Professor Emmy van Deurzen "Rising from our Existential Crisis: Widening the Human Horizon."

that my words will be very much based on and the reason I wrote that book are that my entire life has really been about thinking about crisis and what happens to human beings when things go wrong I grew up in the Netherlands was born soon after the end of the second World War war and I observed the pain and the trauma not just in my parents who had had to hide during the War and who had starved but of a whole population which had been violently occupied for five years so my heart absolutely goes out

to our Ukrainian colleagues and I fervently wish to support them in every way we can my book start with this quote from Maya anelu which lots of people know well you may write me down in history with your bitter Twisted lies you may trod me in the very dirt but still like dust I'll rise you may shoot me with your words you may cut me with your eyes you may kill me with your hatefulness but still like air I'll rise very appropriate words at the moment as the world is burning once again so how do

we as psychotherapists but as human beings make sense of human existence when the world is constantly changing and in danger and how can we help other people to find meaning again after crisis despite this great adversity and their despair how do we go down with our existential crisis instead of going under how do we learn to rise again as Pat was saying this morning so in the book I speak about rising from the pandemic which has been a kind of wakeup call to us all about how we are all Linked In This Global world and

how the external conditions of Our Lives matter so greatly and how we need to be in solidarity with each other but we also have to do this because we are going to go into a period of nonstop crisis with the climate crisis and now as we have seen in the last few horrible weeks with political threats and War so this is a message that is relevant to absolutely everybody we need an existential turn we need to bring into view philosophical ideas that help us EXP explore our ways of being in the world and what's wrong

with them and that's not about interest psychic realities or maybe it comes to that too but it is to widen our view to the external realities that will impact on all of us so we need to learn to approach these problems in real life in the real World in a creative in a dynamic and in a very sensitive and reflective manner but it is all about how we find our meaning and purpose in the world ultimately this is a search for truth and a search for courage so I call come from an existential background and

we believe in having a constructive dialogue with clients Beyond blame and shame we don't believe in Psychopathology but in understanding people's modes of being we focus on the actual life as the person live lives it and we call that onto Dynamics the Dynamics of being rather than just psychodynamics we make a map of the connections in the person's world and we take a philosophical view of human existence so we constantly ask ourselves what is it that truly matters to this person now and we believe that anxiety guilt Despair and suffering are paradoxically the key to

how change is arrived at I used this four World model to always remind myself that the world is not simple it is not a monistic world nor is it just a dualistic world it's a nonbinary world and it is layered it has many dim dimensions and these four always need to be taken into account when a person is in an existential crisis their physical space their social space their personal space and their spiritual space will all be affected they will all have been Disturbed and they will feel disoriented ated so what is an existential crisis

it is exactly God it is a sudden upheaval a catastrophe that affects and potentially endangers our entire life at all these different levels it is a sudden shocking lifechanging experience where all of our nor noral connections that give us safety are destroyed at all these levels usually at the same time so we need to desperately secure the person we need to help them find new actions which will bring back the values in their world so in my book on existential crisis I speak about many different things I start talking about my own experience of existential

crisis at the age of 10 so the first 10 years were very much in the light of the second world war and the fear of the Cold War and the threats of nuclear war but then like lightning out of a blue sky at the age of 10 I had a serious traffic accident and spent many many weeks in hospital after many hours in a coma with head injury I was stuck in a bed I couldn't move I was told my life was in danger and I was absolutely having to reinvent myself and find my own

security because I could have no visitors I describe in the book how I did that with the means at my disposal and the castner book on LTI and Lisa dotus Lin became a very important instrument in that process because it taught me that in the moment of crisis when everything goes blank as it were and it is as if nobody cares about what is happening to you there is this empty space in which the world comes clear to you some suddenly you know what has happened who you are what matters and how you need to

change your life if you get a chance to do so and that is what I did this is just after I came out of Hospital four four months after the accident when my parents took me on a holiday to Denmark Sweden Norway Germany all in light of making connections with other European countries so that Wars would never happen again and I was hoping they hadn't but now all these years later we have to face up to the reality one thing I discovered in my little hospital bed is that a focus on nature which for me

meant looking at the flowers I had been sent focusing on the Goodwill that one senses is around one rather than finding fault with it building a rich inner world having sound routines and basic habits that you religiously practice have small things that bring you Joy and that allow you to process your emotion ions and your past difficulties is the best way to set the world to rights so that was a beginning of my understanding of how we can find the Vitality in ourselves when we come to the edge of death and how we have to

find the courage to rise above our worst fears and our miseries and to learn to be fully TR and freely beyond the difficulties that have been sent into our lives we have to find a way to transcend or surpass our troubles and one of the best ways I have found of doing so is to widen my perspective to look at the stars to remind myself of how small are planet really is in the wider universe and how it is all connected and regulated and beyond my direct control so there we are in that red spot

we are a tiny little spot of Lights in the Milky Way galaxy and there are many many many many more galaxies that we know know nothing about and there are 200 billion stars in one Galaxy very similar to what is happening in our brains where we have 85 billion neurons and 84 billion other cells and we're making new cells all the time and it's all about connectivity adaptability and flexibility of Consciousness when we stay vital these neurons will make new synaptic connections they will organize our experiences and we will be able to make meaning of

it so while we have to trust that the Universe does this too in some way and keeps order in the chaos we ourselves are responsible for making order in our own inner Universe no matter what happens in our outside world but of course our inner world is all about Connections and that connects us to the outside world this is how we create meaning in life by creating more and more Connections in an orderly way in an harmonious way and meaninglessness is all about disconnection so when an existential crisis happens and it severs our connections we

are completely out of our balance so this is how human beings basically are we feel good when we can weave things together we can make sense of it the word really Gara in Latin means connecting that's where the word religion comes from a system that brings everything together in a meaningful way but it doesn't have to be a dogmatic system it can be a system where we change our view we increase our understanding because getting understanding is about putting the different pieces of the puzzle together as we discover them we seem to be going in

the opposite direction right now that's very strange right we're going back in the right direction so human beings aim to be in control of their connections but when we are faced with existential crisis and be lose everything there is sudden disconnection one of the example I use in my book is that of the plight of the 5 million EU citizens who live in the UK when brexit was voted in they were suddenly severed from what they took for granted their home in the United Kingdom suddenly they were being treated as Intruders as undesirable migrants and

this loss of Human Rights and this sense of disenfranchisement really made them feel no longer welcome and afraid of deportation I went through a crisis with this myself when my UK citizenship was refused twice when I applied for it and I began to panic and then I discovered that there were thousands and thousands of people who were becoming depressed and disconnected nothing makes sense to you when everything you took for granted suddenly is in question it is like going into a fog we were called citizens of nowhere second class citizens bargaining chips collateral damage we

no longer had the right to stay in our own home but had to apply for the right to do do so there was no more safety it was nonsensical Kafkaesque orwellian these words are even more applicable to anyone connected to the Ukrainian crisis it is Kafkaesque orwellian ridiculous absurd and nevertheless it is happening right in front of our eyes the European citizens in the UK felt and still feel betrayed disappointed angry but also incredibly sad worried anxious frustrated heartbroken I can't even begin to imagine how ukrainians feel right now well I know because I'm speaking

to quite a lot of you and those of you who are here trust me my heart is with you so in my book I interviewed two EU citizens who had had breakdowns because of this situation they had never in their lives had a breakdown before they were Joan punon laana a nurse from Spain and Lucy dunova a well-known musician from the Czech Republic both of them surprised themselves by becoming deeply depressed and dysfunctional I saw thousands of other people in the same way who felt that the loss of their Northern Star was a loss that

they could not Encompass they didn't know how to make that change because they had become so identified with being an EU citizen rather than being the citizen of one country or another that their very identity their physical security their whole sense of being a respectable person were down the drain so that's when we set up this emotional support service which I'm happy to say we have now decided to open up as becoming an emotional support service for anyone who who is touched by the Ukrainian crisis but we did this emotional support service for the European

citizens for several years and saw many people and this is what we found in our sessions that if you had a criminal record you had no chance you were basically no longer wanted and you had to leave even if you had been here for decades if you had never been in work because you were a mom or looking after elderly relatives you may not be able to claim your residency rights either there were people who had to split their families and leave the country not many people realize what crazy situations happened children were being bullied

in school for having had to declare they had foreign parents there was verbal abuse in shops people were spat at it was incred ible and in working with the EU citizens it was heart-wrenching they were self-blaming saying why did I trust that the European Union would carry on in the UK why did I gamble my whole life on that faith in that carrying on now my future is blocked I can't sleep anymore I can't eat anymore are living in a nightmare so the loss of meaning goes across all four levels homes and safety of re

residents were in question now apply this to the Ukrainian crisis and you'll see it in Spades you know multiplied by many degrees some have removed themselves in fear for their future thousands of EU citizens left people became suicidal they were insomniac anxious depressed and socially they felt unaccepted without voting rights suddenly without job security being bullied and threatened they had lost their standing in society personally they felt a loss of identity a loss of pride in themselves a lot loss of a sense of future a loss of Integrity selfworth of validity of doubt and spiritually

they felt a loss of purpose as if everything was taken away from them the EU values they believed in like collaboration Freedom peace loyalty and solidarity and fairness were suddenly no longer important now I'm thinking what Ukrainian War does at all those level not just for them but for all of us in the UK the situation happened because of deliberate misinformation about immigration and because of misleading propaganda created by a hostile environment to immigration it was disgusting in fact migration in the UK but everywhere else makes a net contribution to to a society it is

essential in the UK for the NHS Academia the food industry Logistics Hospitality you name it and of course migration is a wonderful thing you get cross fertilization you get new ideas and people who come in you have not had to educate so they're free so how could people do this and how can people be callous about the Ukraine Ian situation how can they not see that these things are what we call evil because evil is banale as Hanah Aon said the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their

minds to be good or evil they set themselves aside from it they don't take sides they Daren risk themselves this may be part of why the records on Asylum Seekers are so appalling the mental health Foundation statistics are shocking they suggest that Asylum Seekers are five times more likely to have mental health needs than the general population and more than 61% will experience serious mental distress but they are far less likely to receive support than the general populations when people sacrifice everything to find Sanctuary they need support there are 26.4 million Asylum seekers in the

world and they going to be many many more after this war and when the climate change crisis really hits Ros papadopulos who I believe is a speaker at this Congress as well says the loss of home is the only condition shared by all refugees not trauma do not fixate on trauma fixate on the situation the person is in and their courage in doing something something about it and support them when you can the UK should be ashamed of itself it is home to only approximately 1% of the 26.4 million refugees who have been displaced by

War and they are one of the countries in Europe who have offered the least Visas so so far to ukrainians in my book I drew on the doctoral research of three of my students in the first place on the work of Armen Danesh who is a political Refugee from Iran in the UK and he spoke about how Hannah aren said refugees driven from country to Country represent the Vanguard of their peoples they are at the spearhead of change and they bring tremendous power and courage withd them they should be honored not put down into second

rate places he says all the participants in his study all of whom were political refugees from Iran to the UK suffered many losses not only family members and friends who were EX uted or having lost their homes and their possessions but also their support networks their natural and cultural environment and their identity their meanings and he found that adaptability is the key factor for them to thrive and what helps them adapt is if they focus on the affirmation of they are human rights and we would do well to remember this going through the fire creates

resilience and courage and this world needs it read The Works of Mandela Gandhi and Luther King and you'll find out exactly what that looks like so Gabor mate says people who are not adaptive may seem to function well as long as nothing is actually disturbing them and they can keep their ordinary lives going but they will become frustrated and helpless when confronted with loss and difficulty they will typically blame themselves or blame others and this is what we saw in the EU citizens who weren't expecting to be in this dis position and often were despairing

about it until they realized they had to be adaptable and they had to find their courage so it's about enduring and daring to show the world what we learn I would like each of you to do a thought experiment it is a nasty one but please do it imagine the chobble nuclear generator being bombarded in this war which is quite possible and exploding into a giant mushroom cloud which will wipe out the whole of Western Europe how would you feel where would you go what would you do how would you survive as a refugee if

you survived the impact what would become of you the second student I drew on is the work of nany Hakim daek who interviewed many people who had had to flee to Lebanon those who do have to overcome such catastrophes she said tend to find their bearings in new ways because they realize everything is in question so they turn to the moon the sun and the planets they become their allies because they come with them wherever they go so do the seasons and the weather we widen our Horizon to get a bigger base because the base

we previously had is no longer safe they value turning their face to the Sun but also to the wind and the rain they relish extreme conditions sometime which match their experience hurricanes ice snow and their identity becomes much less ego centered and much more relative they have great compassion for others and their adaptability increases their connections to their families may have been broken away if you see where the individual is the we have other rings around us and families and peer groups we have the society the state and politics refugees have all of that destroyed

and often even their even their culture and their ideology they need to build it all from scratch now sometimes it can be just too much Susan Yakov the third piece of work I drew on did her work on the aftermath of the bombing of HMS Sheffield in the Forkland war and she was married to one of its Survivor she quotes from vand Coke traumatized people are terrified to feel deeply because it's too much they are afraid to experience their emotions because emotions lead to loss of control the essence of trauma is feeling God forsaken cut

off from the human race itself bear this in mind and one of the people Susan Yakov interviewed said so unless you've actually had that experience to me you will never understand it and hence i' failed see the point of telling anybody about it so they didn't have to think about it because they couldn't really understand it anyway so people cut themselves off with their pain someone else said when you actually watch somebody getting shot when you see somebody who stood on a landmine actually behind them and watched them go up that also is a futility

a waste of life and it's something you don't forget it's the same thing that I was saying earlier we are altered our perspective changes and the only way in which we can help as therapists if we can change our perspective to meet them where they stand rather than speak to them about the small things that no longer matter to them crisis can lead to a vacuum of meaning Yakov said very wise words at the end of her research she said combat doesn't cause trauma symptoms combat causes individuals to question all that they think they know

about the world everything that they value all their actions and priorities to date and for the future and in doing so creates an existential crisis in which they have to cope with a sudden vacuum of meaning and that is what we will find when we work with people who come through Wars they will have the flashbacks and they will have all kinds of other things we have written about and know about but what matters greatly is that they will feel alienated and will feel lost in their worldview and their values when our freedom is squashed

by political events by the state by Wars we are squashed into a corner Simon deovir in her novel The Mandarin said you can't lead a proper life in a society which isn't proper whichever way you turn you are always caught and that's exactly what people experience you can't draw a straight line in a curved space so our role is to understand that and to set the world to rights as best we can so how do we help people survive a crisis it is about finding inner coherence and Trust in the principles that give us our

integrity and knowing that you did what you did and being able to be proud of what you did and stand by it and to be in community with others we need to feel there is a continuity of respect and understanding and that we are given a platform to speak from to be heard and validated we need to feel love and a sense of meaning in our lives so that we are not destroyed and therapy especially relationship therap kind of relationship therapy may help we need to work with the intention of standing the pain not diminishing

it but drawing on it we need to understand how all this suffering can be distilled into something that makes us a better person and that allows us to give something to the world that the world otherwise can never know there needs to be the hope that the record can be set straight one day and that we can trust our own labor and that time will help there needs to be a belief in the slow force of Justice that's the only way we can keep going my friend and colleague Anna in Kiev who I went to

teach for in Kiev for many days here are some pictures of that occasion said to people on Facebook who were telling her oh just use nice smells and good things and pleasant things have positive thoughts keep your emotions under control don't listen to much to the news she said nonsense you have no idea what it is like to to be in a war this is my message to the people who are in the war be yourself Panic be angry cry give yourself some space live and express your emotions these are difficult times you will feel

overwhelmed with pain and fear the more we can live it now the less py as D we will have less accumulated pain there will be l less impulsive aggression Live While You Can routine is everything now stick to it simple routines that are still possible they stabilize you they give you at least a little stability war is also life horrible perverted inhuman but still life read the news yeah read as much news as you can it's an illusion of control at least you get a sense of what's Happening you need to know that do it

on purpose realize it's now your crutch stay in touch with your loved ones when you can and your friends we need the connections we need the links we need the solidarity and do your best to stay alive the rest will take part and figure out later priorities when it gets to this stage it is about the basics of life let's never offend people who go through things like this with Petty ideas we need to think widely broadly supportively we need to allow ourselves to imagine what it is true truly like and understand the layers of

a person person's life which have been cramped or ruined or destroyed and which we can still build up with them and for them of course we've had a general dress rehearsal with Co it's brought us together it's made us aware we are a global world and life cannot be Tak taken for granted so let's learn from those experiences and let's remember that when we go through that fear and that isolation we hurt and we are humbled by life and we learn that we need to have new moral strength as well as emotional strength we need

to find our existential courage as teig said courage is something we learn to build up the average person has only a limited amount of capacity to deal with life-threatening situations neurotic people can hardly take any of it at all but that's because they're actually very vulnerable creative people can take on board a lot and that's usually because they've already dealt with a lot of destructive situation God is defined as that being that can take on an infinite amount on board I need to go quite quickly because time is going by faster than I wanted to

the stoics can be very helpful but because they live through a lot of wars and they Marcus Aurelius said it's not death that a man should fear but he should fear never beginning to live and by that he meant living with our eyes open with our whole body emotions soul and all of our compassion and passion the troubles we meet will help us to open up and become a real they wake us up to the awareness of what is truly the case so so you need to be prepared to go through your crisis and meet

your challenges and face the facts at all the different levels starting from facing your temporality the fact that you are subject to gravity to entropy to labor to illness to failure to loss to death and have those things at the back of your mind and realize that much of the time we try to forget about such things and we forget that other people have fought to give us our freedom that allows us to take things for granted these limits are important we cannot just be afraid of them or run of run away from them kard

said anxiety is the dizziness of Freedom well if you don't don't allow yourself to feel that anxiety you will never be free and when the difficulties come you will not know what to do with them so you need to prepare for it and allow your anxiety to be there at the same time as seeing the positives in the world we have to befriend our anxiety and dare to lose our footing momentarily rather than losing ourselves SRA said a lucid view of the darkest situation is already in itself an act of optimism indeed it implies that

this situation is thinkable and that we can talk about it and so we begin to find new ways of communic ating and solving our problems we may feel lost at first but as we are lost unly we also can look for truth and unveil the things that stay normally hidden haiger spoke about the way in which human beings tend to close off their freedom because they want to keep their anxiety at B they'd rather be distracted or fallen in with other people or tranquilized themselves do protective Sheltering backing away from difficulties Comfort seeking being in

the Rapture of forgetting becoming opaque evasive distracted inauthentic we need to challenge ourselves especially when life gets difficult to face up to the challenges n said but there is something in me that I call courage it has always destroyed every discouragement in me for courage is the best Destroyer courage that attacks for in every attack there is a triumphant shout and kamu said in the midst of winter I found there was within me an invincible summer a desire to reaffirm life to find my breakthrough rather than my breakdown to reclaim my existential space at all

levels and to overcome those narrow spaces and to find how I can reaffirm my right to having all these invaluable things that make life worth having our Sensations our feelings our thoughts our intuitions our relationships our environment our values our beliefs our identity all of that together and how we can build it up again when it's lost and find our resilience the work of Katherine Honor on resilience is essential for any of us working with these situations it is a summary of all the research on resilience the need for an internal locus of control not

believing what other people tell you but believe yourself to be self-efficient have your own goals have a sense of meaningfulness use your past successes to confront the challenges and to get stronger and keep using humor and patience and tolerance and optimism to adapt adapt adapt adapt to change and to be action orientated and have strong relationships and have faith in something if it's only the fact that after the night the morning will come again as Frankle put pointed out and read Frankle again in this day and age we are confronted with our freedom to choose

how we are going to be in these circumstances not just in Ukraine not just in Russia but all of us we are now responsible we are responsible for our choices of values and ways of being hardship will free us to open up to this really fundamental aspects of Being Human and we will discovering that being human was never about having a comfy existence which was all about maximum happiness we discover that there are other values than happiness there is love truth beauty loyalty honor courage and freedom and many other things beside remember to connect physically

create Harmony use your skills find out the facts build a safe world at so many different levels socially connect with each other with affection and a sense of kinship and affiliation with generosity people need good inst institutions to safeguard that and to work together connect with yourself have inner Integrity establish inner peace create safety for yourself we need education support creativity and philosophical thinking and Leisure to do so and reconnect spiritually to what is true what is of value and what trans sends human error and human hatred seek meaning in the world create together a

credible Vision a belief system which is free from Creed and dogmatism but gives us a joint framework of morality and commitment to truth justice and freedom at all levels we will find our meaning if we stand together and and we are willing to understand these things in lived truth we will find deeper meanings than we ever felt or found before remember David Bone's idea of the implicate order of the universe we are all a part of that and each of us carries inside of us an entire universe that we are responsible for don't underestimate the

importance of that as Mandela said when he took on the M mantle of leadership we might have our differences but we are one people with a common Destiny in our Rich variety of culture race and tradition dare to take that broad perspective in your work as therapists we are the guardians of the art of living and we must live deliberately rather than haphazardly may this conference have been a step in the right direction of human collaboration thank you very much for listening to me here are some websites if you're interested