We are all meaning-seeking, meaning creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer.

In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.

We are all meaning-seeking, meaning creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer.

In the end, we are only tiny frightened animals, doing our best to survive amid other tiny frightened animals.

The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites.