I’ve been a Pastoral Counselor for 25+ years in private practice and a counselor educator for nearly 20 years. I first discovered William James when my mentor at Loyola University Maryland gave me a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience to read during my doctoral studies. James, along with Thoreau, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and more lately Barry Lopez and Wade Davis have been wonderful companions in both of my roles as a therapist and teacher. A few years ago John Kaag published Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, which instigated my investigation of James’s lectures and essays, especially his 1895 lecture Is Life Worth Living? As Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle report in their book Be Not Afraid: In the Words of William James, James had been asked by the Cambridge YMCA to address a spate of recent suicides in the area, to which he responded with this lecture. And his answer to this existential question? “Maybe, it depends on the liver.”
My area of focus over the years has been community mental health, working with people suffering from painful mental illnesses and/or addictions, especially gambling addiction which has the highest rate of suicide of all the addictions. Working with this population has made awareness of suicide and its mental and emotional climate very important to me. At first in my mental health career (mid life career changer; I got started as a therapist at age 42) I struggled with being a “yes man;” that is, my automatic answer to anyone suicidal was “yes it IS worth living!” While that may seem a reasonable answer it is important to remember that the person considering suicide is not usually coming at this question from a reasoning point of view. So to the suicidal “liver” in front of you who cannot answer that question easily your affirmation of life is experienced as shaming, and often a sense of toxic shame is at the heart of the suicidal impulse. This is especially true for people who endured trauma, neglect and abuse in childhood. It is awful to find no reason to live and then feel shamed for having that feeling.
James’s “maybe” is not only the best response to the suicidal person, it is the correct response, once the therapist has ascertained that the client is feeling suicidal but is able to give assurances that they have neither the intention nor the means to commit suicide. The evidence for this is found whenever any person who is not suicidal responds to the question “What makes MY life worth living?” Inevitably every answer a person might have for that question, whether the answer is as profound as “falling in love” or as quotidian as “hiking forested trails,” involves a “maybe” in one way or another. There is no certitude that a certain activity will be meaningful. It is the chance of meaningfulness, the possibility of contentment, that makes our most important values and activities most cherished. If this is true for what makes life worth living, then certainly the answer to the most primal of questions, “IS life worth living?,” must include this same “maybe.”
Early in my career a friend of mine committed suicide. Tom suffered from debilitating diabetes and had been told by his physician earlier that day that his life span would be less than 10 more years and his legs would soon be amputated. That night he got drunk and stepped in front of a freight train. I heard the news at 7 am the following morning; it stopped me cold and made me ask myself that question: Is life worth living? and if it is, why? I took time off from my work as a psychotherapist to gather my thoughts and manage my emotions. It was a long and contemplative week.
The day that I returned to the mental health clinic after my friend’s death a very depressed client, a middle aged man who had lost everything he held dear in life, came in to my office and told me he had decided to commit suicide. He stated that he knew I would hospitalize him; he expected it from me and he respected my professionalism. But the inpatient unit couldn’t hold him forever and once released he would quietly end his life. He wanted to tell me now to thank me for my good work, but his losses were too insurmountable so he had made his decision, which was irrevocable.
I was unguarded; I spontaneously began to weep. Not little weeping; heaving, crying, snot running down my face, loud gasps for air weeping. Uncontrollable. He leaned forward and said “my God, Jim, what’s happened to you?” I told him, crossing boundaries, about my friend who had died a week earlier. He said something like “I can see how much you loved him. Tell me more.” Which I did, as he responded authentically and empathically. Then he comforted me in my loss, and then I regained my composure.
“If I kill myself will my friends feel this way?” “Yes,” I said. “Then I will not do this. I cannot be the source of such suffering. I must find a reason to live.”
I recall this story so well because I have used it to illustrate the nature of suicidal feelings with my students and interns for a long time. I believe that what made the difference was my authenticity; I did not try to be a “life is good! You SHOULD want to live!” kind of therapist. Instead I devolved into the feelings of loss associated with my love for my friend, and this led to my client reaching out to help me. And in reaching out, in actively choosing to love me in that moment he began to find reasons to live. He began to resolve the “maybe” as he found within himself his dormant capacity to be a loving presence in the world.
I’m happy to report that my client had another good ten years of living before he died of natural causes. He found intimate love and friendship again in his life, which had been missing. He stayed in touch after moving out of the area, and was able to look back on his days of despair with wisdom and even some humor. His losses from those days remained; he had hurt too many people and even attempts at amends making could not heal those wounds. But he had come to accept his failures and find a modicum of self-forgiveness through compassion to himself and others. He once again found the good life.
Life is difficult even on good days sometimes. But the process of living is made more complete by finding those reasons for living over and over again. The implicit shaming that well-meaning people, including therapists, foist upon people causes much misery. James’s authentic face-forward approach to this question, “maybe,” is healthy because it is real. It is a road less traveled by therapists and loved ones because it feels so vulnerable, but that vulnerability is grounded in the reality that each of us is on a journey to discover our own reasons for living. When I can be present with a heartfelt “maybe,” the suffering soul before me experiences a level of authenticity and understanding that is healing in and of itself. With that presence the dialog that must occur could emerge; without that presence there is only more despair and, tragically, worsened shame. If we seek to truly help the sick soul we can only do so by leaning into the reality that life’s worth is always anchored on the foundation of that existential “maybe.”
James M. Walsh Pastoral Counseling 