Life Transitions, Meaning and Purpose

There is a kind of unease that never announces itself as a crisis. It shows up quietly: in the pause before you answer “how are you”, in a Sunday evening that feels heavier than it should, in the sense that a life built carefully over decades has become, without warning, unfamiliar.

A marriage ends. A diagnosis arrives. The children leave. A career that defined you is over, by choice or otherwise. Someone dies before the conversation you were going to have with them.

We call these life transitions. But underneath the practical disruption — the changed routine, the altered finances, the different shape of a week — something else is usually happening. The transition has knocked loose a set of questions that ordinary life is very good at keeping buried.

Why a transition brings these up

Much of daily life runs on borrowed certainty. We don't spend our mornings interrogating the meaning of existence; we go to work, keep relationships going, plan holidays, and the structure itself does a great deal of the meaning-making for us.

A major transition interrupts that system. Retirement removes the structure that told you who you were for forty years. Illness or disability forces a direct encounter with the body's limits, and often with mortality. Divorce dismantles the “we” that had quietly organised decades of decisions. In each case the given that was being managed stops being background and becomes foreground.

This is why people describe these periods in language that sounds out of proportion to the event itself: I don't know who I am any more. Nothing feels like it matters. They are not being dramatic. They are accurately reporting that the old structure of meaning has stopped working, and a new one has not yet been built.

Success is not the same as meaning

Some of the people I see have built everything they set out to build. The career, the security, the house, the standing. Nothing is missing, and something still is.

That is a particularly difficult place to speak from. When a life looks enviable from outside, unhappiness starts to feel like ingratitude. People often arrive apologising for being there at all — aware that others have far less and manage far better, half-convinced that having a problem of this kind is self-indulgent. The guilt then does its own work, and keeps them quiet for years.

Very often the emptiness arrives when the career ends. While the work continues, it supplies the structure, the status, the reason to get up and the answer to “what do you do”. When it stops, what is left is the question of who you are without it — which may not have been asked in forty years.

Meaning is made, not found

Viktor Frankl, who worked this out under conditions most of us cannot imagine, held that meaning is not lying around waiting to be discovered. It is generated — by what we do, by what we love, and by the stance we take towards what happens to us.

Meaning, purpose and love are, on his account, the real contributors to a life that feels worth living. Not comfort, and not achievement. What each of those looks like is entirely individual, and working out your own version is much of what this kind of counselling is for.

James Hollis calls the midlife version of this a necessary descent: not a breakdown, but the beginning of a second and more honest life, built on the ruins of a first one that was largely inherited or assembled to please other people. None of this makes the experience comfortable. It does mean the discomfort is frequently meaningful rather than merely dysfunctional.

The questions worth sitting with

These are the questions I put to people. They are not quotations from anyone — they are an understanding of what this work asks of the self, shaped by James Hollis's writing on the second half of life.

None of these has a quick answer, and they are not meant to be settled in one sitting. But they are a fair indication of what this kind of counselling is actually for, and of how far it can go. Most people find that once these have been asked properly, they do not close again.

I have been through one of these

Not by choice. My accident took away something that had been at the centre of my life, and with it a large part of who I understood myself to be. What followed was a long stretch of feeling genuinely lost — not depressed exactly, but without a map.

It also did something I had not anticipated. Alongside that life I had built another, organised largely around ambition and what it could provide. I am not disparaging that. Ambition, work and the means to live well contribute a great deal to the quality of a life, and for many people they always will.

What I found is that they struggle to stand on their own, in any sustained or meaningful way — and least of all in the face of a later-life crisis. When the first life was taken from me, the second could not answer for it.

I would not recommend acquiring that insight this way. But it is why I take these questions seriously rather than treating them as abstractions, and why I am not uncomfortable sitting with someone while the ground is still moving.

When it is more than a rough patch

Most people move through ordinary transitions without professional support, and that is right. Grief, adjustment and reassessment are part of being human, not automatically clinical events.

There are signs, though, that a transition has moved into territory where a therapeutic relationship helps more than time passing:

• A flatness or disconnection that doesn't lift even once circumstances have settled
• Decision paralysis, because none of the available identities feel like you any more
• Grief that has outgrown its original object, where losing a job, a relationship or a physical capacity has become entangled with a much larger loss of self
• Circling thoughts about death, freedom, isolation or futility that never open into anything
• Performing competence for everyone around you while privately feeling the floor has gone

None of these is weakness or failure. If anything they suggest someone taking the questions seriously rather than numbing them, which is the harder and more honest path.

What the work actually looks like

You will not be treated as someone with a fault to be corrected. The starting assumption is that you already have the capacity to find your way through, and that what has been missing is not expertise about your life but a relationship steady and honest enough to think inside.

Carl Rogers argued that three conditions make that possible: empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. They matter especially here, because these questions are frightening enough without also fearing judgement for asking them.

In practice it means slowing down rather than rushing towards reassurance or a five-step plan. It means asking what this ending actually means to you — not what it is supposed to mean, or what a book says it should. It makes room for anger at a body that has let you down, for the strange guilt of feeling relief after a death, for the vertigo of discovering that a carefully built life was never quite yours.

Anxiety often arrives alongside all of this. That is not automatically pathology: it is frequently the cost of encountering real possibility, and it usually has something to say. More on that on the anxiety page.

And much of the work is simply awareness — seeing, without flinching, what is actually happening in you, rather than the story you have been telling yourself about it. That is the thread running through my whole approach.

A different way to hold the question

The unsettling questions that arrive in a transition are not a malfunction to be fixed so that you can return to normal. They are often the start of a more honest relationship with your own life — one built on what is true for you, rather than on the roles that carried you through the previous chapter.

That does not make the transition painless. It does mean the pain is not meaningless, and that it is not something you have to sit with alone.

Where this often overlaps

Transitions rarely arrive alone. They run through self-worth, self-esteem and identity, they are among the commonest routes into loneliness, they sit underneath a great deal of anxiety, and for some people they are bound up with living with limb loss or disability or with addiction.

Practical details

Sessions are fifty minutes, in person at my practice in Stellenbosch or online by Zoom, in English or Afrikaans. Fees and other practical questions are answered on the FAQ page.

Getting in touch

Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form. You do not need to have named the problem before you write.

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