Counselling Loneliness as a Form of Longing

Approaching loneliness as a form of longing can transform a client’s experience of therapy. Informed by recent metareviews, existential perspectives, and practice insights, this article suggests some considerations for working with loneliness in session. It proposes approaching loneliness first as an experience of longing, rather than a deficit, in order to shift the early focus of therapy from goal-setting to meaning-making. As well as deepening attunement to the client’s experience of loneliness, this approach can support the normalising potentially unresolved longing and focuses on calibrating expectations before shifting to shifting to prosocial behaviours. This is particularly important given the dangers of pivoting towards solutions before context has been safely established, with many often-effective interventions also risking exacerbating one’s loneliness (Ray & Rushing, 2025). Phenomenological studies (Mansfield et al., 2021; McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023) of how people experience loneliness support the claim that this framing may be particularly relevant for clients who have begun to or have already internalised a sense of loneliness, and who may need to cultivate a level of acceptance and reconciliation before considering action. This framing does not replace evidence-based cognitive approaches, but informs their timing and directs their application, as well as deepening therapeutic engagement.

Surveys on social connection indicate that 15 per cent of Australian adults are often lonely and 25 per cent sometimes lonely (Ending Loneliness Together, 2023). The significance of loneliness as a potential client concern for accredited counsellors is potentially under-appreciated with neither the Australian Counselling Association’s “find a counsellor” nor the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia’s “find a therapist” interface listing loneliness as client concerns to search by when seeking a therapist. Furthermore, recent research into how people cope with loneliness found that participants reported that therapy is infrequently used and has only mixed success, in part tied to how well the therapist is able to relate to the client’s experience of loneliness (Ray & Rushing, 2025).

Challenges with relating to loneliness are often driven by an element of avoidance. When pioneering psychotherapist Fromm-Reichmann observed “loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it”, they were referring not primarily to their patient’s avoidance, but also to the reluctance of psychiatrists to engage with such a distressing phenomenon (Fromm-Reichmann, 1959/1990, pp. 305–306). The focus of loneliness scholarship in the decades since has largely been on its dynamics, measurement, demographics, and physical and mental impacts (Banerjee et al., 2023). Studies recognise the increasing prevalence and seriousness of loneliness as a public health concern (WHO, 2023), but are not matched by research that explores the phenomenological perspective required to support counselling. As noted by Dahlberg (2007, p. 195), “few attempts have been made to capture the phenomenon and its existential meaning without reducing its complexity”.

The cognitive deficit model proposed by Peplau and Perlman (1982), which currently remains highly influential in the therapeutic approach to loneliness (Palamara & Carter, 2025), sees loneliness as the perceived discrepancy between actual and desired levels of social connection (Banerjee & Kohli, 2023) and something that can ultimately result in maladaptive and self-defeating thoughts (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010; Masi et al., 2011). Phenomenological studies around how people experience loneliness clarify that loneliness is more than maladaptive thinking or subjective comparisons, however. Loneliness features a suite of emotions extending beyond sadness to include emotional upheaval and inner turmoil (Rokach, 1988). These states include dissatisfaction, boredom, fear, emptiness, anxiety, worry, hopelessness and loss, as well as shame and stigma (Akhter-Khan et al., 2024; Cunningham et al., 2025; Heu et al., 2021; McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023). As well as a range of painful and challenging primary emotions, reviews have highlighted that loneliness often involves longing.

Explorations of how people experience loneliness often highlight that they are not necessarily lonely in general nor simply seeking more connection for the sake of it, but that they are longing for something specific. For example, it has long been understood that loneliness is both a general and pervasive experience but can also be tied to a lack of specific relationships or specific people (Weiss, 1973). Phenomenological reviews describe longing for friendships, as a source of fun, emotional intimacy, and emotional support (McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023), family relationships, especially for older adults longing for the presence of their adult children and when there is an absence of instrumental support or care (Tiilikainen & Seppänen, 2017), or romantic or intimate connections (Bekhet et al., 2008; Cunningham et al., 2025; McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023; Sønderby & Wagoner, 2013).

Reviews (Mansfield et al., 2021; McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023) also note a form of loneliness arising specifically from a lack of meaningful connections: deeper connections that allow for emotional intimacy, sharing thoughts and experiences, authentic engagement and a sense of closeness, confirmation, and understanding. This theme echoes findings that loneliness can arise from a lack of relationships with similar others, such as people of the same age, ethnicity or cultural identity, or with a similar mindset (Cela & Fokkema, 2017; McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023; Vasileiou et al., 2017; Wright-St Clair & Nayar, 2020).

The need for deeper connections or for specific connections might explain the mixed success of many loneliness interventions (Masi et al., 2011), and reinforces the seminal observation of Weiss (1973) who distinguished emotional isolation from social isolation, and that more connections do not necessarily reduce loneliness: “[f]requent contacts with nonsupportive, indifferent others can go only so far in promoting one's general well-being and would do little to satisfy the need to belong” (Baumeister & Leary, 1995, p. 500). The review of Mansfield et al. (2021, p. 8) also noted that poor quality relationships, especially intimate relationships, feed emotional loneliness and “feelings of disappointment, abandonment, and feeling devalued or powerless”.

In this context, counselling could explore how to deepen existing connections or establish new ones, but a problem-solving approach may ultimately be fraught and potentially invalidating. Deep connections take time to develop (Hall, 2019). Counselling for this type of loneliness may therefore be initially limited to symptom reduction in the short- to medium-term. A focus on acceptance, adaptability, and expectation setting may be more appropriate given that building networks or connections requires time, motivation, and opportunity and cannot be forced. And, also, that some types of loneliness may never be fully resolved.

Framing loneliness as longing minimises risks of moving too soon to solution finding, which can readily backfire. Recent research (Ray & Rushing, 2025) indicates that people use a variety of methods to escape their feelings or situation of loneliness, and that these strategies vary in efficacy and in frequency. The key insight, from a counselling perspective, from Ray and Rushing (2025) is that seemingly effective and accessible interventions can be fraught. For example, deepening existing connections was found to be a frequently used and usually effective way of managing loneliness, but it could potentially worsen loneliness if people were confronted with unavoidable limitations: “I tried reaching out to my old friends, but that didn’t work out very well. They were involved in their own lives and so we never seemed to connect on a regular basis” (Ray & Rushing, 2025, p. 2,447).

A reframe towards longing also shifts the thinking away from deficit and lack. Not towards immediate solution finding, behind which there is an implicit recognition that things are not as we would like. In fact, the safety and rapport building with the lonely client begins with integrating the pain that comes from the discrepancy between where they are and where they would like to be. And, critically, with suicide screening, as there is a demonstrated link between loneliness and suicidal behaviours. For example, a moderate, positive correlation has also been reported between loneliness and suicidality in healthy populations (r = 0.26 to 0.59) in the systematic review of Lu et al. (2025).

However, instead of viewing that pain as something to leverage towards a solution, therapy might first start with exploring the meaningful, client-specific longing behind the loneliness. In the same way that it would frame a client’s painful longing to self-actualise in the face of adversity or limitations as a deeply human and intrinsic orientation, rather than a problem, the client might also find relief in holding their own loneliness as a natural longing before they move to seeing it as a painful problem to solve. It shifts early conceptualisation from asking “how can we resolve this?” to “what value does this reveal?” and “how can you stay present with your longing?”. This aligns with the moral approach to counselling that “requires us to think at a deeper level than mere ‘problem-solving’” (Ivey et al., 2023, p. 386). Even if we cannot self-actualise, the humanistic approach that underpins person-centred counselling treats this longing for connection as sacred. The longing paradigm orients towards the necessary meaning-making we are often called to do in difficult situations, as captured in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic approach. Clients often retain some agency to change the way they experience a situation: “[e]verything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way” (Frankl, 2008, p. 75).

Framing loneliness as longing also helps avoid the reductionist categorisation of loneliness as either social isolation (not enough connections), emotional isolation (no one to share our inner world with), or existential isolation (a feeling of broader disconnection from existence, ourselves, and others). Instead, the longing paradigm recognises the potential of an existential element that often underlies all loneliness. In phenomenological studies, this existential element appears as feelings of incompleteness, separateness from other humans, feelings of loss and longing, and a lack of meaning and belonging (Cunningham et al., 2025; McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023; Mansfield et al., 2021).

These issues have long been considered integral to the human experience and are part of the givens of existential therapy. Existential therapy, for example, highlights the “limits of intimacy” which, if not acknowledged, can actually lead clients away from connection because the shortcomings of relationship can intensify existential isolation (Ratanashevorn & Brown, 2021). Social relationships and engagement can soften the reality of existential isolation (Iacovou & Weixel-Dixon, 2015; Mayers et al., 2002), but they can also challenge us, as we learn that connection cannot spare us our innately separated existence and the inevitability of having to experience our own life – and death – for ourselves (Yalom, 1980).

Coming to terms with this might not only facilitate rapport, it can also help calibrate expectations, and perhaps lessen cognitions about loneliness. It can also prompt a pivot towards an acceptance of longing as a meaningful but painful human requirement, and therefore avoids pathologising it. For many clients, understanding loneliness as something that is not only an externally mediated situation that comes from a lack of connection, but also an internally generated drive that comes from the very human need to be witnessed, supported, and validated, can mitigate shame and tension.

Even though loneliness presents in many forms and has many drivers, this article suggests that starting with a longing-based orientation may be better aligned with many clients’ lived experience of loneliness, reduces risks of invalidation or failed solution finding, and orients towards meaningful connections. The therapeutic implication is that counselling may be better served by first helping clients reconcile their loneliness before attempting to resolve it, thereby affirming their humanity, whereas early problem-solving risks misframing their experience.

Counselling Loneliness as a Form of Longing

Background

Loneliness as longing

Conclusion

References