The listening cure: why a little empathy could go a long way to healing our general malaise

It's easy to imagine the stresses of a working life devoted to the care of troubled and wounded souls. People in crisis. People bewildered by the turn their life has taken. People in need of sympathy and support. People seeking guidance, or the comfort of a listening ear, or perhaps no more than a safe space where they can be themselves.

And what about therapists' own private lives? Are they expected to reflect the advice or guidance they offer their clients?

That's one of the questions that inspired me to write my new novel, The Therapist, whose central character, Martha Elliott, is something of a maverick in her personal and professional life. For instance, she sometimes combines counselling with deep breathing, meditation or foot massages.

But I was also intrigued by this question: how transparent can clients be and how do therapists deal with the problem of only hearing one side of the story? As Martha says: "I sometimes wonder if I'm in danger of being overwhelmed by all the things I don't hear." Another question I've pondered: what might it feel like to be the partner of a person in therapy who wants to keep the whole process secret? My new novel takes a deep dive into these issues via some intense sessions in Martha's office, and some glimpses into her own life.

The surge in demand for psychotherapy provides the context for The Therapist, but there's no mystery about where the demand came from. Floods, fires, COVID and cost-of-living pressures have exacerbated it, but the long-term trend has been driven by radical shifts in the choices we've been making about how we live - choices that have contributed to some erosion of social cohesion and an increase in social isolation and fragmentation.

A few examples: we've been shrinking our households (more than 25 per cent of households now contain just one person); we're leaving relationships and fracturing families like never before; we're more mobile than ever (moving house, on average, once every six years); our excessive busyness often inhibits social connections; our zealous embrace of information technology has led to a dangerous imbalance between screen time and person-to-person time.

Mental illness takes many forms, of course, but loneliness, anxiety and depression have reached epidemic proportions. Because of all the health risks associated with loneliness - not just anxiety and depression, but also hypertension, inflammation, sleep disturbances, vulnerability to addiction and reduced life expectancy - it's fair to say that loneliness has become our number one public health issue, even eclipsing obesity.

In a pre-COVID national survey conducted by Swinburne University and the Australian Psychological Society, 25 per cent of Australian adults reported feeling lonely most of the time. The figure rose to well above 30 per cent for the loneliest group in our society - the 18-25-year-olds who are also, paradoxically, the most connected via social media.

"Connected but lonely" is an apt description for people who seem to be in constant touch with others via the internet, but who lack sufficient person-to-person, eye-to-eye contact. As a result, they may be suffering from what Melbourne clinical psychologist and loneliness researcher Michelle Lim has dubbed "social hunger", a condition with remarkably similar effects to physical hunger - irritability, crankiness and even anger. That's one reason why some heavy uses of social media are so nasty to each other: they're socially hungry, probably without realising it.

The starting point for understanding our present malaise is simply to acknowledge that we humans belong to a social species. We need each other. We're hopeless in isolation. We're born to connect, to communicate, to co-operate. The sense of belonging to groups and communities of all kinds - families, neighbourhoods, friendship circles, workplaces - is fundamental to our mental and emotional health. We're herd animals, and we don't react well to feeling cut off from the herd.

But the solidarity of our herds has been disrupted. One result: the rise of individualism and an obsession with "me" - my identity, my rights, my gender, my entitlements - that is deeply unhealthy for us if it diminishes our sense of a common humanity. No wonder there's been a spike in demand for psychotherapy!

Therapy comes in many forms, ranging from telephone or face-to-face counselling to cognitive behavioural therapy designed to help people change negative patterns of thought and behaviour, and psychoanalysis, among others. If you think of a psychological problem as being like a saucepan boiling over on the stove, therapeutic approaches might include working with the client to turn down the heat as quickly as possible, settling in for the long process of trying to determine the original source of the heat, or showing the client how to take the pan off the stove and focus on some other cooking.

Among psychologists, there's furious debate about which "school" of therapy is best. But I'm a social (not a clinical) psychologist, so I'll offer no comment on the merits of these various approaches, except to say that it's important to find a therapist that's right for you. A friend recently described his experience with a therapist who, at their first meeting, silently motioned him to a chair and said nothing. Eventually, my friend said, "Aren't you going to say something?" and the therapist replied, "This is about you, not me." After two sessions, my friend quit in frustration.

Whatever specific trigger might lead a person to seek therapy, the desired outcome is almost universal: I want to feel valued, heard, understood and appreciated. Most therapies "work" at some level because they are based on giving the client the therapist's undivided attention - though, like my friend, most clients prefer a conversation to a monologue.

At the heart of the therapeutic process lies the healing power of being listened to. Perhaps "the talking cure" should really be called "the listening cure" ... and that's something we can do for each other. In fact, another possible contributor to the rising demand for counselling services is the loss of the art of listening in everyday life. Yet patient, attentive, empathic listening is the surest sign we can give people that we are taking them seriously - and, for members of a social species, one of our deepest psychological needs is to feel that we are being taken seriously.

We might dream of a future in which we won't need so many psychotherapists because we will have addressed the structural problems that have led to the rise of social isolation, in particular.

Meanwhile, we can all help ease the burden on therapists by taking our roles as friend and neighbour a bit more seriously. A little kindness - especially in the form of empathic listening - goes a long way.