That time I Fell into a Nihilistic Hellhole

If you’ve been hanging around Wonderland for a while, you might know I work as a therapist, in addition to caring for my daughter and pontificating to you all via THE INTERNET a couple times per week. Now, being a therapist involves a lot of sitting in stiff-backed chairs, mustache-twirling, pipe-smoking, and saying “mmm…mmmhmmm.”

Just kidding. But seriously, I was wondering why my 1.5 year old daughter, Warrior Girl, says “uh huh” and “hmmm” all the time when my husband pointed out it is because I am a therapist.

But really, being a therapist involves a whole lot of listening to things that are hard to hear, and a whole lot of sitting with people in their sadness, their anger, their despair. This is tough to do without a paradigm of life that can give meaning and/or coherence to the vast suffering we therapists (and humans in general) encounter on the daily.

So not long ago, I was skating through life, not really paying attention, when suddenly I woke up and found myself in a nihilistic hellhole of absurdity. Yes, yes, I’m sure there were warning signs. However, I was too busy writing grad school papers and collapsing in front of Netflix to notice. Thus, after a few months of feeling increasing levels of despondency, despair, and wondering whether therapy even helped anyone, and whether it even mattered whether any of us were happy because we’re just coincidentally intelligent apes who happened to come into existence for no reason whatsoever and who will soon blow ourselves up….. I woke up and realized what had happened.

So what happened? In the pursuit of truth and intellectual honesty, I slowly, ever so slowly, began to adopt a paradigm that seemed so real, so obvious, that I failed to recognize it was a paradigm at all. Belief blindness –it’s kind of like white culture blindness, where a person belongs to the dominant culture in their society and thus believes they have no culture. Likewise, if your point of view meshes well with the POV’s around you, it is easy to be blind to the fact that a paradigm is influencing your reality.

But as it turns out, the nihilistic/absurdity paradigm couldn’t hold up to the rigors of facing enormous human suffering day in and day out. Or it couldn’t hold me up. Hell, I was just as despairing as my clients!

So when I woke up and found myself at the bottom of a nihilistic pit of despair, I was thrilled. No, I’m not being sarcastic, because once I realized my paradigm was not just the way things are but was an optional way of viewing the world, I knew I could escape! Get out of jail free!

As someone once told me, our values should determine your paradigm, not the other way around. You can’t not have a paradigm, but there is danger is paradigm-blindness. Unfortunately, the paradigm of absurdity and nihilism did not support my values of trying to make the world a better place, or of putting effort into…anything at all. Rather, all my efforts seemed pointless.

I realized I needed to adapt my paradigm to support my intentions to try to help others, to try to help myself, to live a creative and fulfilling life. I had to find a way to understand and find meaning in the suffering I encounter routinely through work. I had to believe it is okay (and not selfish) to pursue happiness and that it may even benefit others if I am happy–this as opposed to believing my personal happiness is of no consequence whatsoever. So there I went, confronting limiting belief after limiting belief and replacing them with beliefs that better suit my values, my intentions, and my goals.

Thus, I slowly stopped digging, and began to climb out of the hellhole into which I stumbled. I hope my time there will serve me with empathy and understanding of what the world looks like from there. Which might come in handy in a profession like mine.

In the meantime though, I have to be careful of my footing. Left unchecked, nihilism becomes my default setting. It takes effort to maintain an awareness of the suffering in the world while retaining a sense of hope, a sense that our striving is worthwhile. To find a sort of dignity in our human struggles. Because after all, here we are.