Every one of us is facing this pandemic for the first time. Although not all in the same boat, all of us are in the same storm and none of us feels we’re navigating it exceptionally well. I even put together a YouTube playlist of short videos to help friends navigate this crisis in a more resilient way. Just my way of trying to ‘be a helper’ in a time when if I’m honest, I’m being it because I need to see it.
What a crisis is
There are moments and seasons of our life that irreversibly alter our lives. Standing at some dire T-intersection, going forward as usual with our lives simply is not an option. If the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t count as a crisis, nothing does. But what makes it an ‘existential crisis’?
A crisis of existence
The word “exist” finds its root in the latin “existere” meaning to emerge or stand forth. Existence, as many practitioners like myself would insist, is not so much a static state comprised of mechanical drives and subconscious forces, but rather the continuous act of becoming.
Existential therapists view people as being in a continual process of emerging and as such, a crisis of existence is that season or event which we are unable to continue being as we have been at a core level. It rips us out of our old ways of being and forces us to confront what’s emerging in ourselves more fully.
Many of us are acutely aware of how busy we’ve kept ourselves, and what our busyness has kept us from acknowledging or addressing. We may have taken relationships for granted, now forced to confront the pain of not having them be accessible.
We may find ourselves re-inhabiting our spirituality and faith life for the first time, the first time in a long time, or in a new way. Many of us have had a lot of time to be with ourselves, assessing whether or not we like the company we keep when we’re alone.
This is an existential crisis. All of us are having it. No one gets to opt-out. So, let’s have it well.
The resilient self
All of us have the capacity to grow, adapt, and become; despite and sometimes because of even the most adverse circumstances. Resilience is about our ability to foster that growth capacity and adaptability. Resilience is our ability to either return to what our baseline was before, or to find a new and healthy ‘normal’ to inhabit. It’s essential to our lives, and existential therapy can help us foster it.
Authenticity and responsibility
People tend to live shut off from ourselves. We may learn the hard way early that emotional vulnerability can lead to hurt and so we wall ourselves off inside a very logical and cognitive way of being. Perhaps we are beset with feelings of inadequacy. And so best, we busy ourselves every moment, gathering materialistic trophies of various sorts and showing them off to our social media feeds. And there we stay, safely quarantined from the deeper wounds that would require countless hours of reflection and untold vulnerability to heal from.
Much of what I do is really just freeing people to re-inhabit these parts of themselves. Authenticity is a word that I fear gets used so much, we’ve lost any true sense of a definition. From an existential perspective, I would say that authenticity is the process of inhabiting of one’s full self.
Building resilience means being vulnerable and brave enough to slow down and sit with those parts of ourselves that we’d rather stay walled-off from. It’s only here that we find our capacity for authentic response in our lives. Within the limits of our lives, some chosen and some not, how then will we live?
Sometimes the growth-potential part of resilience only happens when we slow down and quiet ourselves.
Awe
I’ve written about the cultivation of awe before, but allow me to add another dimension to the conversation of how awe intersects with resilience. Awe increases our ability to adapt in that it opens us up to possibility in our lives and in ourselves. When we set our gaze on things that remind us of our finiteness and fragility, the narrow constraints of our day to day: the job we have to have, the way we need our spouse or our kids to be, come into focus better.
Most of our rigid, inflexible patterns and the polarization you’ve heard me write about, begin to fall away in the face of awe. The truth is that most of the ‘needs’ we have are not in fact needs. Many of the boundaries and conditions we insist are immovable are in fact kept in place only by us. Awe has a way of revealing when that’s the case.
Meaning
Meaning is the structure within which we make sense of ourselves and our world and it is also the why that empowers us in the how of living. To make this a daily practice would certainly not be a waste of your time. What were 3 good things that happened today? What did they mean for you? What was the last meaningful thing that someone said to you and what made it so?
When we infuse our lives with these things, we increase our ability to adapt and grow in new ways.
