In the client’s chair – Awkward silences

"I remember once being at this slightly random house-warming party and one of the girls who arrived was promptly offered a drink, which she declined"

Holding and being held

"Loneliness is often at the root of depression, argues Madeleine Böcker. Here she outlines a groupwork approach that can unlock the barriers to emotional intimacy"

In the client's chair – Who is this man?

"Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve spent three years in the company of my therapist yet I know nothing about him. He is a man who sits opposite me in a chair, week in week out, and I have no idea who he is outside of this context"

In the client's chair – Burden of hope

"Once, during a particularly trying period in my 20s, I was accosted at an extended family gathering by an elderly, distant relative. She wanted to know if I liked my job, if I was happy in what I was doing, where I thought my career was heading and other such inquiries"

Learning zone

Dilemmas

This month's dilemma: Cameron gets on well with his therapist. They have developed a quasi-supervisory relationship during his counselling training and now he thinks she might be an ideal supervisor

Student column

We’ve always been told throughout the counselling course that the journey each of us will follow during training will change us

Counselling and Psychotherapy Research (CPR)

is a peer reviewed, quarterly international journal. Visit http://www.cprjournal.com/ to read abstracts, receive regular e-bulletins and access the research glossary

In the client's chair – Lonely or alone?
by

Caitin Wishart

I read somewhere that there is a misunderstanding about the difference between loneliness and aloneness. Ever since the breakdown of my last relationship, I have been wondering what that misunderstanding might be.

Loneliness to me feels a bit like a familiar ghost that has been haunting me since my childhood; I know it’s there but it only gives me a fright from time to time. When I was in my last relationship I forgot that I was lonely for a while. We were a mismatch but it was a comforting, distracting mismatch and when it ended I was totally distraught.

I brought all my knee-jerk hurt, anger and recrimination into therapy. It was ages before I saw how isolated, how fortified I had made myself in the relationship – and how this may have impacted upon it. In other words, I might have forgotten my loneliness but my loneliness, it seemed, had not forgotten me.

There it was, rattling its chains beside me in the therapy room, week in, week out. Month in, month out. I tell my therapist that I am scared to death, that I will never be able to have a proper relationship, that I will always be lonely.

I went to my default position – exorcising the loneliness as best I could with drink, distractions, running into the arms of enticing affairs. But it didn’t seem to work any more. In fact it just felt like being at the same noisy, overwhelming party, where I somehow never felt I was actually there.

‘I feel like a ghost,’ I tell my therapist. ‘I feel insubstantial, like no one will be able to touch me.’

‘It is contact we are talking about here,’ he says. ‘Close, sustained intimacy. And your terror of it.’

When we pull the thread of my childhood (it’s always a reluctant thread), contact is seldom and overwhelming, and loneliness something abandoning. As an adult, in my attempts to avoid it, I realise loneliness becomes the practice of me abandoning myself.

In the most recent session I have with my therapist, loneliness is there as usual. We talk a little and the session lapses into a kind of rumination but the silence becomes OK; full somehow, not empty and anxious. Then I see a magpie on a roof and, feeling a rush of superstition, curse the creature and ask my therapist to look at it too. ‘One for sorrow,’ I say, but he doesn’t understand. I explain that if two people see the lone magpie, the bad luck goes away. We both look at the magpie and the magpie looks at us.

‘I’ve enjoyed today’s session,’ he says at the end – and now I don’t understand. My loneliness is enjoyable?

‘Our silences have felt contemplative today, and shared somehow,’ he explains. ‘I have felt very close to you.’

It hung in the air, that untenable contact. I think I shifted in my seat a few times, made a joke, tried to rid myself of it. But it was there, nonetheless.

And then I remember that I am in a relationship, a different one, one that isn’t just a distraction from my loneliness and its rattling chains. One in which I am not actually able to abandon myself. And then I wonder about that misunderstanding between loneliness and aloneness. Am I learning in this relationship how to be alone and feel OK? How to be alone and not feel ‘lonely’?

Loneliness to me has always come armed to the teeth with a set of ‘shoulds’. I shouldn’t be lonely. I should be in a relationship like everyone else. I should be married by now, with children probably. I should buy something (usually shoes). I should be more together. I should be like other people...

Aloneness feels less what ‘should be’ and more ‘what is’. I am alone. I am alone and I am learning that maybe it doesn’t have to be a place of deprivation. Maybe it’s a place of resource, of creativity even, or of peace. Maybe it’s a place where I can be intimate with somebody again, someday. It feels tenuous, as if I am learning how to walk on very wobbly legs, but that’s OK I suppose. It feels more hopeful than lonely.

The more alone I am able to be, the less loneliness gives me a fright and makes me want to run away: abandon myself. It is still there, of course, but more and more my old ghost is starting to disappear into thin air.
Details have been changed to protect identities.