((((( Der_Sohn_des_Leides )))))

Quote from Yalom's book, "The Gift of Therapy"

"We humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky maneuver of denying our personal authorship of this meaning. Thus we conclude that it was 'out there' waiting for us. Our ongoing search for substantial meaning systems often throws us into crises of meaning.
More individuals seek therapy because of concerns about meaning in life than therapists often realize."

So there is some aspect of 'learning' to do this, to assign meaning to our lives. I think it begins in our early life, as witnessed by how well our parents do this. I think if we don't get to have that experience, then we have to learn it somewhere else like in therapy, where we can explore what we learned and maybe more important, what we didn't learn. I know for me that therapy is helping with the feelings of puposelessness, pointlessness, hopelessness, emptiness, uselessness.... I often still feel like I don't exist outside of therapy, but in that relationship, in that room, I do feel like I exist, I matter.