Loneliness and Isolation

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. You can be lonely in a marriage, in a full residence, in an office of forty people, at a family lunch. And you can spend a weekend entirely on your own and feel perfectly well.

What makes it loneliness is the gap: the distance between the connection you have and the connection you need. That gap is not visible from the outside, which is why so many people carry it without anyone noticing — and why so few say anything.

Four different things, often confused

• Being alone is a circumstance. Nothing more.
• Solitude is being alone by choice, and it can be one of the most restorative things available to a person.
• Loneliness is the felt distress of that gap. It is subjective: only you can say whether it is there.
• Isolation is measurable — how little contact you actually have. You can be isolated without feeling lonely, and lonely without being isolated at all.

Knowing which of these you are dealing with matters, because they do not respond to the same things. More company will not touch loneliness that comes from not being known.

The kinds I see most

No one close. You may have plenty of people around you, and no one you can say the true thing to. This is the loneliness that hides best, because on paper your life looks full.

No circle to belong to. You have moved town or country, changed jobs, left school, retired, separated. The individual friendships may survive; the surrounding web of ordinary contact does not.

Cut off from yourself. Harder to describe, and common. When you have spent years managing how you come across, you can end up estranged from what you actually feel — lonely in your own company as well as in everyone else's.

The kind that cannot be fixed. There is a distance between any two people that no amount of love closes. No one else will ever fully know what it is to be you. Most of the time we live comfortably enough alongside that, but illness, loss and mortality bring it up close. It is not a symptom to be removed. It can, however, be shared — and being accompanied in it is a different experience from facing it alone. This is the existential ground I describe on the Approach page.

The loop that keeps it going

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why loneliness so often deepens in people who genuinely want company.

Being lonely makes us watchful. We become quicker to read a short reply as rejection, a missed invitation as a verdict, a friendly room as a place where everyone already knows each other. So we hold back, decline, leave early, don't text first. Nothing disastrous happens — and nothing good happens either, which confirms exactly what we suspected. The next approach is a little harder than the last.

It is not a character defect and it is not weakness. It is what the nervous system does when connection feels unsafe. But it does mean that waiting until you feel like reaching out tends not to work, because the feeling arrives after the contact, not before it.

You are not unusual

• About one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness.
• Among people aged 13 to 29, between 17% and 21% report feeling lonely, the highest rates among teenagers.
• Social isolation affects up to one in three older adults.
• In low-income countries about 24% report loneliness, roughly twice the rate in high-income countries.
• People who are lonely are about twice as likely to become depressed.

In a university town this is visible every February: a residence full of people, and a great many of them privately convinced that everyone else has already found their footing.

And it reaches everyone. Age, gender, culture, language, faith, wealth, how sociable you appear — none of it grants immunity, and none of it makes the experience fundamentally different. Loneliness is about human connection, and that is something we have far more in common than anything that separates us.

What I have come to believe

Two things stand out from my own life. The first is that being alone and being lonely are not the same, and that becoming comfortable in your own company is a skill worth having — it takes the desperation out of needing other people, which paradoxically makes you better at being with them.

The second is how much it matters to be supported by people you can identify with. Not sympathy from a distance, but the company of someone whose situation you recognise, who does not need it explained. There is a particular relief in that which ordinary reassurance never reaches.

I have also come to believe that the opposite of depression is not happiness. It is connection.

And I have worked with people who became physically unwell from loneliness — not metaphorically, but genuinely ill from living a life unobserved. We are not built to go unwitnessed.

An older woman I worked with said two things I have never forgotten. The first was that happiness acquires its full meaning only once it is shared. The second was that she rarely needed someone to do things with — she could do those perfectly well on her own — what she wanted was someone to do nothing with. A reassuring presence in the room.

That is closer to the heart of it than any advice about getting out more. Our struggles compound and accumulate while we hold them to ourselves. Shared with someone, even briefly, even daily, they dissipate — and the day can start again.

What actually helps

Not “get out more”. If that worked you would have done it.

Working out which gap it is. Whether you need more people, or one person who really knows you, or a way back to yourself. The answer changes everything that follows.

Small and repeated, rather than large and occasional. Connection is built by ordinary, low-stakes contact happening often — the same coffee shop, the same walk, the same Tuesday. Big gestures are far less useful than small ones repeated.

Doing what you genuinely love. Not as a strategy for meeting people, but as an end in itself. It does tend to put you among people who love the same thing, and that shared enthusiasm is the most natural starting point there is. Nothing has to be manufactured, because the common ground is already under both of you. Connections that begin that way tend to grow quietly over time, and to last, precisely because they were never an exercise in finding company.

Going first, before you feel ready. Because of the loop above, the willingness usually follows the action rather than preceding it.

Looking at what you conclude about yourself. Much of the pain of loneliness is not the absence of people; it is what we decide that absence means about us. That is often where the real work sits, and it overlaps with self-worth and self-esteem.

Learning solitude. Being able to be alone well is a skill, and it makes you less dependent on company to feel all right. The two are not opposites.

Group therapy. For loneliness in particular this is often the most direct route of all. A group is a room of people who are also finding connection difficult, which removes at a stroke the effort of explaining yourself — and it is frequently the first place in years that someone experiences being genuinely known rather than politely accommodated. If it looks like the right fit, we identify a suitable group together in our sessions.

Where the therapy itself comes in

There is something specific about being met once a week by someone who is paying full attention, who is not going anywhere, and to whom you do not have to present a manageable version of yourself. For many people the counselling relationship is the first place in a long while that they have been known rather than accommodated. That experience tends not to stay in the room.

Where this often overlaps

Loneliness rarely arrives alone. It runs through self-worth, self-esteem and identity, and it works in both directions with addiction: substances and screens fill the gap for a while, and they also hollow out the relationships that were holding a person, leaving them lonelier than before. It is frequently what a withdrawn young person is actually experiencing (help for youth at risk). It is also one of the least spoken of parts of living with limb loss or disability, of divorce and bereavement, and of fractured or destructive family dynamics.

Practical details

Sessions are fifty minutes, in person at my practice in Stellenbosch or online by Zoom, in English or Afrikaans. Fees and other practical questions are answered on the FAQ page.

Getting in touch

Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form. You do not need a reason that sounds serious enough. “I don't really have anyone to talk to” is reason enough.

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