For many of my clients, they have been planning thorughout their lives for some positive ending: retirement, time with their grandchildren, time together with their spouse, or maybe a time of travel and cruises. Perhaps they were just looking forward to some calm years doing woodworking. Or maybe they would have been content with having a good reputation in their career field and being respected for the way they had lived their lives.
For many of my clients, that anticipated life has been interrupted.
Imagine that we all live lives of five acts. Let's say some of us want to live out romantic plays, some of us comedies, and some of us just nice sentimental plays where everyone gets along, the hero overcomes obstacles (but not too difficult obstacles), and so on.
Life begins in the first act. They are born; they start growing up. Act two, they finish high school and go to college. They date. Act three, they are married and have children. They have a career. Problems arise. (But again nobody wants really bad problems, so let's assume that the problems aren't too bad in this imaginary play.)
And then in the middle of the fourth act, something unexpected happens. Something major. Something which can't be surmounted. The fifth act which they anticipated is not going to happen after all. The romance is now a tragedy. The comedy is no longer a comedy but something else, maybe a mystery.
Perhaps a person's spouse dies. Perhaps someone is laid off and can no longer find work in the area they were trained for. Perhaps they have been swindled out of their retirement savings. Or their children no longer let them see their grandchildren. The director announces that act five is not going to happen after all.
It is as if they were playing Hamlet, and in the middle of the fourth act someone walks in and says, "We are moving next door to another theater. We are shutting down this theater. And you will no longer being playing Hamlet; you will be playing MacBeth." The trajectory and continuity of acts one through five is broken. Things no longer make any sense. "I trained as a physicist; now I am a Walmart greeter." Or, "I spent my life raising my children, and now they won't let me be with my grandchildren." Life no longer feels like it makes sense. There is not the feeling of meaning that they have been trying to create for years and years.
It is as if they were living in a Thomas Kincaid painting of pleasant colors and cottages, and now they have to play out the fifth act as Job of the Old Testament, bereft of family and cattle, and covered with boils.
But what I am talking about is not just that things have taken a turn for the worse. Life seems to have lost its meaning because the trajectory of their life no longer has continuity. It is as if an artillery shell is fired into the air, and just as it starts to come down and reach its target, instead of continuing on its arc, it crashes into an invisible barrier, stops, and falls to the ground. Or it's as if the shell suddenly turns and goes off in a different, wholly unanticipated direction.
When this loss of continuity and meaning happens to my clients, it can not only be depressing, it can make them feel disoriented, as if there is no meaning in life. Whatever has happened to them may be relatively unique (coming down with a dread disease which occurs in .001% of the population), or common to others (becoming disabled by an accident).
I try to help my patients see that even if their situation is somewhat unique, the overall issue of life interrupted is not unique. They are part of a much larger and distinguished group of people (starting with Job of the Old Testament) who were in just the same predicament. It may be that the desirable situation of life acts one through five flowing in logical sequence doesn't really exist for anyone. Or maybe a lucky minority of people get to enjoy that progression. I don't really know. I do know that for many of my clients, life has been interrupted, and there is no choice but to piece together a new plan and a new sense of meaning.
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