Pain, illness, and loss are not risks. They are appointments.
That distinction changes what a person should be preparing for. A risk can be reduced. An appointment can only be met, and the useful question is what you want to be carrying when it arrives.
Each one of us will encounter pain, illness, and loss.
Most approaches to wellbeing are built around prevention, which is sensible right up until the thing arrives anyway. The question that remains is what carries a person through an experience that cannot be avoided or fixed.
The evidence points at values.
Something that the evidence shows is that when you maintain a connection to your values, it can more effectively help you navigate that experience of suffering, because then in spite of all of that pain, you can still see yourself moving towards something.
The mechanism
Moving towards something is the operative phrase, and it identifies what suffering actually takes away.
Acute pain is bad. Acute pain with no forward direction is a different order of experience. When a person loses the sense that their actions connect to anything ahead of them, what remains is not just discomfort, it is stasis. That is the state hopelessness describes.
Values restore the vector. Not by making the pain smaller, but by leaving a direction intact while it is happening.
This is worth being precise about, because it is often oversold. Values do not shorten a difficult period or make it less painful. What they change is whether the period has a shape. A hard month spent moving toward something is a hard month. A hard month spent nowhere in particular becomes evidence.
Values are not goals
This distinction carries the whole idea, and it is where most people get stuck.
A goal is an outcome. It completes or it fails, and it can be taken from you. A value is a direction. It does not complete, and it can be expressed in an indefinite number of ways.
Dr. Finkelstein uses his own case, which is unusually concrete for this kind of discussion.
I love being a psychologist. I love the values of connection and being of service. And there will likely be a time when I cannot practice therapy. Maybe aging, cognitive decline, who knows, some arbitrary thing. And if I maintain these values of connection and service, well then I can begin to experience that and imagine myself moving towards those values in a host of other ways.
Practicing therapy is the goal, and it is losable. Connection and service are the values, and they are not. They can be expressed through the work, and if the work becomes impossible they can be expressed through something else. The identity survives the role.
That is not a small distinction for anyone whose sense of themselves is tied to what they do. Losing a role while holding the value underneath it is a change of expression. Losing a role with nothing underneath it is a loss of self, and those two experiences are not comparable.
Why this is worth doing before you need it
The worst time to figure out what you value is in the middle of losing what you built on it. A person who has only ever named goals arrives at a loss with nothing underneath.
A practical way to find the values under your goals is to run each one down a level:
- Name a goal that matters to you.
- Ask what you would get from achieving it. Not the outcome, the experience.
- Ask the same question of that answer.
- Stop when you reach something that cannot be taken away by circumstance. That is a value.
Someone whose goal is a promotion may find mastery underneath it, or providing for people, or being taken seriously. Those can be pursued from a lot of positions. The promotion can only be pursued from one.
The exercise usually takes three or four steps, and the answer at the bottom is often plainer than people expect. That is normal. Values tend to be ordinary words carrying a great deal of weight.
The connection to life worth living goals
In DBT this sits inside what Marsha Linehan called life worth living goals, which is the framework for building a life that is worth the trouble of living it rather than merely tolerable.
Life worth living goals help capture that sort of resilience. Even when pain shows up, I can still imagine a world for myself where I am behaving, where I am doing things that are important to me.
Resilience here is not toughness and it is not optimism. It is the preserved ability to imagine yourself acting in line with what matters, while things are bad. That is a much smaller claim than bouncing back, and considerably more useful.
Starting the work
Life worth living goals covers where this idea came from and how it is used.
Dr. Jesse Finkelstein works with values and meaning in individual therapy at Axis Psychological Services in New York. If pain or loss has flattened your sense of direction, you can book a free consultation.
If you want to work with your own values in a structured way, learn about DBT therapy in NYC.
Common questions
What is the difference between a value and a goal?
A goal can be finished. A value cannot. Running a marathon is a goal, and once you cross the line it is done. Being someone who takes care of his body is a value, and it is available on a Tuesday when you are tired and the run is twenty minutes instead of ten miles. Goals can be taken from you. Values are much harder to take.
How do values actually build resilience?
By giving you something to act on when the situation will not move. Pain, illness, and loss do not respond to problem solving, so the question shifts from how do I fix this to who do I want to be inside it. That question always has an answer, which is what keeps a hard stretch from turning into a full stop. It is not comfort. It is direction.
How do I figure out what my values are?
Usually by looking backward rather than inward. Think of a week you were proud of, or a moment you would repeat, and ask what you were being in it. Published lists of values work as prompts and badly as menus. The test is whether a candidate value tells you what to do differently on a bad morning. If it does not, it is a word, not a value.
Do values change over time?
The wording changes more than the values do. What counted as being a good father at thirty looks different at fifty, but the thing underneath is usually recognizable. It is worth rereading your list once a year, especially after something large has happened. Revision is normal. Wholesale replacement every few months usually means the list was borrowed rather than found.
