I have a slightly suspicious relationship with the idea that everything happens for a reason.
Not because I think life is meaningless. Quite the opposite.
I think we are very good at finding meaning.
Sometimes perhaps a little too good.
We Are Born Storytellers
Give us enough time and we can turn almost anything into a story.
That difficult job taught me something.
That relationship happened for a reason.
Moving away was exactly what I needed.
I had to go through that to become who I am now.
This seems to start early. The Yale psychologists Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom found that young children readily accept that events happen for something, even when the explanation makes no sense at all. Asked about a broken bicycle, five- to seven-year-olds were happy to agree it might have happened to teach someone a lesson about brushing their teeth. Adults are more selective, but the habit doesn’t disappear. In their research, even people who didn’t believe in God often described important life events as if they were meant to happen.
There is something comforting about being able to look back and see a path.
Life Doesn’t Feel Like a Path While We’re Living It
The problem is that life rarely feels like a path while we’re living it.
At the time, it is usually a collection of decisions, mistakes, accidents, hopes, distractions, and things we thought would happen but didn’t.
We don’t know which details will turn out to be important.
We don’t know which people will become important.
We don’t know whether the thing we are worrying about today will still feel important in five years.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it well in his journals: life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Of Course I Ended Up Here
Yet afterwards, we often rewrite the whole thing.
We take all the uncertainty and turn it into inevitability.
Of course I ended up here.
Did you?
Or did you simply end up here?
Psychologists have a name for part of this. Baruch Fischhoff, who studied hindsight bias in the 1970s, called it “creeping determinism”: once we know how something turned out, it starts to feel as though it was always going to turn out that way. We forget how open things once felt.
Something similar can happen with hard times. Many of us have told ourselves, or been told, that a painful experience made us stronger. Sometimes it did. But when Patricia Frazier and her colleagues measured people before and after a difficult event, the growth people said they had experienced often didn’t match the changes the researchers could actually measure. The story of growth and the growth itself weren’t always the same thing.
Wanting Our Lives to Make Sense
I wonder if some of our discomfort with uncertainty comes from this need to have a coherent story about ourselves.
We want to know who we are.
We want our choices to make sense.
We want our past to explain our present.
And when it doesn’t, we can feel as though something has gone wrong.
To be fair to stories, they can help. The psychologist Dan McAdams has spent decades studying the life stories people tell, and those who describe their lives in terms of difficulty leading to something good tend, on average, to report greater wellbeing. But McAdams has also pointed out that this kind of redemption story is a particular cultural script, and not the only way to make sense of a life. When it becomes the expected story, people whose experiences don’t fit it can feel they’ve failed at their own lives.
Room for Contradictions
But perhaps a life doesn’t have to be a particularly good story.
Perhaps it can contain contradictions.
You can love something and leave it.
You can make a decision that was right for you at the time and later wish you hadn’t made it.
You can spend years pursuing something and discover that you don’t want it anymore.
You can understand exactly why you behaved a certain way and still not particularly like the behaviour.
You can grow without being able to turn your past into a neat little origin story.
When Therapy Looks for the Explanation
I think therapy sometimes gets caught up in this too.
There can be a temptation to find the explanation.
Why am I like this?
Where did this come from?
What caused it?
Those questions can be useful. But sometimes understanding the past doesn’t produce a satisfying answer so much as a more complicated one.
Research on grief offers an interesting example. It’s often assumed that people need to find meaning in a loss in order to recover. But when Christopher Davis and his colleagues studied bereaved people, fewer than half had found any meaning in their loss, even more than a year later. And a good number of people never searched for meaning at all, and seemed to be coping relatively well. Making sense of things can help. It just isn’t the only way through.
And perhaps that’s okay.
Maybe we don’t always need to turn our lives into stories with excellent plot development.
Maybe sometimes we can simply say:
This happened. I made the best sense of it that I could at the time. I know more now.
That may be enough.
If this resonates, you might also like When Psychological Frameworks Help Us Understand Ourselves and Learning to Sit With Your Emotions.
Therapy doesn’t have to mean finding the one explanation for everything. Sometimes it’s simply a place to look at your story with more curiosity, and to let it be as complicated as it really is. At Trueform Therapy, I offer one-to-one sessions in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU. You’re welcome to get in touch to ask any questions before booking.
If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further
Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (2018) is a funny, honest memoir by a historian diagnosed with cancer in her thirties, about what happens when life refuses to follow the expected script.
Dan McAdams’s The Redemptive Self (2006, revised 2013) explores the life stories we tell, why redemption stories are so appealing, and what they can leave out.
And if you’d like to look at the research directly:
Davis and colleagues on searching for meaning in loss (2000): abstract
Banerjee and Bloom on seeing purpose in life events: Yale Scientific
Frazier and colleagues on perceived versus actual growth after trauma (2009): Association for Psychological Science
Leave a Reply