This is part of my Oxford Trauma Conference Reflections, a series on the ideas I’m bringing back into my psychotherapy work in Toronto and how they are shaping the way I think about trauma, relationships, the body and healing.

One of the first sessions I attended at the Oxford Trauma Conference was Exploring the Meaning Crisis, with Tara Swart, Jamie Clements, Rayyan Zafar and Anthea Bell.

One idea has stayed with me in particular: being around people is not the same thing as feeling connected to them.

When we talk about loneliness, we often picture somebody physically alone. But some of the loneliest experiences happen in company.

You can have colleagues, friends, a partner, a busy social calendar and hundreds of people available through your phone, and still have very few relationships in which you feel genuinely known.

Connection requires something more than proximity.

It requires being able to reveal something of yourself. To tolerate vulnerability. To let another person affect you. To risk being misunderstood and stay in the relationship long enough to repair it. It also requires some capacity to know what you are feeling in the first place.

For someone who has learned that closeness is unsafe, disappointing or unpredictable, this can be incredibly difficult.

Sometimes the strategy becomes self-sufficiency.

Sometimes it is being funny, helpful or competent so that people like us without getting too close to us.

Sometimes we become very good at performing connection while protecting the parts of ourselves that most need it.

This is one reason I think loneliness is much more psychologically complicated than simply telling somebody to “get out more.”

In therapy, I am often less interested in how many people someone has around them than in what happens inside them when another person gets close.

Can they ask for something?

Can they disagree?

Can they let somebody see that they are hurt?

Can they tolerate another person’s disappointment without immediately assuming the relationship is over?

Can they receive care without feeling indebted, exposed or suspicious of it?

Those questions tell us much more about connection.

The session also explored the wider loss of meaning that can accompany modern life. We can be constantly stimulated, endlessly productive and technologically connected while feeling strangely detached from our bodies, our communities, nature and a sense of shared purpose.

That is important clinically because not every experience of anxiety, numbness or dissatisfaction is simply a symptom to eliminate.

Sometimes distress contains information.

It may be asking us to look more closely at how we are living and what is missing.

Psychotherapy can help us understand the experiences that shaped the way we relate to ourselves and others. But ultimately, I don’t think healing is only about becoming better at managing distress.

It is also about becoming more able to participate in our own lives.

To know ourselves.

To allow ourselves to be known.

And to build relationships in which being with another person actually feels like connection.