Sigmund Freud said “everyone owes nature a death.”
Death is always with us, waiting. It worries and terrifies us.
Its presence seeps into who we are and what we do. And most of the time we avoid it—at a cost.
The angry, inexplicable outburst? Chronic impatience, especially with loved ones? Panic attacks? Our obsessive compulsive actions? Hyper vigilance? All of these often have roots in our unacknowledged and unprocessed fear of death.
Religion offers a presumptuous prescription. Psychoanalysis and other types of depth therapy offer a safe, authentic and fruitful inquiry.
Death and our silence
Death rarely gets talked about—even too often in the clinical setting. This is because most people, including clinicians, are plagued with their own death anxiety. It often feels safer and smarter to ignore the topic altogether.
Finding a psychotherapist who has spent ample time undergoing his own therapy and processing all that comes up, including death and its attendant anxieties, is strongly advised.
Some therapies even make death a focal point.
Whether death is the focal point or a focal point is not really (sorry) the point. What’s crucial is that this integral part of who we are and what we think gets explored.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus is known to have said, “I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.”
There can be no one-size-fits-all approach to death. After all we know little about it. But therapy plays a crucial role in opening up a trusted space to explore it, in guiding the patient toward a further singular understanding of it and thus resolving anxiety around it.
(Featured photo by Rod Reiring used under CC BY)