03/10/2026
Therapy cannot promise us a life without suffering.
Some experiences cannot be prevented, solved or made fair. We encounter loss, uncertainty, limitation, loneliness, difficult choices and, ultimately, the awareness that our lives are finite.
Irvin Yalom describes four fundamental concerns of human existence: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Rather than seeing the anxiety that can emerge around these realities simply as something pathological, his work invites us to consider what happens when we turn towards these questions and explore how we want to live in their presence.
This idea is very close to the way I understand the therapeutic process.
For me, therapy is not always about making the difficult thing disappear. Sometimes the circumstances cannot be changed. The work then becomes learning how to remain connected to yourself while experiencing them — and discovering where relationship, choice and purpose are still possible.
This is also why I make an important distinction between acceptance and resignation.
Acceptance can mean recognising: This is part of my reality, even though I did not choose it and may not want it.
And from there asking:
What is still within my reach?
What matters to me now?
Who do I want beside me?
How do I want to live in the presence of what I cannot change?
Viktor Frankl's work on logotherapy adds another dimension that I find particularly meaningful: the idea that the search for meaning can remain significant even in circumstances of profound suffering.
Perhaps resilience, then, is not about defeating suffering.
Perhaps it is about remaining in relationship with yourself, with others and with what gives your life purpose — even when life cannot be made easy.
📖 Book recommendation: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl — an introduction to Frankl's thinking about meaning, responsibility and the possibilities that remain when circumstances themselves cannot simply be changed.
