“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
It’s the feeling of numbness as you gaze out the window.
It’s the disconnection you feel inside when you’re around others.
It’s the sense of being an eternal outsider and lone wolf.
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It’s the low-grade chronic, empty, all-encompassing sense that you don’t belong anywhere.
What I’m describing is the phenomenon of self-alienation.
And it’s something I rarely hear discussed anywhere.
Yet feeling estranged from yourself impacts every corner of your life. It’s a type of trauma that is so pervasive, so silent, that it can go undetected sometimes for an entire lifetime.
If you keep running in circles, feeling stuck, or struggling to know what path to take in life, you may be dealing with the impact of self-alienation.
(Big thanks to Mateo Sol for coming across this powerful term in his research.)
Table of contents
Why Self-Alienation is Inner Homelessness
Being estranged from your inner self is a form of inner homelessness because it is a disconnection from your inner truth and the light of your Soul.
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It’s like being a vagabond, wandering in search of love, safety, and peace – desperately looking for these feelings everywhere but within yourself.
When there’s no one home inside – when there’s little to no sense of who you actually, authentically are – you will be plagued with feelings of loneliness, emptiness, depression, and anxiety.
The truth is that you are unconsciously yearning for your own Soul, but because of trauma, you’ve been estranged, cut off, and dissociated from that reality.
How Does the Trauma of Self-Alienation Happen?
The main character of Albert Camus’ book, The Stranger, is a perfect example of the numbness and disconnection inherent in self-alienation. The book starts off with the following words,
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
There is an eerie sense of dissociation here. And as the book progresses, his self-alienation becomes increasingly evident.
The same theme of self-alienation is present in Franz Kafka’s book The Metamorphosis, where the main character, Gregor, wakes up one day to find he has been transformed into an insect. This strange event symbolizes his deep sense of self-estrangement, where he writes,
“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
When we’re estranged from ourselves, the inevitable truth is that we’re cut off from our feelings, wants, needs, and inner reality.
How does this trauma occur?
Typically, self-alienation happens due to:
- Childhood trauma – having toxic, absent, or emotionally immature parents who didn’t mirror your needs for safety and validation can result in a deep sense of shame and inner disconnection
- Relational trauma – other than parental bonds, romantic relationships can be another source of self-alienation, especially if you get involved with an abusive, chaotic, or narcissistic person
- Life crisis or dark night of the soul – existential and spiritual life crises can trigger feelings of self-alienation, especially if our sense of meaning, direction, or personal value disappears unexpectedly
- Aging and sickness – getting older and experiencing more illness, as well as cognitive changes, can lead to feelings of self-alienation, especially as modern society devalues the process of aging.
- Social media – constantly looking outside of yourself and caught in the unending cycle of pings, notifications, and doom scrolling can result in deep feelings of self-estrangement.
What do you think might be responsible for your sense of self-alienation? Let me know in the comments.
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Forms of Self-Alienation
When we experience the trauma of self-alienation, we become an ‘other’ to ourselves, a stranger – what Spanish philosopher Ortega Y. Gasset called “other-ated.”
Otheration is a form of dehumanization. In other words, self-alienation strips us of our own humanity. It is then that we adopt a false self to try to fill the inner hole of self-absence.
Here are some common ways that self-alienation manifests in human relationships:
- Playing a rigid role (achiever, mother, father, entrepreneur, boss, victim) with no room for nuance, expansion, or evolution
- People-pleasing and trying to be who others want us to be
- Self-martyrdom or sacrificing ourselves incessantly for others
- Self-absorption and treating others as objects without seeing them as separate beings with their own inner lives
- Not letting others in and pushing them away (self-isolation, self-sabotage, etc.)
- Getting lost in cult-like movements, beliefs, or teachings
- Codependency and enmeshment in relationships
9 Signs of Self-Alienation Trauma
I fear me this—is Loneliness—
The Maker of the soul
Its Caverns and its Corridors
Illuminate—or seal—
— Emily Dickinson, The Loneliness One dare not sound
Self-alienation is a multi-faceted, deep-rooted experience. Here are some signs you may be experiencing it:
- Feeling like a stranger to yourself.
- Lacking meaning and purpose.
- Experiencing inner emptiness.
- Difficulty recognizing or communicating your true feelings.
- Struggling to pinpoint who you are.
- Chronic low-grade depression or anxiety.
- Having a distorted, fragmented, or absent sense of self.
- Deep feelings of loneliness and isolation.
- Being the eternal outsider who doesn’t fit in.
Do you have any more signs to add to this list? If so, let me know in the comments.
Healing Self-Alienation – 3 Deep Paths to Wholeness
Self-alienation is one of the biggest issues I’ve dealt with, and continue dealing with, in my life.
As a child who grew up in an abusive fundamentalist religious belief system, with two emotionally immature (and wounded) parents, I often felt alone and alienated from myself and life itself.
I learned early on that playing a role and adopting a false self were essential for my emotional and psychological survival. To this day, I’m still healing and learning how to come back home to myself. In fact, earlier today, I realized that in the process of becoming a mother, I have again lost myself. How? Through letting my old self-care and inner work routines slip. Now I’m back on the road of self-reclamation, which is why I’ve decided to write this article.
If you suffer from self-alienation, I want you to know that the path of healing doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does require commitment. It requires work. That may not sound sexy or fun, but it’s the truth.
So please, choose one of the practices below, and schedule it into your daily calendar. Don’t delay. Act. Set a time each day to do one of the following actions – and stick to them without making excuses. Healing is a gentle process, but it also needs inner fortitude and ‘toughness’ to stick.
1. Words, reflection, and inner gazing
Journal daily as if your life depends on it. I’ve recently started the guided Journaling Like a Stoic workbook by Brittany Polat to help equip me with skills to deal with the stress of parenting and juggling life. You may like to do open-ended and unstructured journaling, or go the guided route like me.
If you like the ‘hand-holding’ route, I recommend starting with one of these guided journals:
- Self-Love Journal (recommended)
- Inner Child Journal (great for emotional healing)
- Shadow Work Journal (advanced, but good if you’ve done lots of healing already)
These are foundational, deeply transformative, and proven ways to come back home to yourself.
If you want more niche journals, I recommend the Mother Wound Journal (if you have a difficult relationship with your mother figure) or the Moon Alchemy Journal (follows the phases of the moon and aligns that with inner work). All of these journals have been lovingly written, researched, designed, and created by the lonerwolf team – and all are highly rated by our beloved community here.
2. Silence, stillness, and solitude
Stop filling every second of your day with noise. Turn off the phone. Go outside. Or sit inside in silence. If you want to make the experience more enjoyable, play some soft music and light a candle.
$3To connect with yourself again, you need to let yourself be with the boredom and discomfort of emptiness. If you need a meditation instructor, fine. Just make sure they’re not filling the space with incessant words. The best meditation guides, in my experience, allow room for a lot of silence.
How can you come home to yourself if you’re constantly being hyper-stimulated and distracted? This is where the three S’s come into play (silence, stillness, solitude).
3. Go to the core of yourself
We all have four essential reference points within us, forming the compass by which we navigate:
- Your core wound – the root of your trauma and pain
- Your core beliefs – the unconscious forces that drive your behavior
- Your core needs – the non-negotiables required for living a fulfilling life
- Your core values – the building blocks of your authentic purpose
Doing personality tests and reading lots of self-help books is great. These types of resources give you an idea of who you are, typically on a superficial level.
But don’t forget about these deeper parts of you. No one can give you a test or tell you what these core aspects of you are. You’ve got to do the work yourself, which is probably why they’re less marketable or sexy than 3-minute quizzes.
You can read my article on finding your core wound and core beliefs to get started. These free guides have some wonderful exercises and provide some high-quality guidance.
But if you want a simpler, more direct, and in-depth way of finding these four core parts of yourself, see my Soul Work Compass Course. It will help you find your core wounds, core beliefs, core needs, and core values with ease. You can sign up here straight away.
***
Self-alienation is becoming an ever-increasing phenomenon with the rise in artificial intelligence, the omnipresence of social media, and the toxic individualism of modernity.
Our society seems to be built on isolating us from our inner truth and reality. But we don’t have to be suckers. We don’t have to stay as eternal victims of our childhood traumas either. With fierce commitment (aka, set a habit, stick to it!), we can come back home to ourselves.
Tell me, what does self-alienation look or feel like to you? What has helped? I’d love to hear in the comments.
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Thank you for this. And for your vulnerability to share what you too are going through. I have never heard it described this way and it is utterly accurate and painful at the same time. I felt many things as I read with gratitude for the journey to healing that I continue to be on. Thank you also for the prompting questions. I have taken them down and will explore them shortly.
Thank you Fungai, I appreciate you sharing this 💜
Thank you for a brilliant article. I think the loneliness epidemic we are experiencing is not understood correctly and that what people are experiencing is actually self alienation.
I feel this deeply. I have had PTSD for half my life after having been drugged and raped during a work team building weekend. I have had so much therapy of many modalities and found that therapy has made my life worse. Improvements have been slow, but it feels like while I accomplished so much in the first few years of my life the second portion of my life, post rape, seems to have amounted to me bed being raped instead of me living my best life. My life has been about overcoming. No polarities, no contrasts, no happiness and sadness. Just overcoming, over and over again. I feel powerless even though this is not a thought, but more like something I cannot quite describe is stuck in the body. And I get it: if something hideous happens to a person and you are unable to run away or fight back this is a frozen-ness that gets stuck in the body. So part of my PTSD recovery that I created for myself has been reclaiming parts of myself that I never even new existed. And that has been the positive part of the PTSD. The negative: I am unable to move on with my life. I struggle to connect to others and to life. But my greatest sadness, is the loss of connection with myself.
So I have decided to stop healing and this whole self improvement nonsense, because it’s a hamster wheel that we seem to never get off perpetuated by the feeling of shame and perfectionism. Instead I have decided to find a way to unite, align and integrate all parts of myself to make a coherent whole. Nietzsche’s idea of “Amor Fati” has inspired me, to stop resisting what is and start loving my struggles. Self knowledge for me is the starting point.
“So I have decided to stop healing and this whole self improvement nonsense, because it’s a hamster wheel that we seem to never get off perpetuated by the feeling of shame and perfectionism.” – This line is so powerful because it’s the truth. Thank you so much for sharing this, and your struggles, Shae 💜 Ironically, the healing industry can reinforce the very feeling of brokenness it’s trying to fix. It’s like poisoning someone and giving them the cure at the same time! Anything that has it’s basis in self-awareness and self-acceptance is where authentic ‘healing’ dwells. Nietzsche’s idea of “Amor Fati” reminds me of the teachings of both Stoicism and Logotherapy (Viktor Frankl). You might like to look into those if you’re interested. Sending lots of love your way 💗
Thank you for sharing Shae! You’ve expressed your vulnerability with such fluency, I resonated and it came to me that you could probably keep writing or podcasting about your journey back to wholeness and let others witness and find inspiration from your story and ultimately the journey back to self. You have a beautiful way with words and like you know “sharing is caring” and it may deepen your own “homecoming to self” when other that resonate with you, find solace in your sharing.
Thank you so much for this article on self-alienation. Everything you wrote resonated with me profoundly, because you put into words my entire life in a nutshell. My experience of self-alienation includes a persistent sense of disconnection—feeling numb, or even dead inside—and an inability to truly connect with others. I don’t feel as though I am fully inside myself, as if my mind is not aligned with my body.
I feel as though I am always on the outside looking in, observing life from a distance, enclosed in a shell of emptiness and loneliness, with no anchor to myself. Every sign and manifestation you described feels like a reflection of me. I have always carried a deep, pervasive sadness, and it feels like an intrinsic part of the shell I exist within.
I have endured multiple traumatic experiences beginning in childhood, experiences that fractured my sense of self and shaped the way I exist in the world. Thank you most sincerely for your guidance, understanding, and compassion in this beautifully written article. It made me feel seen in a way I rarely have.
You describe self-alienation so well, Elizabeth, and in such a haunting way. I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to share your experience here with us all – it requires a level of vulnerability that I don’t take for granted. Hopefully, one of the healing suggestions in this post opens a doorway of connection for you. With gratitude and love 💜
There reason this information, spiritual reflections, and art of any power and depth is so invaluable is because it’s more calibrated to the reality and needs of the individualistic or solitary.
If a lone wolf hits an existential crisis and seeks reassurance and treatment from a conventional mental health clinician, the adaptive, normative and algorithmic formulations they will be offered will usually exacerbate the self-alienated source of their distress because they are designed to reassimilate them to a consensus reality they are profoundly dissonant with.
The cure is worse than the disease.
Whereas a lot of spiritual texts and existentially penetrative art is part of a long and validating tradition of highly conscious outsiders describing a hypertrophied reality.
In the choice between leveling idiocy, or uncut awareness, choose the latter.
Yes, conventional psychotherapy, for many, can fall short. I don’t dismiss it entirely as there are some forms of therapy that are effective (existential, transpersonal, depth, somatic, etc.). But there are other forms of healing too, which I’m glad you point out, such as art and spiritual wisdom texts. Thank you for this thought-provoking comment, Steve. :)
Comment on the new format, I am finding it hard to read on my phone, font becomes too small and the page not fitting the screen.
Hi Ft, thanks for letting us know. Would you mind sending a screenshot to support? That would help us fix this issue and it would be greatly appreciated: https://lonerwolf.com/contact/
It’s when you go numb for a while. It’s when you cannot access your passion about anything. Or maybe it’s when you feel self critical and question whether you are really interested in anything anymore. Then something happens that wakens up your caring and you have path again.
Yes, you describe it well, Bill. Thank you!
I remember it. It’s something some of us go through – maybe, eventually, all of us.
Part of the ‘dark night of the soul’.
One positive side of it is developing from loneliness to a familiarity with being alone, and feeling good with that – partly becoming one’s own best friend.
It was a phase, and I remember it taking a while, a few years. It brought a sense of ‘the way to heaven is through hell’..
Quite a journey, but quite an arrival.
Being one’s own best friend – love this. This is *essential* wisdom. Thank you Richard!
Thank you for naming this. It resonates with me. Last year was a massive reckoning and reclamation year for me.
Wow, another wonderful text. My self-alienation probably has the following causes: parents with rigid ideals of social roles, an incessant search for external approval, and constant arguments. Since I was always an introverted child, with heightened sensitivity and attention to detail, I was deprived of being who I truly was in order to fit into social standards.
From childhood, I was introverted, shy, and quiet. I enjoyed calm places, routines, daydreaming, and cultivating a rich inner world. Parties and social events exhausted me to the extreme. I always struggled to play with many children at once, and loud, energetic music irritated me. All of this led people to see me as strange, “a recluse.” Because of that, both people in general and especially my father pressured me to fit in and be “normal.” My mother accepted me more and even protected me—though perhaps excessively.
As someone with uncommon behavior, there was always social pressure for me to adjust. I remember when I started school: I saw the children playing, but I didn’t feel in tune with their games. This created questions about who I was, and teachers thought I might have some disorder. Later, in adolescence—during that phase when we try our hardest to fit in—I tried even more to be someone I wasn’t, which only deepened my sense of strangeness.
When we are not authentic or secure in who we truly are, the likelihood of failing in our attempts to fit in creates a rebound effect. That’s when the feeling of strangeness grew stronger: while I watched people talking and socializing, I only observed and couldn’t understand why I didn’t fit in or have enough topics to converse like anyone else. This only intensified my sense of inadequacy.
I began to envision a career and a life that would make me forget that time. However, because of these feelings, my strangeness caused me emotional pain that prevented me from moving forward, as I gave too much importance to others’ opinions and judgments. I lost many opportunities in life, and the feeling of inadequacy took over me.
Only much later did I encounter the opinions of people who felt the same way I did. That was when I realized I wasn’t alone, and that others also sought understanding of themselves—some more, some less. As an adult, after so many years of misunderstanding and strangeness, I began to search inward for my truth: what was true for me and no one else, who I was, what my values were, what my interests were, and what kinds of people I enjoyed relating to.
All these questions have helped me see a world and a Self that I had been unable to recognize within myself. I realized I can be myself, with my values and ideas, without disrupting order or becoming a rebel. I can give myself the freedom to live in my own way, but I must also have the courage to face life’s hardships and the inevitable criticism directed at those who refuse to conform to rigid social roles and expectations.
It is always necessary to reserve moments of solitude, journaling, meditation, creative idleness, and self-inquiry, because the contemporary world is deeply alienating. When we are immersed in the crowd, our Self and our need for social interaction often distance us from ourselves. That is why I practice detoxing from social media, trends, excessive sociability, news, fashions, and politics, always striving to return to myself, to my center.
This self-alienation is just as dangerous as external alienation, because both distance us from who we truly are. And I believe the worst form of existence is the one that loses itself amid uncertainties and demands foreign to our essence.
As a hypersensitive introvert, I wholeheartedly agree with your description of this life experience. Beautifully stated… thank you for sharing.
“It is always necessary to reserve moments of solitude, journaling, meditation, creative idleness, and self-inquiry, because the contemporary world is deeply alienating.” – Yes, yes, yes! This is a truth I lost touch with after the chaos of becoming a mother. I forgot the value of returning to my center, and therefore disconnected from myself (which I am currently healing through journaling and meditation). Thank you for sharing your deep and insighful personal experience, Hans. 💜
When I was in Junior High School, I experienced this deep self alienation. I went about my days on autopilot, stagnating from without and within.the worst part was that nobody- nobody could understand what I was going through. Some peers even bullied me, since I was the ‘weirdo’.
I did pull through that dark, lonely place in life. but the trauma of that phase still remains. this article gave words to my trauma and whenever I perform any inner child work, I’ll make sure to keep this at the back of my mind ❤️
thank you 🙏🏻
Thank you for your vulnerability, Aadya. You write, “the worst part was that nobody- nobody could understand what I was going through.” I truly hope now those who are in the same place you experienced now have a word to give this feeling. It’s something trauma survivors often feel intensely in their younger years, but it can trail behind us like a long dark shadow as we grow older. Much love 💜