A man once came to see me. He was very depressed indeed. He then told me his story. He had suddenly been made redundant from a very good and well paid job in a famous publishing house he’d been working in for many years. At the same time his relationship was not functioning well. Between him and his partner they had four small children. They weren’t married but lived in a beautiful country house he had bought from the earnings in his job. His partner didn’t work, so he was sole earner. One day she had enough of him and ended their twelve year relationship and told him to leave his house.
According to the law he had to leave as she had the children and they had to have a roof over their heads. She threw him out. He now had no job, no home and had been forced to move into the cheapest accommodation he could find. It was a bedroom in a house. From a four bed country home, family and highly esteemed and paid job, he was reduced to no job, no money, no family around him and no home, all within one year. Their friends sided with her, his family was not close to him and he had no job to go to. That’s just how the dice of life fell for him.
When he came to see me he said he couldn’t understand how he had arrived at the place he found himself in after years of building career, family and home of which he had lost all. He described his loneliness to me which sums it all up very well and it was this: He told me he felt totally alone in the world now with no-one and nowhere to turn to. He had no one to talk to, to cry to about all the loss he had experienced and no one with whom he could express his feelings of utter devastation. He said when he walked in the streets he felt frighteningly alone. He would see everyone else going about their life, getting on with the usual daily stuff, work, going out, children, going to the pub with friends and people going home to their families. These were all the normal things he was so desperately missing. He said there was an empty hole inside him now.
He said he had no way of sharing all he was experiencing and had to deal with every bit of it alone. He said it was the loneliest place in the world anyone could be in, wandering this planet alone and becoming more isolated and excluded from the world with every passing day. Each day’s experience confirming more and more how alone in this world he was. This, in turn made him feel even more alone and more depressed and so the cycle continued until he didn’t want to go out and face a world that was too painful to see. At home in his little room he felt safe and in different pain, but that pain was better than the pain of feeling so alone when he was out. He was grieving badly for all the loss and grieving alone, with no one to share it with and no one to comfort him. He wanted his old life back, but it was gone. He said he felt he had been deserted by the world in a cruel way and was left to cope alone with all his terrible feelings of pain, loss, humiliation, shame, depression and his utter loneliness. He said to me he didn’t have one person in the world to talk to. He described how, during the day he went through the motions of looking for work, but was feeling so alone and so depressed that it was very difficult to get motivated. He felt no one cared in the world and he couldn’t cope with it all alone.
He described wondering the streets during the day obsessively people watching, which caused him immense pain. He described going back to his small room, alone where he felt no one knew or cared about his terrible situation. He told me his loneliness at this low point was so unbearable he got a referral from his doctor to see me.
He then came into therapy. Slowly he dealt with coming to terms with his experience. He started to build a life again and eventually trained as a teacher. Eventually he met a woman he related to, and slowly began a new life. He saw his children and learned to live with the situation of not living with them. All of this only after his depression was better and he was able to start functioning again. Life is far from perfect.
He had learned a great deal from his experience. It was a heavy price to pay, but mainly he learned he had courage and strength he didn’t know he had, and once he had support (me) he was able to take the steps to help himself. He overcame a huge and traumatic experience and used it always as a humbling learning curve of life, because there was a great deal to learn from the experience. One thing to learn is that often it is not the experience itself that matters as much as the way the experience is handled. I think that is true of any experience.
He never believed he would learn to handle it, to come to terms with all his loss or to build a new life, but it was the first step which was the beginning. He decided it was time to build a new life and step by step he did. He re-trained, joined a church, found ways to met women, rented a small but ice apartment and as things slowly started to come together for him, he saw that being instrumental in re-building his life was actually helping him to overcome his loneliness and depression. The more he built, the better he felt and the stronger he became. It’s a humbling story of courage and overcoming adversity. Lessons well learned.
I have told you this story because it represents much that generally surrounds loneliness and is a good example of what we are addressing here. I am certain there are many variations on this story, but this touched my heart at the time and seems to be quite appropriate now.
There is no doubt that for many people, the experience of loneliness is an intensely painful experience they have to live with. There may be many reasons for loneliness, but the emotions that go hand in hand with it can ultimately be very similar. There is also little doubt that there are many people who are, as I write, feeling intense loneliness and isolation in the world. If you are here on this site because you are feeling extremely lonely and because the loneliness has triggered feelings of depression, you will understand very well all that will be written in this series of articles. You also will not be alone here that is for sure.
In my experience, many people become depressed as a result of their on going experience of loneliness and the feelings that surface as a result. So if you think no one can possibly understand what you are going through, then be comforted (if that is of any consolation) that in this day and age more and more people are finding themselves very alone, very lonely and not liking it one bit.
Hopefully, if you are one of these people you will relate to what is written and relate to the story very well. The very nature of loneliness means a great need to connect to others, not just once in a while, but on a regular basis, making new connections and relationships and reaching out to others. Facebook groups are a wonderful way to connect, there are many, many people all speaking the same language and feeling similar emotions, so there are no shortage of connecting opportunities. Look up on facebook groups supporting people with depression, anxiety and stress, there are several, mostly good and very helpful indeed.
In this particular series of articles I am going to attempt to dissect the whole problem of loneliness and see whether it is possible to come up with solutions and alleviate the pain often associated with loneliness, including depression.
What does it mean when a person says they feel such utter loneliness it can sometimes feel unbearable? And how do those feelings that go hand in hand with the experience manifest themselves? What has loneliness to do with depression?
Can we feel lonely when we are not alone? Yes, many people say they do. Many people will say that even when they live with someone they can feel very alone particularly when the relationship is having problems and people stop communicating.
Most of us need to feel needed, loved, cherished, wanted, understood, validated and feel as though we matter in this world and that we share our world with others who care about us. When these things are absent in our lives it is easy to feel very alone in the world. It would also seem that the above factors can become contributing factors toward serious feelings of loneliness and isolation which can then develop into depression.
So, is it a feeling of connection that is needed, or a feeling of validation or cherishment that is needed in order to feel and experience a sense of belonging? Is it feeling loved by another? What causes the feelings of loneliness?
Many people say that at work and amongst colleagues, they feel alone. The same can be said for being with a group of friends. A person can feel removed and separate from the rest of the group. I have heard all of these explanations in my work over the years.
There are the many thousands or even millions of people who live alone, have few friends, have little or no family, work alone, exist alone, or exist in a lonely environment. For example a single mother with a young baby who sees no one during the day, she can find the experience of motherhood difficult and lonely if she has no one to turn to, no one to support, help or love her, so she becomes depressed and slowly sinks into a place where she feels so bad and so depressed, she doesn’t even want to speak to anyone. She then feels even more alone, because of course, she is.
What I have just described can and often is true of any situation a person may find themselves in where ultimately they feel so alone or isolated it can become unbearably painful. From that the feelings might then slide into not being able to face the world and from that, slides into a state of depression difficult to cope with or change as in the first story. It is not a happy state I am writing about, but unfortunately it is a state that exists for many people. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Here, I don’t want to ignore it, I want to attempt at least to answer my own questions as best I can and better still, to find some possible solutions.
As we have now seen a situation in itself can become a self fulfilling prophecy. A person starts out at a certain point in a particular situation that triggers very negative feelings. The feelings then trigger further feelings of wanting to be alone because facing the world is too painful, and so the feelings roll on, one negative feeling bringing on another which in turn brings on another. The more it goes on the deeper the feelings of loneliness and despair can become and the more isolated the person becomes. The more isolated the person becomes, the less likely they are to try to put a stop to it because the depression brought on by the situation is now well under way and will decline even further if nothing is done to change it.
The above is a very brief description of the development and process of how loneliness and depression marry in together and can potentially become destructive. The depression brought about by the experience of loneliness can quickly bring about untold misery and pain and a life with seemingly little quality, and for this reason it is essential to do something about it and get out of the cycle.
I don’t say this lightly or without my own experience, as I too in certain moments of my own life have been in this place too, so know too. I would imagine that at one time or another in our lives we will all have been there to a greater or lesser extent, some will have had support at the time, so the suffering will have been relieved more quickly, others won’t and the suffering will simply have gone on and on in the spiral of decent.
It is the second situation I want to address in this series of articles, the type of loneliness and depression that has spiraled out of control, where the feeling is that there is little hope of it changing. In the next article we will look inside the problem and see why it is so, what makes it so difficult to deal with and look at what can be done to change it. The feelings brought about by loneliness can be addressed in the same way as other situations that are emotionally challenging. We just need to know how and what we need to do. This is the goal here.
Each of these articles will look at one aspect of our probing and look at what solutions can be found to bring about a solution and some long term change.
Good luck
Carole