This is a volume on loneliness and what can be done to address its pain. While most books simply describe loneliness from one author's point of view, this volume includes a comprehensive review of the literature and employs top researchers in the field discuss their own research findings, conclusions and clinical experience. It explores the relationship between loneliness and sexuality, loneliness and optimism, and parental loneliness during pregnancy and childbirth. It also addresses loneliness throughout the life cycle in children, adolescents, the elderly and disabled, leading to a variety of coping and therapeutic modalities aimed at helping those who suffer from loneliness in its various forms.

This is a volume on loneliness and what can be done to address its pain. While most books simply describe loneliness from one author's point of view, this volume includes a comprehensive review of the literature and employs top researchers in the field discuss their own research findings, conclusions and clinical experience. It explores the relationship between loneliness and sexuality, loneliness and optimism, and parental loneliness during pregnancy and childbirth. It also addresses loneliness throughout the life cycle in children, adolescents, the elderly and disabled, leading to a variety of coping and therapeutic modalities aimed at helping those who suffer from loneliness in its various forms.

In this book, the authors discuss two of the most fundamental of human experiences: loneliness, and belonging. There have been other publications, over the years, about each of these topics separately, but none about how they interact and influence one another, in one integrated volume. Loneliness is an existential and basic human experience that all those who ever walked on this earth have experienced. Loneliness is always painful, subjective, all consuming, and an experience which we all try to avoid. This book reviews the most updated literature, research, and experimentation involving loneliness, human alienation, and separation. Covered are definitions and an understanding of what is loneliness, loneliness in philosophy, literature and the Bible, loneliness of marginalized populations, the difference between essential and transient loneliness, loneliness of the seriously ill and the dying, what causes loneliness, and how can we cope with it successfully. Addressing humans' great desire to belong, the book covers that overwhelming wish and need to be part of a community, a family and a romantic dyad, to belong and be valuable.