so you've asked me to explain to you what an existential crisis is because there are so many people who are using that expression and they're being very unclear about it and very inaccurate in some situations so people are using it basically to refer to any crisis that is overwhelming or that might annihilate somebody's existence well that is true in a sense it is true that an existential crisis is to be turned into nothing to have your life ripped apart completely revolutionized where all the safety all the security that you used to have is ripped away
and you are exposed empty alone in the face of a whole new world in which you have not got or do not feel you have got the wherewithal to find your bearings or to resolve the problems that are facing you so the way we use the words the concept existential crisis in existential therapy is to refer to that state of mind that happens to a person who is confronted with such terrible trouble such opposition and such a crisis in their life that they feel denuded undone that they experience a complete collapse of all their previous
values so typically an existential crisis is when all the things you used to believe and that used to be the foundation of your life and that used to help you find your way in the world and help you feel secure in the world and help you feel that there was a meaning to life have been taken away have been undone or are slowly being unraveled bit by bit so this can happen in all kinds of situations most people have some kind of existential crisis when they get to adolescence so what happens is that as we
grow up we build our lives we build our personalities we build our sense of ego our sense of physical safety our sense of what position we can hold in the world and how we can relate to other people and how we can take our world as it were for granted how we can be at ease in it how we become comfortable in it and our parents and the people around us do their very best to secure that as much as possible and give us often an overly secure sense of ourselves in that world so that
we end up believing that the world is a safe place that everything's gonna be alright that we'll always do well and so on and so forth the world basically becomes more and more solid and quite stagnant in a sense now there comes a point in our adolescence where this gets perturbed because we've grown up so much now and we're changing so much and we're so much more independent out there in the real world that inevitably we find ourselves faced with challenges that make rips in that security what is exposed for us is the profound insecurity
of human existence the dangers that we all have to face we become aware that we can take life for granted that people died at pets die that we can't take our successful granted that other people will not always like us that there isn't necessarily room in the world for us that we can't just assume that we will find a job that we like or that we will complete the exams that we want to or we are expected to basically we come to reality at some and in our growing up and as that reality hits with
bang that may rip away the save structures of our lives and we may end up sort of collapsing inwards into a kind of internal turmoil where we begot become more and more self reflective now the art of the existential crisis lies in turning that to our advantage to actually find safety in ourselves and to find safety in the very discovery of the unsafety of the world in the acceptance of the challenge that human life employs the acceptance of the possibilities that lie in being insecure in not being secured in a stagnant stuck way but being
able to be on an adventure in life to go out there discover explore and create new worlds all the time because what mature human existence is about if unfortunately existential crisis after existential crisis where we become aware that nothing is safe that everything will change even the best relationships will end in illness and death and people grow apart things happen difficulties and Sue from even good things everyday life is risky life is dangerous life is a challenge we have to learn to deal with that and find that flexibility that new sort of strengths which doesn't
come from holding on to safety but that comes from trusting the flow of things the movement of things and discovering that the more we go with their movement and the better we get at it so existential crisis in adolescence is a necessary thing and those who don't experience it will invariably experience it later on in life but of course as I said most of us from that point in adolescence where we go through an existential crisis discovered that life is one existential crisis after another and that you know we have another existential crisis when we
go to university or when we go into our first job or when we have a child every new big event in our life will pose such new situations to us that we have to find our way around and that we have to adjust to and adapt to and that we have to also adapt with other people into creating new structures in our relationships and new ways of being new tolerance for anxiety for sadness for losses for disappointments all these things come out of our experience of loss of meaning of loss of the things that we
took for granted and loss of the things that are precious for us okay so if things go well enough then we build more and more strength and resilience in ourselves to face these existential crises but events may occur that really take everything away from us so at all levels of existence we may find ourselves annihilated threatened you know denuded of any security any safety at all so what I mean by that is that for instance somebody who lives through a war as my parents did in the Netherlands where they lived for many years with total
physical in security including hunger and the fear of death around every corner but also social insecurity where other people had become not trustworthy anymore because she never knew who might be the enemy and who might end up being this your death nor a sense of personal security because your own sense of building anything for yourself was constantly taken apart again unraveled again no sooner had you established something for yourself or it would be taken away again so what people discovered in that kind of situation is that the only way you can secure something within that
total blackout of existential crisis is a building of what I call air routes where you connect at a spiritual dimension which is the dimension of meaning making where you have belief systems and ideologies and systems of understanding of the world that help you find your way it's like the level at which we make a map so what what we discovered in the war is that or in any war is that the people who are able to make do with very little physical security with the only temporary safety in relationships and the constant challenge in their
personal strength will do better if they have an overall sense of the meaning of that challenge the purpose of that being put to the test and they believe that they're actually creating new more creative powers better strength and that they're also learning a tremendous amount about how to live a human life in the best possible way so in other words what we can derive from going through these intense forms of existential crisis in a situation of war or in a situation for Refugees for instance it is very much like that you know they need to
discover that further purpose that deeper sense of decency or goodness in human existence that we can only create for ourselves so in an existential crisis when the physical world is destroyed the social world is under threat your personal world is unsafe your spiritual world your ideological world has to become stronger and stronger and stronger but if you make that spiritual world into a world where you rely on a saviour to rescue you things will get worse if you allow that spiritual world to be a world where you find out what the truth about things is
and you are willing to be flexible and go with the flow with some new discoveries and pursue that purpose of understanding clarity holding strong making new relationships new pacts with other people create new safety in the world again then you might find that the existential crisis has had a role to play in making you a better deeper more human being and that is what we often see in people who have been through deep existential crisis that they become very good people very understanding people who have patience and tolerance of other people who suffer and other
people who are under fire once we have experienced this kind of depth of existential crisis we become the kind of people who can build a better world so while existential crisis is a terrible thing and is something that most of us try to avoid like the plague in actual fact most people after the fact will recognize an acknowledge that their existential crisis has been for a reason and has had this very purpose of bringing them to life at the very moment that they were threatened by real misery real poverty real death real deprivation they had
to fall back on the things that are essential and that remained true and solid and decent and worthwhile and meaningful at the worst of times and when we have gone to debt depth of existence that is exposed by existential crisis then we have some real foundations to create something strong and more reliable than anything we've ever had before but of course as we know the way the world goes and the way life is even those solid things at some point will be threatened so what's happening at the moment in Western culture in contemporary society is
that we can oversee the possibility of such an existential crisis striking us with all the things we've taken for granted in having fairly easy lives where our survival is looked after not just by ourselves but by the whole of society that that could change completely that we could end up finding ourselves living in a much more exposed world where there will be much more competition for survival and we're there for all of our values and all of our self belief will be in question so when politicians use the term existential crisis simply to mean a
crisis where you know we might be shot at or where we might be under some physical Rett they are not using the term in the fullest sense of the word and they're certainly not understanding the challenge in existential crisis of re-evaluating your life reconsidering what is worth working for and what you need to be willing sometimes to let go of so existential crisis is much undervalued it's highly misunderstood but anyone who's had one or who's going through an existential crisis right at a minute will know exactly what I'm talking about and hopefully they will find
that is peace at the center of that storm in their life and that they can start to create that balancing capacity that we need when we are in the throes of this kind of challenge so anyone out there listening to this who is facing an existential crisis I wish you courage my friend I wish you the courage to be finding a new strength in yourself a new strength that comes from flexibility rather than from opposition or stagnation I wish you the elegance and the vitality to thrive on this crisis and to mature in it and
to come out a fuller deeper more tolerant more understanding true human being stick in there be brave and all will be well
