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400 Friends and No One to Call: Breaking through Isolation and Building Community Audiobook
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We can be well connected, with 400 friends on Facebook and still have no one to count on. Ironically, despite social media, social isolation is a growing epidemic in the United States. The National Science Foundation reported in 2014 that the number of Americans with no close friends has tripled since 1985. One out of four Americans has no one with whom they can talk about their personal troubles.
Social isolation can shatter our confidence. In isolating times, we're not only lonely, but we're ashamed of our loneliness because our society stigmatizes people who are alone without support. As a single, fifty-eight-year-old woman who finds herself stranded after major surgery, Val Walker has woven into the narrative her own story. A well-established rehabilitation counselor, she was too embarrassed to reveal on social media how utterly isolated she was by asking for someone to help, and it felt agonizingly awkward calling colleagues out of the blue. As she recovered, Val found her voice and developed a plan of action for people who lack social support, not only to heal from the pain of isolation, but to create a solid strategy for rebuilding support. 400 Friends and No One to Call spells out the how-tos for befriending our wider community, building a social safety net, and fostering our sense of belonging.
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About Val Walker
Val Walker is the author of The Art of Comforting: What to Say and Do for Others in Distress, which won the Nautilus Book Award. She is a contributing blogger for Psychology Today, and also contributes to the Health Story Collaborative in Boston. As a rehabilitation consultant, speaker, and writer, she deeply believes in breaking through the barriers that isolate us by building our confidence as well as our communities. With a Master of Science degree in rehabilitation counseling from Virginia Commonwealth University, Val has explored and developed the art of comforting since facilitating her first support group in 1993. In the trenches of isolated and disadvantaged communities for twenty-four years, she has organized and led support groups for people living with serious illness, disability, grief, and trauma. The Art of Comforting was recommended by the Boston Public Health Commission as a guide for families impacted by the Boston Marathon Bombing, and was later featured by Penguin/Random House on their 2016 list There’s A Book for That: Hope, Healing and Doing Good. Val’s articles and interviews about comforting have appeared in Time, AARP, Whole Living, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Coping with Cancer magazine, Boston Globe magazine, Chicago Tribune, McClean’s magazine (Canada), and others.
About Ann Richardson
Ann Richardson is an Earphones-winning narrator who studied broadcast journalism and Spanish at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Years later, the desire to take up a creative yet productive career lead her to narrating audiobooks and founding Great Plains Audiobooks, an audiobook publishing company focusing on bringing Midwestern literature to audio.