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. ↩︎