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Early trauma often teaches young people that hope is a liability.

Looking functional and quietly disappearing are not mutually exclusive.

Existential groundlessness, met honestly, can become the start of something real.

Clinical details have been altered to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individual described.

I recently was clinically supporting an 18-year-old who didn't think she would make it to certain milestones: graduations, weddings, and other important life events. She had no plan to die by suicide. Her future simply felt inaccessible, as though it belonged to someone else.

She could picture the ceremony, the flowers, the faces of people she loved, but she could not locate herself inside the internal image. She was always slightly off to the side of her own life, watching from a distance she could not close. She struggled to find language for this, as most people do.

Existential Feelings About Continuity and Time

What she and many young adults experience isn't necessarily a hidden death wish. It is something harder to name: a psychological disconnection from their own continuity. In other words, the self and the future have come unstuck from one another.

Clinically, this can present as derealization, depersonalization, depression, numbness, or the flattening of time that often follows complex forms of trauma. Yet in more existential terms, it is an encounter with identity and meaning that the person has not yet been equipped to navigate.

Irvin Yalom identified four ultimate concerns at the root of existential suffering: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. While his work on death anxiety is most widely known, it........

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