Case Study Question:
A 35-year-old woman who had a successful business and strong professional identity before relocating to another country, but since then she has tried several professions without finding a sense of stability or belonging. She often says, “Everything is temporary. What is the point of putting so much effort into something if everything can change or disappear so quickly?” She feels caught between her former identity and the person she is becoming, while financial pressure and what she describes as procrastination make it increasingly difficult to move forward. How can a psychologist or therapist can help her rediscover meaning and direction without pushing her toward productivity or a new identity before she is ready?
Professional Response
A useful starting point may be to reconsider whether procrastination is actually the central problem.
What appears behaviorally as procrastination may be connected to a much deeper disruption involving identity, grief, belonging, safety, meaning, and trust in the future.
The client’s statement, “Everything is temporary, so why try?” deserves particular attention.
Rather than immediately challenging this belief or attempting to replace it with a more positive one, the helping professional can become curious about the experiences that created and continue to reinforce this narrative.
In many ways, the client’s conclusion makes sense within the context of what she has experienced. She built something meaningful and then lost it. Her environment changed. Her professional identity changed. Her sense of predictability changed.
The therapeutic or coaching task may therefore begin not with motivation, but with observation and understanding.
What does “temporary” mean to her?
What did she lose besides her business?
What parts of her previous identity is she grieving?
What does she fear will happen if she invests deeply in something again?
What does she believe is still worth investing in, even when permanence cannot be guaranteed?
Reframe the Period of Uncertainty
Another perspective is to explore whether this period can be understood not only as instability, but also as exploration.
Trying several professions does not automatically mean failing several times.
Each experience may be providing information about what fits, what does not fit, what matters now, and how the client’s identity has changed.
A helping professional can support the client in shifting from:
“Why can’t I figure out what I am supposed to do?”
toward:
“What am I learning about myself through what I am experiencing?”
This does not minimize the client’s financial realities or the need to make practical decisions. It simply allows practical planning and identity exploration to exist together.
Explore Values Before Goals
When a person’s previous life structure has been disrupted, asking immediately, “What is your new goal?” may create more pressure.
It may be more helpful first to explore values.
What remains important regardless of where she lives or what job she holds?
What does she value in relationships, work, creativity, service, independence, spirituality, learning, community, security, or contribution?
Goals may change when circumstances change.
Values can sometimes provide continuity when external structures do not.
Make Space for Grief
The professional should also consider the role of grief.
Immigration, displacement, career loss, and major transitions can involve losses that are not always recognized as grief.
A person may grieve a home, community, profession, social status, financial security, familiar language and culture, relationships, possibilities, and even a former version of herself.
Before asking the client to build something new, it may be important to allow space for what has been lost.
Work With the Narrative, Not Against It
From a Narrative Awareness perspective, the goal does not have to be to tell the client that her narrative is wrong.
Instead, help her observe it.
For example:
“When the thought ‘Everything is temporary, so why try?’ appears, what happens next?”
Does she withdraw?
Stop planning?
Avoid opportunities?
Feel safer?
Feel hopeless?
Experience relief from the pressure to make a decision?
The professional can then explore the function of the narrative as well as its cost.
Eventually, the question can become:
“Is this narrative still helping you in the way you need it to?”
The client does not have to erase her story. She can gradually develop greater awareness of how it influences her present choices and decide what she wants to keep, change, or understand differently.
Practical Suggestions for Helping Professionals
1. Slow down the pressure to “fix” the client.
Before focusing on productivity, explore identity, loss, meaning, and the client’s relationship with uncertainty.
2. Separate practical needs from existential questions.
The client may genuinely need employment and financial stability while simultaneously exploring identity and purpose. Help her develop practical short-term steps without requiring those steps to answer the larger question of who she will become.
3. Explore the client’s narrative.
Listen for recurring statements such as “Everything is temporary,” “Nothing lasts,” or “Why bother?” Explore where these narratives came from and how they influence current choices.
4. Explore values that survived the transition.
Ask what remains meaningful even after so much has changed. Values can become anchors when roles and circumstances are unstable.
5. Reframe experimentation.
Rather than labeling each abandoned job or direction as another failure, explore what the client learned from each experience.
6. Look for small experiences of aliveness.
Ask when the client feels interested, peaceful, curious, connected, useful, creative, or energized. These moments may provide important information without requiring an immediate major life decision.
7. Support small, reversible steps.
Instead of asking the client to choose her next career, consider small experiments: one course, one conversation, one volunteer opportunity, one project, or one new professional experience.
8. Allow uncertainty to exist.
The professional does not need to know where the client’s journey will end. Part of the work may be helping her discover that she can continue living meaningfully even while some questions remain unanswered.
A Question for the Professional
Perhaps the most important question is not:
“How do I motivate this client?”
but:
“How can I help this person understand what happened to her sense of self, observe the story she is living through now, and create enough safety and space to discover what comes next?”
Sometimes our role as helping professionals is not to provide the next destination.
It is to help a person become aware of where they are now, what they are carrying with them, and what they may be ready to choose next.