by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
A Period of Isolation Can Either Make You or Break You
Every human life contains seasons and some of these seasons feel as though the entire world has stepped away from us:
When this happens, our social circles start to thin out, our routines lose their rhythm, and one day we look around and realise we are no longer woven into the everyday hustle-and-bustle of other people’s lives.
What follows is a period of unexpected isolation that the ego swoops in and reframes as loneliness but knowing the real difference between the two (isolation and loneliness) can shape how we experience these periods that can define the rest of our lives.
The bottom line is that if you’re living a REAL life then periods of isolation are an inevitable part of the process:
They arrive with the same quiet certainty as winter and – like winter – they serve a purpose far deeper than we often recognise at first.
Unfortunately, instead of embracing them as a natural part of our real growth, many of us panic and assume that something has gone wrong – even worse, we assume that we have gone wrong and so we begin to project meaning onto the isolation – “This means I’m unwanted”, “This means I’ve failed”, “This means I’m behind”, “This means I’m unlovable” – and so we lose sight of what the experience is actually offering us.
This article is about how these natural periods of isolation in life aren’t punishments but a gift and how – if we understand it correctly and work with it instead of against it – it it can become one of the most important and transformative phases of our lives.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Gift of Isolation: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- A Period of Isolation Can Either Make You or Break You
- Loneliness vs Solitude: The Ego’s Static World and the Real Self’s Growth Process
- Why Isolation Arrives: The End of the Ego’s Line
- Facing the Shadow: Why Isolation Feels Difficult Before It Feels Liberating
- The Blessing of Skill-Building: How Isolation Turns Into Preparation
- Planting Seeds for the Future: The Vision That Solitude Allows
- Isolation Can Make You or Break You Depending on How Real You Are
- How to Make the Most of a Period of Isolation: Practical Steps for Realness
- 1. Stop Asking What the Isolation “Means”
- 2. Shift From Loneliness to Solitude
- 3. Face What You’ve Been Avoiding
- 4. Create a Real Vision
- 5. Break the Vision Into Tangible Goals
- 6. Build Habits That Support Your Future Self
- 7. Upskill deliberately
- 8. Accept Where You Are
- 9. Stay connected to reality (not the story)
- The Gift of Isolation: The Final Word
Loneliness vs Solitude: The Ego’s Static World and the Real Self’s Growth Process
Before we can make use of any period of isolation, we have to understand one vital distinction: the difference between loneliness and solitude.
Loneliness is what happens when we are alone with our EGO; solitude is what happens when we are alone with our REALNESS.
To understand this, we need to understand that the ego is static:
It is a fixed sense of self built from old stories, unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma, and the fragments of who we think we’re ‘supposed’ to be.
When we’re going through a period of isolation and filtering the experience through the ego, the situation becomes unbearable, because a static ego can’t handle the flow of reality.
It can’t handle the movement of life, the pushing and pulling of change, the invitation to evolve and so instead it compensates the only way it knows how: it creates meaning.
Which is unfortunate because ego-meaning is always a distortion of truth.
To the ego, isolation usually ‘means’ that we’re ‘broken’. Currently having no friends around us means that we’re the ‘defective’ ones. Having a phone without constant notifications blowing off ‘means’ we have no ‘value’.
In short, the ego tells us that if our life is stripped of external validation, then we’re empty, alone, and worthless and our isolation validates this assumption.
Of course, this meaning isn’t the actual TRUTH – it’s actually the ego’s way of avoiding truth:
Behind most of these distortions is the same root:
Shame.
Shame is the deepest layer of fragmentation and is always the origin of the separation we feel within ourselves and between ourselves and life.
It’s the thing that leads to us living our lives in the Void instead of in the flow of reality.
Isolation feels terrifying only because we’re still interpreting the experience through our shame instead of seeing it clearly and the opportunities it presents for us to become real and to overcome our shame (and the ego that stems from it).
Once we understand this, something almost miraculous happens:
Isolation stops feeling like abandonment and begins to feel like an invitation.
(Because it is).
Solitude, real solitude, begins the moment we stop running from ourselves and start growing through ourselves and nothing accelerates this process more powerfully than isolation.
Why Isolation Arrives: The End of the Ego’s Line
If you look back through your life, you’ll notice something:
Every major leap forward – every moment where you became more real, more mature, more capable, and more aligned – was preceded by a time of difficulty, discomfort, or withdrawal from the world.
This is because isolation almost always arrives when the ego has reached the end of the line:
When its old strategies have stopped working; when its old illusions have been exposed. When its distractions have run dry; when the things we’ve used to avoid ourselves – relationships, achievements, noise, unreal routines – have been stripped away or no longer work as a coping strategy for life (instead of a way of facing and embracing life).
Life, God, reality (whatever word you wanna use) doesn’t do this to punish us – it does this to PREPARE us.
This is because isolation gives us a quiet enough environment to notice what has been unsaid and unfaced within us:
All the shadow ‘stuff’ we’ve avoided – old grief, unprocessed emotions, limiting narratives, shame, suppressed desires and goals that were deemed to be ‘unacceptable’ in the eyes of the world – finally has room to rise.
And while this is deeply uncomfortable at first, it is also deeply necessary if we ever want to be REAL:
Because until the shadow is integrated, the self cannot be whole and, until the self is whole, we can’t truly participate in our own lives (which is what we’re all here to really do).
Facing the Shadow: Why Isolation Feels Difficult Before It Feels Liberating
Most people spend their entire lives avoiding themselves (which is why they end up living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”):
They bury their discomfort under busyness, their doubts under noise, and their shame under distraction.
They keep moving so they never have to stop.
They keep talking so they never have to hear themselves.
They keep striving so they never have to ask how they ended up where they don’t want to be.
As a society, we have become human doings instead of human beings but isolation ends that illusion and wakes us back up to reality:
When the world quietens, the truths we’ve been avoiding grow louder – at first, this feels brutal because sitting with your own thoughts, feelings, and memories without escape can feel like being forced to look in a mirror you’ve spent years avoiding.
This is why the first stage of any isolation period is resistance as we cling to our old coping patterns and everything else that serves as scaffolding for the ego as a whole, even though we know they’ve stopped working long ago.
On the other hand, if we stay long enough – if we stop fighting the solitude and start accepting it – something shifts:
We begin to integrate.
Integration is not about ‘fixing’ ourselves; it is about acknowledging and including the parts of us we previously rejected and sent into exile in order to ‘fit in’ with the world (which is what causes the Shadow Dance between the ego and the shadow self).
It is about dissolving shame by bringing light to the places we hid and is about seeing our humanity clearly enough that we can finally stop fighting it.
Once this begins, isolation stops feeling like an extension of the Void and starts feeling like a foundation on which to build something real.
The Blessing of Skill-Building: How Isolation Turns Into Preparation
Another overlooked gift of isolation is the space it gives us to grow in real ways that we’ve postponed for years (despite knowing that they’ll serve us).
The truth is that there are certain skills, capacities, and strengths that can only be cultivated when life slows down:
For example, after my failed kidney transplant many years ago, I found myself in an extended period of forced isolation and I saw that even though my life shrank in many ways, internally, something else was expanding into realness.
During this period of isolation I read probably hundreds of books that shaped my thinking permanently and now influence the way I coach at a deep level. I learned to express myself through writing – skills I later used to write my books. I also built a strong relationship with my body through yoga and found discipline, vision, and real direction.
Most importantly, I found myself (which really remains I removed all the things that stopped me from seeing the realness was already there).
In the end, what initially looked like a setback was actually a preparation for the live I’m living today and the skills, knowledge, and confidence I gained in that period are still serving me in everything that I do.
Many people only grow when life leaves them no choice and so isolation is most often the classroom we don’t voluntarily sign up for but end up grateful we attended.
Planting Seeds for the Future: The Vision That Solitude Allows
Once the noise of the world subsides, we find the clarity of realness that was always waiting behind it and this clarity allows us to see not only who we have been, but who we are meant to become.
This is why isolation is the perfect environment for planting seeds.
To plant anything meaningful in our lives, we need three basic things:
- A Real Vision – Not an ego-fantasy or an escapist dream but a grounded sense of where life is calling us next based on our real values and aspirations.
- Goals That Translate The Vision Into Actionable Steps – Realness is practical; it moves through the world through real action.
- Habits That Carry Us Forward Consistently – The daily rhythms that turn potential into embodiment and allow us to keep getting results that compound over time and allow us to use our time, energy, and attention as investments.
Isolation gives us the time and space to do this properly and so when solitude is free of distractions, vision becomes sharper, motivation becomes internal, and habits become easier to establish.
If the next season of your life will be built on actions, the blueprint is drawn in the solitude that precedes it and that’s why isolation can be a real gift if you use it in this real way.
Isolation Can Make You or Break You Depending on How Real You Are
The defining factor, then, is not whether we are isolated; it is how we interpret and respond to the isolation:
If we approach the experience unrealistically – through ego, shame, resistance, and projection – it will feel like everything is collapsing around us and that it ‘means we’ve failed in some way.
If we approach it realistically – with acceptance, presence, and a willingness to grow – it becomes a transformation as we let go of the unreal and step into the real.
The power of isolation is that it breaks the ego but builds the real self.
Once you emerge from a period of real solitude, you return to the world as someone different:
Someone clearer, stronger, more grounded, and more capable of love and contribution because you’re more in tune with your own realness.
Isolation doesn’t end because you fight it – it ends because you’ve taken from it what you needed so that the world can open up again and you can meet it as a whole human being.
Check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you’re ready to go deep into uncovering your realness and living a real life.
How to Make the Most of a Period of Isolation: Practical Steps for Realness
Here are grounded, actionable ways to turn your period of isolation into a period of real growth:
1. Stop Asking What the Isolation “Means”
The ego will try to interpret everything through the lens of stasis instead of growth but don’t let it -instead, acknowledge the truth:
This is not a final judgement upon you – it’s an opportunity.
2. Shift From Loneliness to Solitude
Remind yourself daily as you’re moving through the isolation period:
- Loneliness = alone with ego
- Solitude = alone with the truth
Choose solitude consciously by returning to presence and continuing to learn from it.
3. Face What You’ve Been Avoiding
Make time each day for stillness through simple but powerful activities:
Journaling, breathwork, quiet reflection, or simply sitting with uncomfortable emotions can all help dissolve shame and integrate the shadow.
4. Create a Real Vision
Ask yourself:
- What is life preparing me for?
- Who do I want to become on the other side of this?
Let the answers come slowly but then get ready to ACT on them.
5. Break the Vision Into Tangible Goals
Choose no more than three at a time but make them specific, measurable, and meaningful.
6. Build Habits That Support Your Future Self
Your habits are the bridge between isolation and reintegration so start small, repeat consistently, and prioritise alignment with your realness over perfection (ego).
7. Upskill deliberately
Read, learn, practise, build and see this period as your bespoke apprenticeship for the next chapter of your life.
8. Accept Where You Are
Acceptance is the foundation of all transformation and so when you stop resisting the season you’re in, you finally gain access to its gifts and can build something real with it.
9. Stay connected to reality (not the story)
Return again and again to the truth: isolation does not diminish you – it prepares you for the realness to come.
The Gift of Isolation: The Final Word
Isolation is one of life’s strangest blessings because it forces us inward so we can eventually move outward with strength.
It strips away illusions so we can rebuild ourselves in truth and dissolves ego so our realness can finally breathe.
It also asks us to stop performing, to stop escaping, and to stop projecting meaning where there is none.
The truth is that you’re never isolated because you’re lacking but that you’re always isolated because you are becoming.
Use the solitude, grow through it, plant the seeds, and then build yourself.
When the season shifts again – and it always does – you’ll walk back into the world more whole, more grounded, and more real than you probably ever thought possible.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start planting seeds for the next season of your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start taking real action.
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