Maybe There is No Meaning
Sometimes the meaning behind something is that… there is no meaning.
In both mental health and spiritual spaces, we've become strongly attached to the idea that everything happens for a reason. We're encouraged to search for the lesson, identify the blessing in disguise, or uncover the deeper purpose behind every painful experience. While finding meaning can absolutely be healing, I think we also need to make room for another possibility: sometimes there isn't a hidden message waiting to be discovered. Sometimes life is simply painful, unfair, random or disappointing. And that's a truth many people, especially in spiritual spaces, struggle to sit with.
There are certainly times when assigning meaning to an experience can be empowering. If creating a narrative helps someone move forward without harming themselves or anyone else, I don't see anything wrong with that. But where I become concerned is when the search for meaning becomes an expectation rather than an invitation. Some people leave spiritual conversations believing they just haven't "dug deep enough" if they can't find the lesson. They keep searching, analyzing, and questioning themselves, only to end up exhausted and feeling even more defeated or depressed because they can't find what may not exist. Sometimes you keep digging only to find...more dirt.
From a mental health perspective, this can actually make someone's suffering worse. There are situations where it would be insensitive, even unethical, to ask someone what lesson they learned from a traumatic experience or how it "served" them. Not every wound exists to teach us something profound.
As clinicians and spiritual practitioners, our discomfort with unanswered questions should never become someone else's burden. Yet this is exactly where I see many untrained, or undertrained, professionals default to problem-solving. They rush to find the lesson, identify the blessing, or reframe the pain because they can't tolerate sitting with someone else's suffering without an explanation. But the need to assign meaning often says more about the practitioner than it does about the person's experience.
The ability to sit with uncertainty, grief & pain without immediately trying to fix it is a clinical skill. It requires emotional regulation, self-awareness, and the capacity to tolerate discomfort without making it about yourself. When we insist that every painful experience has a purpose, we risk communicating that someone's pain is only acceptable once it has been transformed into a lesson. That's not compassion; it's often an attempt to relieve the practitioner's discomfort.
Sometimes healing is not found in the search for meaning. It's found in making peace with the possibility that there isn't one... and choosing to move forward anyway.