A Theory of Life

As I work with patients, I often am confronted with horrible stories of childhoods of neglect and abuse.  The level of suffering that some of my patients have gone through as children leaves me wondering about the meaning of life.  After all, finding meaning in the midst of pain is one of the ways that people attempt to cope with life's difficulties.  Is life just a Woody Allen movie, searching for meaning but never finding it?  We live, we feel pain, we have a few laughs, and then we die, and that's it?

Well, no.  I don't believe that.

My clients come from a variety of religious and philosophical belief systems, and I try to work within a philosophical framework which makes sense to as many of them as possible.  I believe that life does have meaning and purpose.  Many of my patients also believe that, or at least hope that it is true.

My view is based on a belief that no matter how terrible a client's life has been, there is a point and a purpose to their living.  I do not believe that life is just random suffering.

And so my theory helps me to think of each life, and each person's suffering, from a perspective which attempts to be both psychological and spiritual at the same time.  Sometimes I share this idea with my clients, and sometimes they find it useful.

So, what is my theory?

First, we are born.  So far, so good.  Everybody can agree with that part of my theory.  Existential philosophers talk about our "thrownness."  We are "thrown" onto the stage of life.  We cannot choose to whom we or born, in what time era we live in, or in which culture we will live.  No matter what our belief system, I believe that we can agree that the infant or child is in a sense tossed onto the stage of life.  They are somewhat bewildered, at least about some things.  They don't have a rule book.  Or more accurately, they are given a rule book by their culture.  But the rule book of the family and of the culture they live in is often full of mistakes, and they don't have a perfect one to correct the one that they have been given.  They have to figure out for themselves a better way of living.

For some people, traumas and problems start very quickly. They might have a deformity.  They might have physical pain.  They might begin life addicted to drugs because their mother was on drugs during the pregnancy.  They might be born into an abusive family, or have a mother who is emotionally withdrawn because of post partum depression.  And so on. 

Almost all of us experience some form of problem or dilemma in our childhood.  At least most of us do.  Maybe all of us do.  The dilemma may be obvious, such as sexual abuse, or having a deformity, or being an unwanted child.  Or the dilemma may be subtle, such as having everything handed to us on a silver platter.  (How is this a dilemma?  I think that having things too easy creates difficulties for people later on in life.)  I'm not sure that anyone makes it through childhood without some kind of a dilemma.  Maybe they do, but I've not met that person yet.

We are immersed in the dilemma.  We are totally unprepared for it.  We don't even know that we are in a dilemma, but we experience the negative effects of it.  As a child we generally blame ourselves for the problems we experience.  We are immersed in them.  But we don't understand them.  We experience the fear of abuse or the uncertainty of war or the pain of hunger.  We don't know that we are innocent.  We are innocent, but we don't know it.  We are victims.

As the child grows older, their ability to think logically and abstractly gives them the ability to think more abstractly.  They no longer blame ourselves for everything that happens to them.  They start to blame their parents and other people (and sometimes rightly so) for what has happened to them.  If they are being abused, they may start to realize that what is happening is the abuser's fault, not theirs.

They may start to rebel or withdraw from the problem.  They may run away from home; or maybe they get pregnant or married in order to leave home..  They are sick and tired of being treated the way they have been.  They rebel.  They fight with their parents. Or they use drugs to try to make the problem go away.  They try to escape the pain.

But all too often, whatever their form of escape, the teenager has not actually escaped the problem.  They have internalized it. They thought they had gotten away from it; but they hadn't.  If they were abused by an alcoholic father, they may have picked an alcoholic husband to "act out" the problem over and over again--perhaps choosing several alcoholic husbands.  Women who have been sexually abused sometimes become promiscuous.  And sometimes they totally lose interest in sex.  They have not escaped the sexual problem.  They are only acting it out in various ways.

Next in life's sequence of events, the person's brain reaches maturity.  The frontal lobes reach maturity around age 25 (or later).  The frontal lobes give the person the ability to think and to act in fully mature ways.  The person has the ability to see their problems from a new perspective.

And at age 30, I think we may perhaps grow up in a different way.  The brain has theoretically matured by 25 or so, but at 30 I think that we may start to realize that things are not magically going to "just get better" by getting older.  We realize that if things are going to change (i.e., not being abused by alcoholic husbands) we are going to have to start making different decisions and doing things differently.

We can then use our mature brain and our emotional maturity to break free of the cycle of acting out the internalized dilemma.  We can opt out of the old dysfunctional cycles.  We can quit doing what we were doing, which was thinking we were escaping the dilemma when we were actually perpetuating it. 

And if we realize what we are doing, why we are doing it, and then stop acting out the dilemma then we have OVERCOME the dilemma. 

We gain wisdom from overcoming the dilemma.  Whenever we overcome a dilemma by refusing to act it out anymore, we have gained a type of knowledge that can be described as wisdom.  It is existential wisdom.  It cannot be learned out of a book, and to some degree it is unique to us and no one else.  Your wisdom is different from my wisdom, even if we went through somewhat similar dilemmas.  The dilemmas were never exactly the same, and so our wisdom can never be exactly the same.

And wisdom may just be the point of life.  Not just happiness.  Not wealth.  Not fame.  But deep understanding and mastery--existential wisdom learned the hard way that means that a particular dilemma will never again have control over us.

Now as we get older, we start to become less flexible in our thinking.  And if we live long enough, we are all likely to develop some form of dementia, such as Alzheimer's.  At that point, our ability to overcome our dilemma is lost.  We no longer have the self-awareness, the abstract thinking, the flexibility of personality, and the decision making power to overcome such powerful issues.  Probably we are best equipped to overcome dilemmas from the ages of 30 to 65.  That does not mean that we cannot do it before or after that time period, but the likelihood of doing so decreases in our later years.

Now, this theory of life is inadequate in some ways.  Notice that it does not really mention the importance of relationships, having children, spirituality, love, creativity, giving, and so on.  All of these could be fit into my theory, but each of these could be a theory of life in its own right.

My theory also does not take into account dilemmas that crop up in the middle of life rather than childhood (such as war, a severe car accident, death of a child, etc.). 

And it leaves open the question of what the meaning of life is when someone does not overcome their dilemma.  What if they are simply broken by the dilemma rather than overcoming it?

But the theory does, I believe, get at one very important issue.  If life is not random, and if it is more than a cruel joke, then there is a purpose.  And I think that the purpose of life if to learn and to love--to be people  of beauty and character--despite our dilemmas.  And that leads to wisdom.