Are You Lonely?
For this project, Eleanor sent out a survey titled 'Are you Lonely?' to club members at the Chelsea Arts Club. Which included the UCAL loneliness scale. Results posted in the pictures above. I gave the following talk at the exhibition itself:
TALK
Loneliness - why loneliness. Loneliness is such an undervalued word in the field of mental health, and as such I, and probably most of you, have never given it that much attention. Loneliness is seen as just another symptom of other underlying problems, but not the root cause itself.
I had a bit of a eureka moment myself, with this term. I was in one of my therapy sessions, talking about this and that my experiences over the weekend, and how I had felt disconnected at a street party. My therapist, has a way of asked me to pause there, how me to return to that place? I said I could remember myself walking up and down the street looking to for a person, more specifically a young male though I didn't say that, to connect with. I said yes, and I remember thinking I wish I had had my dog with me. Why he asked? "Because then I wouldn't have been alone." I replied." Alone. He said mirroring what I had just said. "You were alone?" Mirroring, is when, instead of nodding or going along with someone you repeat back what you have just said. This makes the individual think about what they have said, more often than not we just speak without thinking, this approach is about getting you to think about what you are saying.
I paused thinking about his question. "I was alone.” It seemed quite a trivial thing to say, I think I am so used to this feeling of loneliness, a sense of not belonging, not being “in tune” with those around me that I had never really thought it worth further contemplation, it was just a state of being for me. But maybe it was significant?!
Yes, I said again I felt alone. I often feel alone, not when I am on my own, but when I am with other people. I don’t feel connected. In fact I said, realising more and more the significance of this, so much of my art work is about this, its about the difference between feeling connected and not.
So what is this, I used to call it alienation, I bought scores of books on the subject trying to find someone who wrote about that disconnected feeling in way I could understand, but everything I read on the subject fell short, it was phrased in a language I could identify, it was too verbose, too academic.
I was getting excited, was that it, and was it really as simple as that, were the words that I had been trying to express as simple as "I feel alone." I asked my therapist, who has written about this. He wasn't sure, he thought for a bit before bringing up Carl Rogers, who I had been studying and Dr. Irvin Yalom, who he knew I had read, not good enough, I thought, I want something more scientific.
Back home I immediately typed the words loneliness into Amazon, one of the first books I came across, "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection" by John T. Cacioppo it seemed like a good place to start and after a quick kindle sample, I knew I got lucky, the book summaries thirty years of work by Cacioppo and his colleagues at of the University of Chicago done on the psychology and physiology of loneliness. Loneliness it would seem is a root cause in itself. One of the first exciting things that jumped out of me, was something called the UCAL Loneliness scale, there was a scale for loneliness?!? I found this in itself to be marvelous. Others things jumped of the page, studies have shown that individuals high in loneliness find it difficult to self-regulate, while they are just as motivated as less lonely people their motivation is directed to forming interpersonal relationships a.k.a love addicts, almost every friend of mine who’s in therapy at the moment has been given one of Pia Mellody’s book’s on love addiction or co-dependence, people high in loneliness have greater amounts of cortisol, the stress hormone, when they wake up in the morning, this makes them generally more anxious people. People high in loneliness are tended to have a negative bias when interpreting an individuals intentions, they get highs of connection are less intense then for people low on loneliness, they are also more vigilant, spending more time and energy invested in reading people’s expression, and trying to read social cues. As you can problem feel my excitement levels were rising, people high loneliness are more easily excitable, in fact Cacioppo believes that loneliness and what we call bi-polar disorder might be very closely linked.
Deep breathe. One of my biggest problems is getting over excited, trying to do too much. But I get easily carried away. Why – what’s to get a way what was the reward. Acceptance? Wanting to communicate?
In Buddhism they say you have a choice, if you are unhappy with the world you can either try and change the world or you can change your approach to it, the latter choice is the better one. I’m not sure if it’s a Western thing but I struggle with this, I can’t help feeling that the environment is so much to blame, if only people were more open, were more expressive, and then surely it would be easier?
But what is loneliness? Specifically, loneliness is defined as the distress that occurs when one’s social relationships are perceived as being less satisfying than what is desired (Peplau & Perlman, 1982)
From an evolutionary point of view, loneliness is an adaptive advantage, homo sapiens are born to the longest period of abject dependency of any species we need social connections and the behaviours they engender (e.g., cooperation, altruism, alliances) enhance the survival and reproduction of those involved, increasing inclusive fitness. The feeling of loneliness was the body’s way of telling the individual to return to his tribe. It’s like hunger – but for social connection. The problem with loneliness in today’s society is it tends to be self-propagating. Not only that but it is tied up with shame. I remember when my father came to me at school to ask me what was wrong, the problem was I had no friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, it was to shameful.
Jacqueline Olds, a psychologist, therapist and writer on loneliness commented” We began to notice how hard it was for our patients to talk about their isolation, which seemed to fill them with deep shame. We began to notice that most of our patients were more comfortable saying they were depressed than saying they were lonely. Somehow while our culture has successfully destigmatized mental illness, it has RE-stigmatized an ordinary human emotion. The word lonely was determinedly avoided yet the denial of loneliness is horribly self-defeating.
I could continue I have lots to say, but my opening is in just over an hour and I need to blow dry my hair. I am trying to get better at taking care of myself!
But I have something I need to point out before I finish –
The average loneliness score, as tested from the UCAL questionnaire some of you filled in for me, is actually quite lonely, its not that we’re a nation of people who are fine with a scattering of a few lonely people, but rather we’re a nation of lonely people scattered with a few non-lonely people. There are three factors, intra-personal, interpersonal and social loneliness, and these are rarely balanced, one always leans on one to prop up the others, boys to football matches – social loneliness, women watch soap operas, interpersonal, most people avoid dealing with intra personal factors by keeping busy, that’s why I was interested in looking at artists, as they by nature spend time with that intrapersonal side, but I couldn’t find anything of significance to stand artists aside from other people...we’re all in it together in other words.
So in answer to my original question – why loneliness? It’s because I think loneliness deserves more attention.
