Jonathan Hooker
Psychotherapist Jonathan Hooker is our expert for the next couple of months.
We often start the year with intent to change some aspect of our life, however by February, our will can be fading fast. With this in mind, our ‘Ask the Expert’ feature for February and March is with Jonathan Hooker who specialises in helping others to create change and benefit from it. This whole field of Personal Development or Personal Growth is often misunderstood. Jonathan specialises in helping people with issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, lack of confidence, anger, lack of direction or feeling lost, addictions or difficulty adjusting to being here in a foreign environment. Jonathan is a psychotherapist, management consultant, writer and board member of a Ghana-based NGO working to help children grow up in loving families. He works with individuals, couples and families, and helps organisations to define and achieve change. These two areas meet at the point of coaching professionals and teams, and students through their courses.
If you have questions about any of these areas, or would like some guidance on ‘making sense of your life’ or ‘finding more meaning’, you can email Jonathan at: editorial@barcelona-metropolitan.com
Question 1.
Dear Jonathan, I find that as time goes by, I'm finding the "expat" lifestyle harder to cope with. Many good friends have left the city in the last couple of years and I just don't have the energy to go out and meet new people. At the same time. I've always found it hard to make local friends. Is this just a normal part of living abroad? I like living in Barcelona and have my own business here, so i do feel fulfilled in other areas of my life. I guess I'm just finding it lonely right now and I feel scared that it will always be like this. Thanks very much for any advice you can give.
RE: Lonely.
When we move to a foreign country to live it is likely that we will be isolated by culture and often by language too. Initially any feelings of lonliness and isolation may be outweighed by the excitement and the newness of the lifestyle and surroundings, however at some point it is important to come to terms with some of the realities of living abroad. Different expat communities have different characteristics, but they can feel very close and claustrophobic, because it may be a small community and everyone can feel very much involved in each others´ lives. Barcelona is big enough for this to be less of a problem, but with a reputation as a party and fun place, it does tend to attract people who are more frivolrous by nature, and this can make it difficult to find deeper more meaningful relationships. In addition, expat communities are usually transient in nature, so there are always people leaving, which may give us friends around the world, but does not help us here.
So, I hope by these remarks you understand that this is not just about you, but affects all of us who have had the courage to go and live in a foreign environment. Unless we have a Catalan partner we are unlikely to fully integrate here, and belong in a family in the way we would back home. Even then, we may feel isolated from that family by our different sense of humour and so on. This is not to say we cannot do more to enjoy life here, but like any problem, to solve it we need to understand the cause. In your mail you mention friends having left and friends in general, but is this a question of friendship or is this more about having a partner, as this is clearly an important distinction and each of these areas can impact the other. Also you mention enjoying your job, but sometimes jobs we have enjoyed for a long time can gradually become less fulfilling or have less meaning. Today we often find that our lives are defined by our work, and that our spare time can be in a distant
second place in terms of priority. This can mean that we do not develop deep interests outside work and that we tend to fritter our spare time or leisure time away. On the other hand if we have hobbies or pastimes about which we feel passionately, we often end up spending time with others who feel the same. Often loneliness is a sign of a deeper sense of emptiness or of not knowing what to do with ourselves when we are not working. Sometimes we can feel that we do not feel passionately about any hobby or even anything in particular. This is an indication of us having lost a deeper connection with ourselves. We have become accustomed to making logical and objective work-style decisions by thinking in our head, but when it comes to life decisions and those things we really care about, these are governed by emotions and do not come from the head but from the body. This is why we call them feelings, because we have physical sensations associated with each emotion. If we have lost a deep connection with ourselves, our body will have become more tense and stiff and numb, so in addition to losing flexibility we will be less sensitive, and have less emotional information available to us. This more tense body usually results in us having less energy and in feeling more tired. In turn this will mean we will be living with less enthusiasm and passion and may feel like we are drifting through life with an interesting job, but with few or no real outside interests, and that eventually begins to cause us to experience an emptiness. This can feel like loneliness because we are used to filling our working days with the interactions we have with other people as part of our work. If we work to develop a deeper connection with ourselves, we often find that we feel less need for company, but also find that when we do meet others we have a deeper and more meaningful contact with them.
To conclude I would say that different people feel lonely for different reasons, and I have touched on the main ones here, so that as many different people as possible may benefit from the different areas I have suggested looking at. In writing in to me, you have little opportunity to mention the real detail of your situation, and that is where the answer will lie, so I have covered as many options as I am able to here. If anyone reading this would like to have more information I am very open to saying more in response to specific situations, so please use my contact details here in Metropolitan to mail or call me if you would like. PJ thank you for asking this important question which affects so many of us at one time or another, and if you would like to talk in more detail please feel free to call.
Question 2
Hi. I'm from the US but have lived here for 9 years. I'm very settled here and have a daughter with my Catalan partner. However, my parents are elderly and my mother's health is deteriorating. My brother lives near them and helps out a lot. I spend hours each day trying to figure out whether I should move the family back to the States to be with my parents. My partner doesn't speak good English and has a good job here. Right now I just feel sad and guilty. I spend a lot of time thinking about this and would really appreciate some pointers to help me understand what is best for everyone.
Elderly Parents Reply
I have received two questions asking about the difficult issue of supporting ageing parents at a distance and feeling guilty. There are a number of factors to consider here. Firstly when we are growing up we are often conditioned or trained to feel guilt when it is not appropriate. There are many ways in which this can happen, for example, imagine a child being trusted with feeding a pet, and forgetting. A parent might come home and claim the child is cruel or inconsiderate, when the reality is the parent made a mistake in trusting such a responsibility to a child because children forget things. In this case the child could feel regret at forgetting, but is made to feel guilty and uncaring which is unjust. So if we are making decisions which imply competing priorities between our family (the family we have created with a partner), and our parents feel who feel unsupported because we are living at a distance, is it appropriate to feel guilt? No, it is not. It is not because we are not setting out with an intent to undermine our parents’ security, but we are doing what is best for us and our family. The key word here is ‘intent’. Guilt is only appropriate when we are to blame for something, and often then we do something which may have an unexpected outcome for which we feel sorry, but this is something we should regret, because there was no malicious intent. The second issue at play here is our relationship with our parents. We do not own our children; they are entrusted into our care until they can care for themselves. In the same way our parents do not own us. We have our own lives to live and need to be true to ourselves. This is because our primary relationship is with ourselves, our secondary relationship is with our partner, and our tertiary relationship is with our children and then everyone else. If we do not maintain our relationship with ourselves, all our other relationships will be affected. So if I direct my life by what is best for my parents, I will suppress my own desires, wants and needs and that will lead me to build resentment. Then my dealings with my parents will be contaminated by this resentment and frustration and I will not be completely good-willed towards them. Worse still, is that this resentment will affect my close relationships even more, so my partnership will suffer and my children too. Whereas if I follow my own path, I have no internal tension, to contaminate these other relationships and they will feel light and clean. Better still I will be able to deal with my parents in a loving way. There is more background to this because it has also to deal with the whole issue of whether we leave home and break the parent-child relationship we have with our parents and convert it into an adult-adult relationship. If we do this successfully we move away and form our own family, and when our parents need support we come back to them because we love them and want to help. If, on the other hand, we fail to emotionally leave home and our interactions with our parents continue to be like parent-child dynamics, then when they need our help it will feel like an obligation, or a family debt being called-in, and we will feel resentful of our perceived lack of freedom and personal choice. If these are issues for us we need to seek professional help to make this transition to independent adult. Finally if we are dealing with these issues as expressed in the letters to me, we can end up feeling we have two choices; either we stay here feeling guilty and let our parents fend for themselves, or we pack up and head home to care for them. These are of course two of the choices, but they are the two extremes. In between lie a whole raft or options, such as supporting other siblings to support your parents, or organizing and paying for external help and support, jumping on a plane and going to make an evaluation of what support is required and helping them come to terms with that and organise it. Through any of this process, they may try to make you feel guilty, or say unkind things, but the important part is that you hold onto a strategy that works well enough for you to keep on dealing with them in a loving and caring way, and that implies holding onto your own life.
Please also see the related article that Jonathan Hooker has written on the subject of caring for elderly parents.