What If Your Struggles Are Actually Pointing You Toward Your Purpose?

The anxiety that won’t leave. The grief that’s changed you. The challenges that have shaped your path. What if these difficulties aren’t just obstacles to overcome or burdens to bear? What if they’re actually showing you something essential about your purpose?

At Televero Health, we work with many people who initially view their struggles as barriers to their purpose or meaning. They come to us seeing difficulties as problems that keep them from their “real life” or prevent them from finding their true direction. What many discover is a more complex and often liberating possibility: that our deepest struggles don’t necessarily obstruct our purpose but sometimes reveal it. That our wounds, limitations, and challenges can become not just burdens to overcome but doorways to meaning if engaged with openness and intention.

Maybe this connection between struggle and purpose feels foreign to your experience. Maybe you’ve seen your challenges primarily as problems to solve or eliminate before your “real life” can begin. Or you’ve wondered why you face certain persistent difficulties that seem to have no purpose or meaning. Or you’ve viewed your struggles as evidence you’re somehow off track rather than potentially on a path with its own significance. Maybe the idea that difficulties could actually point toward rather than away from your purpose feels like forced positivity rather than genuine possibility.

This isn’t about claiming that suffering exists to teach us lessons or that all difficulties have hidden benefits. Some struggles create genuine harm without clear redemptive aspects. Some challenges result from injustice or misfortune that shouldn’t be spiritually bypassed or falsely reframed as blessings in disguise. But between denial of difficulty and belief that struggles are only meaningless obstacles lies another possibility: that how we engage with our challenges can sometimes reveal and develop aspects of purpose we might not otherwise discover.

We see this connection between struggle and purpose emerge in many different ways. The person whose anxiety becomes a doorway to helping others navigate similar challenges once they’ve developed their own relationship with fear. The individual whose experience of loss opens capacity for presence with others facing similar transitions. The client whose neurodivergence creates both challenges and unique perspectives that inform meaningful contributions. The person whose health limitations lead to discovering gifts for connection, creativity, or insight that might have remained dormant on easier paths.

This potential connection doesn’t make struggles themselves desirable or suggest they happen for specific predetermined reasons. It simply acknowledges that meaningful purpose often emerges not despite but partially through how we engage with life’s difficulties. That our wounds and challenges, when neither denied nor allowed to define us completely, sometimes develop capacities, insights, and values that inform our unique contributions. That purpose typically includes not just our gifts and passions but also how we’ve made meaning of our struggles.

If you’re currently viewing your difficulties primarily as obstacles to purpose, consider whether a different relationship with them might be possible. Not through forced positivity or spiritual bypassing of genuine pain, but through honest exploration of how your challenges have shaped you and what they might reveal about what matters most in your life.

In therapy, we help people explore these connections through several approaches. First, by creating space to acknowledge the genuine difficulty of their challenges without pressure to immediately find silver linings or purpose within them. Then, by examining how these struggles have shaped their values, perspectives, and capacities – what they’ve learned about what matters most through their difficult experiences. Finally, by exploring how these hard-won insights and abilities might inform meaningful contributions or directions, not despite but partially through what they’ve faced.

This exploration might include noticing how struggles have clarified what matters most to you – values that become more evident precisely because they’ve been threatened or challenged. Or how difficulties have developed specific capacities – forms of strength, resilience, or understanding that emerge through navigating particular challenges. Or how your struggles have shaped your ability to connect with others facing similar circumstances – forms of empathy and insight that come not from theory but from lived experience.

What many discover through this process is that purpose often includes not just our talents and interests but also how we’ve been shaped by our difficulties. That meaningful contribution frequently emerges at the intersection of our gifts and our wounds – not because struggles are desirable, but because they often develop particular forms of wisdom, capacity, and values that inform our unique offerings. That some aspects of purpose become visible only through engaging with rather than avoiding or merely enduring the difficulties that shape our paths.

This perspective doesn’t require believing that struggles happen for predetermined reasons or that all difficulties contain hidden benefits. It simply recognizes that how we engage with our challenges – what we learn through them, how they shape our values, what capacities they develop – often informs important aspects of our purpose. Not because suffering itself is meaningful, but because our response to it can develop forms of wisdom, compassion, and contribution that might not emerge on easier paths.

It also doesn’t suggest that struggles alone define purpose, or that more suffering automatically leads to greater meaning. Purpose typically emerges at the intersection of multiple factors – our interests and talents, our values and priorities, our community and context, and yes, the unique perspective and capacities developed through our challenges. The question isn’t whether difficulties completely determine purpose, but whether the wisdom gained through them might inform important aspects of our direction and contribution.

This exploration isn’t about prematurely assigning meaning to fresh wounds or bypassing necessary grief. Some struggles require simple acknowledgment of their difficulty before any discussion of meaning becomes possible. Some challenges primarily need practical response rather than philosophical reframing. But for difficulties that persist or significantly shape our path, exploring their potential connection to purpose can sometimes transform our relationship with these struggles – not eliminating their difficulty, but placing them in a larger context of meaning and possibility.

Because the truth is, most meaningful human purposes include elements of both joy and struggle, both gift and wound, both passion and pain. The counselor whose own healing journey informs their capacity to guide others. The artist whose struggles provide both subject and depth to their creative work. The advocate whose personal challenges fuel commitment to systemic change. The parent whose difficult experiences shape how they raise their children. The friend whose wounds have made them capable of particular forms of presence with others. Not because struggles are necessary or desirable, but because our response to them often shapes aspects of who we become and what we have to offer.

Ready to explore how your struggles might be informing aspects of your purpose? Start here.