"My conviction in counseling and in life is that no matter what we are facing, we are not meant to face it alone, and we don't have to."

These words the words of Jim Payne, a Pastoral Counselor I'd been seeing over the course of this academic year with regards to crises I've dealt with. It's really obvious that life is hard sometimes. We fail all the time and get dealt with bad cards, but it is a lot harder alone.

In my work with counseling as a Crisis Counselor at the Crisis Text Line, the feeling that people have the most after conversations is that they no longer as alone. No matter what we do or say to people in crisis, feeling like someone is with you is one of the most important things in the world. I like knowing that people are with me on a run or any struggle I have or else life would be unbearable.

It has been widely established that loneliness, the imposition of social isolation, has widely detrimental effects on an individual level. Elena Blanco-Suarez of Psychology Today, explored the case of Robert King, an ex-inmate who was in solitary confinement for 29 years, who shared his experience with the Society for Neuroscience in November 2018. "King knew that solitary confinement was changing the way his brain worked. When he finally left his cell, he realized he had trouble recognizing faces and had to retrain his eyes to learn what a face was like." Neurologically, chronic social isolation causes a decrease in the size of the hippocampus, the area of the brain related to learning and memory. It also causes an increase in size of the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety.

Loneliness has adaptive and evolutionary value: it leads us to connect with each other. I'm glad that in the midst of my personal struggles, I have formed stronger relationships with some of my close friends, met mentors in the ministry that have listened to me and given me guidance, and strengthened my faith and belief in God. There were times that faith has been tested drastically, times I doubted and would have stopped believing had those people not been there for me.

Interestingly enough, the same brain mechanisms and circuits that chronic loneliness causes are the same mechanisms that the brain activates for dangerous situations. It should serve as no surprise then, that loneliness rivals obesity and smoking as a health risk.

Loneliness then, is bad. And that's obvious for most people. So what? What if loneliness is just sometimes how things just are sometimes, and what if it's something most of us just deal with silently sometimes?

I definitely see a point for those questions. If we had to rely on other people for absolutely everything, we'd be much more liabilities than we'd like. But even if that were true, evolution predicts that we even help people who aren't kin to us, afflicted people who many people see as liabilities. That term, in biology, is called reciprocal altruism, which involves sacrificing something right now to receive a benefit for a later time. Vampire bats have shown that when they share food, they receive food back in return at a later time.

I have found been both a giver and receiver of altruism, like most people, and it's not that people you're altruistic to agree to give something back. Often times, they give their time, warmth, and kindness, which mean more than any material reward.

For humans, however, there is another altruism at play that is human by nature: moral altruism. Moral altruism is modeled on a belief or justice system that a person believes in, whether it be the law or a set of religious beliefs. "Love your neighbor as yourself" from the gospel is the most common example in Christian theology. We recall times we had to face nightmares and horrible times alone, and most, like Jim, realize the biggest support and altruism we can give back is compassion, suffering with people amidst their struggles.

And for the people who say argue there is no such thing as altruism? That everyone, at their core, is motivated by self-interest? Well, they're not wrong, but that's saying there is something wrong with getting some arbitrary reward out of being a kind person. But perhaps the word also misses the mark. Even "helping" relationships go back and forth, whether that's something we want to admit or not. Tom Junod and Mark Warren, two journalists who crossed boundaries to help Stephanie Lee, a woman suffering cancer, eventually told her this:

"You don't have to keep on fighting because you think you owe us something. You don't owe us anything. We owe you."

So we'll get dealt problems and, at times, nightmares. Let's just make sure we don't go through it alone.