Self-Isolation: It’s Easier to Be Alone Than to Be With Others

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 11, 2020

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Since COVID began, many people have suffered the impacts that sudden and ongoing social isolation and social distancing have brought.

Thanks to limited or no contact with family and friends, not to mention highly altered ways of being together and moving about the world, many people have felt more isolated, lonely, and hungry for contact than at any other point in their lives.

But still, for some, the experience of being isolated is not unfamiliar.

In fact, for some, this – social isolation, social distancing, restricting engagement with the world and with others – is the norm rather than the exception.

These people are those who cope and manage their daily experience through self-isolation. This is an experience and way of being that predates COVID.

These people are those who find it easier to be alone than to be with others.

These are people who may be looking around, wondering why everyone is having such a hard time with limited contact as it feels so intuitive and normal to them.

People who don’t find the COVID-induced isolation that different or that intolerable.

And no, these people are not just introverts as glib social posts might poke fun at.

Today’s essay explores why this is — why it may feel easier for some to feel safer and better alone than to be with others — and what the causes and impacts of it are, and what can be done about it.

If this topic resonates with you, please read on.

Why is self-isolation such a common trauma symptom?

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” — Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

What Self-Isolation Looks Like for Driven Women

As I mentioned in the introduction, those who are experiencing this aspect of COVID and finding it tolerable, normal, and perhaps preferable, are not just introverts as social media humor likes to poke fun at.

Sure, some introverts may be having an easier time coping with the forced lack of togetherness. But there’s another group who may prefer isolation for far different reasons. Those who come from relational trauma backgrounds.

For those that come from relational trauma backgrounds, self-isolation may be a very familiar experience. They have backgrounds in which they experienced neglect, chaos, dysfunction or outright abuse from their caregivers over an extended period of time.

Indeed, it is both a psychosocial repercussion and aggravating influence of coming from a trauma history.

The impacts of coming from a relational trauma background are as wide and varied as the individuals who move through those experiences — ranging from the innocuous to the severe in impact for each person.

Anxiety, panic attacks, depression, complex PTSD, unresolved eating disorders, substance use disorders, feeling blind with rage — all of these are vivid and perhaps more obvious symptoms. But there are subtle, less visible signs that the past is present, too, and having equally painful impacts on someone’s life.

And one of these symptoms is, in my clinical experience, the tendency to self-isolate.

What do I mean by self-isolate?

Self-isolation is different than taking time for yourself, time to be alone.

It is different from a tendency towards introversion and the preference to create and be in low-stimulus environments.

It is more compulsive, less choiceful, more reaction than response.

It is rooted, I believe, in a conscious or unconscious attempt to limit contact with others because, at some level, contact with others doesn’t feel safe or okay.

It’s a way of being to cope with the overwhelmingness of relationships, versus a temperamental or sensory input preference for solitude.

It’s about protection more than preference.

Self-isolation is the difference between a nice and occasional night in versus a veritable fleeing back to the four walls of your house after the workday ends, so you can lock the door, disappear into your safe space, and limit the outside world from coming in.

It isn’t just “being a homebody.”

It’s being afraid to leave your home because the effort it takes to make small talk with your neighbors feels too draining.

It’s praying you don’t run into any dorm mates in the hallway as you make your way to the bathroom in the morning.

Or pretending not to be home when your neighbor knocks on the door because you feel panicky.

Does this sound familiar? Are you silently nodding your head as you scroll this page?

Or are you reading these words thinking, “Why would anyone do that? What is there to flee from? What’s so hard about talking to neighbors? Why do people self-isolate?”

Read on.

Why do people self-isolate?

We as humans are hardwired to connect.

To be in relationship with one another. To be with each other.

Study after study reinforces how connection with others is a biological and psychological imperative for each of us.

John Bowlby, MD, psychiatrist and originator of attachment theory, demonstrated that the need for secure connection is not a luxury but a biological drive as fundamental as food or shelter. When that secure base is absent or inconsistent in childhood, the developing psyche adapts — sometimes by learning to need less, want less, and reach for others less. (PMID: 7148988)

So why isolate?

Why would anyone feel like they need to flee and withdraw and limit their contact with others in order to be okay?

It is a way that folks who come from relational trauma backgrounds cope with their overwhelming reality.

And while their present reality may not include abusers, bullies, or harmful forces, if they come from a relational trauma history, the chances are high that, at some point, they did have abusers, bullies, and harmful forces in their life.

And because we form in relationship to our relationships, it then makes sense that the tendency to self-isolate would happen.

After all, if you grow up in a dysfunctional or abusive family, you may have learned, at some level, that relationships were not healthy, safe, or nourishing to be in.

You may have, at one extreme, been egregiously physically abused. The danger of human relationship is made obvious in these harmful cases.

And on a less severe end of the spectrum, you may have grown up with people who repeatedly crossed your boundaries or expected you to parent them versus the other way around.

You may have been taught that if you say “No” you’ll be in trouble.

You may have learned that conflict means the end of the relationship.

Or you may never have learned how to express your needs and wants because that wasn’t allowed.

You may have learned to equate being in relationship with being taken advantage of.

Whatever and however you grew up, if you come from a relational trauma history, at some level you may have learned that relationships were a source of struggle and strain versus nourishment and safety.

And so, with this kind of lived experience, self-isolation may have become a wonderful and wise thing to do to protect yourself.

Remove yourself from the people that cause you pain — makes sense, right?

Very possibly, this helped you get through childhood and adolescence, making it through those years when you had less personal power and choice about your environment and the people in it.

So again, the tendency to self-isolate, like with any other coping mechanism we develop in response to our early trauma histories, likely served you well at some point in your life.

And, yet, someday and at some level, what was once appropriately adaptive and smart and wise to do, may no longer be so effective and helpful anymore.

Especially and particularly when there aren’t, in fact, abusers and bullies in your life anymore but you’re still braced for that kind of experience.

What I also see in my work is how emotional numbing often travels alongside self-isolation as a companion coping strategy. When connection felt dangerous or painful, many driven women didn’t just withdraw physically — they also learned to turn down the volume on their own emotional experience. It’s quieter that way. Less risky. And for a time, it works.

Think of Maya: a 38-year-old product director at a Bay Area tech company, sharp and well-liked by her colleagues, who cancels every social plan in the hour before it starts and has spent three years telling herself she’s just introverted. She’s not checked out — she’s exhausted from the effort of managing her nervous system’s threat response every time a social event looms. By the time Friday arrives, canceling isn’t laziness. It’s the only thing that feels possible.

Or Camille, a physician who runs a practice and manages a team of twelve — and has not let a single friend into her apartment in four years. She’s professional, warm with patients, capable in every external metric. Privately, she describes feeling like she’s behind a wall of glass: she can see people around her enjoying connection, but she can’t find her way through to it. These women aren’t antisocial. They’re protecting themselves from a threat that their nervous systems still believe is real, even when the present evidence says otherwise.

There’s a multitude of downsides to chronic self-isolation. On a biological and physiological level, multiple clinical studies have reinforced the suspicion that isolation and loneliness can have profound impacts on the biology and psychology of those who experience it.

Social isolation can contribute to a shortened life span, increased risk for dementia, poor sleep quality, and increase your risk for a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, and suicide.

And, beyond the black and white data that highlights the health risks, there’s the more ephemeral but deeply important fact: self-isolation may inhibit your enjoyment and fulfillment with your one short and precious life.

Maybe you long to have a stable, happy marriage. But you spend weekend after weekend, locked in your apartment, feeling unable. Unwilling to take the steps to make those wishes a reality.

Maybe you watch, on repeat, shows like The Office or Friends. You dream about having a gang of buddies like that. But you feel stymied at the thought of how to meet people and keep and make friendships like that.

Maybe you hunger to advance in your career, but advancing would mean managing people and the thought terrifies you. So you keep yourself small and don’t advocate for that next raise and prized project.

It can be a symptom of feeling overwhelmed, frightened, and overly challenged by other human relationships — despite the fact that those relationships are healthy — and it can greatly interfere with the dreams in our hearts for our lives if left unaddressed and unattended.

So what can we do about it?

How does corrective relational therapy help heal self-isolation?

When you tell your therapist you haven’t answered texts in weeks, that you pretend not to be home when neighbors knock, or that the thought of small talk makes you physically ill, you’re not describing introversion. You’re describing the profound impact of learning early that self-isolation is easier than being with others — a survival strategy that once protected you but now imprisons you in loneliness you simultaneously crave and fear escaping.

Your trauma-informed therapist recognizes that it isn’t antisocial behavior but brilliant adaptation to genuinely unsafe relationships. When childhood meant having boundaries violated, being parentified, getting punished for saying no, or experiencing outright abuse, your nervous system correctly identified relationships as dangerous. Fleeing to solitude wasn’t preference but protection — the only way to avoid being hurt, used, or overwhelmed by others’ needs.

The therapeutic relationship becomes your laboratory for learning that connection can be safe. Your therapist maintains consistent boundaries (so you’re not responsible for their emotions), respects your no (so you learn it won’t destroy connection), and remains stable through your anxiety (so you experience non-overwhelming relating). Each session where you show up despite wanting to cancel, where you share despite wanting to hide, where connection doesn’t result in harm, updates your nervous system’s threat assessment.

One of the most important pieces of this healing process involves something called co-regulation — the biological mechanism through which one nervous system helps regulate another. It’s not a metaphor. It’s physiology.

Together, you and your therapist identify the specific relational dangers you’re still braced for: the parent who turned every interaction into drama, the sibling who violated boundaries, the caregiver whose needs swallowed yours. Through gradual exposure, you practice tiny connections — a two-minute chat with a safe neighbor, a text to an old friend, attending a structured class where interaction has limits. You’re learning what you missed: that relationships can have boundaries, that conflict doesn’t mean abandonment, that you can be yourself without being consumed.

Judith Lewis Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma scholar and author of Trauma and Recovery, writes about how the process of healing from relational trauma requires three stages: safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection with ordinary life. For women who self-isolate, that final stage — reconnection — isn’t just a nice idea. It’s the medicine. And the therapeutic relationship is often where the first doses of that medicine are administered in a way that finally feels tolerable.

Most importantly, therapy teaches you that the isolation protecting you in childhood now prevents the very healing you need. Relational wounds require relational medicine. Your therapist helps you titrate exposure to connection like a careful pharmacist, ensuring each dose is tolerable, building your capacity to receive what humans are designed to need: safe, boundaried, nourishing connection with others who see you without consuming you.

If you’re ready to explore what that kind of support might look like, reaching out for a consultation is a meaningful first step — one that doesn’t require you to have it all figured out before you make contact.

Both/And: Needing Solitude AND the Longing to Be Truly Known

Here’s something I want to say clearly, because I think it gets missed: needing solitude isn’t a problem. Genuinely preferring quiet, wanting space to process, feeling most like yourself when you’re alone — that’s real, and it’s valid. The issue isn’t the need for solitude. The issue is when solitude becomes the only option you allow yourself.

In my work with clients, I’ve found that the most honest description of what driven women who over-isolate are actually experiencing isn’t “I prefer to be alone.” It’s this: I need solitude AND I’m desperately hungry to be truly known. Both are true at the same time. The pull toward aloneness is real. And so is the ache — often quiet, sometimes overwhelming — to be seen by someone without having to perform for them, manage their reactions, or brace for disappointment.

That both/and is important. Because if you only honor one side — if you give yourself permission to retreat without ever acknowledging the longing — you end up isolated in a way that doesn’t actually feel like rest. It feels like loneliness with better justifications.

The work isn’t about forcing yourself into connection before you’re ready. It’s about getting curious: when you cancel that plan and feel relieved, is the relief purely about rest — or is part of it about not risking being seen? When you spend another evening alone, does it feel like a genuine choice — or more like the only option that feels safe? Those distinctions matter.

Elena, a 44-year-old management consultant who travels for work nearly every week, told me something I’ve heard many versions of over the years: “I’m great at being alone. I actually love it. But sometimes I catch myself watching couples at restaurants and feeling something I can’t name.” What she was naming, once we had language for it, was grief. The grief of a part of her that had wanted closeness for a long time and had stopped asking for it — not because it stopped wanting, but because it had stopped believing closeness was available to her. That’s the both/and that matters. The solitude she’d made peace with, and the longing she’d nearly forgotten to listen to.

If you’re a driven woman who has built a rich inner world and a productive outer life — and you still feel that quiet ache — I want you to know that ache is not a sign of ingratitude. It’s a sign that you’re human. And that part of you hasn’t given up on connection yet, even if another part has been working overtime to make sure you don’t need it.

The Systemic Lens: How Society Trains Driven Women to Isolate

I want to zoom out for a moment, because self-isolation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The culture that driven women navigate — the same one that rewards their productivity, their self-sufficiency, their ability to handle everything without complaint — is actively training them to isolate. And it’s worth naming that.

We live in a society that celebrates not needing anyone. Independence is a virtue. Asking for help is reframed as weakness. “I did it alone” is a badge of honor. If you grew up already primed by your family of origin to believe that relying on others was dangerous or disappointing, the cultural messaging you absorbed as an adult only reinforced what your nervous system already suspected: don’t need people. Don’t let them see you struggling. Stay in control.

Brenée Brown, PhD, LMSW, research professor of social work at the University of Houston, has spent decades documenting how this plays out — how a culture that prizes rugged individualism quietly punishes vulnerability and genuine interdependence. And Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has shown us how early relational wounds shape the nervous system’s threat detection long after the original danger has passed. For driven women, these two forces compound: the cultural message to be self-sufficient lands on top of an already-wounded attachment system, making isolation feel not just acceptable, but virtuous.

The woman who hasn’t asked for help in years isn’t just introverted or independent. She’s responding — quite reasonably — to a world that taught her that neediness gets punished, that showing vulnerability invites exploitation, and that the safest way to avoid disappointment is to want less from others. These aren’t personal failings. They’re logical adaptations to a culture and a family system that couldn’t hold her needs with any real care.

There’s also something worth naming about how perfectionism functions as a structural reinforcement of isolation for many driven women. If your internal standard is that you must present as competent, composed, and capable at all times, then authentic connection — which requires some degree of being seen in your imperfection and uncertainty — becomes genuinely threatening. The risk of being known is also the risk of being found out. And for women who grew up in environments where their flaws or needs were met with criticism, rejection, or disappointment, that risk can feel existential rather than merely uncomfortable.

Understanding this doesn’t make the isolation any less painful. But it does mean we can stop treating it as a character flaw and start treating it as what it actually is: a learned response to a world that didn’t make connection feel safe.

If any of this landed for you — if you saw yourself in Maya’s canceled plans, or Camille’s quiet retreat, or Elena’s grief at the restaurant — I want you to know that that recognition matters. You don’t have to fix it all today. You just have to be willing to look at it honestly, and to stay curious about what you actually want, not just what feels safest. You’re not broken. You’re someone who learned, quite brilliantly, how to protect yourself. And you can learn — slowly, with the right support — that connection doesn’t have to cost you the way it once did.

When you’re ready, the path toward trauma-informed therapy or executive coaching is one of the most reliable ways to begin rebuilding your capacity for connection. You don’t have to overhaul your entire social life. You just have to find one relationship — one space — where being known starts to feel more possible than it does right now.

Related Reading

Bowlby, John. A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Brown, Brenée. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Center City, MN: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Holt-Lunstad, Julianne. “Why Social Relationships Are Important for Physical Health: A Systems Approach to Understanding and Modifying Risk and Protection.” Annual Review of Psychology 69 (2018): 437–458.

Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer