Everything does not Happens for a Reason
I will never accept that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ but as someone who believes in the power of faith, and someone who desires to assert my own sense of free will, I have chosen to believe that I can make meaning from anything.
That is not to say I can make sense of tragedy or justify the unjust, but in an effort to find peace, I can accept that I become stronger through the endurance of the catastrophe.
As someone who has survived sexual assault, I can hardly imagine a way I could be convinced that what happened to me, what happens to more than a third of the women in the world, was reasonable or happened for a reason. Neither am I willing to attach to a victim identity. Instead, I have chosen to make meaning of my experiences. This practice of meaning-making is by no means my own innovation, in fact, I imagine it is as ancient a practice as the development of mythology. Just as myth is the creation of a story, the telling of a tale for the understanding and sense-making of an entire culture, so too is meaning-making, the process of creating a story from the fragmented, chaotic, and seemingly meaningless parts of our inner culture.
Our own narratives are, more often than not, a reflection of the myths of our culture.
The real challenge comes when we attempt to liberate ourselves from the toxic mythologies of our own cultures. The stories of blame and shame seem to punish us just for being born into a world full of dangerous and violent narratives.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, a book I cannot recommend highly enough, Viktor Frankl recounts the atrocities of surviving the Holocaust and explains the therapeutic technique he developed. He refrains from many of the narratives that depict the incredible violence of this genocide, instead focusing on the opportunities for meaning-making that he would develop into the therapeutic technique called logotherapy, the therapy of making meaning. As with all senseless violence, there is absolutely no justification or reasoning that can be used to address the Holocaust, instead, the author makes meaning of who he is and how he became who he was meant to be. Despite the irreconcilable losses and violence that Frankl endured, he was able to shift his perspective from one of victim of circumstance to one of purpose. His purpose? To survive. To endure the impossible, to go on to make meaningful written works, and to fulfill his sense of purpose as a therapist with a greater understanding of traumatic experiences than most. Not only did he live on to create meaningful therapeutic techniques and texts, but Frankl credits his ability to maintain a sense of meaning as the reason he was able to survive torture and enslavement in the Nazi internment camps.
Frankl seems to have created an inner narrative that could sustain him even in the face of the murder of his wife, parents, and all of his family. Not only this, he maintained a sense of purpose and trust in his purpose whether he survived the internment camps or not. He continued to provide medical care and relief to his fellow prisoners even as he was tortured and fell terribly ill himself. In the face of senseless violence, he stayed connected to his own reasons for living, his own meaning of it all. Though there was no reason Viktor Frankl should have faced the devastation he endured, from his own sense of free will and belief, he created meaning and purpose, tools that helped him survive spiritually and literally.
In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté, an infant when he and his mother fled Nazi-occupied Hungary, the renowned physician and author speaks to both the empowering and disempowering qualities of myth. He begins his book with a critique of the modern myth of productivism and the symptoms of ill health we have normalized in the name of work, propped up by certain concerning practices in modern medicine.
He demonstrates the power of myth and how significantly it impacts human behavior and therefore our culture and sense of health and well-being.
Finally, he calls on the power of myth to guide us to more sustainable and regenerative behavior. He points to how, generations ago, people took lessons of moral obligation from mythology, learning how to grow food sustainably and treat one another well from ancient mythological resources. Without regenerative cultural stories to guide us, what meaning do we make of our experience as over-worked and highly traumatized beings, paying handsomely to live in a culture that challenges our health at every turn?
While Nietzsche said “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” he couldn’t have meant that trauma itself makes for stronger stock. Instead, the overcoming of adversity, the growth in spite of violence, and pain is the fire where strength is forged.
No one should have to be so strong as to look assault or any trauma in the face with the determination to go on, yet so many of us are called to this strength training. We face it, hopefully with the support system that reminds us that nothing we have ever done deserves the trauma we have received. The kind of fortitude that we must find within us is our reward granted in the face of a punishing society full of false and toxic narratives.