Privacy as a prison: when security keeps you apart from people

“Why can everyone else walk to school, but I can’t?”

A child who asks this isn’t asking about security. They are asking why they are different. And the parent who has to answer knows two things at once: that the decision to have a driver take them, or someone accompany them, is sensible — and that the child is losing something that can’t be replaced. The walk to school with classmates, dawdling by the shop, crossing the road alone for the first time. Small things that an ordinary childhood is made of.

For people with substantial wealth or public exposure, privacy is a necessity. Security decisions, discretion, care about who you tell what — all of it has reasons that shouldn’t be underestimated. But a wall that protects has two sides. What keeps danger out also keeps out a great deal else: chance encounters, friendships that form without vetting, the feeling of being one among many. This piece is about that other side of the wall.

When the wall that protects starts to separate

Privacy rarely becomes a prison all at once. It usually happens gradually, through a series of decisions that each make sense on their own. First you give up public social media profiles. Then you stop going to restaurants where people recognise you. Then you find it easier to invite people over than to go to them. Then the circle of people you invite narrows to those you have known for a long time, or who have signed some kind of confidentiality agreement. And one day you realise that for months you haven’t had a conversation with anyone who didn’t need something from you and wasn’t being paid by you.

This process takes the shape of a spiral. Every step of protection reduces the number of spontaneous contacts. Fewer spontaneous contacts mean you no longer meet new people in everyday circumstances, only through intermediaries or in formal settings. And there, anyone who approaches you is slightly suspect. Greater mistrust leads to more protection. The spiral tightens by itself, without any ill intent.

What we know about loneliness

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. It is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you need. A person can be surrounded by people — family, colleagues, staff, advisers — and still feel deeply lonely. On the other hand, someone can spend a lot of time alone and not feel lonely, because they have a few relationships in which they are truly seen. The entry solitude explains the difference between chosen and unchosen time alone.

Research on what a lack of closeness does to people is surprisingly consistent. In a 2010 meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues combined 148 studies with more than 300,000 participants. They found that people with stronger social relationships had around a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period than people with weaker ones. The size of the effect was comparable to well-known risk factors such as smoking.

John Cacioppo, who spent his whole career studying loneliness, described another, less familiar effect. Loneliness switches the brain into a state of heightened vigilance for social threat. A lonely person notices rejection more quickly, reads ambiguous facial expressions as hostile, and would rather avoid relationships than take a risk. This happens automatically, without any conscious decision. In people who, because of their position, already have good reason to check other people’s motives, this vigilance adds up with reasonable caution — and the result is a state in which it is almost impossible to trust anyone.

Security has a cost that appears on no bill

When people talk about the cost of security, they mean staff, systems, insurance. The cost I am talking about here is never written down anywhere. It lies in no longer knowing what life without a plan is like. In not going for a coffee with your partner on the spur of the moment. In your child not being able simply to stay over at a friend’s, because first someone has to check who the parents are, where they live and who will be there.

The hardest part is that each individual reason for caution is often entirely real. Nobody is paranoid for wanting their children not to be a target. That is why the cost is hard to talk about: every conversation about living more openly quickly runs into the answer “you know why we can’t”. And it’s true, it can’t happen everywhere. But between “everywhere” and “nowhere” there is a great deal of space that often goes unexplored.

The safety the body needs and the safety the soul needs are not the same. The first is provided by walls. The second is provided by relationships. In John Bowlby’s attachment theory, a secure base is a person you can return to and set out from to explore the world. No fence can be a secure base. So a person can be physically fully protected and still not feel safe — because around them there is a lot of security and very little closeness.

Publicity: when people you don’t know know you

A particular part of this experience is public attention. When your name appears in the media, on rich lists or in the conversations of people you have never met, a strange asymmetry arises. Others know something about you — or think they do — while you know nothing about them. Every new contact starts on an unequal footing. Someone you meet may already have an opinion of you before you have opened your mouth.

This asymmetry changes the way people talk to you. Some are overly friendly, others overly reserved, and others make a point of showing that your position doesn’t impress them, which is just another way of reacting to it. Rarely are you simply a person someone chats with about the weather because they find it interesting. I have written about how hard it is, in circumstances like these, to know who is with you for your own sake in Who can you trust when everyone wants something from you?

Public attention has another consequence that people often describe: the feeling that you always have to play a role. You can’t be tired, in a bad mood or unsure, because someone might notice, remember, perhaps even publish it. Living with constant attention to how you are seen is exhausting. And it calls for a space where no role is needed — the very space that is often hardest to find behind the walls.

Children and ordinary life

With children, the tension between security and ordinary life is at its most painful. Parents want to protect their child from threats that are real. But for healthy development a child needs things that are hard to provide in a secure environment: friendships they choose themselves, a little risk, the experience of finding their own way, and the sense of being one of many rather than an exception.

Across several studies, psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that in some samples adolescents from affluent families had higher levels of anxiety, depressive symptoms and substance use than one might expect. Among the factors she highlighted were pressure to achieve and emotional distance from parents — not wealth itself. The research was carried out mainly in American suburbs and can’t simply be transferred elsewhere, but the message matters: abundance does not protect in itself. Connection does. More on this in Children in abundance: raising them without scarcity and without emptiness.

Children who grow up behind walls often don’t know what they are missing until they come into contact with others. Then shame can appear — the sense that they are different, that people don’t see them as themselves but as somebody’s child. Some respond by withdrawing, others by rebelling. For parents this is often hard, because they put the protection in place precisely to make life easier for the child.

What helps a child most is not complete openness, which often genuinely can’t be provided, but a space where they can talk about it. Where they can say that being different bothers them, and don’t have to hide it so as not to hurt their parents. Family rules about what is talked about and what isn’t are often the key in family therapy — I have written about how a change in one member spills over into the whole family in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

Lonely among people

The paradox of loneliness among people with substantial wealth is that they are rarely physically alone. Around them there are often staff, advisers, business partners, security. But these relationships share one feature: they are asymmetrical. People are there because they are paid, because they need something, or because it is their job to be there. They can be kind, even warm, but in these relationships it is hard to be vulnerable. You don’t tell your bodyguard that you are afraid at night. You don’t admit to your adviser that you don’t know what to do with your life.

Closeness, though, requires exactly that: vulnerability that nobody will exploit. A relationship in which you can show that you’re not all right, and the other person stays. People whom life has taught that exposure is dangerous often find this step harder than others do. And because they don’t take it, they remain among people, yet alone.

For some, a pattern older than the wealth joins in. Someone who learned in childhood that it is better to rely only on yourself may accept the caution their position demands with a kind of relief — at last there is a reason not to need anyone. I describe this pattern in Avoidant attachment: why closeness tires and retreat calms. Protection doesn’t create it, but it can harden it.

A relationship behind the walls

When the circle of people you can speak openly with is small, a couple’s relationship often becomes the only place of closeness. That is both precious and hard. Precious, because a partner is sometimes the only one who knows the whole story. Hard, because a single relationship can’t carry everything we would otherwise share among friends, relatives, colleagues and casual acquaintances.

In such couples I notice two common patterns. In the first, one partner — often the one who came into the marriage from a different background — gradually loses their old friends and the world that was theirs. In the second, the partners each live in their own part of the wall: one in the business world, the other at home, and they meet mainly over logistics. Both patterns lead to loneliness inside a relationship that looks solid from the outside.

(a composite, not a real person)
“When we met, we used to go to the market on Sundays. We don’t go any more, because people stare at us.”
“What do you miss about it — the market, or something else?”
“That we were just two people picking tomatoes. Nobody knew who we were.”
“And where are you just two people now?”
“… Nowhere any more, I think.”

A conversation like this doesn’t solve anything, but it opens a question worth asking: where do we still have a space where it’s just the two of us? And if there isn’t one, can we create it?

Exercise: a map of closeness

This exercise helps you see where your circle of closeness is wide and where it has narrowed. You need a sheet of paper and about fifteen minutes.

1. Draw three concentric circles. In the inner circle write the people you can tell that you’re not all right. In the middle circle, those you enjoy spending time with but wouldn’t tell everything. In the outer circle, people you are in contact with mainly because of work, position or an arrangement.
2. Next to each name, note whether the relationship is symmetrical. Does this person need something from you, or do you pay them? Do they also sometimes tell you that they’re not all right? Mark symmetrical relationships with a tick.
3. Look at the inner circle. How many people are in it? When did you last talk with each of them about something that wasn’t practical? If the inner circle holds only your partner, or no one, write that down without judgement.
4. Choose one person from the middle circle who could be closer. Someone with whom things used to be easier, or someone you sense sees you as a person. Write down one thing you could do with them this month, without staff and without a plan.
5. Write down one place where you can simply be a person. A place, activity or group where your position doesn’t matter or isn’t known. If you don’t have one, ask yourself what it could be.

The exercise isn’t meant to show you that you have too few people. It is meant to help you see where the wall is necessary and where it has stayed out of habit.

When privacy really is essential

It would be irresponsible if this piece were read as advice to reduce your protection. The threats faced by people with substantial wealth or public exposure are often real: extortion, harassment, kidnapping, intrusions into privacy. Decisions about security belong with people who understand them, not in psychotherapy. I am not a security adviser and I won’t judge which measure is excessive.

Nor is every kind of solitude a problem. Some people need a lot of time to themselves, and a closed life suits them. If you feel good in your circle, if you have a few people you can be open with and you don’t miss anything, there is no reason to change anything. This piece isn’t about how many people you ought to have around you, but about whether you have the ones you need.

And finally: sometimes privacy isn’t the cause of loneliness but its excuse. Someone who was afraid of relationships before can use security reasons to avoid them. This isn’t a reproach, but an observation worth considering — because then the answer is different. The question is not how to reduce protection, but where the fear of closeness comes from.

If loneliness turns into despair, if you have thoughts that it would be better if you weren’t here, or if you don’t feel safe in your own home because of someone close to you, seek help straight away. In Slovenia you can call the mental health crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (from 7 pm to 7 am), the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day), the SOS helpline for violence in Slovenia on 080 11 55, and in an emergency 112 or the police in Slovenia on 113.

What can help

There is no recipe that suits everyone, but there are some things people in this situation often describe as helpful. The first is distinguishing between protection that is essential and protection that has stayed out of habit or fear. That is a conversation worth having with the people who look after your security, and with yourself. The second is keeping one or two spaces where your position doesn’t matter — a sport, a group, an activity, a place you have been going to since before. The third is talking with your children in a way that doesn’t require them to hide what bothers them.

The fourth is a relationship in which you can speak without a role. For some that is a long-standing friend. For others it is therapy. The therapeutic relationship is unusual in this respect: it is asymmetrical, because the therapist doesn’t bring their own problems, yet at the same time it is a relationship in which vulnerability is the purpose, not the risk. If you worry that something might get out, you can read what applies in Confidentiality in therapy: what stays between us and where the limits are. In relational family therapy, which I am training in, this relationship isn’t a goal in itself, but a space where you can practise what doesn’t yet exist outside — trust that isn’t naive, and closeness that isn’t dangerous. I also work with English-speaking clients, so you are welcome to do this work in English.

If you’d like to explore how closedness, caution and mistrust lived in your family even before you, the longer genogram session A Look into the Past is suited to that. Sometimes it turns out that the walls are older than the wealth.

What to remember

• Privacy rarely becomes a prison all at once — it builds up gradually, through a series of decisions that are each reasonable on their own.
• Loneliness is not the same as being alone: it is the gap between the relationships you have and the ones you need.
• Walls keep the body safe; the soul is kept safe by relationships in which you can be vulnerable.
• Children need protection and ordinary experiences — and a space where they may say that being different hurts.
• The point is not to tear the wall down, but to see where it is necessary and where it has stayed out of habit.