Expert Eric Partridge

Loneliness is where the predator gets in.

In this extended bonus conversation, Bill Collins sits down with Dr. Eric Partridge, a priest in the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia whose doctoral research examined the impact of gratitude practices on chronic loneliness in older adults. His interest began with a parishioner who was busy, involved, surrounded by people, and who told him that when she went home at night she was achingly lonely.

Dr. Partridge explains why chronic loneliness so often goes unnamed. There is a stigma attached to the word, so seniors rarely say it outright. Instead, they say that nobody visits anymore, or that they cannot think of a reason to get out of bed. He walks through the three tools his research found most effective: gratitude practices, touch, and storytelling. Listening to the same story for the twentieth time, he suggests, is no different from listening to a favourite song again.

He also offers hard counsel for families watching someone they love drift toward a charming stranger. Telling a parent to stop seeing that person almost always backfires. It sets up a conflict and puts you on the wrong side of it. The better approach is quieter: reduce the loneliness the predator is feeding on, and you remove the hook. He discusses what neighbours can do when adult children live thousands of kilometres away, how to guide a caregiver toward the same practices, and one surprising finding from his study. The visitors improved as much as the visited.

This is the full conversation, recorded for Beware Mysterious Mark and released here in its entirety.

Beware Mysterious Mark is a Radio Sidney production. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada's New Horizons for Seniors Program.

Show notes, episode transcripts and resources: mark.radiosidney.ca

Contact: info@radiosidney.ca

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Beware Mysterious Mark, a 10-part series about financial elder abuse. Our goal is to expose how these schemes work, reveal the warning signs, and help you stop it before it happens to someone you love. Eric Partridge has spent decades working with older adults and holds a doctorate in ministry with research focused on chronic loneliness.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

I'm Eric Partridge. I'm a priest in the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, which is basically the uh islands and inlets of uh of Vancouver Island and around. I did my doctorate in Doctorate of Ministry about 10 years or 15 years ago. And at the time, uh loneliness was not a big topic, but I had an interesting uh experience with with one of my parishioners who had been at hospital. She she'd had a fall, and I wanted to be with her when she was having some tests. And we were just chatting about things, and she said um something that threw out out of my mind everything I knew about loneliness, I thought went completely different. She said, You know, I'm involved in the church, I see all the people I see, three or four people I get together with regularly. Um I am part of a ministry that takes people to and from doctors. I do all kinds of things in the daytime. But then she said, But when I go home at night, I'm achingly lonely. And I thought, wow, every I she's involved, she's doing all the things I thought you're supposed to do to avoid loneliness. And she still was achingly lonely every night. So that got me thinking about uh how I might do my doctorate, and I did my doctorate on on the impact of gratitude practices on chronic loneliness. Okay, so gratitude practices are if you look on the website, there are thousands that are out there, but basically it's the kind of thing that you say uh you get up in the morning and you say, name three things for which you're grateful. It might be as little as I I didn't break my shoelaces this morning, or it can be big, I'm so grateful for my grandchildren, or or whatever it is. And it can be different each day. That's one gratitude practice. Another might be journaling. Many people love to journal, and they write the things that that mean something to them in the day. And there are many, many more gratitude practices out there, but they're a consistent daily thing you do to remind yourself of the things for which you're grateful. For years and years before I did my uh my doctorate, gratitude had been studied by all kinds of people. And yes, it's it's a definitely a a thing you do to to uh to create new neural pathways. And actually, the scientists say they can measure the actual change in your in your neural pathways by having gratitude practices for a period of time. Often it's uh every day for three or four months, and it actually changes the physical reality of your brain. So when you meet something in life, you either have a choice of feeling uh upset by it for the change or whatever, or you feel really grateful that there is a difference. And the more and more you create these neural pathways, uh sort of super highways, the more likely you're gonna be grateful. And the um the practice can be all kinds of choices. One one of my friends, uh her practice is to take her phone, which has a a uh camera on it, of course, and she during the day takes pictures of three things for which she's enlightened or great and grateful or happy. And that's her practice, and it seems to work. So there's all kinds of ways you can do it. And uh it wasn't until about maybe 15 years ago that people started paying attention to the the difference between a gratitude practice and not having one and how it impacts your uh your uh levels of loneliness. And of course, we're talking chronic loneliness, which is a different thing. So everyone feels lonely for moment to moment. If you're in an airport and you see people walking by and you see someone that reminds you of your spouse or your children, and you go, oh, and then you turn and you look at the board above you and see where your gate is. And that's that's situational loneliness. That comes and goes and doesn't actually have an impact. Chronic loneliness, however, that's where you can't see a change. This is the way it's going to be forever, kind of feeling. That has a greater impact, greater correlation with morbidity and early death than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's actually measured that all kinds of research has been done on that. It's huge. And it's also it's really important to recognize that in Japan, in North America, and parts of Europe, chronic loneliness is found in almost 30% of the population, which is huge. It's an epidemic, and we don't pay attention to it. It's really important. It it has an impact for uh people who are 80 or above, quite often will have uh impact on their heart, their lungs, their liver, has actual physical impact. And the next, interestingly, the next largest cohort where it has has uh the greatest impact of chronic loneliness is the people between the ages of 18 and 25. And when you say that to people, they sort of sort of say, really? How could that be? But if you think about it, most kids growing up have basically their cohort, their neighbors, their friends they play with, and so forth. They go to school, they come home and play with their friends and so forth. Then they get to 18 or thereabouts, and they either go off to work, where they're working with people who are 35 or 40 and have no interest in hanging out with them, or they go to university or college and they're hanging out at class and they go home and study at night. And then they always imagine that everybody else is out dancing around and having a good time, like the beer commercials, but everybody's at home thinking the same thing. And for them, for that age group, the biggest concern isn't uh the physical breakdown that you have with the elderly, it's suicide. But equally horrible, obviously. Chronic loneliness is epidemic, it's everywhere. Chronic loneliness and depression, they they are different things, they're measured differently, and they actually have different impacts on him, but they they overlap each other. One one can create the other and they can interact with each other to create problems. So, yeah, it has a big deal. And when a person's lonely, they usually feel that they they need to have, first of all, let's back up to the definition of loneliness when you're chronic loneliness, which is really the difference between the actual uh impact, the perceived impact, and how much a person wants of impact with other people. So it's a perception thing. It's not actually the actual number of hours someone visits them. In fact, I as a priest, I've visited many people that I say, How are you doing? And they say, Well, no one comes to visit me anymore. And I say, Yeah, but your son was here yesterday, and so-and-so from the church was here the day before, and I'm I'm here now, and they say, Yeah, but no one comes to visit me anymore. It's perception. It doesn't matter what the actual numbers are. And for some people, they're happy to have one person visit them once a week. For other people, it it never is enough. And it's just a personality thing. We try to find things that other other people can do, and and gratitude practices is one of them. The three big ones, uh visiting is wonderful, but it has a very short life, half-life, half-life, like about two and a half, three days, after which it doesn't have an impact at all on a person's uh chronic loneliness. But there's the three big ones that we found in research was uh the gratitude practices is one, which quite surprised people, but it turns out to actually be true. And the second one is touch. During COVID, when everybody was worried about being near anybody else, there was a huge increase in chronic loneliness because nobody touched anybody. They didn't shake hands, they didn't uh give them a hug. In fact, you know, you think about the impact of touch and you say, well, what's the actual impact? Well, when a person player, a soccer player comes off the field and her coach touches her shoulder and says, Good job, that touch increases that imp the impact of the comment. Just saying good job has one impact. Touching them and saying it has another, and we think about that. So touch is another important thing to bring to the table. It's another arrow in the quiver. And the third is storytelling. And it's not that we tell stories, but rather we listen to stories. Years ago, I was visiting one fellow on a regular basis, and every time I visited with him, he would tell me the same story about the time he was a child during the Blitz, and his parents sent him away from his house to get away from downtown London. And he told me the same story in almost the same words every time. And I was talking with an older priest at that time, and I said, You know, this is really boring. I can't believe how often I hear the same story. What can I do differently? And he said, Don't do differently. He said, Do you ever listen to music? I said, Yeah. He said, Do you listen to music from the 60s where you grew up? And I said, Yeah. He said, Does music ever change? I said, No. He said, Do you still enjoy it? And I said, Yeah, that's true. So it changed how I listened to other people's stories. When they want to tell you the same story, if you think about it as their uh musical background for their life, it's easier to understand it and to enjoy their enjoyment of telling the story. So storytelling is really important. And sometimes the storytelling is you can connect with them and say, Yeah, I understand what you're about. I too was doing this or that, and there is a connection there. Sometimes it's completely different. I have one uh person I visit fairly regularly who grew up in Maoist China. I I have no no way to connect my body and my story with her story, but it's very interesting. And so I love to hear her tell me about what life was like in Maoist China at the time. So there are the three big ones for in addition to visiting are gratitude practices and touch and storytelling. And those together are a really strong connection of things that you can do to help your elderly parent, to help your teenage son, whatever it is that you're trying to help with, it's a really useful thing to bring it to the table. I've been asked a number of times, how do I know if somebody's chronically lonely? And um for most people, they don't use the word lonely because there's a bit of a stigma to that. If I say I'm lonely, it's admitting I don't have friends kind of feeling. That's not true. It's not exactly a reality, but it's the way people feel about it. So quite often they won't use, they won't tell you I'm lonely. But they will tell you that no one visited them anymore, or that um they can't think what any purpose in getting out of bed in the morning, or those kind of things. The things that would would trigger um sometimes depression or sometimes may come from the same thing. But it's uh it's more about paying attention to to what their reaction is to your visiting, what the reaction is to your your talking with them or hearing them. My experience with talking with parishioners that I go visit and so forth uh is that they'll quite often tell me it's really good having a chance to talk about this. They may have told me the same thing 25 times, but those kind of comments, when you get that kind of feeling, I think people can notice uh when a person is feeling chronically lonely. They often won't use the words, so you have to watch for the signs of how they're behaving and how they react to uh to being encouraged in other ways. Um I find when I've talked with people about uh gratitude practices, I often don't start out by saying this is a thing to deal with for your loneliness, because then they put their heels in and back up, I'm not lonely, and and or they just won't do it. But if you tell them that this is a way to create new neural pathways in their brain, which it does, and give them some possible things and sort of laugh about some of them. I I, for instance, have tried journaling. I sometimes journal for four or five days in a row and then don't. Journaling doesn't work for me. For some people, my wife journals and has done for years, and it's wonderful. So for some people it works. So you try out things and see what they but do it as if you bring it to the table as a fun thing to do, and isn't that interesting how it works, as opposed to I'm fixing you, because nobody wants to be fixed. The three I just talked about, the uh gratitude practices, touching and and uh storytelling, that it helps to reduce their chronic loneliness, which may give uh uh room for you to come in and spend some time with them and talk about other things that they can do in life and so forth. The time I've come across someone who appeared to be just being a little too uh connected and all of a sudden finding out that they they want to change their will uh to put this person in it, or or they're happy to to loan them some money just for the interim. They'll pay me back anytime. Of course, they don't. When they have the things they need to help reduce their chronic loneliness, my experience is they'll have less interest in in doing whatever this other person who's inserting themselves in their life, whatever they want, because they won't need to. It's not a oh, I gotta fill I have this huge feeling in my chest that I need to fill my life with something, and here's this person who is being that. You're providing by the other things, you're providing the things that they are aching for, and therefore there's a less need to be involved with that person. Um obviously there are all kinds of legal things that one can do, and I highly recommend using all the tools so that's necessary, but part of it is reducing the the aching need to have someone fill that hole, which is how how a person preys on them. I don't know if it's best practices, it's my practice, and and and if I've had some success with it, but it it it is a bit of a hands-off approach in this in the respect of saying, I'm not going in the same, you shouldn't be hanging out with Harry, he's problem. As soon as you do that and you put up a we they, you're good, I'm bad, that kind of a mess. You don't want to do that. You don't want to get into the the place where you're questioning the adult parents' choices. People tend to re-respond not positively to that. Um just like I know when someone says to me you should do such and such, my usual reaction is to not do it, even if it maybe maybe is good for me. So it's not about that, but if if what that nefarious person is doing is stepping into a need, you're reducing the need by going and offering other things. So rather than saying, don't mess around with that guy, he's a bad person, offering them ways to reduce their chronic loneliness, fills that hole that they're aching to fill. You don't allow someone in your life unless there's a reason to have them in their life. And if there's no reason or less and less and less reason, they're they'll have less of a hook on you. You don't want to go to the person and tell them, don't have that person in your life. That just sets up a conflict. But if you go in and take away the thing, the reason that person has an entry into their life, into your parents' life, you've taken away the hook that they have, that that solves the problem in a much less uh aggressive and and in-your-face kind of response. In the church, when I was doing the the doctoral uh studies, we did some some research by sending the uh pastoral care team out and pairing them up one to one with with other people. We the people they were paired with were um individuals who are 80 or older living by themselves and not showing signs of dementia. That was a the package. But the um the fact that they weren't the family, they were a a person from the church that they happened to know, and the person would go to visit them, and in some cases it it was without anybody like family involved in it. So it was the same kind of thing. And they they brought the same things together, but how you get a person who's living in Toronto, if you live in Victoria, to step go next door and tell them about uh uh these various things, maybe harder, but I think if an adult child was talking to uh a neighbor of your parent, they might suggest those three things as things you could raise over a cup of tea. Uh we did some studies, interestingly, we did this in the study of that, we measured at the beginning of the process, both the the visitor and the person being visited were tested for uh levels of uh gratitude and levels of chronic loneliness. And there are all kinds of uh scientifically supported research tools for that. And we tested at the very end, and interestingly, both the people at the beginning and the two at the end increased in gratitude and decreased in loneliness. The people who were visiting, doing the visiting, actually had value out of it, which we thought was interesting. It was a completely unexpected outcome. And we had over the period of time that the study was done, right toward the end, just before we did the testing, one of the people in the study, one of the over 80 year olds, had a brother die just days before. And I thought, well, that's they're gonna change that person's mark. And it was a little less of a change, but it still was greater gratitude and substantially less loneliness. So a visitor doesn't have to be a family member to be able to bring those tools to the to the table. Being um seen as being lonely uh is has an astigma to it. And people don't to people don't like the stigma of of being, oh my god, I don't I'm not lonely, I'm okay. So yeah, you might you might talk to your friend about it, whereas your children you worry about them, them worrying about you. And we always, as parents, you you want your kids to be okay. And it doesn't matter how old you are as a parent, you're still worried about your kids. So that's probably true. And uh and I don't have friends and people don't like me, or however you read that out, yeah, it has it has a negative uh uh sort of feeling about it. But that no one comes to visit me anymore, that's their problem. They're not visiting me is not my problem, but the impact is uh is real. If someone's becoming increasingly uh isolated. One thing to remind people is is that the the half-life of a visit is really short. The actual impact of it and measurable impact of it is very short. So it's not about seeing the person over and over and over. So as a child of an adult child of a parent, I don't have to feel badly about not going over to see mother every day uh or not contacting mother on the phone every day. It's still useful, but it's not something that you need to think you need to do every day. But you can um by helping them find some of those uh ways of feeling better about themselves, uh, you'll help you won't have to feel as guilty when I feel like I'm not doing what what is necessary to make my parent safe or happy, I feel guilty about that. And if I stop and really think about it, I don't have to feel guilty about not visiting my father or my mother every day because that's not really what's necessary. It's for the person that's feeling chronically lonely, some of those other things are the things that are actually going to make the long-term change and their long-term value. Uh, encouraging people who feel they're worried about what their their parent and their parent looks like they're getting more and more isolated, encouraging them to try on try those things. Visit, touch them, actually do touch them. Some people are don't like hugging. I have uh a number of children, and one of them is a cardboard box when when we hug. It doesn't like hugging. But touching that person's forearm or or putting an arm on her shoulder still has the impact of a touch. It doesn't have to be, you know, the uh throw your arms out and grab each other kind of a hug. But touch is important and letting them tell their story is really important. And you can do that from a distance when you're talking on the phone. Don't make it all about business. You know, this is when I'm gonna visit, this is when we're gonna be you know bringing the kids, and then get off the phone. Stop and let them tell you what's going on in the day. And that's really useful. You can do that much more effectively than a lot of other possible ways of fixing. The the organ recital, we call it, when the uh uh the you start talking with an old person, at first they tell you about their hip, and then they tell you about whatever, right? That's not a bad start. But one of the things one can do is uh ask for some advice. It's it's not usual that when the the shift comes between the parent and child, when the the parent is looking after the child, and the parent gets older and the child becomes an adult, and then there's a shift, and all of a sudden the adult child is looking after the adult parent. And there's a shift in in power there. One of the things that helps to reconnect is to ask ask advice. Dad, when I was doing such and such, I didn't know quite what to do. What did you do when that happened? And let them have an answer. And they can the answer can be, I wouldn't know. I I was terrible at that. But you're you're making a connection in the place besides the organ recital. Caregivers are generally really very helpful. For one thing, they they can be there with the person and it will have touch and connection and so forth in ways that are very positive. Sometimes the person who is uh using the person improperly is a caregiver. It doesn't necessarily have to be just some Stranger off the street kind of person. That's fairly rare, I believe. And certainly my experience is very rare. But when you're having a discussion with the caregiver that's dealing with your aging parent, you can talk about the things that you'd like to be able to see happening. Talk about the gratitude practices and ask them if they could maybe encourage the uh the parent to to try try this on, just see how it goes. And do it in a way that this is not about you're being a bad person or you're you're you're not up to snuff, but isn't this a fun thing to try? And then have them check in every so often. So how's it going? What's the most interesting thing you've chosen to be grateful about? Sometimes at meals the old traditional thing, I'm a priest, so we we talk about doing grace. And around our table, I I live with 10 people in our house and uh some people we support and and uh you know grandchildren and so forth. And around our table, our grace isn't a traditional prayer, it's just you name one thing you're grateful for. And everyone comes around the table, and sometimes the little guys who are you know seven, five, and two uh will come up with the I'm grateful for ice cream. Good enough. You can be grateful for anything. It's still building the same the same pathways. So the idea of getting people to talk about their their lives, their history, the things that matter to them. Yeah, when I first would meet someone when I visit some, go to visit a new parishioner or whatever, I go and visit the person, and and I don't know who they are or what they're about. But yeah, some of those questions about their past. So you used to live in Regina. Tell me about Regina. What's Regina wind really like? Right? And that usually leads to the kind of opening that you hear great stories about all kinds of stuff. I remember when so forth, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

This is a production of Radio Sydney, with support from the Government of Canada's New Horizons program for seniors. The series was produced by Bill Collins, written by Nancy Miles and Brooke Cooper. Dramatization was directed by Matt Watson with sound engineering by Bill Collins. I'm Barry Bowman.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

Coming to you from the Mary Wynn Spear Center in downtown Sydney by the sea in beautiful British Columbia. Thanks for listening, and please join us again.