When a construct is linked broadly with various mental health problems and associ-ated interpersonal problems, as is the case with loneliness, it is safe to assume a role for the self, in terms of its content, structure, and cognitive processing. We maintain that focus on the self and identity should be the starting point when seeking to understand loneliness. Indeed, decades ago, von Witzleben (1958) characterized primary loneliness as being a loneliness of one’s self and indicated this primary loneliness is responsible for feeling alone and helpless in the world. Similarly, Sadler (1978) proposed that loneliness is a form of self-definition and self-perception that can often entail an acute self-awareness of deprivation. We feel that when lone-liness is chronic and intense, issues of self and identity are important and can account for mental health difficulties. The self is implicated when people have thoughts such as “There must be something wrong with me” that accord with obser-vations that loneliness is a deficit condition and involves an abiding sense that there is a missing part of the self (see Weiss, 1973). If the self is a central focus in loneliness, the self should surface as a key theme when people are asked to consider and describe their own experiences of loneliness. This is indeed the case. For instance, when examining antecedents of loneliness, Ami Rokach identified several clusters of factors including a key cluster related to the negative self. Rokach (1989) conducted a content analysis of the open-ended responses of 526 participants. This content analysis yielded a cluster around the central theme of “personal shortcomings.” These shortcomings included reports of negative self-perceptions and related themes about feeling unimportant (i.e., not mattering), feeling unattractive to others, and low self-worth. People in this study linked their loneliness with being a failure, feeling inadequate, and having little of value to offer. Similarly, a recent interview study of adolescents and emerging adults implicated a negative self-image, low self-esteem, and an insecurity involving the self as core contributors to loneliness (see Sundqvist & Hemberg, 2021).
It has been observed that lonely people “… are readier than other people to use negative terms to describe themselves and their performance” (Vitkus & Horowitz, 1987, p. 1272). This negativistic tendency can be detected among children prone to loneliness. Hymel and Franke (1985) observed that lonely children tend to ascribe social success to external factors but attribute social failure to internal and stable elements in a self-blaming way. This negative orientation toward the self often takes the form of dispositional self-criticism and both loneliness and self-criticism weigh heavily on people of various ages. Typically, the link between loneliness and self- criticism is moderate to strong in magnitude and it is stronger than the link between loneliness and other personality traits such as dependency (see Schachter & Zlotogorski, 1995). Wiseman (1997) examined students making the transition to university in longitudinal research and found that trait loneliness was associated with higher levels of self-criticism and lower levels of self-efficacy. Moreover, higher self-criticism and lower self-efficacy at the beginning of the school year predicted subsequent decreases in state loneliness. Besser et al. (2003) showed that self-criticism was associated with loneliness, but this link was stronger among uni-versity students not in a current romantic relationship (r = 0.62) versus those stu-dents in a romantic relationship (r = 0.43). The magnitude of the link between loneliness and dependency was comparatively much smaller. The link between loneliness and self-criticism can escalate into more extreme forms such as self-disgust (Ypsilanti et al., 2019) and self-hate. Supplementary analyses of data from our Collegiate Health Study confirmed a strong positive asso-ciation between loneliness and self-hate (r = 0.52) along with equally strong asso-ciations with measures of rumination, distraction, neuroticism, social hopelessness, preoccupied attachment style, and depression. Impressively, as seen in Table 1.1, despite its strong associations with key vulnerability factors including self-hate, loneliness remained a significant and unique predictor of depression when consid-ered in a regression analysis with other predictors.
Table 1.1 Regression analysis predicting levels of self-reported depression in university students
| Predictor | Beta | t | p |
| Unbearable loneliness | 0.362 | 4.80 | <0.001 |
| Neuroticism | 0.140 | 2.44 | <0.05 |
| Hate self | 0.319 | 5.38 | <0.0001 |
| Preoccupied attachment style | 0.153 | 2.33 | <0.03 |
Note. N = 246 university students. This block of predictors was significant (F = 29.90, p < 0.0001) and accounted for 51.7% of the variance in depression scores
Besser et al. (2003) suggested that factors and processes involving the self repre-sent a good starting point when responding to the call from Dill and Anderson (1999) to identify mediators of the link between loneliness and depression. Below we outline several ways of conceptualizing the self that we propose have a role to play in loneliness. Our emphasis on the self reflects our sense that bolstering the self should be at the center of preventive, proactive attempts to mitigate loneliness, and reduce the possibility of someone developing unbearable loneliness.
Loneliness can also involve a form of self-blame that encompasses the themes that the lonely individual is personally responsible for being lonely in the first place or is responsible for not being able to overcome the loneliness. Vanhalst et al. (2018) showed that adolescents identified through trajectory analyses as having chronic loneliness were distinguished from adolescents in other groups by an exceptionally high level of self-blame on a multidimensional emotion regulation measure. They also had higher levels of rumination and catastrophizing and less reported capacity to be able to put things in perspective.
While self-blame seems to play a role, it is another matter entirely to suggest that lonely people may have actually acted in ways that have set the stage for loneliness or added to existing levels of loneliness. Nevertheless, Rook (1988) called for a more differentiated approach to understanding loneliness that recognizes multiple possible pathways, including the possibility that some lonely people have engaged in self-defeating patterns in order to gain the approval of other people. When it comes to loneliness, self-defeating tendencies include avoidance and self-induced isolation (see Rokach, 1990). However, Rokach (1990) refers to these tendencies as “nonconstructive methods” of coping with loneliness.
Regardless of whether lonely people are truly self-defeating, an association has been found between loneliness and seeing oneself as being someone who generates stress for oneself and makes bad situations and problems worse. This self- perpetuating cycle research fits with the notion that self-generated interpersonal stress can, in turn, result in isolation and rejection (see Hammen, 1991). Regarding a link with loneliness, we found in a sample of 247 university students that elevated scores on self-generated stress (see Flett et al., 2020) were associated jointly with loneliness (r = 0.39) and depression (r = 0.53). Our results suggest that lonelier students tend to agree with self-reported items on the Self-Generated Stress Scale such as “Much of the stress I experience is due to the choices I make,” and “I have a habit of putting myself in situations that are more stressful than they need to be.” A dual treatment focus here is learning new ways of behaving that don’t add to stress and addressing the self-perception of being responsible for additional stress. The tendency to be false and inauthentic or self-suppressing is another element of the self that can be a pathway to the experience of loneliness. The study by Besser et al. (2003) mentioned above also found robust links between loneliness and a tendency to silence the self among students in a relationship (r = 0.60) and those not in a relationship (r = 0.51). As part of their discussion of Jack’s (1999) conceptual-ization of self-silencing, Joiner et al. (1999) proposed that depressive orientations could result in loneliness via a process that involves silencing the self. They noted that trying to be good and keep relationships going through self-sacrifice is intended to increase closeness to others, but this is typically not a true closeness and is likely to result in hopelessness and loneliness.
Regarding the role of self and identity in loneliness, there is a seminal carefully documented clinical case study that is quite informative. As part of his unique anal-ysis of the case of Ellen West, Carl Rogers (1961) identified the psychological con-ditions underscoring a profound sense of aloneness. He posited that people become estranged from their “experiencing organism” and there is “a potentially fatal divi-sion” between actual experience and the experience the conscious self clings to in order to gain love and acceptance from significant others. The second element in loneliness, according to Rogers (1961), is an unwillingness to communicate one’s real self to others. Instead, the person relies on an idealized façade when interacting with others; using this façade only serves to add to a heightened sense of loneliness and estrangement from the actual self.
The insights provided by Rogers decades ago set the stage for subsequent theory and research focused on connections between loneliness and being someone who is inauthentic due to needing to seem perfect to other people. If this process proposed by Rogers is interpreted with perfectionistic self-presentation in mind, the person who is invested in seeming absolutely perfect will be plagued by a sense of self- inconsistency and a growing sense of detachment, not only from other people, but also from the self. Hewitt, Flett, and associates sought to understand the interper-sonal problems of perfectionists by proposing the perfectionism social disconnec-tion model (PSDM) (see Hewitt et al., 2017). The essence of this work is that loneliness is one clear cost of perfectionism. One element of the PSDM is the notion that subjective and objective social disconnection in the form of loneliness stems from needing to project an image of being perfect. The PSDM applies to children and adolescents as well as adults, and it has received considerable empirical support (for summaries see Flett & Hewitt, 2022; Hewitt et al., 2017).
Finally, consistent evidence indicates that loneliness is associated negatively with trait self-disclosure (e.g., Franzoi & Davis, 1985; Leung, 2002; Solano et al., 1982). Thus, it is not surprising that loneliness should be associated with the non-disclosure facet of perfectionistic self-presentation that assesses an unwillingness or inability to disclose imperfections to others.
A focus on shame and loneliness illustrates how the negative self-views of lonely people can easily result in growing social detachment, isolation, and alienation. Shame is the sense that the self is broadly deficient, and deficiencies are visible to the point that other people can see them and are well aware of them. One lonely adolescent described the sense of living with deep scars and a flood of shame that was so damaging it led to painfully questioning herself to the point of wondering whether she was even a person (see Hemberg et al., 2022). Qualitative accounts of loneliness tend to confirm this emphasis on the negative self-concepts of young people prone to loneliness, but also their tendency to put on a front and hide their loneliness from others (see Verity et al., 2022). We have emphasized the role of self, in part, because we feel that it is particularly germane to the extreme form of loneliness we describe below in the next segment of this article. In addition, we believe that addressing this negative sense of self should be the core focus of prevention and intervention efforts. We will revisit this theme later in the final segment of this chapter.