Fill your well of loneliness

Learn to be comfortable being alone and your children will receive a valuable gift, writes Tony Humphreys

'Aloneness" is the foundation for inner security and of all creativity since it is only in such a state that it is possible to explore one's internal world. When hyphenated, the word "aloneness" shows its true meaning: al-one-ness. One-ness with one's unique, sacred, capable and creative self is the solid ground from which no one can exile, exclude or in any way diminish you.

There are many adults who find it extremely difficult to be alone, cannot embrace time for self and depend on relationships for any sense of security. Those adults who do not have a stable, ongoing relationship with another suffer chronic feelings of aloneness and loneliness. Paradoxically, when you are comfortable with your own company and enjoy exploring your inner self, you rarely encounter loneliness.

Individuals who live from the inside out are like honey to bees and draw many people to them. The also tend to maintain life-time relationships because they manifest non-possessive closeness, openness, celebration of difference, safety, separateness and unobtrusiveness.

When you have not been given opportunities early on in childhood to embrace your aloneness, the innate need to be in possession of your own person becomes projected onto others so that possession of another or being possessed by another becomes the substitute goal. This substitute goal reflects your need to move towards being, not only the guardian of your own solitude but that of your partner's or friend's as well.

Parents, child-minders and teachers equally have a responsibility to embrace their own aloneness, so that they are in a position to provide the opportunities for each child in their care to develop his or her own positive sense of aloneness. For the child to accomplish this fundamental life task, the significant adults in his life need to create an environment in which it is safe to be nobody (not having to prove myself) because it is only out of such a place that the child can begin to discover himself.

Once the child feels he has be a certain way in his parent's eyes, the child has to remain on guard, mobilised to respond to his parent's projections. It is not safe for the child to float away into her own inner experience. For example, parents who are constantly anxious about a child's welfare, do not provide the safety and space for the child to go into his inner world. The child cleverly learns to be alert to his parent's anxiety and so lives life from the outside in.

A parent needs to be in touch with her own positive aloneness in order to hold a child, not just physically, but in silence. In fostering a state of separateness by being present, but not interfering, a parent creates a holding environment that nourishes a child. In so doing, this parent sustains and encourages her child's inner life.

It is important to see that the capacity to be alone is a paradox since it can only be developed with someone else in the room. For that reason, a child who is left too alone struggles with being at home with herself just as much as the child who is too intruded upon.

Comfort with one's aloneness can only develop when the holding environment is safe and non-intrusive. Once the capacity to be alone is developed, the child trusts that she will not be intruded up and allows herself a secret communication with her private and personal experiences.

The best adult model I can think of for the process of developing children's capacity to be alone is that silent holding between two adults, who sense their deep love for each other, and yet each is content to be alone but is not withdrawn. No anxiety exists. It is in this way we can also develop an unintrusive holding of children.

Dr Tony Humphreys is a consultant clinical psychologist and author of The Family, Love it and Leave it