Loneliness and Isolation

When the Police sang Message in a Bottle they were expressing something universal about people:

“More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair...
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle”

It seems that loneliness is all too prevalent in the modern world.  This morning, I switched on the news only to hear that a recent study has found that the rise of technology and social-networking sites has only made people feel more isolated.  This is because texts have replaced phone calls; emails have replaced letters; Facebook has replaced face to face meetings with people we actually know or have met at least once.  On top of this there is now a rise in people living far away from where they grew up - finding their friends and family scattered to the four winds.  In modern Britain, according to the 2011 census, 30% of people live alone – this is much higher than most countries.  Greece and Italy, for instance, have less than 10%.  In addition, increasing levels of redundancy in Britain are adding to a sense of isolation.  Some recent studies have shown that people who live alone are up to 80% more likely to suffer from depression as those who don’t.  Bereaved and recently divorced people can be particularly at risk as can the elderly in general.   

Loneliness can affect anyone. The hugely successful Australian Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe wrote not long ago of how his depression was fuelled by a sense of isolation.  He described that “Lost in Translation moment” when you are in a big city, surrounded by people but feel utterly alone and alienated.  He said that there could be moments of utter dread, despair and meaninglessness in this.  

Loneliness has been the subject of more poems, stories and works of art than you can shake a stick at and we have famous pop songs such as The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby. It can not only cause unhappiness, but can also lead to low self-esteem and confidence issues and depression and anxiety.  It can make you feel that you don’t want to get out of bed, that there is nothing to live for and that you life is going nowhere.  In short, loneliness can feel like a very empty space. 

How to Deal With Loneliness

 “Loneliness is as much a part of life as night and day and thunder, and it can be lived creatively, as any other experience.” Clark Moustakas 

There are several pieces of good news in the bleakness of loneliness, and counselling can help reveal and channel them.

The first good piece of news is that each of us is in the same situation – in one basic sense, we are all alone and always will be.  In a flash of light, we are born screaming into the world, displaced from the comfort of the womb; and when we die no-one can step through that space with us.  Philosophers call this existential isolation – the sense that even those of us who have the best set of close friends and family possible, or the most connected of romantic relationships, can still never quite escape the fact that they are alone in their head and in their body. 

But, if we go back to The Police song I started this article with and you keep listening, you hear this:

Walked out this morning, I don't believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home.

Sting is saying that once you realise that you are “not alone at being alone,” then there is some comfort there.  The situation is universal and completely unavoidable, so there is not much point railing against it.  It is better to dance with life and its problems than to fight or avoid it.  We can do that by acknowledging (in a trusting friendship or relationship) that we do feel alone and sharing that vulnerability.  Shared vulnerability creates intimacy – and intimacy mitigates against isolation. 

A second way that you can address your isolation can be to talk through it and work through the reasons for it in therapy.  It can take a while to get to the stage where you are ready to take enough courage to reach out and start to alleviate your loneliness.  It can be a long job, but it is worth it and for many people the question “which is worse feeling lonely or getting out there and trying to be more social?” has the answer “being lonely.”   Ian Thorpe talks about forcing himself to go out and socialise - 'Fake it till you Make it' – and this is not a bad idea because just about everything, no matter how hard, gets easier with practise.  A good therapist will not, however, try to force their client to be more social.  They will support and guide on the journey towards that. It can take a long time, but most clients just need a patient and skilled helper to be with them on that journey.

A third way is to learn and use the difference between loneliness and solitude.  The philosopher Paul Tillich expressed it like this:

 “Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone."

Another philosopher, Blaise Pascal, famously wrote: "All of man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone."

Essentially, the issue in one of connection.  If you feel connected to your inner-self, a passionate hobby or nature then you are far less likely to feel lonely.  Studies have shown, for instance, that walking in nature relieves depression and that writing poetry does, too.  Both connect you to something deep - walking to nature, poetry to your inner-self.


Unfortunately, a very typical modern way of dealing with loneliness is not to explore it (and turn it into solitude), but rather to be busy with all manner of distractions and activities.  It is common now to see people surrounding themselves with ipods, televisions and mobile phones.  A grand cacophony is created by this great need and desire to be plugged in -  but within this people are actually unplugging from themselves.  Many people find a great number of distractions to avoid their loneliness.  Some of these can be healthy up to a point– reading and sport for instance; whilst comfort-eating, smoking and heavy drinking are more damaging.  But all distractions form a temporary crutch from loneliness. They do not remove it.  

My experience with friends and clients is that the more they try to hide from loneliness, the more it comes up and bites them.  A good counsellor will suggest a different route – one of exploring and embracing the pain, of discussing its roots and patterns.  This can result in many tears, but in time, it also liberates the sufferer and enables him or her to start working with being alone as solitude instead of loneliness.  This is one reason, for instance, why many people choose to go on retreats – far away from the isolating distractions of modern life.  I have heard many people say that they “found themselves” in some wild and peaceful place. There is no trick or magic to this even though we may be inclined to think that there is. If you think about it, in a quiet place you are dropping your connections to shallow distraction and instead finding deep connections to nature and yourself.  Of course, it can help if you choose somewhere beautiful like Snowdonia or Iona.
Solitude can be deeply nourishing and a space for you to listen to your heart and soul and recharge and re-examine.  It is so sad that so many today run in fear from it. As well as having its own benefits, there is another positive outcome in that finding a deeper connection to yourself is likely to put you in a much better position to connect on a deeper level with others later on.

A fourth way is to engage with something or somebody that you love.  Love and passion are great removers of isolation.  To have someone who is like a soul-mate whether as a friend or partner can be a tremendous joy. However for those alone, having someone in your life like that is not vital.  You can engage in a deep and fulfilling way with a hobby or another passion.  Many of the great artists, writers, scientists and philosophers lived a more isolated life than most people but didn’t feel the suffering so acutely precisely because they had something that they were deeply engaged with – something they loved.  Engagement like this has to be on a deep level – as explained above, it is no use engaging with shallow things as that merely increases loneliness in the end.  

I often ask lonely or depressed clients which hobbies they have dropped over the years or which they have always wanted to do but never got around to; and then encourage them to re-engage with these.

Summing Up

Erich Fromm was well aware of the issue of loneliness and how it connects to depression and meaninglessness – he wrote “Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature.”

It needn’t be like that.  You can change it and going to counselling as a first step can set you well on your way to doing so.

 

David is a fully qualified and BACP registered Counsellor.  If you wish to book a session to talk about loneliness, you can book a face to face, telephone, email or skype session with him by ringing 07578 100256 or emailing him at David@eastcheshirecounselling.com.  You can also follow him on Twitter as Contented Counsellor at: https://twitter.com/SeddonDavid

The Importance of Good Listening

It is often said that many counselling clients claim that the most important and useful thing that they take from counselling is that they feel listened to and understood.  No matter how good a counsellor has been at helping them to clarify, focus, or to facilitate change within them, their skills as a good listener might still feel the most important of all. This might be because there is a perception that bad listening is endemic in society, and that it is hard to find some who will fully listen to us. Perhaps there is truth in the saying that “home is where you can say anything you like cause nobody listens to you anyway. “

People have commented how good listening is a valuable though sadly rare aspect of life, throughout the centuries. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus understood the importance of good listening when he said: “we have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Maybe the world would be a better place if more people followed that wisdom!   General George C. Marshall, more recently, gave this as his formula for working with people:

1) Listen to the other person's story;
2) Listen to the other person's full story;
3) Listen to the other person's full story first.

The Many Different Types of Poor Listener

Poor listening comes in many different forms - and I am sure most of us have met quite a few of the poor listeners I will mention below.  

There are those who give our thoughts short-shrift or are just waiting for an opportunity to steer the conversation around to them.  At its worst, most of us will have experienced this in a narcissistic friend who gave us a few seconds on our problem and then interjected with something like, “oh yes, I’ve got that problem too...” then the rest of the conversation is about that.  And then there are those people who have a very small attention span and can’t listen to anyone or anything for more than a few seconds - long-time teachers will tell you how this situation has got worse over the years – probably since the advent of television and computer games.  There are those that are outright rude and will reply to any attempt to talk about personal matters with a put down such as, “ooh, don’t tell me about that, I don’t want to know!”  Or there is the opposite type of person - the one who definitely DOES want to know!  But they only want to know so that they can spread around whatever you tell them as gossip –probably adding quite a bit extra for spice.  Then there is the listener who hears your words but cannot read your emotions and just doesn’t pick up the subtler clues; or those who have “enough problems of their own,” or who don’t want to hear about your successes, but are more than happy to tell you about theirs.  There are also those that switch off when you try to talk to them, those who are impatient, those who filter everything you say through their own experience and values, those who are busy thinking of how they can reply to you rather than listening to you, those who will judge everything you say, those who are “know-alls” and insist that you do everything their way.  There are also the more subtly useless ones – those who appear to listen and will keep nodding but don’t actually have any empathy, sympathy or interest in what you are telling them at all – they are effectively giving the impression of listening and understanding but have switched off internally.   

With all those types of bad listener around, we are lucky if we do have one friend, work colleague or relative who is a good listener and does not model any of the above behaviours. David Augsburger stated that “an open ear is the only believable sign of an open heart,” so if you are surrounded by poor listeners, the problem can cut quite deep.

How Good Listening is Central to Counselling

"Deep listening is miraculous both for listener and speaker.  When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.  Sue Patton Thoele

Counsellors are trained, highly focussed, deep listeners.  I could write pages about the many things that a counsellor can help you with, but those things all belong in different articles.  Good counsellors are trained to listen and to listen well.  We don’t just listen to people’s words, we listen to the tone of their voice, their body language and their mood.  We notice how they walk into the room, how they sit down, what they do with their hands, how they breathe, how they change from one meeting to another. We pick up on both overall patterns and subtle clues and learn to use our intuition.  For instance, we sometimes offer tentative perceptions about what people appear to be feeling but not saying; and we learn to listen to our own responses to what people say in such a way that these don’t filter out the other’s message but highlight and focus it.  Counsellors call this sort of listening Active Listening and there is a real skill to it.  It is something that is hard to achieve without real practise – and counsellors get lots of that.  In addition to this, of course, a counselling room is set up so that there will be a minimum of distractions – there aren’t many places where you can get that undivided attention and focus in this busy world of ours!

Many of my clients tell me that the experience of being truly heard by another person is a deeply healing experience. Along with the listening comes empathy, acceptance, non-judgemental neutrality and a certain amount of experience and knowledge that comes from having done a lot of training and work with and about people with a wide variety of problems.  The listener not only feels understood and completely heard, but the listening also reveals that there is someone who does have a genuine interest in their life and general wellbeing. A good counsellor won’t tell you what to do, but they will help you to clarify, help you see lots of different angles on issues, help you explore options and above all help you to get in touch with and value your true self.  In short they will facilitate your own change and growth - and most of that springs from being a highly trained listener.  

It is often a life changing experience for a client to have the opportunity to explore their thoughts and feelings in a supportive, safe, confidential and gently challenging space. I am sure that Dr Ralph Nichols, “the father of the study of listening,” was right when he said that “the most basic of all human needs is to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.”

David is a fully qualified and BACP registered Person Centred Counsellor. You can book a session with him by ringing 07578 100256 or emailing him at David@eastcheshirecounselling.com