Hello to you therapy fans it's time for another episode of your favorite two psychotherapists, having a natter about psychotherapy and mental health podcast. At least it's my favorite anyway. Welcome back by the way, Fiona, because not that everybody realizes it, but you've been away haven't you for a week or so.
I have, yes, and thank you. And it's my favorite too. Yes. I've just, I'm just back from Alaska. I went with Jack and it was amazing. Absolutely fabulous. So I'm still flying high.
Hmm. Some of the pictures looked incredible and there was a couple of videos that you popped onto social media as well. It looked, looked astonishing. I've never, I've, have I ever, Nope. I'm trying to think. I'm not very well traveled. I don't think I've been west of Ireland? well, it depends, depends how far around you go. I, I went to Australia, but I didn't go that way around, you know, so Ireland is the furthest west I've ever been.
I've never been to, I've never been to the American continent.
I'm fairly well traveled, but I hadn't realized quite how spectacular it was going to be, and how different it was going to be. So it was, yeah. Got exactly what I needed.
it was exactly what you needed. That's interesting cuz you were, outta touch for a long time. There were days when you probably got no mobile signal at all. It's like, I've just gotta live in the moment.
I'm not that brilliant at living in the moment, but I was on that trip. We were really in the moment throughout and occasionally I was thinking, oh, This is what I'm doing. Living in and experiencing. Enjoying every moment.
Nice.
Not every moment. It was freezing at night
Oh, oh my God. I
and I walked into a the wing mirror. I didn't enjoy that moment.
Ow.
Yeah. Jack thought I was laughing. I
it's cold. Oh, Fiona. Oh, have you got a bump?
I did. It's gone now.
Oh, you properly banged yourself then.
properly bang myself.
oh, your tears could have frozen.
That was during the day, some of the time during the day. It was nice and warm, so the weather was all over the place.
Did you Miss England while you were on your travels?
Um, no,
No. Okay. Did you miss your friends?
um, no, I had Jack and, um, it wasn't that long. And yeah, Jack and I had a great time together. We did loads of quizzes and, uh, yeah, we were only away for 10 days,
that's a long time to be away. To be fair. I'm trying to shoehorn in the topic of today's,
I did recognize that you were, but I wasn't very helpful. Sorry.
It doesn't matter. I'll live with it. We've had quite a few questions and, and emails and things dropped in over the last couple of weeks, but one in particular jumped out at me and it was from listener David who asks, uh, the subject title was, how do you Make Friends as an Adult? And he went into a lot of personal stuff. Which maybe he thought, uh, was just for me to read. So I'm not gonna go into all the, I'm not gonna go into the weeds on it.
but basically, he got to a point in his life where moved house, traveled from one end of the country to the other, and as an adult with a family wants to know how to, how to make friends because it's not something that we do as adults particularly easily. As a kid you sit next to each other in the class at school, and you're forced together, there's less fear. I don't know. We just push together on the playground, aren't we?
But as an adult, we don't tap each other on the shoulder and go, uh, do you like Spider-Man? We don't do that. Maybe we should. Maybe we all need to be a bit childlike, but that means changing an entire culture, especially when now that all the pubs are closing and things like that, and our culture has changed. I was sitting in a pub on Wednesday and it was busy for that pub because there was more than us in it.
some of the friends there they don't drink, just non-alcoholic stuff, but we just use it as a social place and we have a quick drink and a catch up and eat halloumi fries, and then we go on our way. But the culture's changing. People don't go to church on a Sunday anymore. So that bit of community has changed. The pubs are shutting because lots of people, they sit inside and they chat online instead. And that's fine for them.
But if you've, if you're outta the loop, that's not so fine for everybody else, is it? How do we get round that? What do we do as an adult? Fiona?
You are not asking the right person, cuz I'm not very good at this. I'm very good at talking to people, but I don't tend to do it unless the situation arises. So for example, in Alaska, one place we stayed one of the campsites cause we had a, a camper van. One of the campsites had a tavern where they served chili. That was it. and it was ranch house style. Which means everybody sits together on big tables. And so we sat with other people. And it's absolutely fine, but I wouldn't seek that out.
I wouldn't choose to put myself in that position. I absolutely love it when it happens, but I'm not very good at creating it. So I'm sort of a bit in between you and David on this, I think. But it's, it is hard to make friends as an adult. if I think back over my adult life, you've got your university days or whatever. You've got your early days of going to work and being childless where you are likely to develop, or certainly I did and friends did those work relationships.
Where it spills out into friendships. And then if you have children, you've got the, well, certainly the first few years of going to toddler groups and things like that and N C T classes, and it's where you have your children to bond over and go for coffee and those sorts of things. Maybe a bit at the playground as well, but after that, how do you make friends? It's not that easy.
I mean, I, when I was living in London, people would always recommend Meetup, a website for anybody who doesn't know that you can
In the cities. Yeah. That's popular. Yeah.
and I did that a couple of times, but it didn't really work in any way for me. And since moving to Cheltenham joined the Bridge Club and I've, I do have some friends from that, but we meet to play Bridge.
Hmm. Even before all of this, when you were talking about university and school and friends at work and then meeting parents outside the school gates. Then, you've got to be able to take a risk and get to know them. I think there's a reason why people don't, why people don't take that risk, and that's what needs to be looked at. I think that's where the focus needs to be.
I once heard somebody say that, if you are on your own and you are lonely, then you can't like your own company very much, and I think that might be where people need to start. What is it about me that puts people off? And if I can examine that and then learn to be okay in my own company, it's gonna be much easier to not fear rejection and take those chances and send somebody a text message and say, really nice catching up the other day, we ought to do that again and mean it.
That's an important part that mean it. Because in our culture there is a tendency to say these things and not mean it. And how do we know when somebody does mean it and when they don't? It's sort of a little bit like a matchmaking process. If I'm talking to somebody at the bus stop or at Bridge or anywhere, how do I know if they might also be, in the market for a new pal? Or are they somebody who's just saying these things?
Because that's what we do culturally and that's quite a tough one to pull apart. I, I know, I've mentioned my father on this before. I'll do it again. Um, that, somebody in the village said, oh, now your daughter's here. You must come around and have a coffee and introduce her. And I was a bit skeptical as I went into that. Oh, they don't mean it mode. My father was, oh yeah, they definitely do. We went round and they didn't,
Oh.
I, it was absolutely fine, but I, I wasn't bothered at all, but my father was a bit put out well, why did they say it if they didn't mean it? But we do, you know that thing when you meet people on holiday and you say, oh, we'll meet up when we get back. Rarely does that occur. That's a tricky one to get over is, well, do they mean it? I wouldn't feel comfortable of saying to somebody, do you mean that or are you actually, no. You, uh, no. You can't do that, can you? So, so how do you know?
I just want to go back though, onto what you said about loneliness. And I think it is really important to separate out loneliness and being alone, which is sort of where you are going to, in terms of, being okay in your own company. But even if somebody's okay in their own company, doesn't mean they wouldn't get a bit lonely at times. But I just looked up some statistics this morning, and this is from, campaign to end loneliness.org.
3.3 million people living in Britain were chronically lonely or felt lonely all the time in 2022.
Whoa.
a lot of people. And that was all the time. That's a lot. And I suppose we often talk on this, don't we, about continua, and you can feel lonely even if you are with other people. So it's about finding for each individual where you are on that continuum and how much it varies, and whether that's okay or not.
One thing that came out of the pandemic was just how important connections to others really is. I remember I was talking to Billy, my son, about this the other day cause he was talking about this YouTuber called Tom Scott. And, and he said to me, I can't believe you don't know who Tom Scott is. I went, I do, I do. I just forgot that was all. He, he seems a really nice guy.
This Tom Scott just started a little YouTube channel, was in the right place at the right time and now he's really popular, but he's just, his video essays, little mini documentaries. He's just doesn't, he's just a normal nice guy. He's quite intelligent and that helps obviously. And he wanted to find out what everybody's favorite thing was. So he wrote a little computer program that just looked through, I think it was, a certain database of things.
took out things like war and famine and stuff like that accidentally left in diseases. Which was a mistake, but nevermind. And wrote a computer program that just randomly picked one and asked people to rate the thing and put it into the right order so you get Polio at the bottom, but it still appeared on the list of favorite things when this was, uh, finally released, it was actually during the pandemic. So number one was hugs.
Uh,
Hugs was everybody's favorite thing. And I think, you know, if, if that was repeated, it probably wouldn't be so important this year. I think hugs would still be on the list, but it was because it was being denied that made people prefer hugs over pizza, which was quite high apparently, pizza. Depending on where you are in that moment, depends on the thing that you find is the best thing, but connections to others. That's part of being human. We evolved to connect to each other.
we are not isolated animals. We are really not. Very few species are, I suppose crocodiles maybe are one of the random ones. We aren't. We do well on this planet because we stick together, so it's hardwired into us to look for each other. But in the 21st century, we live in this connected world where we can just change our jobs and move to the other side of the country, and maybe even not change our jobs.
Maybe we can just do the same jobs from a different desk because we work from home and that's a problem.
Yeah, I, I know somebody, who moved back to the UK from Australia recently. And is continuing her job in Australia, in the uk, so her on a night shift. So we can move the other side of the world. The pandemic obviously, when we were all disconnected from many people, although some people of course were forced into connections with people that went the other way. More. More connect. Yes, that too. Being trapped in little spaces with people more of the time.
and so working from home and many people are still doing a lot of working from home, which some people love, some people hate and many people are in between, which of course is why hybrid working is coming out to be quite a popular solution in some circumstances.
It is, but it's not always that productive
But sometimes it is. So not always,
or sometimes it is. Yeah. There are no rules. You do what works for you. And we can't have companies saying these are the rules for everybody. Things do need to be very specific. Everybody needs to do what works for them, because some people are more productive when they are in an office of other people and they can see that somebody's having a bad time.
They can see from the expression on their face that something's just gone wrong and they can wait for them to hang up the phone and they wander over to the desk and go, just checking things are okay. Is there anything I can help you with? And we don't get that when we work from home. Sure you can set up a Teams meeting or whatever, but you're missing that spontaneity of that person needs a bit of help with something.
At least there're some of the stories that I hear, but in that brief connection. Even if it's just eye contact, even if it is just walking past somebody and going, Morning you alright? Yeah. Not so bad. You? Yeah, whatever, and you move on. We're not getting that at all if we work from home. I started my podcast in 2010 and started to do a lot more work from home. I was working from two clinics, then I took on a third.
Uh, the third one took a bit, a lot of time it was getting in the way of my online clients, so I had to let that one go, and then I let another one go during the pandemic. And when I went back into face-to-face, I only went back to one clinic. Financially, that's not the right thing to do business-wise. Business wise, do it from home because I don't have to pay any rent. But I would lose so much.
If I didn't also have colleagues that I saw face to face, even if it's just my receptionist or my mate Pete, the osteopath, or Miriam who does the massage, or Kate the other osteopath, all these people, if I don't have those people in my life, I'm gonna be very, very lonely. But I had to feel that loneliness in order to recognize that's something that you want. To go to my values and go, this is what drives my decisions. And that's why emotions are so important. Your body tells you something.
I need to listen to that and go, what is my body telling me? And then think about it to work out if it's right. And it's not just intuition that's wrong because of trauma. I can listen to it and go, yeah, I'm, I'm feeling that I want to be connected to other people, so what am I going to do? And that means feeling the fear and doing it anyway, because we do know what to do. And you asked a question earlier on, well, what do we do? You reach out, you connect, and it's a numbers game.
Like you say, how many people say, oh yeah, we should catch up, but they don't actually mean it because their life is busy enough as it is, and they don't want to add another friend into the mix. How do you know? You don't. You just keep on playing the game until eventually somebody does want to add somebody else into their life. Or they add you in and they realize, oh, I've took on too much.
I've got too many friends, and they just become a, um, a distant friend, an acquaintance that actually it's really quite nice to see them from time to time, but they're not close. Oh, well, it's better than nothing. And of course it is better than nothing. But what that can sometimes do when we have those slightly distant acquaintances is remind us that we don't have the close, deeper connections to others where we can sit down and go, so what's going on with you, dude?
And I've got friends like that. And one of them messaged me a couple of weeks ago and said it was just an emoji, it was just a beer emoji. Actually, he listens to this. Alright mate. And I replied, where, cause it was Dawn's idea. She went, you should reply back with a picture of a bear, the poo emoji and something that represents woods. I went, oh, of course I wanna catch up with my mate. Yeah. So I did. I don't think he got the reference. Because he just replied back with more beers.
I dunno, maybe you did. We didn't mention it. And, and he said, oh yeah, my wife said I should, reach out to you cuz I hadn't seen you for ages. Yeah. Your wife had to tell you that. And Dawn says that to me too. If I say, mm. Feeling a bit lonely lately. Well, you know what to do. You know people. Message them. No, he doesn't wanna talk to me. Well, it turns out he does. Went for a curry. It was really, really nice.
People do want to connect, but until you try and connect to multiple people, you don't know which ones you're gonna have that click with, and you've gotta play the game. Unfortunately, especially when we don't just stand at a bar anymore and get to know all the people in the local area. I've, I live in a little village, it's only got about 500 people in it. That's all tiny place. It's, it's never had more than that in what, 300 years. It used to have two pubs. Two pubs.
There's only two streets, but the village had two pubs. It's not got any at the minute cuz uh, one closed down about 15, 20 years ago and the other one closed down just before the pandemic and hasn't reopened because, well what's the point? Because society's changed. Okay, well we need to change with it cuz our culture, our society has changed far quicker.
Than ourselves and the youngsters growing up, they do feel okay with connecting to each other online and play Dungeons and Dragons or whatever. And they'll do that and they'll chat and they'll be on Discord and they'll join groups and laugh and chat and so on. And as adults are like, uh uh, no, I wanna sit down with somebody and put the world to right. Okay, well let's do that. Let's find out how to do that. And that raises that question, how? Where do I go to do that?
And that's something to Google.
In a previous episode of this here podcast thing we do, episode 25 indeed. We discussed the transactional analysis idea of time structuring. Where things that we do in life can be categorized as anything from ritual to pass time to intimacy. What we are talking about here is how do we get to move towards those deeper levels? Because, it may be that we can, find ways to get the, lower level. So the bridge, for example, that I do is more of a ritual stroke pastime.
But it doesn't tend to get into the intimacy level. It's that step that is often difficult to achieve.
I wonder if men struggle with this more than women do. I wonder if culturally it's more acceptable for women to say, let's meet up. Because for men to do it, if you go back a generation, oh, that's a bit gay. Meeting up with another man.
Probably historically at least men were more likely to create friendships through activity
sport usually. Yeah.
sport. Yeah. very often either playing it or, watching it. That still is a good way into friendship, isn't it? You know, joining a local supporters club, I know that there's a bus that goes from around here somewhere. I have not looked into exactly where, um, that goes to every Aston Villa game. I know when I, lived in Loughborough we went to watch Leicester Tigers a few times.
The, uh, the camaraderie in the bar at Leicester Tigers in the stands on the terraces, at Leicester Tigers is immense real, real feeling. And there you could chat to anybody, but again, it's that level. Well, my experience is it's that level of pastime not any depth. You're talking about the game and the people. but you know, that's still good.
It is better than nothing cuz you're connecting to others. But immediately from that disconnection of we go our separate ways, we're then reminded that we didn't have that deeper connection that we wanted. We didn't have that familiarity. That idea of you see me, you know me, and that's definitely worth picking apart why that's so important and why it's so fearful at the same time. As a therapist, it's tempting to always bring everything back to childhood and go, what went wrong there?
Why were your needs not met there? Cuz sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes there are problems in childhood where we don't feel that our voice deserves to be heard, and we carry that feeling across into our adult life because it's a schema, it's a narrative, that we've been telling ourselves for those first 15 years of our life, and it becomes who we are. A feeling that our voice can't be heard or that people can't be trusted. That needs challenging if that exists.
That's what gets in the way of us playing the numbers game. Going, okay, I know what I need to do. I need to find something that I'm interested in. And it could be sport might not be, it could be something else. For me, it's amateur dramatics. If I didn't do that on a Wednesday, I think I'd go, I, I'd see my therapist even more often than I already do. I really need that absolutely
I'm just thinking though, cuz you, you often talk about the difference between you and Dawn in terms of introversion, extroversion, And, I'd say somebody who's naturally introverted as opposed to somebody who's been turned into an introvert because the world isn't safe.
Hmm.
I, somebody who's comfortable and happy in that way of being, then we shouldn't make being alone a problem.
Mm-hmm.
We shouldn't pathologize being alone. I think that's, that's really quite important. We, we shouldn't be saying that somebody is wrong to be more on their own than somebody else.
Yeah, because it's so subjective. One person's phenomenological experience is different to somebody else's. One person's heaven is another person's hell.
So, I mean, I, I quite often go on holiday on my own and, I'm really, really happy doing that. I love it. I can spend a week and speak to nobody. That's great. But I also, loved my 10 days away with Jack, where we were together almost. 24 7. He did go off on a couple of walks without me. Scary. For me, that was. Not him.
Yeah,
So I didn't know if he'd come back,
boy. Yeah.
but he didn't get eaten by a bear. but It comes back to your old phrase, it's only a problem if it causes a problem. so, for anybody listening to this, just to have a think about, well, what, what is right for you at this point in your life?
Mm-hmm.
because that changes as well.
Yeah,
an awful lot of older people can get very lonely because, things change. They might, when they retire, they lose companionship that they used to have at work. Uh, family becomes more dispersed, all sorts of situations like that. But I looked at that website that I mentioned, campaign to end loneliness, and. I'm sorry about finding it rather depressing because their suggestions as to what to do. well. It's catch up with friends. Invest time in new connections.
Little steps can make a difference eg. Say hello to a neighbor, your local shopkeeper, or a person at the bus stop. Connect online. I suppose I, I, I was hoping that there'd be something profound there and there's not anything profound there.
Well, like, like we say, we, we know what to do. But it's the fear of doing it, and that's what needs picking apart. Why are we not doing those things? Because we do know what to do. We, we say hello to lots of people. until it feels more comfortable to take it to that very next level of, instead of it just being hello to the stranger's dog that you walk past in the street, it becomes, oh, oh, I didn't see you last week. Is everything okay?
Oh yeah, you just got a problem with his paw oh, that's such a shame. Oh, he's a. And you build on that. And I dunno if that takes a thousand interactions with 500 different people and 10 years to do it, but it's worth doing. It's worth putting that effort in. And you, do build it up and build it up and build it up until there is a deeper connection with somebody, if that's what you want.
For me, I'm definitely an extrovert cause I do get my energy up from having lots of people around and lots of experiences. But I also really value small groups, not just one-to-one. And maybe that's because I've been a therapist for so long, but also just two or three of us sitting down, really putting the world to right. Talking about our insecurities and our fears and our hopes and our dreams and the things that went wrong and the regrets that we've got.
But those sorts of connections to each other is wonderful because I feel part of something. I feel that I belong and I, and I think that's what a lot of people are searching out. A sense of belonging. I fit in in this person's life. I fit in here. I belong. Cuz the opposite of that is rejection and ostracization and that's painful. So painful.
We know from MRI scans, the brain lights up in exactly the same way to thoughts of rejection as it does to the thoughts of physical pain and electric shocks, actual physical pain, and I think putting your hand in icy cold water as well, it's painful. That's how we've evolved over millions of years to feel pain at the idea of being rejected. And there's that old phrase, feel the fear and do it anyway.
It is scary and it might be a lot of hard work and it might take time, but it might only take a few months because it's a numbers game. You, you've only gotta buy one lottery ticket and you win sometimes. I've heard those stories from people, oh, I've never played before. And you think, yeah, God damn it. But sometimes that happens.
And actually that analogy does work the other way round. How many people do we hear of who say, oh, I never win the lottery. Do you buy a ticket? Well, no.
Yeah.
that's so, it, it does work. If you, if you're not, putting yourself out there doing things in order to meet people, you're not gonna meet people.
Like with many of the subjects that we talk about on here, it's the sort of thing that could be a podcast series all of its own and probably is, more than likely. Because if you can think about it, there's a podcast all about it. Sure.
I suppose what this is leading me to conclude, as another way of looking at it is, you know, I, I said earlier that how do we know if somebody else is looking for a pal? Well, maybe that somebody else is looking for a pal and they dunno how to go about it. feeling the fear and doing it anyway, risking the rejection, without getting into needy, scary territory, you could be doing somebody else a really big favor as well as yourself.
Mm. What I often think about, and, and I know like you said, the campaign to end loneliness had these rather simple, obvious ideas. But one of them was, I think, reconnect with old friends or something like that. Yeah, it's much easier to reconnect with old friends than it is to make new ones. But that's not always appropriate. Especially if you moved across the country.
But if you haven't and those old friends are there, what I would say is imagine how you would feel if you got a phone call or a text message from them that said, Hey mate, long time, no to speak. Haven't seen you for ages. How are things?
on this website it actually says we can sometimes think our friends will be too busy to chat. But you might be surprised when you make the first step to connect. So that's exactly what you're just saying.
Yeah. And put yourself in, in their shoes. If you, if, if you had the experience of somebody connecting to you out of the blue. You'd probably think that's really nice. Well, that's how they feel. That's how they would feel. Don't deny them of that. So, I'm sure this is, again, a topic that has many, many different layers to it that all fit in with all the different things that we talk about in this podcast series, Fiona.
So this is something that's gonna crop up at some point again in the future. In the meantime, we need to love them and leave them. We need to disappear away for another week. Next week, we've got Alan. And he's going to be talking about, cuz he's really passionate about the past, about what we can learn about the past. Uh, as an archeologist who's also a psychotherapist, he's got a lot of interest in how the past influences the present and the future.
So I'm, I'm interested to know what he's gonna be talking about when we meet him next week. That'll be fun.
Absolutely it will.
Alright then we're best, uh, we're best get on with that Have a lovely week everybody. If you need anything, the link is in the show notes of how to get in touch. Have a good un. Bye for now.
Bye.