Death Anxiety

When I decided to write a blog post on death anxiety I have to admit I did so with some hesitation as I wondered if anyone would actually want to read it! Death is not exactly the most uplifting topic or something that is easy to think about. But, I concluded, that was precisely why it seemed important to bring it up. I guess we’ll see what happens… 

I began thinking about death and its role in mental health when I read a book by Ernest Becker called "The Denial of Death". Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1974, and his study of how different cultures have dealt with mortality throughout the centuries was a game changer for me. I followed up my reading of this extraordinary book almost 30 years ago by turning my attention toward an approach to counseling called existential psychotherapy. I read the works of Irvin Yalom and Rollo May and began to radically rethink the purpose and focus of my work as a therapist. 

Irvin Yalom is a psychiatrist trained in psychopharmacology and Freudian psychoanalysis. But his great love of literature and philosophy allowed him to think in new ways as a medical doctor about how to live a deep and meaningful life. Yalom concluded, along with many of the existential philosophers, that the real source of despair in the world happens when a person bumps up against ‘the givens of existence.’ These givens of existence include death, meaning, isolation and freedom. In practical terms, the encounter with our mortality, our aloneness and our responsibility for the life we live often brings about tremendous anxiety. The anxiety can be hard to sit with, so we develop defense mechanisms or strategies to avoid this painful and unsettling reality. Over time, these defense mechanisms get in the way of living the life we truly desire and many people look for help to alleviate the anxiety or the undesired symptom.  

Ernest Becker suggests that at the root of most anxiety and other psychological neuroses is the strategic avoidance of the awareness that we will one day cease to be. For some people, this awareness becomes harder and harder to avoid as they age and grow chronologically closer to death, but Becker believes that death anxiety exists and affects us from a very early age. He believes that we spend a great deal of our psychic energy trying to avoid this reality throughout our lives. 

The hope of both Yalom and Becker is to challenge each of us to slow down enough in our daily lives so that we might deeply consider the role that our impending death may be having on us. Søren Kierkegaard once said that anxiety is our greatest teacher. What he meant by this is that anxiety serves a purpose for us. It doesn’t show up because something is broken or damaged within us, but it shows up because it is trying to alert us to something that needs to be dealt with. Anxiety isn’t the problem, anxiety is the invitation to listen, to get curious, to wake up and explore the parts of us that are calling out for attention.  

I found it really interesting during the COVID pandemic that so many people turned to therapy for help. Therapy offices were packed. Anxiety was at an all-time high. On the surface, the reasons seemed obvious. But underneath it all it seemed to me that as the pandemic slowly eroded all of our familiar ways of staying busy and distracting ourselves, we were increasingly left alone in our homes and maybe the presence of isolation, death and lack of freedom left us a little closer to the givens of existence than we were comfortable with. Now that life is back to normal and we are busy again are those deeper questions still asking to be answered? And, if we were able to stop being so reactive to the discomfort of anxiety what would we discover about ourselves lurking beneath the discomfort? It might be a worthwhile exploration. Yalom and Becker would probably suggest that the exploration is what the anxiety is all about.