Category Archives: existential crisis

Believe that there is more to you

It is a sad and common theme.

A person is struggling: with an addiction, or obsessions and compulsions, or moral injury, or the impact of trauma, and has come to a place where the sense of self has been entirely subsumed by the problem and its pain.

The definition of self becomes “the addiction,” or “the monster who did (whatever has led to moral injury)” or “the mental disorder diagnosis.”

And, of course, as a therapist, I believe it is critical to address mental health troubles with the best of the science we have, with the particular approaches suited, as discerned ongoing, with the specific needs of that client.

But I also believe that a parallel need is extant and urgent: the need for this person, who is suffering, to come back to an awareness of self as a deeply beloved child of God. Not generically loved, like we may say that we “love” some food or activity or type of animal – but particular, personal, and intense.  Women who, like me, have been blessed to give birth will recall that wild wave of emotion that engulfs us when we meet that little person face-to-face after the peculiar intimacy of pregnancy. It makes us irrationally jealous of everyone and anyone; what mother doesn’t remember resenting the nurses and physicians who separated us from the baby long enough to do the general assessments and necessary care? Well, that is a reflection God’s love for each person.

If a person who is suffering is willing to enter into, and do, the hard work of therapy, which will include lifestyle changes and “homework,” and also becomes open to reconsidering his or her existence as a deeply loved person, someone who is more than the addiction, or bad choices, or terrifying memories, or intrusive thoughts and painful compulsions, then true and deep healing can happen.  This is what I would wish for every person struggling with emotional wounds.

Loneliness can kill you…part 3

This is the third of three posts. This one focuses on the art of conversation:  being better at conversation will help you overcome loneliness.  As noted in part 2 of this series, a lot of people struggle with reflection and/or asking questions that elicit a deeper conversation.

So, here are two strategies to help with these.

Reflection:  reflection has to do with being able to identify how someone else feels, and mirror that back to them with your expression and your words.  Laughing when someone tells you something sad (it happens, trust me) is not good. Identifying all negative emotions as some form of “mad” or “angry” is not helpful, either.  Sometimes, when you are watching a show, put it on mute and try to verbalize the emotions that characters are experiencing. Then go back and watch with the sound on. See how you did. Experiment with mimicking their facial expressions and see what feelings you experience; the imitated expression can trigger a shadow of the other person’s emotion via our mirror neurons.  If your emotional vocabulary is lacking, do an online search for Dr. Gloria Wilcox’ “The Feeling Wheel” for a research-based set of some of the many emotion words.

Asking questions:  there are plenty of sources for “conversation starters.” I have used Gary Chapman’s conversation starter cards for couples and for families with clients, as well as a discount store’s set of conversation starters for couples, families, and general-use conversation. Basically, at this writing, for about $1.25, you can get about 100 sample conversation starters. Here’s how to practice by yourself: pull a random card, look at the question, make up an answer someone might give, and see how many questions you can come up with related to that answer.

Random example:

Who was your favorite teacher?

And, here are just a few of the many possible questions to take the conversation further:

  1. What was special about this teacher?
  2. What is one of your favorite memories about being in that teacher’s class?
  3. Did other students feel the same way? Why or why not?
  4. How did having this teacher help you out in future classes with other, not-so-great teachers?
  5. If you could meet this teacher now, what would you want to say?
  6. Have you had any opportunities to help others the way this teacher helped you? What was that like for you?
  7. If you were going to encapsulate what you learned from this teacher as a “life lesson,” what would it be? How has that lesson reverberated for you since those days?
  8. Did you ever have a teacher who was sort of the evil opposite of this teacher? Who helped you get through that school year?

Practice making up questions. You won’t be peppering people with multiple questions; the goal isn’t to overwhelm people with an endless interrogation. The idea is to develop confidence that you can invite someone to have a richer conversation by asking a thoughtful question or two, and have the kind of dialogue that helps heal the loneliness that you, and perhaps they, are experiencing.

Because loneliness can kill you.

Loneliness can kill you…Part 1

According to new research from the journal Nature, Human Behavior published on January 3, 2025, loneliness and social isolation lead to molecular changes that, in my simple terms, seem to set the body up for serious problems – increased risk for dementia, depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and early death.  The researchers’ recommendations include routinely asking about loneliness and isolation, the way a health professional asks about sleep habits, alcohol use, and drug use.

If you are lonely on an ongoing basis, this is for you.

Loneliness can strike through no fault of one’s own.

Losing your spouse, for example, or a best friend, will almost inevitably lead to a long stretch of deep loneliness during the initial year or so of grief, and can continue beyond, as the bereaved person struggles to outsource some of that emotional, intellectual and spiritual intimacy to other relationships. In a healthy marriage, you share all sorts of confidences with a spouse that you simply might not share with anyone else – fears, dreams for the future, spiritual insights and struggles, and the warmth of shared memories that are no one else’s but the two of yours.  Somehow, some of that must be extended to others, and depth built over time. It an absolutely monumental task to parcel out these small slices of the immeasurable depth of a healthy marriage.

Moving, alone, to a new city, for a new job, can be exciting, but the reality can include aching loneliness when everyone at the new job goes home to their lives and you go to your apartment and try to figure out how to build a life. Developing the big, and small, connections that make a place feel like home can be daunting, and for most people, it takes longer than they had ever anticipated.

Loneliness hits other people, too. Those who are living primarily second-hand, separated by screens and trying to substitute electronic connections for human ones, are often intensely lonely. Some people interact with others in person, but the conversations are shallow, guarded and therefore nearly empty of connection and meaning. This type of loneliness can be even more painful, because it seems inexplicable; how can a person live with family or a partner and yet feel deeply lonely?

So, what to do? Unfortunately, the impetus is mostly on the lonely people to do something differently.

Here are some suggestions I would give to a client in such a situation.

  1. Go to church or synagogue. If you are grieving, try to go back to your own – but if that’s painful, go somewhere else, at least for now. If you are new to the area, just find a place that seems like a possibility. Then go to the hospitality time afterwards. Introduce yourself, and invite people to tell you about the faith community. Do not stand around with your cup of coffee and wait for people to notice you. Set a goal: perhaps that you will introduce yourself to three people, get their names, and ask a little about this community. See what happens. Try to focus on the other person; make the conversation a chance to get to know them and about their community – not about you. If it goes fairly well, go back the next week, greet those three people (and anyone else you met) by name if you can, re-introduce yourself without taking them forgetting your name personally, and see if you can meet a couple of other people. Within a month, you will have some acquaintance with a dozen or more people and have a solid idea if this community offers activities for education, worship and service for you to join.
  2. Even if you usually like to do things solo join at least one activity – one exercise class, one art class, one talk at the local bookstore, etc. – on a regular basis. Get to be a regular. Greet other people.
  3. Volunteer in your community. Do this with others. Doing good solo is beautiful, but if you’re not getting out of your head and focused on others in an interactive way, you are missing part of the point.
  4. Be friendly but don’t try to bully people into being your friends. For example, if you are new to the area, don’t wear out your welcome with the neighbors who came over to introduce themselves on moving day.
  5. Please do not use alcohol or other substances, or resort to hanging out having drinks as a way to cut loneliness.
  6. Be patient and keep trying! Think of these steps as experiments. Track what happens over time; be willing to change to a different experiment if the first one isn’t working after a month or so.

As you can see, the remedies for loneliness all include getting out of your head and into the world. Focusing on others, in small ways (such as greeting them and showing interest) to big ones (such as volunteering), is a critical part of overcoming loneliness. This can be really hard, because loneliness tends to make people even more withdrawn, more insular – it is a self-perpetuating problem unless you boldly step out, even with small but courageous steps, into focus on others.

More about connecting with others in Loneliness can Kill You, Part 2, coming soon.

7 Things to do When Life Is Crazy

Sometimes, life just goes horribly sidewise.  This week, like most weeks, I spent time with people who have lost their homes to natural disasters, lost their job, had loved ones die, and sometimes are grappling with multiple serious problems.  The world seems crazy, you can feel like you’re going mad, and it is oh-so-easy to slide into attempts to numb the pain that are ultimately harmful.

It’s easy to advise people on what NOT to do – don’t drink alcohol. Don’t use drugs. Don’t eat a lot of junk food. Don’t let yourself scroll through social media and/or your newsfeed for extended periods of times. It’s easier, though, to “do” than to “not do.”  Anyone who has tried to break a bad habit knows that; it’s easier to “eat an apple” than to “not smoke/drink/eat a bag of cheesy poofs the size of a pillow.”

So, here are seven things to do – and keep doing – when life is crazy

  1. Say grace. Say grace when you get to sit at a table and say grace – together – when you eating a granola bar in the shade after another few hours of trying to make sense of the debris that used to be your home.  Say grace when you are out on a hike, just about out of water, and have miles to go. G.K. Chesterton famously noted he said grace when he sat down to write, to draw, etc.  A moment of gratitude shifts the focus from the mud to the mountaintop.
  2. Put the social media/news scrolling down and, instead, watch something that will make you laugh, preferably either an episode of a sitcom or a funny movie. Why? These require sustained attention, will bring a focus on characters who have ups and downs, and have the potential to make you laugh. Laughter releases dopamine – that feel-good chemistry that helps you heal.  Make it better and share that humor break with someone else. Sharing laughter with the person you love helps that sense of connection that seems strained, or even lost, when life has gone crazy.
  3. Eat food that is good for you. Ongoing extreme stress causes havoc in your body, including your brain, and getting decent nutrition is essential to your well-being, now and later.  I did the price comparison:  a precooked chicken, a bag of salad, some fruit and a little something else healthy, for example, feeds two or four people far cheaper than most or all fast food. Your brain will thank you.
  4. Listen to music that is soothing: piano or guitar, instrumental jazz, classical, baroque:  as tempting as it may be to listen to “angry” music because you feel so angry about what’s become of your life, that will only reinforce your distress.  Let peace soak into you, however slowly it may come.
  5. Check in with other people every day. Reach out to someone to see how s/he is doing. It helps us get out of our own heads, our experiences, and feel less alone.
  6. Get outside, preferably in the morning, for natural light exposure. You don’t need to bake in the sun; just get out there. Take a walk if you can.  Early natural light helps the brain regulate the sleep/wake cycle, setting you up for a healthy rhythm of melatonin production over the course of the day.
  7. Ask God to show you where He is at work in the events of your life, because when life goes crazy, the fog can make God’s loving presence hard to detect. Ask for the grace to notice the helping hands, the kind words, the moments of clarity.

I’m sorry if life has gone crazy. It is scary, and lonely, and disorienting when disaster strikes. If you find that you are sinking, reach out for help:  call your local helpline (in Pinellas County, FL the number is 1-888-431-1998, for the new Care About Me program that helps match those in crisis with an appropriate mental health provider).  Call a friend, a family member, or, if you are feeling unsafe and considering suicide or plan to harm yourself or others, go seek immediate help via 911 or go to an emergency service location.  When life has gone crazy, it is natural to feel frightened, confused and even helpless, but remember that none of us were designed to “handle it all.” We are, in fact, designed so that our strengths are distributed so that each has something to offer but none has every gift and ability.  Please reach out for help if you feel you are sinking.

Random Life Lessons

Here, on a beautiful autumn day, are a few life lessons I’ve picked up on the way…perhaps one will be useful to you.

Walking in the morning, before sunrise, can lead to being stopped by law enforcement, who, upon getting a look at me from the front (wrinkles and rosary beads) say things like, “Oh. I thought you were a kid out breaking into cars.”  Wearing a reflective vest and a skort, instead of baggy gym shorts, has solved that problem. Either that or I have succeeded in looking old from behind. The lessons: be reflective and dress appropriately to the task at hand.

Don’t save special stuff for special occasions.  Eventually someone else will just throw your treasure away or it will end up, sad and dusty, on a thrift store shelf. Use it up, whether it’s that fancy cocoa mix someone gave you at Christmas or your grandmother’s crystal. Drink sweet tea out of a fancy goblet.

Not from personal experience (see a prior post about this issue) If you change your hairstyle and/or color on a regular basis, you might not be the best candidate for a tattoo. The same goes if you try to destroy or at least hide any photos of you from five or more years ago because you can’t believe you left the house looking like that.

If there is something you really want to do, and it’s realistic for you, then pick a reasonable time frame (say, one year) and reverse engineer backwards all the way to tomorrow. If you want to achieve “X” – your G.E.D., your master’s degree, a marathon, writing your first book – there will be something specific that you do and/or don’t do tomorrow that is different than yesterday. Then the next day, you will, again, do/not do something different because you have this goal. If it’s your G.E.D., and you want to pass by one year from now, then the first thing to do is look up where to go for information. Then call the place. Then go. Then decide what you will give up to make time to study. Then do that: give up some of that time to study. Learn how to study (a lot of people get to college without knowing how to study; no shaming). And study again and again. Enlist people who will encourage you because it will be hard and discouraging and there will be people who try to pull you off course.

Don’t spend time around people who discourage you when you are trying to become a better person. If you have thought things through, and realized you must change some habit or adopt a new plan for life, and wise people agree it is a good move, then be very skeptical about the motivation of people who try to interfere.

Unless you have doctor’s orders to the contrary, odds are that alcohol is not your friend. Remember when Pinot told you what a great dancer you were at your cousin’s wedding?  Or how some kind of brown liquor helped you straighten out that miscommunication with your in-laws? Yeah, not your friend. Besides, alcohol is eager to share bad things: disrupted sleep, increased risk of cancer (it’s a major factor in a number of types of cancer), dementia, prematurely aging skin and who knows what else. Disclaimer: I don’t drink and I’m not in recovery, which means this one comes from 1) observing life and 2) reading the medical research.

Be wary of people who think it is funny to scare animals. A guest who tries to frighten your cat because it’s “funny” when the cat’s fur stands on end needs to go away and not visit again. This is a red flag, no matter how “nice” you thought this person was. They exert power by terrifying others; is that nice? No. If a five-year-old could easily explain it, I shouldn’t have to say another word.

The above does not include the person who is willing to make an absolute ass of themselves trying to scare a squirrel, bunny, rat, lizard, etc., out from under their parked car so they can leave without killing it. 

Try, if you can, to be patient with people who act as if they didn’t need to let you know about something they wanted you to know about because they put it on social media. Give yourself permission to explain that you don’t spend time looking for something you ought to know on social media. Unless you do, in which case you have bigger problems, perhaps, than missing one person’s newscast.

And, in closing, bear in mind that one person’s life lesson is not necessarily yours…but then again, maybe it could be.

The Best Years

When I was in high school, many adults told me I ought to really enjoy those years because they were “the best years of [my] life.”

Well, for me, high school itself was not, overall, such a great time, and having a bunch of grownups assert that it would turn out to be so was not encouraging at all. From where I am now, I feel sorry for a lot of those adults, because if that was their experience, they must have had pretty miserable adult lives.

Very often, we’ve adopted the idea that some certain time comprises the “best years of life.”  Consider the people who postpone marriage and family because they believe that their 20’s are “the best years of life” and they want to be “free” to travel/build a career/be self-indulgent/whatever.  Some of them will regret later that they did not make different choices (ask any therapist, priest, minister or rabbi).

On the other hand, some of us have our lives unfold in a different order: responsibility precedes higher education, and career-building comes largely after active-duty parenting. What, in the long haul, did I “miss out” on? Not a thing, and this was clear all along the way because I refused to take the bait on some certain time being “the best years” as if it were a prize category.

How about framing things up this way: each period of life is the “best” for what it is meant to be. As it says in Ecclesiastes, 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in His time.”  And in its time, too.  There are some things that our 20s tend to be best for; and for some things, our 40s, 50s, 60s.  Yes, biologically, the 20s are peak time for having babies, and yes, forms of learning that require sheer memorization are best pursued prior to the 40s.  High-level analysis and wisdom, on the other hand, peak later than memorization and keep rolling, usually long after we start fumbling for the reading glasses we put down someplace and then find on our head.

There are different challenges, joys, and heartaches all along the way. Fortunately, our priorities change, or ought to. For God’s sake, who wants to be over 50 and as terrified of other people’s opinions as the typical 15-year-old? 

Are you tempted to feel discouraged? Does it feel as if all doors are shut because some events, some struggles, or perhaps your own regrettable choices, have meant you have lost a chance at the “best years”? Please reconsider. Make a different set of choices or just one different choice today. Then, perhaps, unexpectedly “best” years start today. You probably won’t be able to tell right away. Usually, we only see this when there’s enough distance to look back at today, tomorrow and the next day.

Why am I still here?

“Why am I still here?”

I hear that a lot. Perhaps you do, too.  The veteran who survived a firefight that took his friends; the person who woke up in the hospital to find they were the only survivor of a car crash that took their family; a survivor of a natural disaster that took many lives.  Many adults, perhaps most, have had such an existential episode. I’ve been in car accidents that could have killed me; survived acts of violence that could just as easily have tipped over into lethality, lived through serious illness. None of those are particularly unusual, and only mentioned to underscore the point.

“What do I live for now? What ought I be doing?”

That’s a tough one, yet it is the question every believer is tasked with as the subtext of life every day.  There is some chatter among the media that presuming that one’s survival is in God’s hands is some sort of unusual perspective. It is not my intention to speculate on any particular person’s interpretation of what that means. For those who find it perplexing, I hope to offer at least this Christian’s perspective. God never wants evil; it takes our free will for that to happen. Many of us wrestle with trying to figure out why God allows bad things to happen. Allowing something is not the same as wanting something, that’s for sure; every parent has to learn that lesson, fairly early on.

You may want your toddler to go to sleep. You may want that very, very, very eyes-burning-with-exhaustion much. But you have to allow the reality that the toddler will keep on singing songs, or whining, or coming out to complain. (If you do anything to “make” a child sleep, whatever adult is aware of it is required to report that to child protective services). C.S. Lewis does a much better job of explaining this particular point.  God, of course, chooses to allow or not. I’m not going to understand why because I am not God. God creates everything and I can do not a thing, even catch a breath, unless God wills it.

Our job is to figure out what God wants from us in each emerging situation, whether the situation itself was His will or not. For believers, every breath is a gift; there is no guarantee of another. Pondering what we are to do with these circumstances and assuming God has a preference in terms of our choice of action is not a big stretch.

So, for a Christian, God did not want Corey Comperatore to die in gunfire, protecting his family. It was not God’s will for the gunman to shoot. Mr. Comperatore clearly discerned his purpose was to protect at all costs. He had, apparently, discerned this over and over until his reflex towards self-sacrifice looked “automatic.” That seems to be a sign that his formation into the nature of Jesus Christ, the nature of complete self-giving, was something he had truly embraced.

And now, everyone left behind must discern what God asks of them in this new, tragic circumstance. Over the course of years and months, his family will each have to discern how to restructure life and find a different path forward. Friends and neighbors will need to discern, ongoing, how to provide friendship and support when the months pass and the spotlight of media attention fades.

The question doesn’t necessitate a tragedy, such as an accident, tornado or an attempted assassination. It is a perennial question: every person mourning infertility, every widow, widower, and bereaved parent.  Adolescents are supposed to wrestle with it; the elderly are, too. And all along the way, it is the question every thinking person ponders when transitioning to a new stage of life. We ask it at those times, too, that are both joyful and sad; a child grows up and successfully leaves the nest: mission accomplished; but what is my purpose now? Retirement comes; well, then what? What is your purpose now, beyond a vague sense of perpetual recess?

Being Christian means striving to be conformed to the nature of Jesus Christ. That means seeking not just to avoid being “bad” but attempting to do God’s will in every situation.  Is it “bad” to spend an entire lazy weekend afternoon with a pot of tea, a good book and a handful of chocolate? Especially on the Sabbath? No, lemon ginger tea and Lady Gregory’s book of Irish folklore, edited by W.B. Yeats, don’t make the list of “do-nots,” but the entire afternoon? When a friend needs a caring ear or a letter? When a nagging thought keeps intruding with that starts with, “I really need to reach out to…” maybe the “not a bad thing” needs to step aside and yield to the “better thing,” a “because” for the moment.

And, when you’re wrestling with the big questions of life, the little “becauses” become a path through the dark places.