Loneliness

 Loneliness

A friend of mine wanted to do being a Samaritan listening to people on the phone who felt I need to talk to someone and they were very feeling very down or suicidal. I feel she shouldn’t do this obviously it’s a great thing to do and a great thing to want to do to help people but I was worried that he’d make things worse. In my experience talking to people when you feel down can make you feel worse because if you do not feel understood then you begin to feel very lonely and the loneliness is very depressing. My friend was quite well off you came from a privileged background and for this reason I felt that people ringing might not feel understood by him and so might then feel more lonely and more depressed and if they were ringing because they were already suicidal I didn’t think this would be a good thing. I have some examples; 

A colleague at work who was complaining to me that his wife did not understand him. Aside from the fact that you’d think that sort of thing would’ve been resolved before agreeing to marry. He elaborated that when he was growing up he had a privileged background, his family had a car and a home and they went on holidays. This level of privilege allowed them as a family to extend their holidays for an extra day by sleeping in the car for an extra night before heading home. In response to his lament I said, I get it Sarah ,your wife, doesn’t come from such a privileged background as you so they didn’t have the privilege of the option of a holiday and a car And an extra night on holiday because they have a car. And that wasn’t it - he was trying to tell me that his family were poor. Go figure.

A friend of mine was complaining about all the travelling you have to do at Christmas. I know I said it is very tiring. My parents are divorced and I have a sister. We agreed that I would visit mum in the morning and dad in the afternoon. Whle she would visit dad in the morning and mum in the afternoon. It’s about an hours walk between the two homes. So naturally I did mum in the morning and then while they’re eating Christmas dinner I walked down to visit dad in the afternoon. Having arrived my dad was very distressed because no one had visited him and he had no visitors on Christmas Day until I arrived in the afternoon. So I went hungry on Christmas day, walked an hour between the houses and got it in the neck from my dad for visiting him. So yes, I agreed, the travelling on Christmas is tiring and of course you don’t get to eat. The thing about her then standing there slack-jawed staring at me Is not that she didn’t understand but I felt like I’d lost the connection that we had something in common that we agreed on that all the travelling at Christmas it’s tiring and her face told me that we couldn’t be more different and we didn’t have this in common after all. so it wasn’t just that I wasn’t understood and I didn’t have something in common with someone else, is that I lost that feeling that pleasant feeling of connecting with someone and then it went.

These are the reasons I don’t think privileged people should be helping out at the Samaritans it just makes people who are less like them feel even more lonely isolated and so depressed.