By Ben Carey Donaldson, Certified IFS Therapist
(estimated reading time: 9 minutes)
Something has stopped working. Not in your circumstances, but in the frame you used to make sense of them.
You might still have the job, the relationships, the routines. Everything is functional, more or less. But somewhere along the way, the story you were living inside has started to feel hollow, or the questions that were once easy to set aside are no longer staying put. What is this actually for? Is this the life I meant to have? Why does any of it matter?
These are the questions of an existential crisis, and they don't belong only to people in dramatic circumstances. They surface during transitions, in the quiet after a major achievement, in the middle of the night for reasons that remain unclear in daylight. They are some of the most common and least well-named experiences people bring to therapy. This guide looks at what an existential crisis actually is, why meaning sometimes breaks down, and what a parts-based perspective (like Internal Family Systems) offers as a path back toward something more solid.
Why Meaning Breaks Down: The Common Triggers
Existential crises rarely emerge without context. They tend to cluster around specific types of experience that create conditions in which whatever was holding meaning in place becomes exposed.
Transition and Life-Stage Shifts
Quarter-life crises, midlife crises, post-retirement loss of identity — these aren't cultural clichés. They are moments when the scaffolding of life trembles. The career that absorbed all your energy. The relationship you organised your identity around. The role you never examined because there was always something more immediate to address.
When the scaffolding shifts, the meaning that was attached to it doesn't automatically relocate somewhere else. It simply becomes harder to find.
Grief, Loss, and Disillusionment
The passing of someone close. The end of a long-term relationship. The collapse of a belief system, a professional identity, or an assumption about how the world worked. These are among the most reliable precursors to existential questioning — not because they are unusual experiences, but because they expose life's contingencies.
“Everyone is destined to experience not only the exhilaration of life, but also its inevitable darkness, disillusionment, aging, illness, isolation, loss, meaninglessness, painful choices, and death.”
— Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy
Yalom, the existential psychiatrist whose work on meaning and mortality has shaped an entire tradition of therapy, wrote extensively about the way that confronting these realities rather than looking away from them is often the precondition for genuine psychological change.
Success Without Satisfaction
One of the more disorienting triggers is arriving at something you worked hard to reach and finding that the satisfaction you expected is not there. The promotion. The partner. The house. The number you told yourself would feel like enough. The absence of the expected feeling can provoke something close to panic: the system you were using to generate meaning has been revealed as unreliable.
Expat and Cross-Cultural Displacement
For people living far from home, existential disorientation can carry an additional layer. The cultural scripts that were previously available for making sense of a life — what counts as success, what kind of relationships matter, what the arc of a good life looks like — may not translate. The references that once provided bearings quietly disappear.
The Inner Experience of Meaning Collapse
An existential crisis rarely announces itself. It tends to feel like one or more of the following:
Flatness or numbness. Things that previously held interest or pleasure no longer do. This is distinct from depression, though the two can overlap. The signature of meaning collapse is that the absence of feeling is targeted at significance rather than mood generally.
Restlessness without direction. A sense that something needs to change, without any clarity about what. Dissatisfaction that can't identify an object.
Heightened questioning. Thoughts about the point of what you're doing; whether you are living the life you actually wanted; what you would do if you could start again; whether it is too late to change something essential.
Disconnection from previous anchors. The beliefs, relationships, or routines that once felt grounding feel thinner or less convincing.
Unusual preoccupation with time and mortality. Awareness of how much has already passed. A different quality of attention to the question of what remains.
“We crave the comfort of absolute truth because we cannot bear the desolation of a purely capricious existence… We cling tenaciously to the belief that explanation, some explanation, is possible. It makes things bearable.”
— Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy
The difficulty is that many of these inner experiences look from the outside like dysfunction — like something that needs to be fixed rather than something that needs to be understood. And the instinct, both internal and cultural, is to treat them as problems to resolve as quickly as possible: more productivity, more distraction, more certainty, more goals.
How IFS Makes Sense of It
Internal Family Systems offers a distinctive lens on existential experience that doesn't treat meaning collapse as a malfunction.
What IFS proposes is that the mind is naturally composed of multiple parts, each carrying its own perspective, emotional range, and way of responding to the world. Some of these parts work to keep the person stable, functional, and safe. Some carry older pain or unresolved experience. And all of them are operating within a system that is trying, sometimes at great cost, to hold things together.
The Parts That Build Meaning Structures
Meaning-making is, in part, a protective function. Parts of the internal system work hard to generate frameworks that keep life legible: this is what I'm working toward; this is who I am; this is what matters. A coherent sense of meaning supports everything else: wellbeing, direction, the capacity to make decisions and sustain relationships.
But meaning structures are also, to some extent, provisional. They are built on particular beliefs, experiences, and assumptions about the future. When those foundations shift — through loss, through transition, through arriving somewhere and finding it doesn't feel like you expected — meaning structures lose their stability.
When Protective Parts Become the Problem
An existential crisis often involves protective parts doubling down on the very strategies that are no longer working. The ambitious part drives harder. The planning part generates more plans. The part that believes in deferred satisfaction insists that the next milestone will be the one that delivers. The part that manages social presentation works harder to project certainty.
The problem is that none of these parts are addressing the actual disturbance: the collapse of the underlying framework. They are protecting against the experience of not knowing, of uncertainty, of the genuine question beneath the crisis: Who am I if the structures I've relied on no longer hold?
Understanding how protective parts work is often the first step toward loosening their grip — not by overriding them, but by getting genuinely curious about what they are afraid of.
“We are here to learn a particular set of life lessons, and the lesson plan is already within us. Each of us carries legacy burdens inherited from our families and cultures, and each of us also accrues plenty of personal burdens along the way. So our lesson plan begins with unloading those burdens, and that sets the stage for the most important lesson of all — finding out who we really are.”
— Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts
What the Crisis Is Actually Protecting
Underneath the busyness of the protective response, there is usually something more vulnerable: a part carrying the weight of choices not made, directions not taken, or something that has always been suppressed in favour of the acceptable version of a life. Exiled parts — those pushed out of everyday awareness because their experience was too painful or too destabilising — often become more audible during existential crises.
The crisis is not only a collapse. It is also, in many cases, an emergence. The parts that have been waiting to be heard have found a gap in the system's defences.
What a Parts-Based Approach Offers
Existential crises tend to be treated, in both popular culture and some therapeutic traditions, as problems of cognition — as though finding the right framework, the right philosophy, or the right answer to the meaning question will restore the sense of direction that has been lost.
What IFS offers instead is a relational approach.
Rather than asking what is the right answer?, it asks: which parts of you are activated by this crisis, and what are they carrying? Rather than reaching for a new framework to replace the one that collapsed, it slows down to get curious about why the collapse happened and what it might be pointing toward.
This is different from talk therapy approaches that focus primarily on restructuring thoughts or identifying cognitive distortions. The distinction matters because the experience of an existential crisis is rarely one of wrong thinking. It is one of a system in reorganisation, trying to find a new basis for operating.
Getting Curious Rather Than Resolving
One of the most counterintuitive moves in IFS-informed work with existential material is resisting the pressure to arrive at answers quickly. The parts that want resolution, that are working hard to find the new framework, the new goal, the new certainty, are understandable. They are trying to help. But their urgency often forecloses the possibility of actually discovering what is underneath.
Getting genuinely curious about the crisis, including what it is bringing up, what it has disturbed, what it might be asking for, is a different quality of attention than trying to solve it.
Working with What Has Collapsed
Meaning structures don't collapse randomly. They tend to collapse where something was never fully integrated: an identity that didn't quite fit, a direction chosen for protective rather than authentic reasons, a relationship with the self mediated primarily through external achievement.
Working with the parts that carried those structures with curiosity and without judgement often reveals what was being protected against. And that is frequently where more durable forms of meaning begin to emerge: not from finding the right answer, but from developing a different relationship with the question.
For people whose existential distress connects to early experience, such as childhood environments that required the suppression of particular ways of being, or significant early losses, the connection between present crisis and older pain is often worth exploring carefully, and usually benefits from professional support.
A Note on Self-Energy
In IFS, there is a concept that becomes particularly relevant during existential crises: Self-Energy.
Self-Energy is not a solution to meaning collapse. It is not a state of certainty or a replacement framework. It is a quality of steady, curious, compassionate presence that makes it possible to be with the questions without needing to resolve them prematurely.
“Our core Self, the soul that is revered in spiritual traditions, encompasses curiosity, compassion, calm, confidence, courage, clarity, creativity, connectedness, and kindness.”
— Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy
What most people discover, working with an existential crisis over time, is that the loss of meaning is not the final destination. It is a passage. And the quality of how that passage is navigated matters enormously. Moving through it with urgency and resistance tends to reproduce the same vulnerabilities as before. Moving through it with more Self-Energy — more capacity to be curious about what is actually here — tends to produce something more genuinely grounded.
If you'd like a plain-language introduction to what Self-Energy actually is and what it feels like in practice, the free guide What ‘Self-Energy’ Feels Like — And What It Doesn’t explores this in accessible detail.
Curious about working with an IFS therapist?
If this article has raised questions you'd like to explore further, I work online with English- and French-speaking clients. Sessions are available via video call.
About the Author
Ben Carey Donaldson is a certified IFS therapist, meditation guide, and group facilitator based in the Fontainebleau–Paris region of France. He works online with English- and French-speaking clients across Europe and internationally, drawing on IFS, somatic awareness, and mindfulness practice to support people navigating transitions, identity questions, and the quieter forms of distress that don’t always fit a clinical category.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an existential crisis?
An existential crisis is an experience in which the frameworks that previously gave life a sense of meaning, direction, or coherence stop functioning reliably. It often surfaces during transitions, after significant losses, or when a long-held goal is achieved without producing the expected satisfaction. It is not a clinical diagnosis, but it is one of the more common experiences that brings people to therapy.
What triggers an existential crisis?
Common triggers include major life transitions (moving countries, changing careers, relationship endings or beginnings), grief and loss, achieving significant goals, and periods of cross-cultural displacement. Quarter-life and midlife crises are well-documented forms, though existential questioning can arise at any age and in response to many different circumstances.
How long does an existential crisis last?
There is no fixed duration. Some resolve within weeks, particularly when the person has adequate support and the capacity to engage with the underlying questions. Others persist for months, especially when the protective response is to avoid the disturbance rather than explore it. Working with a therapist who is comfortable with existential material can significantly affect how the experience unfolds.
Is an existential crisis a form of depression?
The two can overlap, and both can feature low mood, reduced interest, and difficulty engaging with ordinary life. The distinctions matter, however: existential crisis is primarily a crisis of meaning and direction, while depression involves a more pervasive disruption of mood, energy, and neurological functioning. Someone experiencing an existential crisis may be functioning well by many external measures while finding little significance in what they are doing.
What does IFS offer for existential crisis?
IFS approaches existential crisis not as a problem to be solved but as a system in reorganisation. Rather than searching for new frameworks to replace collapsed ones, it works with the parts of the inner system that are activated by the crisis — getting curious about what they are protecting against, what they are carrying, and what might be underneath the collapse. This relational, internal approach often produces more durable results than purely cognitive interventions.
Can an existential crisis lead to positive change?
Yes — and this is one of the more important reframes available. Many people describe existential crises, in retrospect, as having cleared the ground for something more authentic. The collapse of a meaning structure built on external achievement, social expectation, or unexamined assumption can, if navigated thoughtfully, open space for a more grounded relationship with what actually matters. The quality of how the crisis is met tends to determine whether it leads in that direction.
Related Articles
What Is Internal Family Systems (IFS)? — A Definitive Guide
How IFS Works: Parts, Protectors, Exiles, and Self-Energy
IFS vs. Talk Therapy: What Makes Parts-Based Therapy Different?
References & Further Reading
1. The Gift of Therapy — Irvin D. Yalom (2002)
2. No Bad Parts — Richard C. Schwartz (2021)
3. Internal Family Systems Therapy — Richard C. Schwartz & Martha Sweezy (2020, 2nd ed.)
4. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl (1946)