©Julia Welstead

When I was asked to write an article about loneliness I copied and pasted the request into a new document, as I always do, and in the process accidentally lopped off the ‘l’ such that the title now rather interestingly read ‘oneliness’.

As someone who lives alone in a world where the majority of folk around me seem to be in a couple, or living with family of some sort, this struck a chord. I have been single for almost a decade (discounting the odd, brief flurry into the world of dating – and I use the word ‘odd’ deliberately) and most of the time I’m very happy with my ‘oneliness’. I enjoy the freedom of being the dictator of my own volition, sole director of my own show, of making decisions without compromise, of having my material world as I want it, without the physical, mental or emotional clutter of A.N. Other.

Only sometimes does being alone equate to loneliness, and I can pinpoint and predict when those times will occur.

1. When I’m tired or unwell physically
2. When I’m feeling insecure in some respect
3. When I’m feeling isolated from the larger community

I could bore you with my personal experience of these three broad categories, but the overall point is that all of these can also be seen within and across the essential emotional needs described by the human givens approach to emotional health and wellbeing. When I am getting my emotional needs met in balance, I do not suffer loneliness, whereas when a few of my needs are lacking, I suffer.

Loneliness is in the news, it’s the ‘in thing’ for which to calculate statistics, to describe at length in articles, and to collectively worry about. You can read and hear all about it in a plethora of newspapers, newsfeeds, glossy mags, celebrity tweets, radio interviews and so on. We even have the UK Royal seal of approval: loneliness is a real thing and it’s OK to talk about it.

There are ongoing discussions about whether the old or the young suffer more loneliness, whether immigrants suffer more than natives (in any given country), whether being financially rich, or poor, helps or hinders and to what extent loneliness can lead to physical and/or mental illness, and vice versa.

While all of these ponderables are laudible and keep our various media voices busy, in order to effectively help those lonely souls, we need to look not so much at where they are from (economically, geographically or demographically), but more at how well their essential needs are being met in the here and now, for them, personally, in their daily lives.

Why is this important? Because, underlying the media cacophany is a quiet but vital truth: that loneliness is significantly damaging to human health, is painful and miserable, and is increasingly prevalent in today’s world. Yet the state of being lonely need not be permanent and can be challenged and redressed, with all the attendant recoveries in health. We just need to know how to go about helping the millions of sufferers. 

This may seem an enormous task, as wide and deep and endless as the universe, but don’t worry, help is at hand in the form of the human givens approach: a handy framework for looking at emotional health, a lens through which every human situation can be understood and every individual helped, whoever they are, wherever they come from and whatever they are suffering.

A good place to start in understanding our essential emotional needs is by having a go – for yourself or on behalf of someone else – at the Emotional Needs Audit (ENA). This helps to tease out which of the needs are not being well met. For instance mine might show that, while my needs for security, volition, attention, privacy, community connection, status and meaning all score quite highly, my need for a close, warts and all connection with another human being is not being met at all. 

With an ENA like mine – mostly OK with only one significant lack – a person can be in good emotional health most of the time, only suffering temporarily when one or more triggers – illness, tiredness etc – strike. But imagine if I also had security needs missing (an insecure job, financial troubles or an unsafe home situation), or if I was for some reason (physical difficulties perhaps) unable to get out and interact with my community, or was lacking in a sense of meaning in my life. As the audit suggests, if we are struggling to sufficiently meet more than three or four of our emotional needs, we will be emotionaly distressed and will suffer accordingly.

Emotional distress can manifest in many ways. Stress, anxiety and depression are all much discussed now, but loneliness has been a quieter, less publicised, form of suffering, perhaps not recognised as emotional ill health so much as a by-product of one’s situation, lifestyle or behavioural habits. If someone admits to feeling lonely we might glibly suggest that they get out more, or work less, or try meeting people in the flesh rather than entirely through social media. But by using the human givens approach to look at their underlying lack or imbalance in met needs, we can help them to identify their problem(s) and home in on the route to recovery in much more effective, practical and pragmatic ways that will work for them within the reality of their lives.