Loneliness is a universal experience. It is painful in the extreme. It lies at the core of most mental health conditions. It is one of the emotions primarily associated with depression and accompanies most suicidal ideation and intent, writes Marie Murray
While its aetiology is complex, its prevalence is clear, as it reaches epidemic proportions in society today. There are many very lonely people out there.
It is said that loneliness is articulated least but may be experienced most profoundly by men. While women experience it deeply they also seek and often find immediate alleviation of its most acute aspects by talking to each other about their feelings.
Men tend to express emotion differently and one of the crucial mistakes we make might be to ask or expect them to express their feelings in the same manner as women. If this is not their way, then their own way is both invalidated and denied.
Christmas is, of course, a high-risk time for loneliness: New Year a time for contemplation on who we are, what we have achieved and how we hope to go forward into the year ahead. This may uncover a core of loneliness that is kept at bay at other times.
Episodes of loneliness can range from isolated incidents to acute attacks. Loneliness is the inevitable companion to bereavement and an integral feature of grief. This is why mourning begins when we realise the extent of loneliness that lies ahead in the void created by the loss of someone or something we love.
Most major psychiatric distress is distinguished by the loneliness endured by the sufferer: the isolating fear of the perceived ill-will of others in paranoia; the experience of estrangement from reality in psychosis; the loneliness of obsessive-compulsive repetitive rituals that other people are not burdened by and the loneliness of delusional belief; holding perspectives and experiences not shared by others, thereby having one's own reality invalidated.
Phobic fears cause exclusion from activities enjoyed by other people. For some, the ultimate loneliness of agoraphobia and social phobia is that it severs contact between the sufferer and the wider world, making every foray outside the home an agony of terror.
For some people, the experience of loneliness is triggered in situations similar to the first episode. The childhood experience of being sent away from home may produce acute homesickness when faced with any subsequent separations later in life. For others, chronic loneliness forms a melancholic backdrop to their lives: a predictable pattern of pessimism, dejection and wretchedness, which people try to hide.
Some people are acutely lonely during specific life-cycle transitions. Adolescence is one such stage. Consider the lonely musings of Adrian Mole, his dissatisfaction with his physical development, his propensity to be misunderstood by other people and his unrequited adolescent passion for Penelope?
Adulthood without a partner may also bring profound loneliness, portrayed in countless Irish works of fiction. Who could remain impassive before the quiet desperation of these lives: Tarry Flynn's cry to the Lord above if he'd ever love or the barren futility in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
More poignant still may be the loneliness within relationships, between intimate emotional strangers bound by obligation. Remember the cold moment of realisation by Gabriel Conroy in James Joyce's story of The Dead? Standing at the window near his sleeping wife, watching snow fall "all over Ireland upon the living and the dead" knowing that he could never compete with the celibate passion his wife shared with the young Michael Furey in her youth.
Loneliness defies definitive definition but most descriptions emphasise its negative aspects.
It is distinguished by its paradoxical nature: its isolation is felt most profoundly among a crowd. It lurks in the existential angst of being thrown into a world of other people.
It is assumed in the anomie of alienation, the ennui of societal disenchantment and has been the source of philosophical speculation into the meaning of "being" and of "nothingness" - concepts through which we may come to understand more about ourselves.
Loneliness lies at the core of human longing, spiritual yearning and the quest for belonging. But our fear of loneliness is not actually fear of being alone but the fear that nobody wants to be with us.
This negative definition of loneliness prevents us from enjoying the psychological enrichment being alone can bring.
Ironically, solitude is something many of us unashamedly crave. It is the acceptable face of "loneliness". It understands the joy of being alone: the opportunity for insight from "sessions of sweet silent thought" through which self-discovery may emerge.
If we did not try to combat loneliness, we would not experience the many toxic antidotes that invade our lives.
With iatrogenic irony the more we attempt to fill the emotional space occupied by loneliness, the more we fill its silence with sound, its solitude with activity, emptiness with entertainment, and the desire for companionship with technologically generated soulless company.
Worse still is the profusion of psychobabble, the proliferation of self-help programmes that may send false messages about the nature of psychological health. These suggest total emotional control, great social success, cognitive competence, strategic organisational skills and psychological perfection are available commodities.
They enjoin us in the words of "Dr Fell" to "relax", "relate", "communicate". In supreme psychobabble they invite us to "name", "claim" and "tame" our anger. They try to cure our loneliness. They define us in numbers; they describe us in patterns. But perhaps they miss the point.
And in this lies a question. Why are we afraid to be alone?
What definition of the human condition have we concocted that makes it unacceptable to enter into and embrace the universal and human experience that loneliness provides?
How and why did we come to definitions of psychological health that omitted being alone as an acceptable condition?
Because in the quest for self-understanding it may be that instead of struggling against the experience of loneliness we might begin to appreciate it. We might be proud of our capacity to be alone: we might redefine what we mean by "lone-ly" in "love-ly" positive terms.
The word "alone" is derived from ALL ONE. This etymology points to the completion to be found just by being yourself: one person, all one.
It says you are complete if you are prepared to spend time with yourself. It says that in solitude we discover ourselves: that understanding emerges through silence. It says you are sufficient. It says you can choose to be you and that has a totality that does not require, although it might desire, an other.
The healer of the self may be the self. We may become "all one" by being alone. We may anoint our sorrow and remove our pain simply by entering into, rather than avoiding, the experience of the self.
Mystics and monks and druids have always known this. Poets and writers and musicians have also always known that creativity is born out of the self, alone. Our most profound moments are often alone.
So what do we choose for the year ahead? How do we choose to be? What if we were to choose to remove the ceaseless cacophony of sound that currently accompanies our lives? What if instead we were to choose to enter into an appreciation of silence, a spiritual renewal in the New Year.
What a New Year choice that might be!
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin.