Death & Dying Archives - Sergio Integral

How therapy can help us face uncertainty, grief, and meaninglessness.

In Before IT Hits the Fan… I wrote about how, as a therapist, I hear a version of the question that gives this article its title at least once a week; depending on what is going on, often many times per day.

Things Look Disheartening

We are living through what has been called a polycrisis: multiple crises that interact with and amplify one another. But you don’t need me to tell you that. Almost every conversation, if long enough, turns to politics, money, isolation, or the environment. Let’s face it: things look disheartening.

It is easy to lose hope when everything around us reminds us how bad things are. Crises breed helplessness, numbness, panic, and fatalism. It is tempting to disconnect through mindless scrolling, or to convince ourselves we must keep watching the news to stay informed. Cynicism and despair can feel almost rational when it seems there is nothing we can do.

Yet here we are. Do I wish things were different? Absolutely. I worry about my young daughters. I feel sad thinking they may inherit a worse world than the one I grew up in. So when clients, quietly or explicitly, ask me whether humanity will make it, my honest answer is that I don’t know.

This is not the first time things have looked grim. I find it hard to imagine how our predecessors endured wars, invasions, and upheavals throughout the ages. As a Mexican, I have tried to grasp how Native Americans must have felt when settlers and conquistadores shattered their cultures, or how European Jews must have felt during the Second World War. This is no consolation, but things have been worse¹.

The Question Beneath the Question

And still, it is hard to make existential sense of any of it. When a client looks me square in the eye and asks, “What is the point?” I understand why Camus thought life was absurd. Is there a plan? Is this some god’s test? Karma? An illusion? Does humanity deserve it? Are we doomed to follow the dinosaurs as just another curiosity in the history of this planet? Again, I don’t know.

Fortunately, as a therapist, my job is not to reassure clients or provide neat answers, but to witness and accompany them on their life path. Therapy does not solve the polycrisis, but I deeply believe it serves a purpose. This is not me justifying my profession, but trying to understand how I, and all of us in the helping professions, can help from our trench.

How can therapy help?

How can meeting privately with another person possibly help? For one, nobody should suffer alone. Crises heighten isolation and powerlessness. We may ask: Am I the only one seeing this? What can one person possibly do? It is easier to fall prey to doomsday news and despair in isolation.

Therapy offers a place to grieve together. A place to regain dignity, lucidity, and perspective; to figure out what matters and how to proceed. It offers a potential space to stay present in the face of doubt and to wonder what life is asking of us now. It also offers the possibility of reclaiming agency and deciding how to act, how to relate, and what not to become. Despair deepens when we become spectators instead of agents.

A Different Kind of Hope

It is also a place to rekindle hope. Not the naïve hope that everything will be okay. History provides no guarantees. Mature hope is a choice (Macy). The decision to keep going without surrendering is already a victory. As Václav Havel suggested, hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well; it is the conviction that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Not Becoming Cynical

When, in therapy, we face anxiety, adversity, despair, and meaninglessness together, we claim the “courage to be” (Tillich). In the presence of another person, the client confronts fear and desolation. This can revitalize us and keep us from becoming insensitive. We may not be able to save the world, but we can prevent our souls from becoming cynical, cruel, or inert.

Furthermore, as Jung suggested, evil flourishes when humans repress their shadow. The unconscious person is easy prey to fear, hatred, and mass ideology. In therapy, we stay present instead of avoiding reality; we metabolize grief, rage, and fear. Only then can we move from protection or paralysis into action.

It is in relationship that we remember we hurt because we belong. With that clarity, we can decide how to proceed, how we choose to show up in times of crisis, and how to uphold our values and the dignity of life.

When therapist and client courageously affirm life in the face of suffering and uncertainty, we connect with a deeper dimension of identity within us that is more spacious than fear. We remember that we are more than a frightened, skin-encapsulated ego.

Facing Uncertainty Together

So, are we gonna make it? I still don’t know. I hope we will. In the meantime, let’s walk together, meet our pain, find meaning amid the meaningless, and trust, not in a Pollyannaish way, but, as Tolkien suggested, with the clarity that we have the opportunity, and perhaps the obligation, to decide who we choose to be in the time given us.

Facing uncertainty with support

If you are moving through some version of this yourself, you are welcome to reach out. Therapy can help you stay grounded and make meaning. We don’t have to face it alone.

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Related reading: Why the Relationship Heals

We must remember that how we experience crises is relative to our level of privilege. Even if we are all going through this polycrisis, there are significant differences between how each group is being affected by it. Those differences matter. ↩︎

Things don’t look good. It’s getting harder to be an optimist. It doesn’t matter if you are liberal, conservative, man, woman, old, young, even wealthy or poor — there is a sense that we’re moving through dark times. Worse, it seems to be hitting us from every direction: health, safety, economy, relationships, ecology…

Of course, not everyone agrees. Pinker (Our Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), Rosling (Factfulness), and Norberg (Progress) argue that — contrary to what our brains (and the media) want us to believe — we are living in the safest, healthiest, most educated, and most prosperous times in human history. Then again, plenty argue the opposite. Graeber & Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything), Hickel (The Divide), and Mann & Wainwright (Climate Leviathan) claim that inequality, ecological collapse, autocratization, war, and mental health crises put humanity at risk.

I am not a global trends analyst but a psychotherapist. In my sessions, I don’t deal with the reality of the world, but with my clients’ perceptions of it. This makes my work both easier and harder. Easier, since we don’t need to figure out what is “real” (although at times reality-testing is useful). Harder, since facts don’t matter as much as how clients feel about them. (Nietzsche wrote, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”) In any case, I keep hearing concerns about the state of the world. It’s been a while since a client said, “I have a good feeling about where things are going,” quite the opposite, anxiety and depression have surged worldwide—up about 25–30% since 2020—with U.S. rates of depression rising over 60% in the past decade, reaching historic highs.¹

How can we face this reality? Faced with distress, our brain seems to have a limited number of preprogrammed responses: fight, flight, freeze, or appease. Depending on circumstances, we select the most viable. We can despair, give up, curl into a little ball and wait for impact, pray for divine intervention, etc. With my clients, we’ve explored many of these alternatives. None of them (with the exception, perhaps, of some forms of prayer) feels truly satisfying.

Fortunately, there are other options. Some existentialists, who also faced extreme circumstances (WWII, Nazi occupation, concentration camps), urge us to accept the absurdity of existence (not an easy thing to do) and remember that even in the worst situations (e.g., Frankl in Auschwitz), we still have the possibility — even the responsibility — to choose how to respond. We have agency. Our actions matter. We get to choose; we must choose. Regardless of the outcome, it is we who define the meaning of our lives. Some take it even further. Leaders such as Gandhi, MLK, or Thích Nhất Hạnh urge us not only to avoid running from suffering but also to face violence without succumbing to it, to transform hatred through love, and to act decisively with compassion.

There is yet another possible (and perhaps puzzling) approach. As a transpersonal psychotherapist and psychedelic facilitator, I am familiar with the teachings of sacred plants and mystics throughout the ages. Paralleling Buddhism and Hinduism, plant medicine consistently reminds us that life is illusory, a cosmic game or līlā. Many times, I’ve witnessed clients cracking up (what I like to call the Cosmic Laughter) when they realize how silly and pointless our toils are — echoing Julian of Norwich saying, “All shall be well” amid Europe’s plague, or Ramakrishna’s supposed answer to why suffering exists: “to thicken the plot.”

How are you facing our current situation? How is the barrage of negative news affecting you? What resources do you have to move forward? Please remember: if you are struggling, if you feel despair (perhaps the healthiest reaction to our profoundly sick society), reach out. You are not alone. We are not made for suffering in isolation. There is help.

Since my clients are not mystics (yet), and many would not even consider themselves activists, my job is not to philosophize or tell them what to do. I am there (and here) to explore alternatives, to empower them (and you) to make their own decisions. How to face suffering, and what to do about it, is a deeply personal choice. Yet, perhaps influenced by those same mystics and plant-teachers, I — most of the time — remain optimistic. Mostly because every day I witness in my practice the strength, beauty, and dignity of our shared human struggles.

Perhaps, until each of us finds our own answers, the best we can do — as Vonnegut suggests — is to remember that “we are all here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2025/20250416.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.who.int/news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide?utm_source=chatgpt.com ↩︎