In all of the varied pain that has been felt so widely these past few months, I have struggled with clients to hold onto a sense of meaning in life. Whether it has been the ravages of COVID-19 on vulnerable loved ones, on household financial stability, and general future plan making or the heartbreak that continues to fuel the Black Lives Matter movement in the face of ongoing brutality and negligence,. There is a lot of profound pain and fear circulating our collective lives.
Something that we as therapists often do in times of hardship for our clients is pull forward internal resources to help buffer the pain. These may be religious beliefs, ancient philosophies, personal doctrines, lived experiences or stories passed down from one generation to the next within a family. However, I have been witnessing the failing of this strategy for many folks. In the large unknown landscape of our current lives, these previously strong buffers seem to fall short.
In her TED Talk, Kate Bowler shares her own story of suffering that also lead to the shattering of her personal and religious buffers. At the age of 35, after arriving at what felt like the culmination of hard work and great effort, at the peak of her lived happiness , she is diagnosed with stage IV cancer. What happens from there is the story of her initial disbelief, fear and disconnection from her prior buffers that gave way to profound and unexpected connection and peace in the heart of that fear.
“I was entering a world of people just like me. People stumbling around in the debris of dreams they were entitled to and plans they hadn’t realized they had made.”
This sentence captures so well the universal feeling that I am hearing from clients these days and quite frankly, that I have felt myself.
However, she does not come out of her pain and struggle succumbing to a dark and hopeless acceptance of inevitable human difficulty. She is able to locate a feeling of love in her darkest moments that defies her own explanation. Ultimately, she is left with this unexpected and beautiful sense of acceptance.
“I’m learning to live without counting the cost, without reasons and assurances that nothing will be lost.”
For all of my perfectionistic, driven, high-achieving clients, for all of us who have internalized the promise that good things happen to good people, this level of acceptance around that illusion may seem frightening. But Kate does a beautiful job of showing us the power of liberation from this perspective and the love and connection that comes with it.