Removal: How it Develops and its Effects on Individuals
Haylee Backs
Haylee Backs is a senior at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is double majoring in Anthropology and Cognitive Science. Her research interests include the interaction of cognition and culture as well as mental health, Native America, and repatriation. She hopes to pursue a PhD in anthropology or archaeology and work with communities to bring together little known or forgotten histories.
Introduction
In January of 2020, I started an independent research project investigating the concept of removal. I had no idea that in a few short months, removal would be the new reality for everybody in the COVID-19 pandemic. The stories I collected are all pre-pandemic, but the implications for what removal means, the circumstances under which it manifests, the emotions surrounding it, and the long-term effects it can have on individuals are all crucial to managing life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent research indicates that the physical distancing required by the pandemic is taking its toll on the mental health and productivity of the population, especially young adults (Clair 2021). And in geriatric populations social isolation has been theorized to lead to depression, impaired cognitive function and dementia, and even increased risk of morbidity (Guo 2021), indicating the harm removal and isolation can cause. However, we need to be aware that removal, isolation, alienation, remoteness, and loneliness were present before the pandemic and will be present after. It is crucial to understand removal to both prevent it and help people recover.
The Harm of Removal
Prior to the onset of a global pandemic that forced most people to stay distant and isolated from one another, removal was an issue for many people and the effects are damaging. People who describe themselves as lonely tend to have issues socializing, which makes it harder to make friends and continues the cycle of loneliness (Horowitz 1979). A great deal of research on loneliness and isolation has been done on the elderly, who often live alone or in assisted living facilities without much meaningful or personal interaction. Elderly people who have been living alone for substantial periods of time demonstrate increased depressive symptoms, worse mental health ratings, and deterioration of quality of life (Koo 2021). Additionally, eating alone has been found to lead to both obesity and a larger likelihood that meals are skipped in elderly populations (Tani 2015). Even children experience loneliness and have surprisingly strong emotional responses to it. Paula Karnick asked ten children what it feels like to be lonely, and their answers reveal “distressing isolation, contentedness, and cherished engagements” (2008). Children would feel intense isolation and sadness, then make themselves content with the situation by finding joy in being by themselves or sympathizing with others that they thought were also lonely. Social interactions became cherished events for them instead of normal occurrences (Karnick 2008). And while being alone is a cause of isolation, loneliness, and removal, people do not have to be alone to feel lonely. Social isolation can occur even in the presence of others and is harder to identify because it is often less obvious than physical isolation (Rodriguez 2020). Loneliness impairs the health of everybody and deserves the attention psychiatrists are insisting it needs (Rodriguez 2020).
Methods
The data for this project consisted of fifteen narratives, four from students at Vassar College, one from a Vassar professor, six from adults between the ages of 45 and 60, and four that were unusable due to not following the prompts and or meeting the requirements of the project, leaving eleven narratives usable for analysis. The Vassar student narratives were collected by asking friends, the professor volunteered to participate, and the non-Vassar student narratives were collected by asking friends, family, and posting on social media. All participants wrote a narrative in response to the prompt and understood their narratives would be used in a study.
I analyzed and coded the narratives for meaning and patterns. The coding retained the author’s voice as much as possible while highlighting information pertaining to the research question. An additional interview was also conducted with seven participants (five in person, one via phone, and one via email) to clarify pieces of information from the narratives and answer any further questions I had related to the research question. Information from the interviews contributed to the analysis of the research question, though due to time and circumstances surrounding the interviews, they were not coded.
The prompt asked “Try to remember some time in your life when you felt removed or distant somehow from something, someone, a place, an ideal, an event, etc. Why did you feel removed or distanced? What was happening at the time of the feeling? What emotions or thoughts were occurring during this feeling or period of being removed or distant? Did this experience have any influence on you afterwards?” The hope was for the responses to allow an assessment of what circumstances lead to a feeling of removal, what feeling removed consists of, and what, if any, lasting effect feeling removed had on an individual mentally and emotionally.
People
The circumstances that preceded or surrounded the experience of removal were diverse, but there were some common factors among several narratives: a feeling of separation from a person or group of people was specifically mentioned in seven of the eleven narratives. P1 was unable to be with her family when she went to college and “the reality that they continued on with their normal routines” made her feel removed from them. P2 and P4 both specifically mention feeling removed from their mothers and describe how that relationship has affected them. P7 moved across the country and felt removed from her family because she was not with them but also because “she did not know one other person” in her new environment and could not connect with anyone during a large change in her life. P8 lost her connection to her friends while abroad and cites their neglect and lack of inclusion as the reason for her removed feelings. P9 and P10 experienced removal during divorce and describe the feeling of separation from their family as the reason for their removal. Problems with or a lack of relationships appear to be causes for a state of removal, which is not surprising as humans are social creatures and tend to become unhappy when alone. However, in most of the cases above people were not alone, just not with a specific person or group, suggesting removal from a specific person or group, not just people in general, can cause a sense of removal.
World and Role Change
The other circumstance that surrounded removal, thought of broadly, is a perceived change in the “reality” in which an individual resides. P3 feels removed in waiting rooms because they represent “a completely separate experience” between her world and her objective. She feels removed from one reality and placed into another one. P5 did “something that made [him] hate himself” and “a self-loathing started.” He described feeling removed from himself mentally, emotionally, and physically. He says he “didn’t feel like himself anymore” and talks about this state being a new reality for him. P6 felt removed after he retired because he was no longer in a role of power, he did not go to work every day, and he had to learn how to navigate retired life. A major shift like retirement can make someone feel removed because their reality appears to be a completely different world that they are unfamiliar with. P10’s perfect family fell apart when her parents got divorced and she was forced into a reality that, in her terms, was ugly and that she had no power to change. The perfect family P10 had lived among for her entire life was suddenly taken away, even though all the people she cared for were still there.
A sense of not fitting within a role or a world can also lead to removal. P11’s career is in the world of academia, yet she does not agree with many of the field’s expectations and practices. Despite disapproving of the culture of academia, to do what she enjoys she must “live in their midst and be judged by people who value [the practices]” causing her to feel removed. P11 is also a member of a minority group and finds herself in situations where her identity is assailed by others, whether they are aware of it or not. The assumptions and remarks people make cause P11 to feel a sense of isolation and otherness in the world she occupies that leads to a feeling of removal. A tendency to see oneself as other also contributes to P3’s removal. P3 believes part of the reason she feels removed in waiting rooms is that she can tell they are “specifically cultivated” to produce a certain reaction from the occupants. P3 feels she is more aware of this phenomenon than others and deepens her removal by singling herself out in the environment.
Removal from people and a perception of new or different worlds are not mutually exclusive; in fact, one can often lead to the other. In my interview with P1, we discussed how the removal from her family led to a sense that their realities were so different that they could not understand her life at college. Her position as the only college graduate in her immediate family continues to play a role in the lives they lead today. P4 describes her relationship with her mother as one where they “never lived in the same world” and it eventually got to the point where her mother was told by a health professional, “[P4] is not here. She is not with you,” despite occupying the same physical space as her daughter. The realities we allow people to see can also lead to removal; in the case of P9, she had kept her family at a distance during her failing marriage, and “had only allowed them to see what was in front of the curtain for years” so the possibility of revealing what her actual world was like caused her to feel removed. Her family was not part of the same world as P9, and she was afraid letting them in would lead to rejection. When individuals feel that others do not share their same reality it can lead to removal, from both a world one occupies and the people with which they want to share their lives.
Physical Distance
The role of physical distance and removal is interesting since people can feel removed when sitting in the same room, like P4 and her mother. However, physical removal can play a part in the development of removed feelings. In several instances participants felt removed when they were distanced from people or places, because it caused their relationships with friends and family to change or become more difficult. When P1 went to college she does not describe feeling removed until she called home and realized, “They went on about their lives without [her].” In my interview with P1, she expressed that she felt as though she was missing out on moments and feeling like she “didn’t belong anymore.” She elaborated in the interview that she was the first in her family to go to college, so it was not only her being a few hours’ drive away, but the inability of her family to relate and share her experiences that contributed to what she described as feeling “removed from the family.”
P7 wanted to remove herself from her past and get a fresh start and did that by putting space between herself and others and moving across the country. Her experience took a turn when a few weeks in she felt as though she only had her pet bird and was alone, making her experience one of fear because she “did not know one person.” Participants highlighted the emotional connection they did or did not have with other people in addition to the physical space between them. P8 was in another country for months when she felt removed. In her situation, her former housemates had all decided to live together without her the coming year. She states, “Not only did they physically remove me from the house, but I also felt removed from the friend group.” She refers to her removal from then on as a removal from people or “the group.” The physical space of the house represented a greater human connection and friendship that was more important than being physically close to people.
Sometimes physical distance helped improve the feelings of removal. P8 believes that “the physical distance made it easier to stop feeling so upset” since the physical removal from her friends while she was abroad meant she did not have to be constantly reminded of the removal she felt from them emotionally. When P10’s parents got a divorce she was sent to live with a family friend for the summer and was “happy [she] was distant from the ugly” of the divorce and changing of her family. She was physically removed but also emotionally removed, and the emotional removal is what had a lasting impact on her. “I was living a happy life that summer” is P10’s description of the time during the physical removal, but she describes removal as being “pushed aside from what is going on and you have no input… feel[ing] like an outsider when this is part of your life.” The physical distance from the divorce helped her emotional state at the time, but the removal she felt due to not being included emotionally in the process of her parents’ divorce and the removal she experienced still impacts her today. Physical removal may end, but the emotional effects remain for participants long after their physical space changes.
Emotions
Feeling removed also comes with a variety of emotions, mostly negative. No participant described their experience as completely positive. After retirement P6 had less stress in his life but also describes “a decreased feeling of satisfaction and a reduction in self-actualization immediately after retirement” that he then describes in detail. Removal as a concept seems to have a negative effect and even if there were positive emotions the participants focused on the negative ones. P7 mentions feeling “inspired” and “reinvigorated” after her move across the country but also “alone” and “panicked,” which are the feelings she goes into detail about. The move left her with positive emotions, but perhaps separate from the physical move across the country was her emotional removal that she sees more negatively and focused on.
Most of the time, there are no positive emotions with the experience of being removed. Sometimes the emotions are not so overwhelming as to have an extreme effect, like in P3’s case when she describes her feelings in waiting rooms as something that “puts me on edge” with no considerable effect after. Contrarily, when P2 communicates with his mother he feels very removed and believes he has been removed from her since childhood. He stated he “felt neglected and overlooked” by his mother, despite being “forced to live with her” when his parents divorced. The circumstances surrounding his mother elicit negative emotions with no positive outlook related to the experience and a perhaps lifelong effect on P2. Also, an overwhelming amount of negative emotions is seen when P9 felt removed from her family when she was considering divorce and was “feeling insecure, anxious, fear, disappointment, and loneliness,” and these feelings prevented her from reaching out to her family for support. The negative emotions that are present with removal can have a lasting impact on relationships and perspective. As a graduate student, P11 had an experience where a group member made an inappropriate joke that targeted her identity. She was “annoyed and felt separate from the group,” a difficult experience for P11 as she had moved away from home to attend graduate school and was in a new environment. P11 experienced a similar issue when her dancing teacher made an inappropriate joke despite knowing P11 identified as a member of the group the joke targeted. She “could feel [her] attitude toward [her teacher] change” and that “the emotional distance…had grown” between the two of them. P10 is still angry with her father after the divorce, P8 has a complicated relationship with her friends and former housemates, and P11 has a different relationship with her teacher than the one she had before the joke was made. The negative feelings people carry can be detrimental to their relationships, current and future.
Perhaps more concerning than the negative emotions that come with removal is the possibility for people to develop the tendency to feel nothing. After doing something that made him “hate [him]self” P5 “became paranoid, terrified” and eventually his thoughts and emotions seemed to leave him. P5 describes feeling removed from himself and states, “I no longer felt anything. Not happiness, not anger, not sadness. It was a flatline, a haze in my mind that covered and muted everything.” The lack of feeling became a “hell. Just my new normal” to P5 and demonstrates how in extreme circumstances emotions can disappear completely. P4 has a difficult relationship with her mother that causes a lot of strain. She “used to cry” when her mother would go missing at times or act in strange ways, but her mother’s lifestyle “was unsustainable.” To deal with her mother, P4 says she “floated outside my body, hovering somewhere in the fog of my mind.” Eventually, P4 “stopped trying” and “walked away completely” for her own health, but this time and space away from her mother did not help. After all that P4 had been through, she says she “can’t bring myself to feel anything towards her [mother]” and now she feels “a dreadful kind of nothingness… a hollowness in my chest and a buzzing in my head. Sometimes it almost makes me want to cry, but it’s not enough,” demonstrating a lack of emotion like that felt by P5, but in P4’s case the nothingness is felt toward a specific individual. The development of nothingness in the cases of P4 and P5 appear to be reactions to an extended state of removal that encompassed most of their realities. This led me to a question: how do feelings of removal stop?
Stopping Removal
From my research, it seems evident that removal causes negative feelings and effects for the individual experiencing it. I then examined how removal appeared to end. Interestingly, few participants elaborated on the end of their removal in their narratives. However, what became evident was that the way to stop feeling removed involved gaining or maintaining a connection with another person or people. In her interview, P8 stated that one particular friend who made it a point to maintain regular contact with her while she was abroad helped ease the removal she was experiencing due to her other friends who had excluded her from housing. In cases where removal was not directly connected to people, having other individuals for support also helped ease transitions. As he adjusted to his life in retirement, P6 spent more time with his wife and he says he “enjoy[s] playing my weekly rounds of golf with my closest friends.” Spending time with his wife and friends helps him fill the space that was left by his job and find his place in the world of retirement in which he finds himself. Perhaps the most direct connection to people that helps with removal is to reach out to those you feel removed from. P9 found the courage to open up to her family about her failing marriage and feels closer to them because of it, making her negative experience of divorce easier. It can be difficult to reach out, but it appears that people are the best way to improve removal and even lives.
Perhaps the grimmest description of removal came from P5 who felt completely removed from himself as well as his emotions to the point where he felt nothing. He describes his removal as lasting a year and his resolve that that would just be his reality, until he “found love… someone who saved me from myself” as he describes it. He credits his girlfriend, their relationship, and the love he feels for her for the improvement he experienced. He “felt again, [his] emotions flooded back, love leading the charge,” and beyond that his girlfriend encouraged him to get outside, professional help that further improved his emotional and mental state. Even though P5 felt removed from himself, after finding his girlfriend and having a strong connection with her he “felt more like [him]self.” Having a connection and relationship with other people seems to help improve removal, whether it is initially caused by people or not. But the connection has to be active and meaningful. Participants who casually cited having friends or family did not report any improvement from those passive relationships. And it seemed complete improvement was elusive if not impossible, even with the help of people.
Long Term Effects
In contrast to the lack of discussion regarding improvement of removal, there was a significant amount of description relating to the lasting effects of removal. More than half of respondents indicated a continual, long-term effect from their removal experiences. Several attributed how they live their life years later to the experiences they described. In addition to still actively being in a state of removal that has basically lasted his entire life, P2 says he attributes “much of who I am and how I act…due to this initial feeling of detachment and distance from my mother.” In our interview he said, “I don’t even like when people joke about divorce,” because he was forced to live with his mother, and without his father there to care for him he had no parental figure to which he could attach. The divorce made him even more aware of his removal from his mother and likely made it worse since he could not be with his father, with whom he had a close relationship. He also said he is “[wary] of putting anybody else in that same situation” because he knows what it feels like to not have a good relationship with a parent. He actively works to prevent causing others to feel the same removed feeling he felt.
Removal can also cause people to take steps to prevent themselves from experiencing it again. When people experience so much pain it is understandable to want to prevent having that feeling again. After P10 saw her family, particularly her mother, go through such pain during the divorce she saw a new side of life and she needed to adapt to it. While the experience made P10 learn “to be successful and independent” and encouraged her to “live life to the fullest,” she also finds herself with some lasting negative effects. She says, “I'm still angry at my father,” indicating a lasting strain on their relationship decades after the event P10 describes. She also feels “like I have had a barrier/wall around me that I refuse to let people in” because of the removal she experienced. P10 does not want to be hurt the way her mother was. She protects herself by remaining distant from people. The removal continues to affect P10’s relationships with others and the way she lives her life.
The appearance of an emotional “wall” is not an experience unique to P10. P4’s relationship with her mother was so strenuous that she says she had to “build up a wall to protect myself against the world my mother lives in.” Even after separating herself, attending therapy, and hoping that her mother would change, P4’s relationship with her mother remains strained. She says, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to overcome [the wall]” she built between them. Like P2, this separation has been going on for years and P4 continues to separate herself from her mother because it is easier that way—remaining distant is less harmful than reaching out. Other participants describe a similar experience. P1 stated she “never called home on a Sunday again” after the call to her family that made her feel removed. A hesitancy to reach out can go beyond the people removal is felt towards and affect other relationships as well. After the removal from her friends, P8 states, “I respond by distancing myself,” a practice she identifies as unhealthy, but one she seems unable to stop practicing. To P8, distancing herself is a defense mechanism since when she feels removed she “assumes that it was purposeful and that they don’t want [her] around, and cut[s] off contact.” Having experienced pain and what she interprets as rejection from people in the past she “won’t make the first step towards friendship again” either towards the people she feels removed from, or towards new possible friendships for fear of rejection. Experiencing removal from a group or person that was previously a close attachment harms an individual’s ability to form lasting connections with other people in the future. The fear of pain is so strong it causes people to close off and prevents further connections.
Removal could also cause so much emotional damage, or be so perpetual, as to never truly leave an individual. P5 experienced a drastic improvement in his well-being after connecting with his girlfriend. His mental, emotional, and physical state improved dramatically, but he has not completely recovered. Even though he has made so much progress, he identifies that his “emotions have never been the same as before it all happened.” While he does not seem to have the same physical pain that he experienced during the peak of his removal, the emotional damage he suffered is not fully recovered. He says his emotions are “still muted, like a distant echo in a cave filled with oppressive darkness. I have to search to find them.” The lack of emotion and feelings of emptiness, while not as drastic as before, are still present. Professional help and the love P5 feels for his girlfriend helped to bring his emotions back, but not to the state they were in prior to his removal. Perhaps his removal was so intense and extended that it will take a while to fully recover. Or perhaps there is a more unfortunate reality, that there may not be a complete solution for removal, and it becomes a part of someone’s identity.
Lasting effects of removal are evident from the narratives, and one participant goes so far as to describe it as a “temperament.” P11 feels removed from academia, the field in which she works. Being in environments or circumstances where her identity makes her feel separated from groups or situations is “a persistent backdrop from day to day.” Having to spend an extended amount of time in situations where she feels removed, she has identified removal as “the default feeling” she experiences. She does not have to respond this way and believes she could respond more positively, but she does not. For that reason, she believes that since removal is a reaction “we must be talking about temperament” and identifies herself as having a removal-type temperament. By removing herself from situations she prepares herself for disappointment and does not attach herself to aspects of her life that could end up alienating her. After removal, people develop defense mechanisms to protect themselves. Doing so can greatly affect their future actions, relationships with others, and outlooks on life while also changing who they are as a person.
Conclusions
These results have large implications for life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being forced to stay physically distant from other people does seem to suggest a greater likelihood of feeling removed, but if individuals can stay connected emotionally and mentally to others the removal could be prevented or lessened. The modern capability to communicate without being in the same room makes staying connected over distances relatively easy for most and, while it may not be the ideal form of social interaction, it is crucial for our own mental health and that of those around us. As the end of the pandemic nears it is critical to keep these ideas in mind because removal is not a phenomenon exclusive to COVID-19 protocols, as evidenced by the narratives I collected. Preventing the feeling of removal in yourself and others is an important aspect of mental health.
References
Clair, R., Gordon, M., Kroon, M. et al. (2021). The effects of social isolation on well-being and life satisfaction during pandemic. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(28). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00710-3.
Horowitz, L. M., & de Sales French, R. (1979). Interpersonal problems of people who describe themselves as lonely. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47(4), 762-764. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.vassar.edu/10.1037/0022-006X.47.4.762.
Guo, L., Luo, F., Gao, N., & Yu, B. (2021). Social isolation and cognitive decline among older adults with depressive symptoms: prospective findings from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 95, 104390. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.archger.2021.104390
Koo, J.H., Son, N., & Yoo, K.B. (2021). Relationship between the living-alone period and depressive symptoms among the elderly, Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.archger.2021.104341.
Karnick, P. M. (2008). Feeling Lonely: A Parse Method Study With Children. Nursing Science Quarterly, 21(2), 156–164. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894318408314696.
Rodriguez, M., Bellet, B.W. & McNally, R.J. (2020). Reframing Time Spent Alone: Reappraisal Buffers the Emotional Effects of Isolation. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 44, 1052–1067. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10128-x.
Tani, Y., Kondo, N., Takagi, D., Saito, M., Hikichi, H., Ojima, T., & Kondo, K. (2015). Combined effects of eating alone and living alone on unhealthy dietary behaviors, obesity and underweight in older Japanese adults: Results of the JAGES, Appetite, 95, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2015.06.005.