Loneliness and self-help
If you search the Internet, you’ll find lots of self-help advice! I tried a lot of self-help strategies when writing LONELY: I swallowed anti-loneliness potions, and experimented with anti-loneliness hypnotherapy, and read books that were supposed to make me feel less alone.
I don’t want to give away my findings (for that, you have to read LONELY!), but I will say that I find the whole notion of self-help as it applies to loneliness to be a rather sad and strange idea. Loneliness is a need for other people. It’s a signal telling us that we’re too much on our own. The thought that we can rely on ourselves in order to overcome loneliness is, um, weird.
I’m not saying there aren’t things lonely people can do. They can keep in mind the advice John Cacioppo provides on his site at www.scienceofloneliness.com. They can be kind to themselves, and not berate themselves for “failing” to socialize. They can be curious about their loneliness, they can read about it (for me, this helps a lot), and they can recognize their needs as legitimate.
But this doesn’t mean they can “overcome” or “cure” the state on their own. Telling a lonely person to rely on self-help is like telling a depressed person that all they need is Mind Over Mood. Sometimes, a problem is more complicated than what self-help can respond to. Loneliness is complex and powerful; it can be overwhelming. One of the kindest things we can do for ourselves is recognize just what it is we’re dealing with, and stop telling ourselves that we can “fix” it on our own.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under the category Dealing with Loneliness.
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I’m in a situation where all of our friends moved from our area years because it was too expensive for them to buy and they naturally didn’t want to keep renting. So distance is an issue in keeping up. I hadn’t been able to make new local friends to replace these friends due to the too busy for new people syndrome.
Anyhow about 18 months ago I was diagnosed with cancer which meant waiting in waiting rooms and having chemo with others as well as attending support groups and cancer council events. Through this I have met a number of local people, some who are or will become long term friends and I will certainly keep up with. This occurs because cancer creates it’s own community as it creates a commonality and many affected people want to connect with others who are going through the same experience.
However now I’m on the road to recovery and also realising that some people will want to move on from that experience and not have contact with others who have been through it I’ll be moving on with my life and having less and less to do with cancer things and thus it won’t be such an avenue to meet new people. But also I’d like to meet and connect with locals from a diverse variety of sources and methods and not put all my eggs into one basket so to speak. So I am now facing how will I go about this (not the joining of other activities) but how and when do I initiate a connection.
Just before having been diagnosed I’d actually gone for some counselling to address this issue and found that it was no real personality or lack of skill fault of my own although they did suggest some strategies and said I could come back for more counselling. So I may need to go back but firstly need to be over the cancer experience emotionally and really practice the strategies. I’m not looking forward to the level of strategising and hard work that seems to be involved with making new friends and connections, it seems like it needs the skill level required to sort out US middle east relations.