The Loneliness of Competence
What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.
Therapy for loneliness isn’t about making more friends. A loneliness therapist helps you understand why you’re surrounded by people and still alone, because that’s not a social problem.
You got the position. Maybe you got tenure, too. You’ve published, you’ve been cited, you’ve sat on the committees, reviewed the manuscripts, supervised the dissertations. By every reasonable measure, you’ve made it.
So why does it feel like this?
Not terrible, necessarily, not crisis-level. More like a low hum of something you can’t quite name. A flatness where meaning used to be. A sense that you’re performing a version of yourself that used to feel real but now feels like a very convincing habit.
The cost of being the one who has it together
Academic life selects for a certain kind of person: someone who can tolerate enormous ambiguity, delay gratification for years, and appear composed under chronic pressure. These are real strengths. They’re also, if you look closely, a recipe for a specific kind of isolation.
Because here’s what happens: you become the person others come to. Students need you. Junior colleagues need you. The department needs you. And somewhere in that process, you lose track of who needs to be needed and who actually wants to be here. The role absorbs the person.
Or you might notice it in bigger ways. A marriage that’s gone quiet. A body that’s started keeping score. A low-grade anxiety that attaches itself to everything and nothing.
The particular cruelty of this position is that you can’t easily talk about it. Complaining about the burdens of a faculty position, to students who would kill for one, to friends outside academia who don’t understand what it’s like, feels absurd. So you keep performing. And the performance gets a little more hollow each year.
What therapy can actually do here
I’m not going to teach you coping strategies. You’re already world-class at coping. That’s arguably the problem.
What I do is something different. In our sessions, I’m tracking something very specific: the moments where you move toward ease and authenticity, and the moments where you tighten up and start managing. Managing your image. Managing my perception of you. Managing the emotional temperature of the room, which, if you’re a faculty member, you probably do so automatically you don’t even notice anymore.
Most of what brings high-functioning people to therapy isn’t a disorder. It’s the accumulated cost of performing a self that’s slightly (or significantly) different from who they actually are. That performance was adaptive once. It got you through graduate school, through the job market, through promotion review. But the thing about adaptations is that they don’t retire on their own. They just keep running, long after the danger has passed.
Something here hitting home?
A 15-minute conversation can help you figure out what you’re actually dealing with.
Schedule a Free ConsultationA brief conversation to see if this feels like the right fit for you. Not therapy.
The work I do is about noticing that gap in real time, together, and gradually making the performance unnecessary. Not by replacing it with another performance. By making it safe enough to stop.
Why this, why now, why in English
If you’re an international faculty member working in Europe, there’s a very practical dimension to this: finding a therapist you can actually go deep with, in the language your inner life operates in, is harder than it should be. Local waitlists are long. English-speaking options are scarce. And the idea of doing this kind of intimate, precise work in your third language is like trying to play piano with gloves on.
I work online, in English, with flexible scheduling across time zones. I’ve been in my own therapy for years. Not as a patient with a problem, but as someone who believes that this work only functions if the therapist is willing to keep going themselves.
If any of this sounds like you, I’d welcome hearing from you.
I work with English-speaking professionals who are sitting with exactly this kind of quiet stuckness. I offer individual therapy and couples therapy online in English worldwide. We start with a brief 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.
Keep Reading
Why Do I Feel So Guilty All the Time? The In-Between You’re Not Failing. You’re Disappearing. Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns
What Clients Say
“I came in thinking I knew what my issues were. I’d been over them a hundred times. But those were just the things I could already see. Aaron helped me notice what I couldn’t, and that’s where everything actually started to change.”
“I’d been in and out of therapy for years. Different therapists, different approaches, none of it really stuck. Aaron helped me understand more in a few months than all of them combined. And he talked to me like a normal person, not like all this weird therapy-speak.”
“A few years ago I suddenly developed prolonged panic attacks but couldn’t begin to understand what had caused them. Having been in therapy in the past, and being a counseling intern student, I felt I had exhausted my resources trying to figure out “What is wrong with me?” I can honestly say Aaron provides a form of counseling that is difficult to find anywhere else regarding efficacy. Not only has his approach been effective, but he also has provided me a safe space to explore aspects about myself I may not otherwise have felt able to. I cannot recommend him enough as he has helped me feel more myself than ever before.”