Ep. 171 How To Reduce Midlife Loneliness, Ease Anxiety & Increase Connection With Others This 4th July

Are you feeling lonely this 4th of July—even surrounded by others?
Modern self-awareness may be fueling your midlife loneliness more than you think.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     Why midlife loneliness is often rooted in disconnection, not solitude

2.     How introspection tied to tradition once protected us from isolation

3.     A new perspective that helps you reconnect with both your values and the people you love to foster a sense of belonging

Ready to reflect differently this holiday?
Join me for a timely look at how loneliness might be trying to teach us something—and how you can use it to build bridges, not walls.

****

About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll----discover how to turn your self-awareness into a source of connection, not loneliness. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Happy 4th of July week, or is it? A few months ago, I released an episode on midlife loneliness. Within a half a day, it had a record number of listeners. To be honest, I was surprised and deeply moved. Or should I say troubled? Since then, thanks to many of you, I've not only been reading and listening more about loneliness, but walking through my day-to-day life with a new lens, trying to understand what loneliness really means at this point in our lives and how we might build a bridge out of it. In this episode, you'll discover the fruits of all of this reflection of mine And how loneliness may have more to do with our cultural emphasis on self-awareness than you think, and how a new idea, I'm calling selfspection could help you reconnect. Where it matters the most. Now, don't hit pause. Stay with me because today I'm not asking you to celebrate independence, but rather our interdependence. And to do that, we may need to look at our loneliness, not as the problem, but as the beginning of the solution. You still with me? Good. Let's begin. We used to think of loneliness as something that happened to an 85-year-old grandparent alone in their apartment, but that's not what caused the US surgeon General in 2023 to declare loneliness a public health crisis. He said that loneliness isn't about being alone. It's about feeling unseen and disconnected. Take that in. Loneliness is not about being alone. It's about not being seen. Here's the twist. In a world where each of us can have a voice, a podcast, a blog, a Facebook post, we are lonelier than ever. Yes, we are. Just yesterday, I was at a party. I stepped back for a moment and looked around. It was a beautiful setting, boating, walking paths, everything designed for connection. But many people, and to be honest, the majority were kind of zoned out scrolling on their phones. The kids were playing, but the adults weren't. I wondered how many felt lonely. Most seemed disconnected. I'm sure they were grateful for a break in their routine, but unsure how to make that break feel nourishing. I think this is modern loneliness. We're together, but alone. You already know many of the culprits, the phone, hyper individualism. A consumer culture rooted in not enough. I'm not enough. They're not enough. I don't have enough. This isn't good enough. A growing skepticism of institutions, churches, government, schools in the past, bridges of connection, purpose, and meaning today, all seen as not good enough. Family dynamics, children who live far away, smaller families, estrangement work and school fueled by competition, not collaboration. I talk about this in episode 1 46, but today I want to add a surprising culprit self-awareness. Yes. This is where as a therapist, I do take some of the blame. And again, don't hit pause. Let me explain. There's been a massive cultural shift. My mother was born in 1930. Part of the silent generation committed to family, faith, and country. When I was 23, I signed up for a class called something like Journey to Self. I told my mom about it, thinking she'd think it was a great opportunity, and she looked at me with genuine puzzlement and said, why would you need that? I rolled my eyes at her and thought to myself, she is so not with it. But that moment has always stayed with me. Or to be honest, it's always kind of haunted me as I've been exploring loneliness these past few months. Her face, her confusion kept resurfacing. That's when it hit me. In her generation, self-awareness didn't exist. The way we think of it today, what they had was introspection. Introspection is the act of looking inward, reflecting on your thoughts, feelings, or motives in connection to something greater religious, civic, or philosophical tradition shaped it. This was the way for centuries a Catholic might examine their conscience before confession. A Jewish person might keep kosher to align daily choices with deep values. And introspection isn't limited to religion. It can be civic. Think of someone serving in the military or voting in an election asking what kind of citizen do I want to be? What values am I willing to stand for? I. Even to die for. That's introspection with a shared moral purpose. In the past, introspection was tied to something larger. Faith, family, country, community, people reflected not just to understand themselves, but to stay aligned with meaning and purpose. I have begun to wonder if this protected them from loneliness. Today, self-awareness is often practiced in isolation, disconnected from anything larger. It easily turns into self-criticism or a constant drive to measure up, leaving many of us feeling less than not more whole. So, yes, I am saying this gently and perhaps I'm not right'cause these are all new thoughts, but self-awareness as we've come to define it, might be making you lonely. Self-awareness helps you know yourself better, but it can also oversize the self instead of what I call right sizing it, being in your capital eye instead of the more healthy, lowercase, italicized eye, which is flexible and connecting. Let me give you a clinical example. I've had many midlife clients come to terms with their less than perfect parents. Often a parent who struggled with alcoholism, sometimes sober, sometimes not. Anyone familiar with Al-Anon, knows children react differently depending on their temperament and role in the family. Some are the hero. Some the scapegoat, others are the lost child, the mascot or the caretaker. In therapy. These clients work hard to understand their past and create healthier relational dynamics with their self and others. Their therapy also includes grief, grief for the childhood. They wish they had. It also involves boundary setting with an imperfect parent. But here's what's changed. Only in the past five to 10 years have I seen a major value shift. Clients now come to therapy feeling they have the right to cut off contact with a parent. For the first 30 years of my work, that was nearly unthinkable. Now 27% of families report some form of estrangement. Years ago, a client once told me, well, my dad, he might be a drunk, but he gave me life. I must owe him something that is introspection. Not just self-awareness that's anchoring your truth to something greater than yourself. Let me take you deeper with another example. A couple of years ago, I worked with a client who had left her marriage as she came out as gay. Her parents' religious values didn't align with her queerness, but they didn't cut her off. They said one of those honest but complicated things. We don't agree, but we love you. She came to therapy with a painful question. Could she stay in a relationship with people who didn't fully support who she was? As we explored her confusion, I offered an equally important question. Could she love people whose values she didn't fully support either. Her values around sexual orientation and individual rights were clear, but her values around staying connected to people with many different beliefs. Those were still forming. She was like many of us, clear about some things, confused about others. After all, we are all works in progress. Self-awareness helped her really for the first time in her life, feel authentic and like most of us, she found comfort in people who shared her views. Algorithms make that even easier. Surrounding us with sameness and dawning our tolerance for difference. But what helped her move toward peace wasn't just self-awareness or introspection, it was something deeper. She wasn't just exploring who she was or what she believed she was doing. Something more complex. Something that didn't have a name. Until now, something I have come to call self selfspection is a conscious and purposeful inner gaze that not only observes your inner life, but connects it to your values, your choices, and your relationships. It right sizes self-awareness by grounding it in something greater than identity, and it right sizes, introspection by linking inner reflection to timeless values, the common good, and the responsibility to live with others in mind. It helps us see the whole picture. My client's turning point came when she imagined herself 20 years from now after her mother had passed and the grief she might carry if she walked away from the relationship. An imperfect, sometimes tense relationship that lands her back into therapy for a tuneup every so often to help her get grounded in her ability to live in the tension of loving her parents despite the significant value difference. she always says the same thing. I want to be rooted in love, but I feel like the culture keeps asking me to root myself in difference. She longs for her parents' full acceptance, but over time she has come to see that her real work was learning to receive their love. And to offer hers back, even though neither could fully accept the other's worldview, their introspective selves were shaped by the values of their respective generations, but it was self that helped her move forward. Self inspection gave her the clarity to honor both her identity and her commitment to family. It helped her hold space for two truths that her sexual orientation mattered deeply, and so did her connection to the people who raised her. That's what made peace possible. Not perfection, but presence. I think that's why so many people find Pope Leo so compelling. He models something rare, calm, grounded, leadership, rooted in reflection. He doesn't just display self-awareness. He lives in connection with values, tradition, and community. He embodies self spectrum, the quiet power of knowing yourself, knowing your values, but staying in relationship with others who may have different values. As we reflect on this 4th of July I invite you to consider how self spec might be the bridge, not just between your inner world and the outer one, but between isolation and connection, where interdependence is valued more than independence. In this episode, you've discovered why modern self-awareness may be fueling midlife loneliness, how introspection can offer protection against disconnection, and how a new concept self spec can help you build bridges back to meaning, connection, and longing. Your inner challenge this week. Is a difficult one. I want you to ask yourself, how might you be fueling your loneliness? Have you stepped back from people or communities because they don't perfectly align with your beliefs, your values, your authenticity? Could there be room to build a bridge, one that might energize your life and restore a sense of purpose and belonging? Be brave. Look, this inner challenge in the face. If your answer is maybe, perhaps, or absolutely yes, you'll love Thursday's follow-up episode. I'll share with you a practical plan to help you reconnect with yourself and with others. Because I don't want you to be lonely. Thanks for listening. I'll be back on Thursday building bridges on creating midlife calm.