I have spent much of my adult life questioning the stories that make human existence easier to bear. Leaving the ministry forced me to examine beliefs I had preached, the authority I had exercised, and the distance between what I intended and what other people experienced. Losing confidence in my theology did not settle those questions. It removed some of the explanations I had used to avoid them.
That experience continues to shape my work in existential health. I am interested in how we develop the capacity to inhabit a life that includes uncertainty, suffering, dependence, desire, and consequence. Understanding these conditions intellectually is different from allowing them to alter how we live.
I call one of the central capacities of existential health reality contact: the ability to remain attentive and responsive to what is happening, including what unsettles our identity, exceeds our explanations, or implicates us in harm. It requires enough honesty to acknowledge what we encounter and enough capacity to respond without immediately retreating into denial, self-justification, or collapse.
This becomes difficult long before we reach the great questions of mortality and cosmic meaning. It becomes difficult at the dinner table, in our sexual lives, within the communities we love, and when we look at the face of someone we despise. Much of reality contact concerns what we have learned to keep outside the frame.
Most of us want an honest relationship with reality until reality threatens something we depend on. A cherished identity, a source of belonging, or the conviction that we are decent people acquires protective importance. We begin deciding what deserves attention according to what that attention would cost.
The process rarely announces itself as dishonesty. We explain why an allegation deserves skepticism, why our circumstances are exceptional, or why a troubling practice is too complicated to judge. Some of these explanations are warranted. The difficulty lies in noticing how consistently our sophistication arrives in defense of what we already want to preserve.
Our lives become organized around a selective field of vision. We see the care we offer more clearly than the burdens we transfer. The harmful consequences of an opponent’s beliefs remain vivid, while the injuries associated with our own commitments require extensive qualification.
Reality contact asks whether our understanding remains open to correction by what exists beyond our preferred account. Other people’s experiences must have the power to change that account. Otherwise, listening becomes a ceremony through which we appear receptive while keeping our conclusions secure.
This is also why reality contact involves more than acquiring information. Someone else’s suffering enters our awareness as a fact, yet remains absent from our decisions. We know and continue living as though we do not know, preserving a separation between what we acknowledge and what we allow to matter.
A meal arrives looking finished. The animal has become a cut of meat, the crop a packaged ingredient, and the work of producing both an item on a receipt. The immediate experience is taste, convenience, nourishment, and price.
Behind that experience are living organisms, land, labor, and death. When we eat animals, another creature’s death is directly involved. Eating plants also places us within agricultural practices that alter habitats and affect other forms of life, although the kinds and degrees of harm differ. No serious account of eating begins and ends with the appearance of food on a plate.
Those differences deserve attention. Acknowledging that all eating has consequences does not make every food practice equivalent, and dependence offers no justification for avoidable cruelty. The point is to encounter nourishment as a relationship with a living world rather than an innocent transaction between a consumer and a product.
Something dies, something is displaced, someone works, and we continue living. That recognition introduces a gravity often missing from the language of consumer choice. Our existence is sustained through processes that involve other lives, many of which remain invisible to us.
I find this difficult because I would prefer care to mean that my life takes nothing it does not deserve. Reality offers no such arrangement. The responsibility is to learn what sustains me, distinguish necessity from convenience, and reduce harm where I have meaningful choices.
Gratitude belongs here, but gratitude alone is insufficient. Feeling reverent about a meal does not answer questions about how it was produced. Contact becomes consequential when attention reaches our habits, purchases, expectations, and willingness to bear some cost ourselves.
Condemnation becomes easier when the person we condemn disappears. A leader becomes a collection of offenses, an adversary a specimen of everything wrong with the world. Their life is edited until nothing remains that would complicate our disgust.
Accountability requires accurate judgment about conduct, power, and consequences. Someone who abuses authority should face restrictions, removal, or other appropriate consequences. Recognizing their humanity does not require restored access to people they have harmed, nor does it place a burden of reconciliation on those people.
Yet moral judgment becomes distorted when we treat harmful conduct as evidence that its author belongs to another order of being. We grant ourselves a history, pressures, wounds, and contradictions. Our enemies receive a character verdict.
The person whose actions we oppose has also lived from the inside of a human life. They have needed attachment, interpreted rejection, feared humiliation, and developed ways of explaining themselves. None of this erases their decisions. It restores the human context in which decisions occur.
That context is unsettling because it brings wrongdoing closer. If harmful people possess recognizable human needs and capacities, then our own humanity provides no exemption. We must examine how fear, loyalty, ambition, and resentment operate in us, rather than locating danger exclusively in the people we reject.
Scapegoating protects more than our self-image. It allows institutions and communities to deposit their failures in a single person, as though removing that person would remove the conditions that enabled them. A serious reckoning investigates the rewards, permissions, silences, and dependencies that surrounded the conduct.
There are legitimate reasons to focus on a powerful individual. Reality contact keeps that focus from becoming an explanation for everything, especially when such an explanation leaves the rest of us comfortably unexamined.
Sexuality exposes the distance between experiencing ourselves as decent and treating another person as fully real. Desire has its own urgency. It directs attention toward what promises pleasure, affirmation, release, or reassurance, sometimes narrowing our perception of the person from whom we want those things.
Being sexual does not make someone complicit in sexual violence. The ethical inquiry concerns how we inhabit desire within cultures that excuse coercion, reward conquest, trivialize violations, or treat another person’s boundaries as an obstacle to overcome. “Rape culture” names those conditions and permissions, including the ordinary conduct through which they are sustained.
Complicity takes different forms and carries different degrees of responsibility. Assault, persistent pressure, excusing a friend’s behavior, and laughing at someone’s humiliation are not interchangeable acts. Their differences require precision, while their relationships deserve examination.
A person who condemns assault still has reason to consider what they excuse when attraction or loyalty is involved. Have they treated reluctance as a negotiation? Have they regarded a partner’s disappointment, fatigue, or uncertainty as inconvenient information rather than part of the encounter itself?
Reality contact requires acknowledging that another person’s experience continues beyond our interpretation of it. Their silence does not become agreement because agreement would relieve us. Our intentions do not establish how free they felt to refuse.
The work extends into how we understand our own desire. Sexual freedom includes the capacity to tolerate disappointment, hear a boundary without retaliation, and remain curious about what we have learned to associate with excitement. Desire becomes more accountable when it remains in relationship with another person’s agency.
Our capacity for pleasure belongs within existential health, alongside vulnerability, embodiment, and intimacy. A fuller relationship with sexuality makes room for the difficult knowledge that wanting someone and meeting them as a person require different capacities, even when both occur within the same encounter.
A religious community gives someone friendship, language for grief, and a place to bring their children. Another person encounters humiliation, enforced silence, or the demand to deny an essential part of themselves in that same community. Both experiences belong to its reality.
The difficulty begins when the beneficiary’s experience becomes the authorized account. The injured person is asked to distinguish the institution from its representatives, appreciate its intentions, or recognize how much good it does. Their testimony receives a hearing only after the community’s identity has been protected.
I know the attraction of that defense. When your work, relationships, and sense of purpose are invested in a religious system, criticism reaches far beyond an argument about doctrine. It threatens the world through which you understand your own contribution.
Leaving religion does not remove this vulnerability. Secular movements, political commitments, professional institutions, and communities organized around healing acquire similar protection. We become reluctant to investigate harm when the people reporting it threaten a source of meaning we regard as indispensable.
Even existential health must remain answerable to this scrutiny. A framework devoted to human dignity does not establish the dignity of every practice conducted in its name. Its language acquires value through whether people retain agency, whether disagreement is survivable, and whether those with less power have effective ways to challenge those with more.
The good we receive from a community creates a reason for gratitude. It also gives us a reason to investigate what our belonging makes harder to see. Affection becomes more responsible when it withstands an honest account of what the beloved institution does.
Once we recognize the hidden costs of ordinary life, cynicism offers a tempting refuge. Every institution becomes corrupt, every relationship transactional, and every moral claim a disguise for power. The person who trusts nothing gets to feel that nothing will fool them.
But suspicion also selects its evidence. An account that finds exploitation everywhere and dismisses generosity as naïveté is as resistant to correction as an account that refuses to acknowledge harm. Both decide in advance what reality is allowed to contain.
Reality includes tenderness that asks for nothing, institutions that provide real protection, and people who change their behavior when confronted. A damaged community sometimes repairs what it has done. An ordinary pleasure sometimes arrives without concealing a moral emergency.
These realities deserve the same disciplined attention as cruelty and evasion. Existential health requires the capacity to register what sustains life, including what exceeds our pessimism. Otherwise, exposure becomes another identity, defended through the claim that bleakness proves honesty.
A person with good reality contact remains available to surprise. They do not need goodness to redeem the whole world before acknowledging it, just as they do not need every instance of harm to confirm that the world is beyond repair.
The recognition of implication easily becomes unmanageable. Food, clothing, technology, institutions, and public life connect us to consequences we neither fully understand nor individually control. The demand to feel every connection at full intensity would exhaust attention without necessarily improving conduct.
Responsibility needs a shape. It concerns the decisions we make, the power we hold, the benefits we receive, and the leverage available to us. A person setting institutional policy bears a different responsibility from someone dependent on that institution for a livelihood.
Economic constraint also belongs inside the moral picture. Choices available to one household remain inaccessible to another, and demanding equal sacrifice from unequal circumstances conceals reality rather than confronting it. Collective action becomes necessary precisely where private virtue reaches its limits.
Generalized guilt often obscures these questions. It keeps attention fixed on how bad we feel about participation while leaving the practical arrangement intact. A more useful inquiry identifies a practice, a relationship, or a decision in which something specific should change.
Sometimes that means relinquishing a convenience or benefit. Elsewhere it means supporting a policy, confronting conduct among our friends, or helping build an alternative. The response should remain proportionate to the situation and open to correction by the people most affected.
There is no permanent certificate of completion. Accountability continues because our circumstances, knowledge, and influence change. We develop the ability to revise how we live without making each revision a referendum on whether we deserve to exist.
Reality contact involves emotional and relational capacities as well as intellectual honesty. Accurate information is difficult to use when its arrival sends us immediately into defense, humiliation, or paralysis. A person needs enough stability to hear something unwelcome and remain capable of thought.
In my work, this is one reason I emphasize the development beneath our ideals. We tell people to accept complexity, own their impact, or listen across difference. Those demands require the ability to bear discomfort, distinguish criticism from annihilation, and remain present while a familiar account of oneself changes.
Support belongs within that development. Trusted relationships provide places to examine what we are learning without requiring either absolution or punishment. Rest and limits help preserve the attention that sustained responsibility needs.
The discipline of staying also includes knowing what staying is for. Remaining in contact with an abusive situation does not mean remaining available to abuse. Accurate recognition sometimes requires departure, protection, distance, or the interruption of a relationship.
As this capacity develops, a person becomes less dependent on resolving every encounter in their own favor. They have more room to acknowledge an injury without rushing to explain their intentions. They are better able to love someone whose experience challenges them, or oppose someone without falsifying their humanity.
This is part of the work I take up in . I wrote it out of a growing conviction that questioning what we believe leaves a deeper task unfinished: developing the capacity to live with what our beliefs once helped us avoid. Reality contact brings that task into our relationships, desires, loyalties, and ordinary choices. It asks whether the life we are building remains open to truths that inconvenience us—and whether we are willing to let those truths change how we live.
That is a substantial form of existential development. Our lives become more answerable to the world because we have less need to keep editing the world into something our identity will tolerate…
