. We no longer feel the impact that everything has on us and that we have on everything else and, as a result, we can cause something or someone else pain without perceiving it in ourselves.
— Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection