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nzherald.co.nz

Feeling lonely: why it can strike at any age or stage

By Kim Knight

11:30 AM Friday Jun 10, 2016 Feeling abandoned and alone is almost a normal thing for teenagers, says Auckland university's Dr Terry Fleming. Photo / 123RF

Feeling abandoned and alone is almost a normal thing for teenagers, says Auckland university's Dr Terry Fleming. Photo / 123RF
The anorak was olive green with a brick-red lining. The hood was pulled tight around my unmade face, recently exited from my unmade bed.

It was 3pm on a Sunday. Raining. I was not walking a dog, nor towards a friend, nor to anywhere other than out. Out of the foetal position. Out of my mind.

"You forget what you feel like on your own," I wrote in the blank book with the black cover.

"Arms are just for lifting. Pushing into sleeves and sinks of soapy water, picking up a book, propelling my own hands through my own hair. It was a surprise when you turned over. Breathed on the space inside my elbow. I remembered what I felt like."

All the lonely people. They come from bullying texts, busted relationships, new babies and old age. Divorce and death, lack and loss. The dumb detritus of one-night-stands (see above) and connections that just don't stick.

Six years ago, the New Zealand General Social Survey found that one in three people over the age of 15 - about one million of us - had felt lonely in the previous month. Age Concern has reported up to 9 per cent of older New Zealanders feel lonely all or most of the time.

In 2013, Census figures showed 11 per cent of New Zealanders, or 355,000 people, lived alone. Half of those said they had felt lonely in the previous month, compared to the one-third of those who shared accommodation with others.

Statisticians estimate that, by 2023, half a million New Zealanders will live on their own.

All the lonely people. Canvas found them at every age and stage.

Remember that first time? You were 13 and your mum said you looked a-maz-ing. You hadn't been a teenager long enough to hate or doubt her, but she was wrong. Because Emma, Olivia and Sophia said so. Because Emma, Olivia and Sophia, who were your friends yesterday, said you were a basic bitch today and so it began. Self-doubt. Self-consciousness. The fear and lonely loathing of being 13.

Kathryn Barclay, from the New Zealand Association of Counsellors school counsellor advisory group, says adolescence is when you start to figure out where you belong.

"Who am I? What's my worth? They are totally comparing themselves to their peer group, with this absolutely driving need to fit in."

Every teenager, she says, will experience some degree of loneliness.

"Absolutely! They say things like, 'I walk into the classroom and everyone's looking at me and judging me.' Someone could have 100 positive comments and they remember the two that are negative.

"Kids will tell me that the popular girls have such a great life - and the popular girls will tell me that being at the top of the pyramid is terrible, because their friends are going to backstab them ... If you're away from school for a day, the power base shifts and when you come back, they don't talk to you. So even the Queen Bee, or the most popular, can experience exclusion."

Self-esteem grows with self-confidence. When teens find their place - in music, sport, art and other activities, they become less vulnerable. Barclay identifies two high-risk areas: gay and transgender teens who are dealing with wider societal prejudice, and teens who feel torn between peer groups, particularly as a result of family pressure. "Kids talk about putting a mask on for their family and then putting on another mask to belong and fit."

Teens are biologically primed to band together in peer groups, says Dr Terry Fleming, senior lecturer in youth mental health at the University of Auckland.

Lonely is a label that is a bit more socially acceptable than grief.
Deborah Hill Cone
"And it's almost a normal thing for teenagers to feel abandoned and alone. If they don't get invited to one party, it seems like a catastrophe ... a kid who might have been happy to spend time alone isn't necessarily so relaxed about that as a teenager."

Parents need to step up, she says. Role model social confidence; train your kids to fake it till they make it. Endlessly talking about loneliness, or leaving them alone in their room (at the potential mercy of digitally driven bullying) is not the best fix.

"If I had one message to give to parents, or anybody, it's 'take action'. Typically, if you just sit there, it gets more and more overwhelming. Sometimes they need a new circle with new friends and a clean start. Sometimes, as parents, you have to be your children's everything. One of my sons didn't have a lot of friends, and we watched the silly TV programmes with him and went to the movies in the weekend. Kids still need something fun in their life and maybe they'd rather have a peer group, but an adult is better than nothing."

Eat less and less; keep busy, keep moving, don't stop. Drink. Lash out. Withdraw. Sarah Illingworth is remembering her early 20s and a visceral response to loneliness. "Don't talk about my feelings. Talk about my feelings. Talk about my feelings too much. Try too hard to be mates with people and push them away. I guess the eating disorder had its root in loneliness, or at least they reinforced each other."

Illingworth, now 33, is an Auckland-born, Manchester-based freelance journalist and editor at Impolitikal.com. She writes - and talks - freely, about anxiety and the anorexia she developed at 20 and sought treatment for at 26. She says loneliness and being alone are different and, slowly, she has come to understand she often puts herself in a position where one is the consequence of the other.

"So now I tell myself: 'No one's making you do this, dude.' If you don't want to experience the downside of this situation, change the situation."

Illingworth thinks loneliness is an increasingly common experience - transient lifestyles are more possible; technology allows us to do more on our own.

"We're more connected, and have more capacity for connection, than ever before, but there also seems to be a profound sense of disconnection as we adjust to these new ways of interacting with each other. Which can be reinforced if you get caught in the crossfire of other people testing out new boundaries.

"Relationships are less linear and long-term; I don't think that's all bad, but we're still socially conditioned to expect long-lasting, meaningful connection with people, while at the same time authentic, deep connection seems to be being diluted in a lot of ways."

Maybe, she suggests, there'll be a backlash. "I think aloneness gets romanticised - and there is something comforting about anonymity - but, as with most things, you gotta keep the balance."

In 2013, an international wellbeing study found New Zealand - country of mateship, whanau and small-town spirit - performed incredibly poorly in areas of "social connectedness". Of the 23 countries surveyed, we ranked 20th worst for meeting socially with friends, relatives and colleagues. We were the least likely to feel close to people living in our neighbourhoods.

But "lonely", says New Zealand Herald columnist Deborah Hill Cone, is a lazy and unhelpful word - because it implies a cure, via company.

"Going out with people doesn't make you feel any less lonely. You can have some of your most intense lonely moments in a marriage that isn't working, for example, or a close relationship that's not going very well."

Disconnection is a better description, she says: "There's a particular feeling I've had at various times in my life where you just feel like you are an alien and the world is going on and it's like there is perspex between you and everything else."

It was the middle of the night in Manurewa. Hill Cone was sitting in the stairwell, breastfeeding her first baby. She was 37, her husband was overseas for work and she couldn't stop crying.

"Everybody else is warmly asleep and leading normal lives and you're feeling like you're just so disconnected and isolated."

In the daytime, when the midwife arrives, "I put on this great 'really, really, I'm fine, I'm fine'. I'm fine until she left. It's not as easy to reach out."

Years later, (divorced, two kids) she understands. "Living on my own in Manurewa, of course you'd feel like that. But at the time, it's the self-blame, recriminations and self-disgust that goes on top of the original negative feeling."