And That Might Be the Most Healing Thing You’ll Ever Hear
By Abi Beri | Integrative Somatic Therapist | Family Constellation Facilitator
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Not Everything Happens for a Reason — And That Might Be the Most Healing Thing You’ll Ever Hear
There is a phrase said at every funeral, every hospital bedside, every moment of loss that exceeds our capacity for easy explanation.
Everything happens for a reason.
It is said with love. Almost always with genuine love, and genuine care, and a genuine desire to make the unbearable slightly more bearable. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. The people who say it are reaching for something real — the human need to make suffering meaningful rather than arbitrary.
But I want to offer something that years of sitting with people in genuine grief has taught me. Something more honest than what most people were given when they needed it most.
Not everything happens for a reason. And that is not nihilism. It is the beginning of genuine healing.
What the Phrase Actually Does to the Nervous System
When something terrible happens — when the nervous system encounters loss, harm, or violation — the body’s honest response is an alarm. A physiological mobilisation. The amygdala fires. The stress hormones move. The system activates in proportion to what it has registered as wrong.
This is not a malfunction. This is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do in response to something genuinely bad. The alarm is appropriate. It is information. It is the body saying: this was not okay.
The natural completion of this response — in a body that is supported and given time — involves moving through the activation. Feeling the alarm fully, being witnessed in it, and eventually returning to regulated baseline. This is what grief looks like when it is allowed to complete.
When ‘everything happens for a reason’ is offered in the middle of this process, something specific and well-documented happens. The alarm is interrupted. The grieving person is asked — with love, but still asked — to move toward acceptance before their nervous system has been allowed to complete the honest response to what happened. The body is presented with a frame before the feeling has been felt.
Clinically, this is what psychologist John Welwood called spiritual bypass: the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid confronting difficult emotions. The bypass is not deliberate. It is not malicious. It is the gap between what we know how to say and what the grieving person’s nervous system actually needs. And it has a cost.
The cost is that the grief goes underground. Not as a resolved memory but as an unfinished physiological process — stored in the body, in the nervous system’s default setting, in the particular quality of chronic low-level tension that does not respond to time or rest or intellectual understanding, because it was never allowed to complete what it was trying to complete.
The Three Positions — and Why Two of Them Leave People Stranded
There are broadly three positions available in the conversation about whether things happen for a reason, and it is worth distinguishing them carefully.
The first is the cultural default: everything happens for a reason. As established, this is offered with love and comes at a cost. It asks the nervous system to perform acceptance before grief has been witnessed. It is spiritual bypass in its most well-intentioned form.
The second is the rationalist response: nothing happens for a reason — life is random and without inherent meaning. This is also, in a limited sense, defensible. And it is insufficient as a home for a person trying to survive loss. The nervous system needs more than randomness to orient to. The substantial research on post-traumatic growth — on the genuine human capacity to find meaning, depth, and connection in the aftermath of terrible things — is not the research of a system that has concluded life is random. It is the research of a system doing what human beings do: building orientation and meaning from the raw material of what happened.
The third position is the one that I believe the clinical evidence, the somatic evidence, and genuine spiritual honesty all point toward: something happened. It was real. It hurt. It was not okay. The grief does not need a justification in order to deserve witnessing. And meaning is not the same as reason.
Meaning is Not the Same as Reason
This distinction — meaning is not the same as reason — is the most important thing I want to offer.
Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz. He survived it by finding meaning. His book Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the most important accounts of human resilience ever written. But Frankl never said Auschwitz happened for a reason. What he said was that he could choose his response to it. That in the gap between stimulus and response, there is always freedom.
These are not the same claim.
Reason implies cosmic design — the universe arranged this, therefore it was meant to be, therefore peace is available if you can locate the design. Meaning implies human agency — something happened, and I am choosing what to do with it. The first asks you to find the reason in order to heal. The second asks you to be honest about what happened — and then, in your own time, to find what you want to do with it.
The first can produce borrowed meaning: fragile, maintenance-dependent, vulnerable to the next hard thing because it was built on an assumption rather than on genuine grief. The second can produce earned meaning: rooted, durable, genuinely yours, because it grew from the honest encounter with what happened rather than from a frame placed over it.
Borrowed meaning sits on top of unprocessed grief. Earned meaning grows from processed grief. They look similar from the outside. The nervous system knows the difference.
What the Family Constellations Approach Offers
In family constellation work — the therapeutic approach developed by Bert Hellinger that examines the hidden dynamics within family systems — one of the most consistent and most powerful observations is this: the nervous system heals through acknowledgment, not explanation.
The healing sentence is not: I understand why this happened. The healing sentence is: I see what happened to you.
Not redemption. Not reason. Not the narrative that makes it acceptable. Just witness. I see it. I see you in it. It was real. These simple, honest words — offered without rushing toward meaning, without the frame that manages the pain by explaining it — do something in the nervous system that explanation alone cannot do.
The system settles. Not because the grief is gone. Because it has been seen. Because the honest response — this was wrong, this hurt — has been received rather than redirected.
This is the specific gift that is missing from ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Not meaning — which it genuinely tries to provide. Witnessing. The permission to be in the honest experience before the narrative arrives.
When Meaning Genuinely Arrives
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying meaning is false or unavailable or that suffering never produces growth.
Post-traumatic growth is real. The research on it is substantial and carefully conducted. People do find depth, perspective, connection, and genuine transformation in the aftermath of terrible things. Not always, not automatically, not on any schedule the culture would prefer — but genuinely.
What the research also shows is that the meaning which arrives after genuine grief is different in quality from meaning borrowed before the grief has been processed. The first has roots. The second requires maintenance. The first does not need defending. The second can be shattered by the next hard thing.
There is a specific quality I have observed in people who carry genuine, earned meaning — not borrowed consolation. They are not the people who found the reason immediately. They are the people who allowed themselves to be genuinely broken first. Who did not rush to the lesson. Who gave the grief the time and honesty it required. And what they found, in the aftermath, is theirs in a way that no phrase offered at a hospital bedside ever quite is.
What Grief Actually Needs — Practically
If ‘everything happens for a reason’ is insufficient, what does the grieving person actually need? The clinical answer — from somatic therapy, from polyvagal research, from the attachment and grief literature — is consistent.
The grieving nervous system needs witness before it needs meaning. It needs the space to complete the honest alarm response — to say, in the body, this was wrong, this hurt, this was not okay — before any narrative is offered. It needs co-regulation: the presence of a regulated nervous system alongside which its own activation can gradually settle. It needs time — not the culture’s timeline but the body’s.
In somatic terms, the most important thing a supporter can offer is not a reason but a regulated, genuinely present, non-managing presence. The capacity to sit with someone in their honest grief without rushing them toward acceptance or meaning. To say, without the frame: I am here. I see what happened. I am not going anywhere. You do not have to perform peace for my comfort.
That presence — simple, unglamorous, requiring nothing from the grieving person except to be themselves in it — is what the nervous system was designed to receive. Not philosophy. Presence.
In Practice — What to Say Instead
This piece would be incomplete without some honest guidance on language. If ‘everything happens for a reason’ is not the right thing to say, what is?
In my clinical and personal experience, the most useful things to offer someone in genuine grief are also the simplest. I see what you are going through. This is real. I am not going to rush you through it. You do not have to find the meaning yet. What you are feeling makes complete sense.
None of these offer a reason. All of them offer witness. And witness — genuine, patient, non-managing witness — is what the nervous system actually needs in order to move through grief rather than around it.
To the person in grief reading this: your pain does not need a justification. The honest response to what happened is not a failure of spiritual development. It is the beginning of genuine healing. Not everything happened for a reason. But everything that happened to you is real. And everything real deserves to be met honestly.
That meeting is where the real things grow from.
Ready to go deeper?
I work with grief, trauma, and the nervous system’s relationship with meaning in individual sessions in Dublin (Oscailt D4, Dublin Wellbeing Centre D2), Naas, Newbridge, Co. Kildare, and globally online. Sessions draw on Integrative Somatic Therapy, Family Constellations, and polyvagal-informed practice.
Book at blissfulevolution.com | somatictherapyireland.com | familyconstellationseurope.com
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ‘everything happens for a reason’ harmful?
It is not harmful in intent — it is almost always offered with genuine love. It can become harmful in effect when it is offered before the grieving person has been given space to have the honest response to what happened. In clinical terms, it can function as spiritual bypass: using a spiritual narrative to shortcut the genuine processing of grief. When this happens, the grief does not disappear — it goes underground in the body, where it can contribute to chronic dysregulation, somatic symptoms, and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been performing acceptance rather than genuinely processing loss.
What is the difference between meaning and reason?
Reason implies that the universe arranged the suffering — that it was sent, designed, or intended, and that peace is available if you can locate the design. Meaning implies human agency — that something happened, and you are choosing what to do with it. The first asks the suffering to have been purposeful before it can be healed. The second allows the suffering to have been genuinely wrong and still to produce something of value — not because it was designed to, but because the person moving through it is a meaning-making being. Viktor Frankl’s survival of Auschwitz is the clearest example: he found meaning, but he never claimed Auschwitz happened for a reason.
What does the nervous system actually need when grieving?
According to polyvagal theory and somatic approaches to grief, the nervous system needs the space to complete the honest alarm response — the physiological mobilisation triggered by loss or harm — before any narrative is offered. It needs witness: the regulated presence of another alongside which its own activation can gradually settle. And it needs time — the body’s time, not the culture’s. Premature meaning-making, however well-intentioned, can interrupt this process and contribute to grief becoming stored in the body rather than moving through it.
Can meaning still be found without a reason?
Yes — and the meaning that arrives after genuine grief is different in quality from meaning borrowed before grief has completed. Post-traumatic growth is real and well-documented. But it grows from honest engagement with what happened, not from a frame placed over the grief. Meaning made from genuine, completed grief tends to be durable, personal, and genuinely transformative. Meaning borrowed from consoling phrases tends to be fragile, requiring maintenance, and vulnerable to the next hard thing.
Do you work with grief and loss in sessions?
Yes. I work with grief, loss, and the somatic and ancestral dimensions of unprocessed pain in individual sessions in Dublin (Oscailt D4, Dublin Wellbeing Centre D2), Naas, Newbridge, and globally online. Sessions draw on Integrative Somatic Therapy, Family Constellations, and polyvagal-informed practice. blissfulevolution.com
