What the second half is actually for.

What It Looks Like

The goals ran out, and nothing replaced them.

You did the work. You built the practice, the company, the body of work, the family. By any outside measure it went well. And somewhere in the last few years the whole arrangement stopped answering the question it used to answer.

People describe it in oddly similar language. A flatness that is not quite depression. A restlessness that has no obvious object. A Sunday evening feeling that has spread across the week. The sense of standing at the top of something and finding the view unfamiliar.

There is often real grief in that, and it is rarely named as grief. You are mourning a meaningfulness you assumed would arrive along with everything else, and it did not arrive, and no one warned you that this was a normal thing to happen to a competent adult in the middle of a good life.

How We Work

A straight existential conversation.

We take the question seriously rather than treating it as a symptom to be managed. What was the life for. What did you agree to and when. What have you been calling a preference that is actually a value, and what have you been calling a value that you inherited and never examined.

I begin every session with conversation, taking time to meet and hear from you, because this material does not surface well in a hurry. Then we look at what is here, including what the body is doing while you talk, and then we work. Often that is inquiry, which means asking the question underneath the question and staying long enough to hear the answer.

I am trained in cognitive behavioral work, psychodynamic work, somatic approaches, mindfulness-based therapy and the humanistic and existential traditions. Here it is mostly the last of those, with the others available when they are the right tool rather than the default one.

What Changes

Not an answer. A better relationship to the question.

I cannot tell you what your life is for, and I would distrust anyone who offered to. What tends to happen instead is that the question stops being an emergency. You develop the capacity to hold it, examine it, and act on what you find rather than outrunning it for another decade.

Practically, that often looks like a change of direction that other people find surprising and you find overdue. Sometimes it looks like the same life, held completely differently. Both are legitimate outcomes and I have no stake in which one you choose.

Fifty years of this work has made me patient about pace and impatient about pretending. I will tell you plainly what I think, including when I think you already know the answer and are waiting for permission to say it out loud.

Practical

How the work runs.

Sessions are 60 minutes, by secure video, anywhere in North Carolina. Most people begin weekly and adjust from there. I see adults 18 and over, and most of the people I work with are between 30 and 75.

This work asks you to become interested in your own inner life. If you want advice, a technique to apply on Tuesday, or someone to agree with you, I am not the right counselor, and I would rather say that here than three sessions in.

I do not treat addictions or eating disorders. If either is the primary concern I will refer you to someone who specializes in it.

Keep Reading

Related Reading