Does Everything Really Happen for a Reason?

When my son Neil was 17, he was hit by a drunk driver in a crash that killed his girlfriend and left him with a serious traumatic brain injury. Neil spent days in the intensive care unit, months in physical therapy, and years in counseling dealing with his depression, anxiety, and loss. During that time, well-meaning friends and family members routinely told us, “Things happen for a reason.” I bristled. What possible reason could there be for my sweet boy to endure this much suffering?

How Writing Helped Me Through

Throughout Neil’s ordeal, I kept a journal. On the page I processed my disenfranchised grief as the “other mother” whose child did not die in the accident. I managed my deep sorrow for everything Neil had lost. And I coped with my anger at the drunk driver who caused this misery. Eventually I wrote a memoir about it all. I became an ambassador for the Brain Injury Association, giving speeches to high school students during prom season and college kids during alcohol awareness week. Audience members came up to me afterwards to share their own tales of trauma and grief. We had connected through stories, joined together in our loss.

Making Meaning Through Connection

In sharing my story with others, I had made meaning from our tragedy. If one teenager used an Uber on prom night, I had achieved something positive. If one college student avoided his car after a kegger, I had made some small difference in the world.

The event you make meaning from doesn’t have to be as traumatic as a car accident. You don’t have to write a book or become an ambassador to effect change. Even small situations can feel negative if they disrupt our cohesive worldview or run up against our core values or beliefs. Meaning-making occurs as we appraise the situation and re-align its basic components with our broader understanding of ourselves in the world.

How Writing Helps Us Re-evaluate and Find Meaning

Reflecting upon a verbal encounter by writing about it can help us process the conversation more fully. In doing so, we might learn something new about ourselves, identify some strength we exhibited that we did not recognize before. Perhaps we were angry but held our tongue and didn’t lash out. Now, writing about the exchange reflectively, we see where the other person was coming from. Now we can respond more appropriately, having clarified our own needs and responses.

Sometimes reflection helps us see situations with a deeper clarity. Things might just not be as bad as we thought they were. As we change and grow, we may come to this gradually. But writing helps us achieve this steadiness and balance sooner as we assign more benign causes and effects to an event.

Reflection can also help with meaning-making by allowing us to see positive outcomes we may not have recognized before. Writing reflectively about the pandemic, we remember a new skill we learned. Illness in a family member may open channels of communication long thought to be closed to certain subjects.

Sometimes negative experiences, even large obstacles like injury or illness, compel us to re-frame our larger goals for ourselves. As we reflect, we realize what is important in our lives, what is worth pursuing, cherishing, or working on and what we would be better off letting go of as it no longer serves us well.

Maybe things happen for a reason. Maybe they don’t. But by taking the time to actively reflect—preferably with pen in hand—we can make our own meaning in any situation.