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Collectively, we are talking about loneliness more than ever before.
We know that people are spending more time alone. People are getting married later or choosing not to. Fewer generations are living together under one roof. Many people are working from home with minimal in-person interaction during the workday. Young people are often moving to cities where they know next to no one.
Data from the American Time Use Survey shows that over just thirteen years, from 2010 to 2023, young people ages 15–29 began spending about 45% more time alone.
The most common advice is understandable: Get out more. Join a group. Call a friend. Put yourself in situations where you can meet people.
And sometimes, that is exactly what someone needs. Those are actions that almost anyone can benefit from and something I, as a therapist, commonly encourage.
However, for many people experiencing chronic loneliness, there is more to the story. Simply spending more time around other people may not create the kind of connection they are actually seeking.
At this point, most of us recognize that you can have friends and still feel profoundly alone. You can be surrounded by coworkers, go on dates, attend parties, have a partner, and maintain an active social life—and still carry a persistent sense that you are somehow separate from everyone else.
So then the question becomes: Why? And what actually helps us feel connected?
For some people, the problem is not simply a lack of opportunities for connection. The deeper problem is that connection itself does not feel entirely safe.
There is an important distinction between being alone and feeling alone.
Social isolation describes something relatively observable and easy to understand: you do not have enough contact with other people.
Loneliness is subjective. It is the painful experience of not feeling meaningfully connected, understood, or fully known.
That distinction matters because increasing someone's social contact does not automatically create a sense of belonging. I often think about loneliness through the lens of attachment and complex trauma for this reason.
If your earliest relationships taught you that closeness was inconsistent, conditional, overwhelming, rejecting, or unsafe, your nervous system may have learned something very different from other people are where I can consistently go for comfort.
Instead, your nervous system may have adapted around beliefs such as:
I need to take care of myself.
I shouldn't need too much.
If people really know me, they might leave or like me less.
Other people's feelings matter more than mine.
Closeness eventually becomes painful.
Those beliefs may never be spoken aloud. Often, they do not even feel like beliefs. They may function more like the inner workings beneath our conscious thoughts.
And they can profoundly shape the way someone experiences relationships decades later.
When people hear the word trauma, they often imagine a single catastrophic event.
Complex PTSD and attachment trauma can look different.
They may develop through repeated relational experiences: emotional neglect, unpredictable caregiving, chronic criticism, abandonment, parentification, instability, emotional abuse, or growing up in an environment where a child's emotional needs were consistently minimized or misunderstood.
Research increasingly supports this connection. A large meta-analysis involving more than 1.7 million participants found that childhood maltreatment was associated with greater loneliness across the lifespan, with particularly strong associations for emotional abuse and emotional neglect.
Children adapt to the relationships and environments they are given. The difficulty is that those adaptations do not necessarily disappear once we reach adulthood or become physically independent. Patterns that once helped someone feel safer can continue operating long after the original circumstances have changed.
Maybe you learned to become exceptionally independent. Maybe you became very good at anticipating other people's needs.
You might have learned how to be charming, funny, easygoing, useful, or low-maintenance without ever learning what it felt like to let someone truly take care of you.
These strategies are often remarkably effective until they begin interfering with the very thing we all want: connection.
It is possible—and the case for many people—to deeply want closeness while having learned, through experience, that closeness can feel dangerous.
That can look different from person to person.
Someone may want more friendships but rarely be the one to make plans. They may crave intimacy, then pull away when a relationship starts to feel emotionally serious. They might date often but repeatedly choose people who are unavailable, or have close friends and still struggle to let those friends know when they are hurting.
For some people, connection can also come with a constant sense of vigilance. A small shift in someone’s tone, a slower response, or a change in interest can feel loaded beyond its true meaning. They may assume they are unwanted before anyone has actually rejected them.
Others have become so used to relying on themselves that they barely notice how much connection they need until the loneliness becomes impossible to ignore.
From the outside, the advice can seem simple: put yourself out there more. Meet more people. Say yes to more plans.
But more opportunities for connection do not automatically create a sense of safety within connection.
If vulnerability, dependence, or emotional closeness has come to feel threatening, being around more people may not address what is actually getting in the way.
You can put someone in a room full of people, but that does not necessarily mean they will feel safe enough to belong there.
This is why I believe our conversation about the loneliness epidemic needs to include trauma.
We cannot talk only about the number of social interactions people are having. We also have to talk about their capacity to experience safety, trust, vulnerability, and reciprocity within relationships.
For someone with attachment wounds or complex PTSD, connection itself may activate old fears.
Being ignored by a friend can feel disproportionately painful. A conflict with a partner may feel like abandonment. Depending on someone can trigger anxiety.
Sometimes people describe this experience by saying, "I know logically that this person cares about me. I just don't feel it."
That gap—between what you intellectually know and what you emotionally experience—is one place the effects of trauma can show up, and where deeper work may need to happen in order to experience connection differently.
None of this means that someone with attachment wounds should stop pushing themselves toward connection.
Relationships are a critical part of healing.
However, we need to recognize that the work may need to go deeper than simply increasing social activity.
It might mean noticing the moment you begin to pull away from someone and becoming curious about what happened internally.
It might mean learning to tolerate the discomfort of telling someone what you actually need.
It might mean recognizing when you are interpreting ambiguity as rejection.
It might mean grieving relationships in which your needs were never met.
It might mean learning that conflict does not automatically mean abandonment.
For some, it means processing the earlier experiences that taught the brain and body to expect relationships to be unsafe.
This is where trauma-focused therapies such as EMDR can be helpful. Rather than only asking someone to challenge a belief intellectually, we can work with the experiences underneath that belief—the moments that taught a person, consciously or unconsciously, I am alone, I am too much, I cannot rely on people, or I don't belong.
The goal is not to convince yourself that everyone is safe. That isn't realistic, nor is indiscriminate trust what healing looks like.
The goal is to develop a greater ability to recognize when connection is safe—and to stay present enough to receive it.
The public conversation about loneliness often focuses on getting people back into rooms together.
That matters—a lot. We need communities, friendships, third spaces, shared experiences, and opportunities for genuine human interaction.
We also have to acknowledge that loneliness can exist inside relationships.
For some, the path out of loneliness will come simply from meeting others. But for many, the deeper work is learning how to let themselves be known by the people who are already there.
Because ultimately, the opposite of loneliness is not simply proximity. It is connection.
And for people whose earliest experiences made connection complicated, healing may involve more than putting themselves out there.
It may involve finally addressing the wounds that taught them they had to face the world alone.
Dr. Rebecca Hoffenberg is the Associate Director of EMDR at Soho Integrative EMDR in New York City. She specializes in complex trauma, attachment wounds, and relational patterns, helping adults understand and work through the experiences that continue to shape how they feel in relationships. She provides EMDR-informed, integrative therapy for adults in New York.