#meaning-making

#meaning-making

My patient's plea echoed in my ears as anguish and panic reverberated throughout the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a modern plague that, at that time, felt almost Biblical in scale. Her question also brought me back to a discussion about the book of Job that took place in my study group of psychoanalysts, who met monthly for over a decade examining Biblical texts through a psychoanalytic lens.

Loneliness is a universal human experience. We are living in a loneliness epidemic. Loneliness isn't the problem. It's the meaning we make and the story we tell ourselves about it. Loneliness happens for a no-fault reason. It is there to help us honor what we are missing or grieving. Taking action means both fact-checking automatic statements and finding small ways to reconnect with others.

This week, as both Mercury and Jupiter begin their retrograde cycle, we are reminded that even as time moves forward, it asks us to look backward. Retrogrades bring a necessary review before there can be integration, realignment, and wisdom. They're a time of inward reflection and personal truth. Your weekly horoscope for November 9-15, 2025, helps you understand where to look for your insights.

Synchronicities can be dismissed as quirky experiences, an anecdote to trot out at a dinner party, but they can also be profoundly transformative and healing. It's for this reason that synchronicity-informed psychotherapy informs my clinical practice. As a refresher, synchronicities are events in the external world that coincide in a meaningful way with the internal world of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories, and dreams, but not due to causal reasons.

Indeed, getting to forgiveness is perhaps the most difficult and challenging thing that we can do to go beyond ourselves when we are so fixated on our problems, our needs, our expectations, and our demands. Let's face it: When things are spinning out of control-and especially out of our control-it is at least comforting and cathartic, even if it doesn't really resolve anything, to be able to point the blame on others for the situation at hand.

Meaning-making often leads individuals to negative interpretations of their experiences, especially in the context of sexual desire discrepancies, creating unnecessary suffering and confusion.