Can You Please Just Leave Me Alone: The Positive Side of Social Withdrawal

As a psychologist I often find the need to "normalize" many human responses, like the need to sometimes hole up and rejuvenate, staying away from others for a period of time. To bring this home I am inclined to tell them a story about my cat Sandy:

 

When I was about 6, my first pet, a cat named Sandy, got into a wood pile and somehow got a whole hive of bees mad at her and her tail must have swollen up to more that twice the size of her body. While she was affectionate and normally liked to be held, this time she would have none of it. My parents wanted to take her to a vet, and at six I had no idea that they probably would have put her down (she was in awful shape).

She jumped out of my arms and climbed into a tree hole at ground level, just big enough to hold her and her mega-tail. All you could see was her little eyes staring out from the dark, in the cave-like opening.  Nothing we could do would coax her out. For several days she would neither eat nor drink, but eventually she would come far enough out to take some water from a platter, and a few days later she began to eat a little, always returning to her sanctuary. She stayed there, licking her tail, until she was ready to come out.

Sometimes we are wiser than we know, and need some time alone to withdraw and conserve/replenish. One psychologically relevant term is conservation/withdrawal.  It is usually tied to animal behavior but I think illustrates why in the early stages of what may be a reactive depression, it is not necessarily a bad idea to deal with a bad patch by withdrawing. 

Conservation/withdrawal hypothesis.