Facebook post, 7 July 2026

Today I came to know that Victor Yalom, a well-known psychotherapist, died in February this year. He committed suicide.

Yalom was an existentialist-humanistic therapist, like his father Irvin Yalom, who remains among the most well-regarded therapists in contemporary times.

Victor’s suicide reminds one of another famous therapist who committed suicide – Bruno Bettelheim, whose books brought to light the inner lives of children and the use of fairy tales in working with children. Before Bettelheim, Sigmund Freud himself had chosen a death enabled by his doctor through an overdose of morphine. Some of his followers do not like to use the word suicide for this death.

These thoughts bring to light the topic of the therapist and his struggles. Often, an idea is promoted that portrays the therapist as the one who knows, the one who has sorted his emotional issues, and having done so qualifies him to then guide others through their emotional struggles. Of course, this is not true.

I am yet to meet a therapist who had sorted his emotional issues completely or even largely. I have only met therapists who made claims about having done so but their behaviour showed otherwise.

Emotional difficulties are not like money or one’s need for educational qualifications – that after some work, one is done with them. Every stage in life brings its new challenges. As a young adult in my 20s, my primary challenge was to find a sense of vocation, and to be able to wade through the several confusions, anxieties, social pressures involved in going down different paths, experiencing different kinds of work, before finding what spoke to my heart. In my 40s, my challenges are often in relation to my physical health, to how I relate to a body that may not always work the way I would like it to. For older friends, there are difficulties around looking back at life and acknowledging what feel like failures and mistakes. For yet others, life feels like a long flowing stream of loneliness that hasn’t quite stopped, ever.

Each of these themes of the emotional life offer a view into one’s most formative years, childhood and teenage, that throws to light emotions that we never fully felt, or never really registered. Coming in touch with one’s loneliness as an adult, and courageously meeting its depths, opens up the loneliness one may have felt as a 5-year old but never even had the language or the confidence to admit it to oneself, let alone to one’s caregivers.

Seen in this way, life is a layered journey, and emotional pain an opening into depth, into sensitivity, into the capacity to care for oneself and others. Every breath of grief, every simmering of anger, is an invitation to listen more deeply, to know oneself and the other.

There isn’t some mountain to climb at whose summit one will be sorted. The figures of Sadhguru and Sri Sri, Buddha and Ramana, are never real human beings one meets in real life, but cultural productions, sometimes deliberately manipulative, at other times child-like and naive. I do not know what Siddhartha Gautama, the person, was like, before and after the profound shift he experienced in his life at age 35. I do know that the idea of a person sitting in perpetual peace and bliss is not something I have met in my life, except in conversations with people highly dissociated from reality, speaking about their gurus or about their own states that they are permanently trying to re-create.

And I hope nobody ever ends up in that state either, for it seems truly shallow and meaningless.

Like in Yalom’s life, the pain may never go away. We may feel overwhelmed by it. But we are real human beings, on real journeys. And we are searching for a light within that shows us the path to walk.

The deeper the wound, the deeper the possibility of healing. The more we heal, the more we are touched profoundly by the beauty of a kitten, the sorrow of a person unable to see the point of his life. We deepen our compassion and share it with others. We deepen our intimacy with nature and the universe, we have insights into what our life means, why we are here. We are never second-hand, performing to be some ideal or some teacher that we strive towards emulating. We question all authority, most of all spiritual.

New challenges arise, old wounds emerge at deeper layers. We may struggle, or we may know how to wade through this forest of difficult emotions. A friend who listens deeply is perhaps the deepest gift life can give us.

The often-quoted words of Ram Dass always touch a chord – “We are all just walking each other home.”