More on loneliness

I have actually gone and listened to the interview on All in the Mind with Emily White on Loneliness (you can listen here, or read the transcript here - apologies that the link wasn't there earlier). It's really very interesting. It doesn't matter which statistics you use, apparently about 10% of people are lonely, and one possible reason given for this is the diminishing depth of people's emotional lives and also a reduction in "passive socialising" (see below). The interview also contains some discussion about the stigma attached to loneliness; how these days most people accept that depression is not a person's fault, but that is not how loneliness is viewed (lonely people are seen as somehow pathetic), but that ultimately, you can't overwhelm loneliness by yourself. I was particularly intrigued by this section on precursors to loneliness, and what loneliness best responds to:

Natasha Mitchell: One thing that you did investigate was ... this notion that it [chronic loneliness] can perhaps it can become a habit brought about by a kind of disrupted sense of attachment that we come to rely on ourselves and that feels like a safer thing to do than to rely on others. Tell us a little bit about this relationship between loneliness and attachment?

Emily White: One of the key ideas in loneliness research is trust and what they have found is that the more trusting you are as an individual the less likely you are to have problems with loneliness and the opposite is also true: the more distrustful you are, one researcher used the word automatic, you will automatically start having more problems with loneliness. And you can take that back to childhood where you can learn a trusting way of being with your care giver or you can learn perhaps that your care giver isn't someone you can fully trust. And if the latter scenario was true for you you're going to be less and less trusting, not just of your care giver but of the other people you come across in life. That's usually referred to as anxious attachment, and if that is the situation you're facing, if you've grown up rightly or wrongly thinking the only person you can truly rely on is yourself, you will definitely be a good candidate for loneliness. Because what loneliness responds to best is a deep and secure sense of trust and faith in another person, a very, very deep sense of emotional intimacy. I use the word attunement in the book and I think that's a lovely word, referring to the sense in which we can feel psychically and emotionally connected to another person in a sort of wordless way.

That's what loneliness responds to. But if you have grown up feeling that trying to achieve that sort of relationship with another person is risky, or if you've sort of been batted away as you've tried to achieve that sort of relationship, loneliness is going to emerge as a problem.

...

Natasha Mitchell: Chronic loneliness is on the rise, this is a very potent analysis that you offer us in the book. Internationally it's on the rise, this is slowly being documented now as partly now being seen as not just a health issue but a public policy issue. Part of it, you suggest, is the diminishing depth of people's emotional lives and I guess we could point to urbanisation, we could point to single person households, the rise of those and all sorts of things and yet you come back to this idea that there's a diminishing depth of our emotional life that might be part of this too.

Emily White: I think we're being encouraged to see relationships that are in some ways superficial and you can think of that in terms of Facebook friends with Twitter followers, you know, insert your social media here, as real relationships and what a lot of people within the loneliness research community are trying to impress upon us is that that doesn't give you what you need to fend off loneliness. It's not to say that Facebook is a bad thing, it's to say that what we need to fend off loneliness - and I'm speaking from personal experience here - you don't need a lot of relationships but you need a few relationships that run really deep, that make you feel fully known, that help you understand yourself. And increasingly we're not finding that. People are spending more and more time alone and researchers don't know why that is and it's not a cohort, they're not finding it within a specific age group, they are finding it across the board, people are spending more time alone, people are living alone.

And what struck me was an interview that I did with a researcher in Toronto named Glen Stocker and we were talking about this increase in time spent alone and he said, you know, when people are with other people there's been this shift in how we're spending our time. In the past there was more of what he called passive socialising and he described that in a way that I really liked. He said that's time spent with someone else when you don't have to say anything. You're cooking and somebody is reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, there is someone there with you in a sort of deep and quiet way. So what we have increasingly today is active socialising, meaning you're out for dinner, or you're out to a baseball game ...