When the Plan That Worked Stops Working
Many of the people who come to me have spent decades doing exactly what was asked of them. They studied hard, chose a field with good prospects, and worked well. For a long time the arrangement held. There was a path, it looked secure, and there was little reason to ask how it felt to walk it.
Then the ground moves. Right now, for many people in IT, academia, and other analytical fields, it is moving because of the crisis around AI and what it means for their work. The anxiety that arrives is real. But often something else comes with it, quieter and older. Looking back, they begin to notice how much of their life ran on capacity rather than meaning. They were productive and reasonably successful, but hardly anyone asked how they were doing, and they did not ask themselves either.
I cannot take that anxiety away, and I don't think I should try. What I can offer is a different way of moving through it. Here is what tends to change when people stay with the process.
They stop carrying it alone
Many of the people I work with are very good at thinking. They have been thinking their way through problems for as long as they can remember, and often they learned to do so because as children nobody was there to think alongside. Reaching out in a hard moment was not something they ever got to practice. Over time, going it alone hardened into a strategy, and it often looks like avoidant attachment.
But overanalysing is rarely an efficient way to meet a difficulty. Circling the same question in your own head is lonely and it wears you down. In our weekly sessions, something different happens. The struggle is spoken out loud, to someone who stays. That is a new experience in itself, and it makes people braver. They meet challenges they would have avoided, and their lives begin to change in ways that have little to do with technique. It is the difference between facing something alone and facing it with someone.
They begin to notice what they feel
In most workplaces, and especially in the lives of many men, it does not matter what you feel or think about your own process. What counts is what you produce. Nobody is asking, so after a while you stop asking yourself.
So when I ask “How are you, really?”, many people have no ready answer. The question has been irrelevant for so long that turning towards it can feel foreign, even uncomfortable. It takes time to make room for this part of life in everyday routines.
But it gives direction. Someone who is aware of their inner life is less likely to make the wrong decision further down the road, whether about a job, a relationship, or the shape of a whole decade. The body also keeps its own accounts. Unprocessed stress, pressure, and loneliness show up in health, and in midlife, for many, they show up loudly. Learning to notice and process what is happening inside is not a luxury. It is part of looking after yourself.
They turn towards the people in their lives
The third change is often the biggest. More people than ever live alone, and loneliness is widespread. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed people across many decades, points to the quality of our relationships as one of the strongest predictors of health and wellbeing into old age.
Yet many people I meet have poured their energy into achievement, and their relationships got the leftovers. Some are in partnerships that no longer nourish them and have little energy left to change that. Some love their children but do not really know them, and only now do they wonder whether that is how it should be. Facing this can be painful, perhaps for the first time. And you can be very lonely inside a distant relationship, sometimes more so than outside one.
I don't let these struggles pass by. I keep coming back to them, gently and persistently, because avoidance only postpones the loneliness. Together we look at how relationships work: how to notice conflict, how to stay in it, how to repair afterwards. For many, this is a great deal of work, and it can change a life. Often they never had good models for it at home, which is part of how their lives took this shape in the first place.
What this can look like
I won't promise that the process is comfortable. Often it is more inconvenient than before, and crises can come up that feel harder than what you started with. But things move in a direction: towards what matters to you, towards your real experience, and away from bypassing your inner wishes.
If you recognise yourself here, and the old strategy of working, achieving, and getting by no longer feels enough, you are welcome to get in touch.