“I need to talk more!”

My client who said this to me hadn’t had a conversation with another person in a very long time, and he feared losing his ability to speak before social isolation rendered him mute. The sound of his own voice struggling to enunciate horrified him. My client had lived his life mostly alone, by choice. But it inflicted on him the wounds of loneliness—a particular existential pain and spiritual suffering.

What is loneliness?

Jean Vanier (1998) described how loneliness can become such uncontrolled anguish that one can easily slip into the “chaos of madness;” that it is like “a taste of death.”

Psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1959) observed how loneliness is distinct from solitude, temporary aloneness, grief, anxiety, and depression; how it has much in common with panic and renders people who suffer it emotionally paralyzed and helpless. She said that the suffering loneliness causes seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it.

As one client described to her,

I don’t know why people think of hell as a place where there is heat and where fires are burning. That is not hell. Hell is if you are frozen in isolation into a block of ice. That is where I have been.

I’ve been there too. More than once. Maybe you also.

Crucial questions arise

• How the hell did I end up there?
• How did I survive?
• What did I learn?
• What do I need?
• Is there any benefit at all to having felt such excruciating pain?

Engaging loneliness

Christopher Fry (1952) stressed the importance of engaging loneliness directly. He said,

No man (sic) is free who will not dare to pursue the questions of his own loneliness. It is through them that he lives.

Despite the prevalence of loneliness, its intensity, and connections to various other health problems, it is often hidden in plain sight, its expression constricted by stigma and feelings of toxic shame.

Dr. Ami Rokach, a clinical psychologist and professor at York University, sees loneliness as a primary issue for his clients. Yet, he said,

In the last 35-40 years that I have done psychotherapy, I have had only one person who came and said ‘I’m lonely.’ People will come in confessing to feeling depressed, anxious, ill, or heartbroken, but are loath to admit out loud that they are lonely. (Quoted in Roderique, 2018)

Similarly, Dr. Donna Ferguson, a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, acknowledged the same reticence to admit loneliness:

I think that if you’re coming in, and just saying that you’re lonely, that there is a bit of a stigma. You’re lonely; it must be your fault. (Quoted in Roderique, 2018)

In my own practice, my oldest patients—those in their late 80s and 90s—talk more openly about feeling lonely. Maybe at that age stigma and shame release their icy grips. My patients talk about how uncanny it feels to outlive siblings and friends, about being the last one left. They talk about how nobody gets their jokes or references any more. And they ask,

• Why am I still here?
• Has God forgotten me?

I listen through the echoes of my own loneliness, my pain. By having pursued my own questions, perhaps I’m freer now than I was before. Perhaps because of this I can help liberate my patients too. I hope so.

What are the questions of your own loneliness that stand between you and your freedom?

Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1959) Loneliness. Psychiatry, 22(1), 1–15.

Fry, C. (1952) Foreword to Solitary Confinement, by C. Burney. London: Clerke and Cockeran.

Roderique, H. (2018). “I have 1,605 Facebook friends. Why do I feel so alone?” National Post. Feb. 14, 2018. http://nationalpost.com/feature/i-have-1605-facebook-friends-why-do-i-feel-so-alone

Vanier, J. (1998). Loneliness. In Becoming Human. Toronto: Anansi.