by David Fireman, LCSW
I decided to apply Parkes’ ideas to our current world situation.
Therapy has always been a “space” for examining and working on personal problems. But it also has always been a container for world tension and weariness. These days the convulsions erupting in our world are forcing many “relocations of the mind” on a daily basis. Amidst the turmoil we are all searching for ways to keep mentally balanced and to hold on to hope. But re-mapping reality is no small task!
Colin Murray Parkes talked about the assumptive world as the set of quiet understandings people carry about how life works. Most of us assume that tomorrow will look something like today, that if we put in effort it will matter, that the systems around us will more or less function, that the future is something we can imagine without too much strain. We don’t usually think about these assumptions. Instead, we carry them around with little awareness of their presence.
Parkes developed this idea in the context of bereavement. When someone important dies, it’s not only the person who is lost. It’s also the life that was already being built and lived with that person. Grief, in his view, is the work of adjusting to a world that no longer matches those expectations. The old map no longer matches the terrain, so the mind must draw a new one.
What feels different in our current cultural moment is that many people are doing this same kind of work without a single, identifiable loss. Instead, we’re living through what is increasingly being described as a polycrisis: climate anxiety, economic insecurity, political violence, uneven application of basic rights and due process, ongoing public health threats, AI, geopolitical disorder, superpower urges toward imperialism—all happening at once. These aren’t one-off events that come and go. They are piling up. Over time, they are fraying the sense that our world is more or less predictable or that our consensus based rules and laws are going to remain stable.
In practice, this shows up in subtle but familiar ways. People say they feel tired all the time, but not just physically. They feel emotionally beleaguered, apprehensive, indecisive, sad, angry. They put off big decisions. They talk about the future in vague terms or avoid talking about it altogether. Some describe anxiety or depression, even paranoia, but what they often mean is that they don’t trust the ground they’re standing on. It’s hard to be motivated when you’re not sure what you’re moving toward.
Parkes reminded us that the assumptive world does a lot to help us tolerate the difficult work. It helps us do 3 basic tasks: to basically know who we are, essentially what roles to play, and what we can fundamentally expect from life. When those assumptions crack, people aren’t just distressed, they’re genuinely disoriented. In grief, there is usually a slow, grinding, back and forth process of rebuilding: over time, the person comes to adjust to, and do their best to live in, a new reality that includes the loss. In our current zeitgeist, that rebuilding process keeps getting disrupted by all the bad and destabilizing daily news. Just as we think we’re beginning to find more solid ground, or balance, or feel relief, or even a tenuous sense of hope, something else happens. Our world is constantly smacking us in the face with new crises and we hardly have a moment to recover from the sting.
From a social work point of view, this lands close to home. Our work depends on systems functioning well enough to be useful. But when housing, healthcare, insurance, education, or legal systems are arbitrary or inaccessible, clients don’t just lose services. They lose hope. That loss of hope has psychological consequences. People can withdraw, become myopic, overwhelmed with stress, feel powerless, or stop expecting help altogether.
In therapy, this can create a mismatch between what we offer and what people need. Skills for calming the nervous system are helpful, but they don’t answer the bigger question many clients are carrying, which is whether the world can be relied on at all. Cognitive reframing can miss the mark when the client’s assessment of instability is accurate. So explaining what is happening to the assumptive world can be a relief. It lets people know they’re not failing at coping. Rather, they’re reacting to something real and widespread and are often simply being self-protective not apathetic.
Parkes was clear that the assumptive world doesn’t get rebuilt through reassurance. Telling someone things will be fine doesn’t help when experience keeps suggesting otherwise. An optimism that refuses to look at the destruction all around us is just plain naïve. Instead, what can help is repeated, ordinary evidence that some things are still dependable. In individual lives it might be a relationship that holds, a routine that continues, a role that still feels important, a creative project that inspires, even a sense of hope that possibilities for change persist. On the bigger scale, it’s harder to imagine, because so much feels beyond our control, which is partly why we feel so worn down.
This attitude also changes how we think about resilience. Resilience isn’t just a personal trait. It depends on whether the world gives people something solid to lean on and draw strength from. Asking people to be resilient while their environment remains unstable can feel like asking them to do emotional labor without the necessary support and basic systemic structure.
The assumptive world that emerges after loss is usually different in some ways from the one that came before. It tends to be less naïve and more pragmatic. In this cultural moment, helping people adjust may mean supporting them with the idea of having smaller, more bite-sized expectations, strengthening closer-in connections, finding meaning in more local causes, focusing on what they can really influence, searching for solidarity in community. Not because the big picture doesn’t matter, but because it feels so precarious and we need somewhere to stand where we can see that we’re making an impact.
Parkes gives us a way to understand why so many people feel unsettled and afraid right now. The world we assumed we inhabited is rapidly changing. Our task is not to pretend otherwise, but to walk alongside people as they figure out how to cope with and repair the world we live in.
This is beautifully written and spot on. I’m going to share it with one of my patients who is particularly affected by exactly this. Thank you.
Thank you for your comments. The ways in which our current polycrisis (Adam Tooze has popularized) infiltrates the world and thus the therapy space/ relationship, is and will be an ongoing challenge for all of us!
Very helpful essay!
Thank you!