“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
A quote often attributed to Viktor Frankl has stayed with me for a long time. Not because it sounds clever, but because it speaks to something I see often in the counselling room, and in life generally.
People rarely come to counselling saying they have lost their sense of meaning. What they usually say is that they feel flat, restless, overwhelmed, anxious, or tired of carrying things on their own. Sometimes they say they feel stuck, or like they’re just going through the motions. Other times they can’t explain it at all, only that something doesn’t feel right anymore.
When life starts to feel like that, it makes sense that we look for ways to get through the day. We keep busy. We distract ourselves. We fill the space with work, noise, habits, routines, scrolling, drinking, anything that stops us having to sit with what we’re really feeling. None of that means there’s something wrong with you. In many ways, it shows how hard you’ve been trying to cope.
The difficulty is that distraction can slowly take the place of living. You can find yourself doing more and more, but feeling less and less connected to yourself, to other people, or to any real sense of direction. Life can start to feel like something you are managing rather than something you are part of.
In counselling, I don’t see people as broken. More often, I see people who have spent a long time being what they felt they had to be. Meeting expectations. Holding things together. Taking on responsibility. Trying not to let anyone down. Over time, it can become hard to know what you actually feel, what you want, or even who you are underneath all of that.
Part of the work we do together is slowing things down enough to notice what has been pushed aside. That might be feelings you haven’t had space for, questions you’ve never really asked, or a sense that the life you’re living doesn’t quite feel like your own. That can feel uncomfortable at first, because distraction is often easier than honesty. But when we begin to look at things more openly, something often starts to shift.
Not because someone tells you what to do, and not because you suddenly become a different person, but because you start to understand yourself in a deeper and more real way. From there, change tends to come more naturally, in a way that feels less forced and more like something that belongs to you.
I see counselling as a place where that kind of understanding can grow. A space where you don’t have to pretend, don’t have to have the right answers, and don’t have to make sense of everything straight away. Just somewhere to be real, and to begin making sense of your life in a way that feels more connected, more honest, and more meaningful.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that something is wrong with you.
Sometimes it’s that the way you’ve been living no longer feels like it has meaning.
And noticing that can be the start of something important.
Wildwood Counselling & Supervision 