A Vaccine for Loneliness?


You're part of the same fabric, but you're a different thread.


 

In 2020, being an epidemiologist suddenly became sexy. People who’d previously had zero interest in public health, or who had had no idea what it was, were following epidemiologists on social media; the germ trackers were the hottest guests on TV news. Epidemiologist parents of young children could put their kids to bed and then proudly imagine their kids telling their kids, down the line, that grandma had been an epidemiologist, and their grandkids sighing wistfully and saying they wish they had known her and maybe they could follow in her footsteps.

Public health has gotten bigger and bigger in recent decades. What was only thought of in the past as individual choices, like drug addiction, gun violence, or smoking crossed over to be thought of by many as social issues and, eventually, as matters of public health. With the Surgeon General’s report that came out in May, 2023, loneliness and isolation may assume their place alongside them as social epidemics.

The report represented an evolution in Dr. Vivek H. Murthy’s thinking over nine years of listening to the American public and reading in the scientific literature. Loneliness is correlated with tremendous impacts on physical health, greater than those for either obesity or inactivity, and similar to those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, with increases in cardiovascular disease, stroke, dimension, and premature death — not to mention depression and anxiety. It turns out, as Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo has said“We are each other’s key to a long life and healthy life.”

Yet it still flatters the individualism of those who don’t smoke — or who are insensitive to smoke — or who are unaware of the dangers of secondary smoke — to see smoking as someone else’s problem or their character flaw. In many people’s minds still, smoking has nothing to do with marketing cigarettes to vulnerable populations, with how prejudice impacts behavior, much less with the potential effectiveness of public education and incentives that would make it easier to quit.
 

But, then again, these sexy epidemiologists have generally been ahead of the popular imagination, seeing such problems as requiring whole societies’ attitudes, choices, and behavior to shift and our best social vision, cooperation, and innovation to address.
 

Many of the health issues that go beyond communicable diseases that we’re still hard put to see as affecting individuals also affect the physical and mental health of others and even their lives, in the case of gun violence.

With loneliness the social impacts may be equally and more widespread, even, as in Dr. Murthy’s (and others’) views it may lead to the total breakdown of our democratic society. Murthy connects loneliness to the increasing polarization in our country and to the survival of our democracy. Loneliness changes the brain, increasing paranoid thinking, vigilance, and creating a vicious circle in which they very brain signals that would ordinarily trigger someone to reach out for social connection instead make them fear others. 
 is correlated with paranoid thinking and even with violence.

So what does our Surgeon General put forth as potential solutions?

  • Structural and policy change to increase interdependence and connection.
  • Altering our relationship to technology.
  • And rebuilding and strengthening the social connections we already have.

 
You know where I’m going with this. THE HUMAN JOURNEY® is about reducing the sense of loneliness that can people have, even within their closest relationships, that bite them in the butt when crisis comes:

  • A parent’s need for 24-hour care, when only one sibling lives close and they know they’re in over their head;
  • The impending loss from breast cancer of the core member of your friend group from college, whom everyone saw as their own best friend; or
  • The loss that no one in the family can talk about because it feels just too raw.

Our Conductors are both what we call Compassionate Citizens—those who are aware of the need and ready to offer their care by offering this innovative, well-structured experience — and professionals in the fields of care management, chaplaincy, hospice, palliative care, counseling, end of life doula work, and social work who have seen the gap in what is offered to families in the pain of transition and what is truly needed.

Learn more about, and certify in, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® methodology. 

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    Grief on the Comedy Stage

     

    You no doubt know by now that THJ helps groups come together in the face of difficult diagnoses, end of life, bereavement, and even other major life transitions.

    We’ll talk here about the role of laughter in bringing groups — even groups that grieve — together. We hope you’ll join us for training! 

     


    “Do not hesitate!”

     

    Recently, the New York Times featured a story about a seemingly new trend in stand-up comedy: using death and grief as comic material. “That’s the Funny Thing About Grief” tracks how common the subjects of death and grief are these days in the work of stand-up comics.

     

    Is it in supremely bad taste, or career-limiting, to use these serious subjects on the American comedy stage?

     

    Healthy and young people have mortality, death, and grief on the minds in ways they may not have prior to 2020. Members of Generation Z think about death more than any other generation, with 35% thinking about it every day. More than 50% of all American adults think about their deaths more often than before they did before the pandemic. With death on so many more people’s minds, it stands to reason that it would be in the popular consciousness and appearing in pop culture in new ways — indeed, that it would be bursting to come out.

     

    We may be more receptive to comedy that leaves a “respectful” amount of time (whatever that is) between a painful event and its treatment in literature or other art forms. For many years, 9/11 was off limits.

     

    In the years after 9/11, articles appeared in the popular media in which their authors would muse about how much time would have to pass before one could produce comedy about a national event that had at once produced enormous loss of life and attacked Americans’ sense of invulnerability.

     

    Writers and comics had to consider:

     

    • Whom would a joke hurt?
    • Whose memories would it disrespect? and …
    • What kinds of people have we become if we’re even capable of creating comedy out of loss?

     

    Does the Taboo Make Any Sense?

     

    But we might consider a broadly held assumption that grief and loss don’t belong in comedy. Re-visiting a painful event through a comedic and performative lens — provided that event has been grieved to a large extent — might actually help both performer and audience. Using their creative writing and timing when engaging with a live audience could conceivably provide a healing communal experience, easing the natural isolation of the grief experience. Shared laughter can improve mood, boost the immune system, and ease pain. It can relax muscles, decrease your heart rate and blood pressure, and release dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins.

     

    And perhaps it is not inappropriate to share, particularly if it is about the author’s own condition or grief, if it is their own story to tell, rather than trying to own someone else’s, including making any assumptions about the audience’s experience.

     

    Breaking such a taboo might even break the ice of a shared reality.  When Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch, who was well-known to have pancreatic cancer, was slated to give his final public lecture, the audience flocked to hear him. His presentational style in that talk could be described as ebullient. At one point he quipped, “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be … sorry to disappoint you!”

     

    Comedy in the Family Gathering Post-Funeral

    In my own extended family of cousins engaged professionally, semi-professionally, or simply by proximity in show business, gatherings at the house after a funeral ceremony has always included funny as well as moving stories. It simply wouldn’t be like the Klitsners (yes, you’re free to chuckle) not to laugh in the midst of tears.

     

    Those stories bank on the eccentric or particular behaviors of the person who had died, those habits or ways of a person that endeared him or her to us, or even annoyed us, in similar ways. It was the unique ways in which they questioned the world, the scrapes they would get themselves into that made the person themselves memorable, all the more important after their death.

     

    I’ve always loved when such stories would start out with the something that the person “would” do over and over again, as if on automatic. (I finally learned in writing this what’s the “would” is called: the “habitual aspect.”)

     

    Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as what happens when what is human seems to be mechanical, acting out of keeping with the norms of a given situation. (The idea of the habitual or mechanical also can become comical when used to poke fun at someone who’s still alive: the boss who doesn’t, but pretends to, know more than his employees; the toddler who says things to nasty relatives his parents wish they could get away with.) The pleasure of the laugh, whether the person being jostled is dead or alive, is perhaps most enjoyable when the audience shares the same knowledge of the person and can recognize their interactions in the speaker’s tale.

     

    So comedy while the performer or storyteller is grieving … comedy that holds up the personality of the person who’s died … comedy that acknowledges an experience all have shared and done work on grieving: all stand the chance not only of success at humor but also success in supporting both individual and group healing.

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      Every Person’s Life is Worth a Novel

      We’re ready for ya.

      All handy in its front pocket, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® has all the ways to meet family members right where they are.

      We have a way to meet people who don’t want to talk about feelings.

      We have a way to meet people who would rather express something silently, with a facial expression, a gesture, or a stance, than with telling or sharing.

      We have a way to meet people who, already anticipating the loss of someone they cherish, need a way to connect, without the risk of incurring a single more unpleasant emotion.

      We even have a way to meet people who aren’t sure they even want to engage with their families, they have so much going on inside them.

      We meet our participants right where they are — even if they don’t want to speak about illness, dying, or death directly. 

      We do that, essentially, through artfulness.

      It’s no accident that THE HUMAN JOURNEY speaks to the kinds of emotions that a painting, a pop song, or a film can take us. A painting can stir, a pop song can move, a film can — despite any best efforts — make us sob.

      Works of art create discernible emotions, ones to which words correspond and bodily sensations can be measured. 

      Awe has a place it tends to show up in the body. Being touched or moved is felt more pointedly in the heart area than does either surprise or amazement. And, as in an artistic encounter, through the THJ Experience, participants are changed physically by what they see and hear — and by what they, to their own amazement sometimes — hear and experience themselves saying.

      Their empathy “burns” broadly across their chests when participants hear what sorrows their mother has been carrying for such a long time or the fears she has, even needlessly, for her children.

      Participants are touched or moved and may be feel a very specific sensation in the heart areas as their brother, who normally doesn’t like to talk about his feelings, recalls and represents through just his facial expression what he felt at a time he was worried for his son’s life.

      And one could say that joy — one of the most consistently modeled emotions in the Finnish study on the bodily experience of artistic emotion — makes participants’ hearts widen, even in the midst of one of the most challenging times of their lives, as, toward the end of THE HUMAN JOURNEY Experience, they co-create a future with their loved ones and make a vow for their future together. 

      Just look how brightly joy burns in the image above. It’s that joy that makes of the sad moment a group may be experiencing a bittersweet one … one in which they can experience the sweetness and their strength as well as the pain.

      Because THJ is a cauldron for group transformation that melts hearts toward each other.

      Through the course of the experience and increasingly by the end, THE HUMAN JOURNEY gives our participants — most of whom we catch at a moment of suffering, when they are crying out for care and connection — a surprise gift that brings the THJ Experience to a natural-feeling closure.

      That gift is the fresh understanding that the artistic emotions they have been drawn to feel over the course of the THJ Experience — the beauty of each other’s characters; the empathy to know that, even though their journeys have been different, their siblings have experienced things that bring their story together —are completed in the knowledge that the final art work that’s being shown to them … is themselves.

      I developed THE HUMAN JOURNEY out of my understanding that discovering the coherence in the themes, images, symbols, and figures in one’s life heals in just the way that art heals. Each participant makes meaning through the THJ Experience on their own terms, to their own spiritual lights. And suddenly they, as well as their family, seem to make sense. 

      They themselves are the novel, the film, the painting that holds together, whose pieces connect the past and the present moment, while pointing to a future they can see enough now to take the hand of their fellow participants and start out.

      Please join us for our next training. This is the perfect time to register, prepare to receive your Conductor’s Kit and Guidebook, and ready yourself for a memorable adventure that will equip you to help families and support groups, in their times of life crisis and loss, melt their hearts toward each other.

      P.S. Thanks to Erv & Sarah Polster, celebrated Gestalt therapists whose book Every Person’s Life is Worth a Novel has long inspired me, especially  throughout the making of THE HUMAN JOURNEY.

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      Ostranenie: A Fantastic Russian Word

      Learn to pronounce ostranenie and impress your friends with your accent as well as with this cool word.

      And what a concept … to learn to re-see, as if with new eyes, those things our eyes think they know so well, they no longer see them at all.

      To find wonder again and again in the way our sister-in-law calls company in for dinner without the least hint of anxiety, exhaustion, or sense of the extraordinary event.

      To learn anew about the people we think we know best.

      A woman runs away from home to find home

      A trope of the last two generations is a woman — economically more self-sufficient than in prior decades — leaving her marriage to “find herself” for the first time.

      Perhaps she had never lived alone.

      Perhaps she was raised by parents who themselves had subscribed to earlier ideas about gender roles, had prepared her, whether consciously or, more likely, because “it was in the water,” to put her needs second to those of her husband and children. She was drowning in meeting others’ needs.

      Recently, the New York Times put its finger on a different kind of relationship crisis: so much physical and psychical togetherness that, again, it became hard for a married woman to find herself. The story suggested that apparently, again, led more by women than by men, a movement to live apart while remaining married and in an expressly loving relationship had a discernible uptick in 2021. 

      The “living apart together” trend had already been noticed by demographers with relation to older people who had been divorced or widowed, wanted to be in a relationship, but preferred to maintain independent households.

      Between 2000 and 2019, the proportion of married couples who lived apart grew by 25%. And it began to rise again in 2021, possibly (the Times speculates) because of the pandemic and its concomitant rise in caregiving and schooling demands, alongside work, on wives and mothers. 

      The women the story profiled decided to live temporarily, and while remaining in contact with their husbands, in their own places, as one said, “remember[ing] who I am by myself, remember[ing] what I like doing by myself.”

       

      Seeing the whole picture that has you in it

      The two versions of women leaving home differ in clear ways.

      One version is permanent, aims to sever relationship and the old sense of home; the other is temporary, maintains relationship, and includes a return. Its success as an experiment depends on ostranenie, remembering oneself, while being able to see anew both a loved one, and one’s relationship to (in these cases) him. It becomes urgent when your habitual ways of seeing and relating have obscured the emergent reality of the human being you live with.
       
      How do you embrace and continue to commit to a picture unless you can see it first, and then keep seeing it as it changes?
       
      The phenomenon of living apart together is of course only available to those who can make an expensive arrangement work economically. And not everybody has to move out to see their family member as if for the first time — an experience of ostranenie that can feel like permission for that person to be themselves and to keep on growing.
       
      Valuing the commitment to allow the other person to continue to grow, and for roles to evolve and change, you need a jolt so that you can see the person you’ve seen 1,002 times, the 1,003rd time as if for the first.

      Despite what they think, people don't already know.

      Professionally, when you work with your clients, patients, or congregants, their families, and with the support groups you lead, you are continually working against their belief they already know who everyone else in the group is, that their existing judgments are true now and forever.

      Powerful experiences work much more effectively and lastingly than mere verbal reminders.

      When offered as an experience for families or groups dealing with serious illness, loss, or a life change such as the recognition of the need to recover from addiction, THE HUMAN JOURNEY actively moves participants into a state of ostranenie, both with respect to every other person in the group and — perhaps even more significantly — with themselves.

      No, they don’t end up a freaked-out mess, not recognizing anyone and shattering into 1,000 shards! They see the vulnerability and fragility of each other person, the ways in which they are creating themselves in every moment. And they release a fixed sense of themselves in the process.

      Thus, when they find home again, it is the one that grants the freedom to every other grieving, or struggling, or growing participant—to be who they are. And the group support they find there is offered to the person they are becoming, day by day. 

      Certification training to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY Experience will enable you to bring families and groups facing grief, serious illness, addiction, and other life transitions together. This tool sets them up to carry what they gained from the experience forward, into listening consistently to each other for values, supporting each other through loss and change from whatever each person’s spiritual perspectives may be, and finding meaning through hard times.

      We are doing a limited number of public Conductor Trainings in 2023. Register here to be included. We limit spaces to allow for personal attention and mentoring. 

      May today be a day of seeing as if for the first time.

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      Your Relationships (By the Numbers)

      Even though our relationships might seem like the least quantifiable things we have in our lives, that doesn’t seem to stop people from thinking of them as sums. I’ve seen that play out a few ways. 
       
      I’ve met people who talked about their “A” list and their “B” lists of friends. (The “B’s,” I guess, are the people they’d call if no one on the A list was available to come to the party or go out. There’s something vaguely disturbing about someone being on either list.)
       
      Dating apps, of course, present candidates’ appearances as either a “swipe left” or a “swipe right.” Facebook itself came from Facemash, Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt, during his time as a student at Harvard, to develop an attractiveness rating system.
       
      NPR broadcasted a long-form feature on a market researcher who decided to interview his wife about her “customer” satisfaction with him as a spouse and the areas in which he could be getting higher ratings. After all, he reasoned, why not use his well-honed professional tools to improve the “product” of which he was most proud, his relationship with his wife? 

      Recently, I saw a different way of quantifying our relationships that I thought had more potential for a social good.

      The Time You Spend is a Real Number

      In these perhaps waning days of Twitter, Sahil Bloom plumbed a U.S. study of “American Time Use” to pull insights from some numbers themselves— the average amount of time Americans spend with those closest to them.
       
      After the age of 20, just how much time do we who are Americans typically spend with our parents and siblings?
      With our friends?
      Our life partner?
      Our children?
      Co-workers?

      It’s pretty stark when you look at a graph that plots, by age, to whom the hours go. 

      After they’ve done the backbreaking work of raising us, we may only spend an average of an hour a day with parents and siblings. (I hear my mother’s voice: “It just isn’t fair, Sara.”)
       
      After the age of 18, we spend significantly less time with friends. By the time we’re in our 30s, according to the survey, it’s less than an hour a day. 
       
      It appears that, after our 30s, the time we would have spent with friends — and more — seems to go straight to time we spend with our partner, with whom we spend between 3 and 4 waking hours each day—that is, until our retirement years. If we’re still with our partner in our later 60s that amount of time rises precipitously.
       
      Time with children? The time goes fast and then it’s really, really gone.
       
      That leaves co-workers, whom we see about as much as (and sometimes more than) our life partners.
       
      All of which begs the question — and circles us back to those darned “A” and “B” lists — to the degree you have some choice, is the time you’re spending in line with the various people in your life in line with consonant with just how important they are to you?
       
      And, more to the point, are you making decisions about your time with the awareness that time flies, and eventually stops, for all of us?
       
      Bloom’s very qualitative insights that he draws looking at the quantitative data remind us of this. They read less like truisms to ignore once you’ve seen the chart with your own eyes:

      “Family time is limited—cherish it.

      Friend time is limited—Embrace friendship breadth, but focus on depth.

      Partner time is significant—never settle.

      Children time is precious—be present.

      Coworker time is significant—find [ones who energize you].

      Alone time is highest—love yourself.”
       
      Bloom’s analysis of the American Time Use study telescopes time so that we see it from birth to our 80s. This is how we, as a society, live; this is likely how we ourselves live.

      Becoming conscious that we will never have more, or even as much, time with the people we care most about, how are we making decisions today?

      Helped me remember what is important in life.

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