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Loneliness
6 min read

The curse of loneliness and the hope of kindness

The tend-and-befriend response is present in many species, but it reaches a particular level of genius in ours, explains Roger Bretherton.
A person stands in a road under misty street lights.
Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

Loneliness kills. I’ve known that for a while. It dawned on me when, as an undergraduate, I first read the anthropological studies of the so-called ‘voodoo death curse’. An admittedly politically incorrect name for a horrifying phenomenon that has haunted me ever since. The studies, reported in the early twentieth century, attempted to account for the highly effective way in which shaman in tribal cultures were able to pronounce death on aberrant members of their community. Often within days of coming under the curse, the hexed individual was dead. It looked like magic. 

Psychologists studying anxiety became interested in this phenomenon as an illustration of the connection between social stress and physical health. On closer examination, they noted that those on the receiving end of a death curse, not only came under the opprobrium of a powerful spiritual authority but were consequently entirely isolated from the community that gave them their identity. The moment the curse was decreed they became a non-person. They ceased to exist in the eyes of the collective. They became a ghoul, a wraith, an abomination to their people. They experienced a social exclusion so absolute and catastrophic that the stress of it killed them. Physical death swiftly followed social death. 

When we fall foul of the charismatic leader of a workplace... we may for a moment shiver in the chill breeze of the death curse.

But the death curse is not confined to stone age tribes and agrarian collectives. It is a ubiquitous artefact of human social life. In subtly disguised form it continues to stalk the industrialised societies of the West. We see it in any social situation that terminally frustrates our hardwired biological need to belong. When we are cast out of employment through redundancy, retirement, or sickness. When a social faux pas leaves us persona non grata. When our social media presence is more of a toenail than a footprint. When we fall foul of the charismatic leader of a workplace, a neighbourhood, a family, a church. We may for a moment shiver in the chill breeze of the death curse. We wonder briefly if the silence and the cold shoulders will kill us. 

We don’t often think about the all-too evident connection between belonging, stress and health- but we should, because social connectedness is the primary way we as a species have made it this far. Most of us are familiar with the physiological responses to acute stress. There are only a few of them. It’s like a multiple choice test, take your pick: a) fight, b) flight, c) freeze, d) faint, or e) some bespoke combo of all of the above. We probably also have some recognition that those of us living in information economies tend to spend too much time in these stressed states of mind. They are designed for short-term threats (like predators), not long-term projects and serial deadlines. The cortisol coursing through our veins designed to deliver us from danger now stops us sleeping at night, and lurks behind all the major killers of our culture: cancer, heart disease, and depression. 

But before we get to all that stressed-out running and punching and standing still like startled rabbits, there is a more common everyday way that human beings deal with stress. Our primary way of navigating a challenging and threatening world is our equally hardwired ability to reach out to others- the social engagement system. This tend-and-befriend response is present in many species, but it reaches a particular level of genius in ours. Our capacity to form groups that can coordinate action through a sense of unified purpose is what allowed our ancestors to take down woolly mammoths and survive ice ages. Our principal strength comes not from our ability to make fists, but to join hands. 

 

To fall out of connection with others is an existential threat. 

No wonder then, given our history as an eminently social species, that loneliness- the perceived shortfall between desired and actual social contact- is experienced as a menace to our survival. It once was, and still is. To fall out of connection with others is an existential threat. Clinical research has been reporting for decades that social support, or rather the lack of it, predicts and maintains pretty much every form of psychological distress we can bring to mind. In a small-scale way I repeat that finding with my own students every year. We annually distribute a 19-item well-being survey to several hundred university students. Most of it asks about the good stuff, happiness, quality of relationships, sense of purpose and so on. But one question asks them to rate, simply on a 1-10 scale, how lonely they are. Every time we run it on campus, this single lonely question predicts levels of depression, anxiety and stress, better than any other demographic. 

So, it is good that loneliness is back in the news. Only last month the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued a report on the devastating health impact of loneliness. It affects a large proportion of the population- he cites 50% in the US, but UK estimates tend to be more conservative. It is apparently as damaging to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and twice as risky as downing six alcoholic drinks daily. Public health officials are partial to measuring mortality in fags and booze. But Vivek Murthy did something very un-like a public health official: he spoke about his own loneliness. How his very success in office had severed ties with friends and family, leaving him isolated, lonely and having to learn to re-connect. He proposes six pillars for addressing the societal scourge of loneliness, but as yet no government funding has been allocated to the initiative. 

It is when we give to others that we know we are known- we matter. 

When the experts are asked what we can do about loneliness they tend to advocate a multi-level approach. As individuals, we should Get Out. If we are lonely there are things we can do about it. Volunteering, exercise, singing, therapy, reconnecting with old friends, Counter-intuitively, we are more likely to benefit from activities in which we give something, in which we care or contribute. It is when we give to others that we know we are known- we matter. 

As groups we should Look Out. Not everybody is able to overcome the barriers to social contact. Some people through physical or mental disability need others to look out for them. I witnessed a heart-warming example of this recently. There is a notorious character who lives locally. He dresses in black, has wild hair, walks with a limp, and speaks in grunts. He’s harmless, but he scares children. I don’t know what trauma or substance reduced him to this state, but he staggers past us twice a day on the way to his allotment. A few weeks ago thieves broke into his shed and stole all his gardening tools. He was pitifully distressed. But within hours the entire neighbourhood had mobilised through social media, and equipped him with every trowel, fork and hoe, that could be spared. I can’t help feeling that there is something in us as people that wants to act kindly like this, and cultivating this instinct gives me hope that we as a society can beat back the spectre of loneliness.

Loneliness it seems may not be just a bug in our software, it may be encoded in our cultural firmware- part of its operating system. 

Which leads us to the third level of action, we need to Sort Out the dehumanising trends of our culture that inevitably generate and enable the pandemic of loneliness. As Mother Teresa famously observed, loneliness is the price we pay for wealth in the West, it is our true poverty. There may be something inspiring about the ruggedly individualistic, materialistically motivated, hyper-competitive, ideal of success that presides over our culture. But the studies of psychological wellbeing unanimously conclude that every one of those motivating values leads to misery, distrust and isolation. Loneliness it seems may not be just a bug in our software, it may be encoded in our cultural firmware- part of its operating system. Perhaps that is why most government-led attempts to alleviate the problem (in the UK and US at least) smack of tokenism. As the old organisational mantra goes: our social system is perfectly designed to bring about the outcomes it produces. So, what do we need? Nothing much. Just a completely transformed society. If only there was one of those knocking around, somewhere. 

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Column
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Death & life
6 min read

The really annoying thing about dying

In his first Notes from Solitude, the death of his dad causes Roger Bretherton to reflect on the relationship and the strange emergence of 'father’.
A pocket watch rests next to a black and white photograph of a father lying beside a new born baby.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.

The death of my dad was sudden and unexpected. I don’t know why it is that, from the moment he died, I have had to fight the almost irresistible urge to refer to him as father- a term of address I never used about him or to him during his life.  

Perhaps in some psychotherapy session at some point my therapist referred to my ‘father’, and I may have followed suit. And maybe occasionally when socialising with those who seemed a cut above my largely lower-middle class background, I called him father so as to avoid the flat northern vowel sounds that would expose me as an interloper. But that was just to fit in- on all other occasions he was decidedly not father and definitely just good old plain, dad.  

At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike.

But for some reason the moment he died, it felt like dad wasn’t enough. I now had to call him father - those were the rules. At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike by panting and sweating my five-year old self round the block, but the father who taught me to be… a man, or something like that.  

The F-word has gravitas, presence, authority. Dads are human, often bewildered, occasionally pissed off, eminently huggable, easily taken for granted - just there. Admittedly, Freud would have lost significant gravitas if oedipal theory had considered common-all-garden dads and not cigar-smoking brandy-swilling fathers. And no doubt the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back would have lacked considerable pathos had Darth Vader casually quipped, ‘No Luke, I’m your’re Dad’.  

The curse of the martyr, write Albert Camus, was to have other people tell their story. The principle doesn’t just apply to martyrs, it’s true of all those who die. To be dead is to become a character in other people’s anecdotes. That’s the really annoying thing about dying, we become a topic of gossip, people get to talk about us without the courtesy of ever having to talk to us. We become object, no longer subject. I think that’s why I resist calling my late Dad, Father. It objectifies him, makes of him something that he wasn’t. It, most definitely fails to do justice to all that he meant to me. 

She simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. 

I say he died suddenly. It was a Sunday morning. I was in church at the time. Actually, worse than that, I was on stage speaking to a church. As a psychologist working in academia, I teach and train all kinds of people in every kind of organisation imaginable, but every now and then I get to speak in churches.  

On this occasion I was talking about character, the positive qualities of being – like love, gratitude, hope, wisdom and so on – that make life worth living. When I stepped off the stage my wife was waving to me from the back of the room, which was weird given that we don’t go to that church and she hadn’t come with me. When I wandered to the back of the auditorium wearing my ‘what are you doing here?’ face, she simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. For someone who prides himself on social insight, it shames me to say that it took a while for the penny to drop. We were in the car with the engine running before it finally dawned on me what she meant. 

I try not to make too much of divine timings or fate, but there was something odd in the timing of getting that news. In that month I had addressed church congregations three Sundays in a row- which, as someone who is generally lazy and prefers not to work weekends, is an unusually intense frequency. But over three successive Sundays I had reflected aloud with those congregations that there were prayers that had accompanied the various stages of my life. Prayers that I found myself praying, almost as if they were prayed through me, as if they had chosen me rather than I they.  

In my twenties I had found myself praying as regularly as a heartbeat, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me, to make me into the person you would like me to be.’ It was a radical invitation for God to put me through whatever was needed to become who I was meant to be. But then the prayer faded. Its visit was over, it had done its work and it moved on. But as I addressed the congregations on those three Sundays I mused aloud that while the prayer of my twenties had departed decades before, I found a new prayer stirring in my forties. Now as the father of teenage boys, my new prayer was, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me to make me the father you would like me to be.’  

In the weeks that followed, people asked me whether I had had a good relationship with my dad. The most accurately answer was: we had the best relationship of which we were both capable. We both tried in our own ways to deepen our connection, but we were like the lovers in a romantic comedy; we always managed to miss each other. When he tried with me, I didn’t want to know. For several years, he left a book lying around at home that he wanted me to read. I never saw anyone touch it, but it moved around the house under its own steam. It was by my bedside, in the toilet, on the dining room table…  Macavity the Mystery Cat would have been proud. It was called, Things We Wish We Had Said. We may have wished, but we didn’t say. I never read it. Years later, when I tried with him, he was too flustered to respond. Both of us in our own ways lacked the courage to connect any deeper. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me, and I him. 

When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious.

He died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning asleep in bed, while my Mum was at church. Almost immediately his absence prompted a profound change of consciousness in me. When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious. If he was inexpressive, I was articulate. If he was like that, I was like this. And yet, almost at the very moment of his death, a reversal of awareness occurred. I started to see just how very much like him I was. His gentleness, his uncertainty, his scepticism, his care, his humour, were all mine. 

There is a rule in family therapy, that adult children relating to their parents should set their expectations to zero. We never truly see our parents until we stop viewing them through the lens of our own desires; what we wanted from them but never got. Until we do that our lives don’t really work, we sit around waiting for an impossible transformation, a payday that never comes, the moment our parents become exactly how we would like them to be, not as they are. For me, that moment of acceptance for dad only came when he was gone, I accepted him as he was when there was nothing left to accept. I don’t write this with any great sense of guilt or regret at opportunities lost, more with a sense of gratitude for what was given but often taken for granted.  

Oddly though, in the shadow of that seismic shift in my interior furniture, I detected the stirrings of an answer to my own prayer to be a better father. No longer compelled to define myself in contrast to what he was, I was freed to be what I was- both like and unlike him, and to be fair, more like him than I cared to admit. At some visceral level I came to appreciate how much of myself originated with him. I came to accept myself as a dad and my dad as a father.

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