I'm lonely - can therapy help?

If you’re feeling lonely, you are not alone. A 2025 survey by the BACP of over 5000 people found that 54% of adults experienced loneliness and that it impacted on their mental health.  

Perhaps you have been wondering if this is the sort of thing people bring to therapy, and if so, can therapy help? In this article, I’ll walk you through four signs that indicate it could be time to reach out for support, and we’ll consider how engaging in therapy can be the first step on the road to creating a more rewarding, connected social life.

Feeling isolated or lonely can be a hard thing to admit, even to ourselves. Often, our tendency is to put on a brave face because we don’t want to be a burden to others, or we don’t want others to feel sorry for us. The ‘fake it till you make it’ culture encourages us to believe that in order to attract others, we have to project a successful facade. Therefore, admitting you’re feeling isolated or alone may not only feel like an admission of failure but can seem counter-productive to our desire to improve our social connections.  

In these circumstances, it’s tempting to just keep going in the belief things will get better; and of course they can and do; but the risk of denying these feelings is the impact they have on our self-esteem. Over time, loneliness can lead to negative self-appraisal, reinforcing beliefs such as “I’m not good enough” or “Nobody really cares.” This creates a vicious cycle: low self-esteem makes social connections harder. In the echo chamber of your own head, those thoughts feel like facts, making it even harder to reach out, which compounds the problem.

Whilst everyone feels lonely at times, the following could be signs that it’s time to seek support:

• Emotional numbness: You feel emotionally flat or shut down, or increasingly disconnected from your own and others' emotions.
• Increased self-focus: You’ve noticed an increased tendency to interpret others' responses to you as confirmation of rejection or social failure.
• Social withdrawal: You fear burdening others or “not fitting in”, which leads to avoiding social situations, which you recognise increases your sense of isolation, but you don’t know what to do about it.
• Loss of meaning and motivation: Over time, you notice yourself feeling hopeless, purposeless, and like making an effort is pointless.

How can therapy help overcome loneliness? 

When you’re sitting with a feeling of hopelessness or pointlessness, it can feel hard to imagine how things could be different, but here are three ways therapy can help:

1. Therapy gives you space to be fully seen and heard

When you’re lonely, it can feel like no one really gets you. In therapy, you don’t have to pretend. You can bring the messy thoughts, the numbness, the “what’s wrong with me?” feeling and still be met with warmth, not judgment.

2. Therapy helps untangle the beliefs that keep you stuck

Loneliness often fuels beliefs like “I’m too much” or “I’m not enough.” These quiet thoughts shape how you show up (or avoid) relationships. Therapy helps you notice and gently challenge these beliefs, so they stop running the show.

3. Therapy can reconnect you with your sense of meaning

Isolation has a way of making everything feel pointless. A good therapist helps you explore what matters to you, even if it feels far away right now. It's not about fixing or forcing, it's about noticing where some vitality or desire may begin to be re-ignited and building from there.

Therapy can remind you that experiencing loneliness is not a judgement on your value as a person; it’s a sign you’re human – wired for connection, and missing something important.