So welcome everyone and thank you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening.
So I want to tell you something that I've never quite heard said clearly enough.
Not everything happens for a reason.
And I know what just happened in you when you heard that.
Some of you felt a small collapse.
Like something you had been holding on to just quietly got removed.
Some of you felt relief.
Unexpected,
Slightly guilty relief.
The kind that comes when someone finally says the things you've been thinking and could not quite permit yourself to think.
Maybe some of you are immediately preparing the counter argument.
And I want to say to that part of you,
Stay with me.
Because this is not the position you think it is.
I am not telling you your life is random and meaningless.
I am not telling you that nothing matters or suffering is simply noise in an indifferent universe.
What I want to offer you today from everything I've seen and felt and worked with is a distinction.
Meaning is not the same as reason.
So your grief does not need a reason in order to heal.
Your pain does not need to have been designed in order to deserve witnessing.
Something happened.
It was real.
It hurt.
You do not need to justify it before you are allowed to feel it.
And that is where we are starting today.
And by the end,
I hope to offer you something that is both more honest and helpful than the phrase that you were given.
So,
I want to be clear about something before I say anything else about everything happens for a reason.
The people who say it almost always mean it with love.
It is said at hospital bedsides.
At funerals.
In the aftermath of loss,
There is no obvious comfort available.
It is said by people who care about the person in pain and who are reaching desperately and compassionately for something that will help.
Something that will make the unbearable slightly more bearable.
Something that gives suffering a shape,
A context,
A frame that makes it survivable.
And I understand it completely.
I have been in those rooms.
I have felt the pull towards the consoling phrase when sitting with someone whose grief is too large for words.
The desire to make it mean something.
Because meaning is what we use,
What humans use to survive.
But here is what I have observed over and over in bodies of people who have received that phrase at exactly the wrong moment.
It doesn't land.
Not because the person doesn't want it to.
Not because they are spiritually underdeveloped or intellectually resistant.
But because something in the body,
Something below the level of conscious agreement,
Knows that the phrase is asking it to do something it is not ready to do.
It is asking it to accept what has not yet been grieved.
It is asking the nervous system to perform peace before the alarm has been allowed to complete.
To produce meaning before the pain has been acknowledged.
And to skip the part where you are allowed to say,
This was wrong.
This should not have happened.
I did not deserve this.
And this was not a lesson I needed or deserved.
And this skipping is what psychologists call spiritual bypass.
It's the use of a spiritual narrative.
However well intentioned it is.
To avoid processing of difficult emotion.
And bypass always has a cost.
The cost is,
The grief stays in the body.
So me repeating everything happens for a reason,
Will not do anything to that grief in my body.
And that grief lives not as a memory,
But as a physiological state.
As a nervous system that never got to complete the honest response to what happened.
Because the honest response was replaced too quickly,
With too much love,
Too little space,
By a story about reasons.
So the body knows the difference between genuine processing and performed acceptance.
It cannot be fooled by a frame,
However beautiful that is.
So when genuine processing is interrupted,
And the alarm is suppressed rather than completed,
The grief goes underground.
Into your tissues,
Into the posture,
Into the specific quality of tiredness that has no obvious source.
And does not respond to rest.
This is not a failure of the person who said this phrase.
It is a failure of the culture that gave us only one script for being in pain.
And it is worth examining honestly.
Because the alternative might be better than most people know.
So in my opinion,
There are broadly two positions available.
In the cultural conversation,
About whether things happen for a reason or not.
And both of them,
Leave people somewhere they don't really want to go.
So the first trap,
Everything happens for a reason.
We have established this one,
The bypass,
The premature meaning.
The story that asked the body to perform acceptance,
Before the grief has been allowed to complete.
Offered with love,
Sometimes very helpful.
There are people for whom this frame is genuinely sustaining.
And I do not want to take that away from them.
But for many people,
In many specific moments of loss,
It produces a quality of loneliness.
The feeling that even grief is being managed.
There is no room for the part that says,
This was not okay,
This hurt,
And I am not grateful for this at all.
And then the second trap,
The rational response is,
Nothing happens for a reason.
Life is random,
There is no cosmic design.
Things simply occur because of prior causes,
Without meaning.
And this also in a limited sense is defensible.
And it is also sufficient as home for a person trying to survive loss.
Because the nervous system needs more than randomness to orient to.
So the research on post-traumatic growth,
The genuine phenomena of people finding meaning,
Depth,
And even beauty,
In the aftermath of terrible things,
Is not the research of a system that has concluded that life is random.
It is the research of a system that is doing what human beings do.
Making meaning,
Finding orientation,
Building a livable story out of raw material of what happened.
So randomness is accurate as a description of cause.
Now,
The third way,
Which I am offering you today,
Something happened,
It was real,
And meaning is not the same as reason.
Here is where I want to take you.
Because I think it is more honest than either of the other two positions.
Something happened.
It was real,
It hurt,
It was not okay.
In the sense that it should not have had to happen.
The child who was abused was not abused because the universe sent a lesson.
The person who lost someone was not given that loss as a spiritual curriculum.
And the grief is not a fee for admission to personal growth.
The pain did not need to be designed in order for you to be more resilient.
And healing does not require discovering the reason in order to proceed.
That is a permission.
The grief does not need a justification.
The honest response,
This was wrong,
This really hurt me,
It broke me,
This should not have happened,
Is not a failure of spiritual development.
It is actually the beginning of real processing.
And genuine processing is where genuine healing becomes possible.
Meaning is different.
Meaning can be found.
Meaning is real,
Human,
Necessary,
And often very transformative.
Now Viktor Frankl,
One of the most renowned psychotherapists,
Psychoanalysts of his time.
He survived the camps.
One of the most systemically evil things human beings have ever done to each other through meaning.
But he never said that what happened to him happened for a reason.
What he said was that he could choose his response to it.
That in the gap between stimulus and response,
There is always freedom.
And these are not the same claim.
Reason implies cosmic design.
The universe arranged this.
Therefore it was meant to be.
Therefore you should find peace in it.
Meaning implies human agency.
Something happened.
It was real.
And I am choosing what to do with it now.
So the first one removes grief.
The second one honors it first.
And then in your own time,
In the body's own time,
Transforms it.
So the first is asking you to be grateful for what broke you.
And the second is asking you to be honest about what broke you.
And then to find slowly in the wreckage what you want to build.
At your own pace.
So this is not a lesser version of healing.
It is a more honest one.
And in my experience,
Both personal and clinical,
It is the one that actually sticks.
So I want to talk to you about what the body actually needs when something terrible has happened.
Because I think this is where everything happens for a reason framework,
Most specifically fails.
Not at the level of philosophy,
But at the level of physiology.
When something happens that the nervous system registers as wrong,
As threatening,
As harmful,
As a violation of what should be,
The body's honest response is an alarm.
A physiological mobilization fight-or-flight system activates.
The amygdala fires and the stress hormones start to move in your body.
This is not malfunction at all.
This is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do in a response to something that was bad.
So the alarm is appropriate.
It is information.
It is the body saying,
Hey,
This was not okay.
The natural completion of this response in a body that is safe and supported and given time involves moving through the activation.
Allowing the nervous system to complete the cycle.
Feeling the alarm fully,
Being witnessed in it,
And eventually returning to a regulated baseline.
This is what grief looks like when it's allowed to complete.
So when the alarm is interrupted,
When the grieving person is given,
Oh,
Everything happens for a reason,
In a moment when their nervous system is mid-activation,
Something specific happens,
The alarm does not complete.
It is suppressed by the narrative.
The body is asked to move towards acceptance before it has been allowed to move through the alarm.
And suppressed alarms do not disappear.
They wait in the body,
In the nervous system's default setting.
In the particular quality of chronic low-level tension that does not respond to rest or intellectual understanding.
Because you never allowed to complete the process it was trying to complete.
So what the body actually needs in the aftermath of experiencing something terrible is not a reason.
It needs a witness.
Someone or something,
Including your own honest self,
That can look at what happened and say,
I see it,
It was real,
It was okay.
You do not have to perform acceptance.
You're allowed to be in the honest response to this for as long as the honest response needs you to be there.
Now in Family Constellation work,
One of the most healing things we offer exactly this.
Not interpretation,
Not meaning making,
Not the narrative that explains why.
The simple,
Specific,
Deeply human act of acknowledgement.
I see what happened to you.
Not I understand why it happened,
Just I see it.
I see you in it.
I see what happened to you.
And that without explanation,
Without reason,
Is the most healing thing available.
Now,
I want to say something about meaning.
Because I have spent the last few minutes questioning a particular story about it.
And I do not want to leave you without the thing the story was trying to give you.
So meaning is real.
Post-traumatic growth is real.
Not as a guarantee,
Not as an obligation,
But as human capacity.
And there is substantial research on it as well.
People do find depth,
Perspective,
Connection.
And even a kind of beauty in the aftermath of terrible things.
Not always though,
Never automatically.
And not on any schedule that the culture would like to impose.
What research also shows is this.
Meaning that arrives after genuine grief is different in quality from the meaning that is borrowed from a phrase before grief has been allowed to complete.
So borrowed meaning is fragile.
It requires maintenance.
It can be shattered by the next hard thing.
And it actually sits on top of the unprocessed grief rather than growing from it.
Meaning that arrives after grief,
After the alarm has been allowed to complete,
After the honest response has been witnessed,
After the body has had space to say,
This was wrong and be heard in that,
That meaning has roots.
It does not require any defending.
It does not need the original event to have been designed by the universe in your favor.
It is simply what the human being,
Having been through something real,
Has found.
There is a specific kind of person I have met in my life,
In my practice,
In rooms where some things are said,
Who carries the quality of earned meaning.
They are not people who found reason immediately.
They are people who allowed themselves to be broken first,
Who did not rush to the lesson,
And who gave the grief time and the honesty that it requires.
And what they have,
Whatever they have found in the aftermath,
Is real in a way that borrowed meaning never quite is.
I am not telling you to seek suffering.
I am telling you that if you have been through something real,
If something happened that was genuinely wrong,
Genuinely painful,
Genuinely not okay,
You do not have to find the reason in order to heal.
You do not have to be grateful for it in order to grow from it.
You just have to be honest about it,
Fully,
In the body,
Without the frame that asks you to perform acceptance too soon.
And the meaning,
If it comes,
Will be yours.
It will not be borrowed.
It will be real.
So,
Now,
I'd like to invite you into something now.
Witnessing.
So,
For this witnessing piece,
Wherever you are,
Just find a comfortable position and just let your eyes soften or close if that's more comfortable for you.
And take a breath now.
Real,
Slow,
Unhurried.
And as you exhale,
Just let the body arrive somewhere.
Not performing relaxation,
Just arriving.
Now,
Slowly,
Gently,
At your own pace,
I want to invite you to bring to mind something that happened.
Something real.
Something that hurt you.
And it does not have to be the biggest thing.
It does not have to be the most dramatic.
Just something.
That is still quietly,
Persistently unresolved in your body.
Just let it come.
Just let it be present.
You are not going to fix it or resolve it or find meaning in it right now.
We don't need to.
You are just going to let it be present.
Now,
Notice where it lives in the body.
The chest.
Perhaps the belly.
The throat.
The heart.
The specific quality of something held that has been held for a long time.
Now,
You may want to put your left or your right hand on the chest,
Or both,
If that feels right.
Center of my chest.
Chest.
And now,
Very slowly,
Very gently,
I want to invite you to say something.
Not out loud.
In the body.
In the place where the thing lives.
This happened.
This happened.
Not,
This happened for a reason.
Not,
This happened and I understand why.
Not,
This happened and I'm going to be okay.
Just these two words.
This happened.
This happened.
And let those words land in the body rather than in the mind.
In the chest,
In the belly,
Wherever the thing lives.
This happened.
And now,
It was real.
It was real.
It was real.
Feeling what you feel.
Sensing what you sense.
And now,
It was not okay.
It was not okay.
It was not okay.
Whatever happened,
Whatever the body has been holding,
It was not okay.
Now let whatever wants to come,
Come.
Just stay here for a moment in the honest response,
In the body's actual experience of what happened.
Without the frame that asks it to be something else.
You are witnessing yourself right now and this is what the nervous system needed.
It never needed a reason to heal.
It just needed a witness.
Now,
If you want,
Now,
Without forcing,
I want to invite you to ask yourself this.
Is there anything that has grown from this?
Not what the universe sent.
Not the lesson it was supposed to teach.
But what you,
In your specific humanity,
Have found in it or built from it or carried forward because of it.
Just take a moment to sit with the body and see if anything comes up or not.
Is there anything that has grown from this wound,
Experience,
Event?
Now,
Whatever might have come up for you or might not have come up for you,
That is completely fine.
The grief does not need a silver lining to be honoured.
Now,
Bringing your attention back to your breath and let whatever is here now be here.
Slowly,
Gently,
Without rushing now when you're ready.
Just coming back,
Coming back,
Coming back.
If your eyes were closed,
You might want to open them if you feel ready.
Take one last final deep breath.
I want to leave you with this now.
The phrase,
Everything happens for a reason,
Was an attempt to help and in most cases it was offered with love,
Care and a desire to make the unbearable slightly more bearable.
I am not asking you to be angry at the people who said it to you but I am asking you to give yourself something they may not have been able to give you at all.
Permission.
Permission to have the honest response to what happened.
Permission to say this was wrong.
To grieve without justification.
To not have found a reason.
To be in the process of finding meaning in your own time,
In your own body without anyone else's script.
This permission is the foundation in which healing,
The kind that stays is actually built.
So not everything happens for a reason but everything that happens to you is real and everything that is real deserves to be met honestly.
That meeting,
Honest,
Patient,
Witnessed is where real things grow from.
So I don't know you personally but whatever happened to you,
It was real.
You were allowed to have been broken by it and you are allowed in your own time at your own pace to find what remains and that is enough.
That has always been enough.
Thank you very much for joining me today and Namaste.
