Everything happens for a reason...No. It doesn’t.
One phrase I hear so often when people are trying to comfort someone who is going grief, loss, a tragic event, is - “Everything happens for a reason.”
I understand the sentiment behind this common phrase as people are trying to uplift others who are going through a tough time. It can highlight someone’s resilient, strength, bravery, or growth. It praises those who “made it to the other side”. It celebrates “what doesn’t kill you make you stronger”. It offers meaning and reasoning to something that might be too difficult to process. Sometimes, it gives meaning to something that is meaningless. When there are no rhymes or reasons. But other times, it brings self-blame and shame. It stirs up guilt. It tells someone that they are innately flawed and forever broken. Forever tainted. It puts responsibility on you to carry what someone did to you when you shouldn’t have to in the first place.
For me, “everything happens for a reason” caused me to believe that I deserved what happened to me. It made me believe that I am to blame for everything that happened, so much so that I believed that the god I trusted in at the time even proved to me that I must go through those terrible things. I believed that my resilient, strength, and personal growth is credited by the things someone did to me. It made me feel worthless and hopeless while being stuck in this cycle of victim-blaming to myself.
“Why did you stand outside alone at night?”, “What were you even thinking wearing that skirt?”, “You’re so stupid, you should’ve known better”, “Why did you not report it to the police?”, “Why didn’t you ask for help?”, “Why didn’t you scream and cry"?, “Why didn’t you say no?”, “You could’ve just left”, “You could’ve fought back”, “You provoked him”. Millions of “whys”, “should’ves”, “could’ves”, and explanations I tried to reason with myself that if I am hurting so much, then there must be a reason for it. Yeah sure, these things were easy to bring upon myself because they happened when I was older. But what about the 3-year-old, 5-year-old, 7-year-old, 12-year-old-me? Did she deserve everything that happened to her, too? Because she should’ve known better? That she should’ve told the adults in her life?
I work as a therapist for survivors of domestic violence and sexual violence. Many clients that come into the therapy space echo this same phrase that people tell them all the time, “everything happens for a reason”. Like their suffering is just a project or a lesson to be learned from. Like it was their mistake for something someone did to them. They blame themselves and internalized that they must’ve deserved it in the first place. Similarly, it tells survivors that if they are not doing well, healing, “getting over it”, or that if they get into another abusive relationship, get sexually assaulted again by someone else, then it must be their fault that these things happened to them. It breaks my heart hearing so many survivors blame themselves for the horrible things that someone did to them, on top of society telling them that they were “asking for it”. Not only do I empathize them, I realized that I also internalized so much of this belief.
So it seems to me that “everything happens for a reason” only applies to those who are able to move on. To those who are lucky enough to not have their own body betrays them. To those whose bodies are keeping the score of what happened to them. To those who are able to regain their agency. To those who have a safe and supportive system to help them through.
I am so much more than what happened to me. I never asked to be strong. I never asked to be resilient. I never asked to be brave. I never asked for those things to happen to me. So no. Not everything happens for a reason. Some things should never have happened to me. I did not deserve what happened to me. And it is okay for me to grieve that.
