“Every time we lose something important, our life loses meaning and we must find it again”

BarcelonaLife is a succession of losses. At every turn, you leave something behind. A person, a job, a friendship. One path ends and another is taken, and another, and another. And each of these losses is a wound. If it is too big, we bleed to death, but if we manage to heal it, it leaves a scar and we move forward with a new lesson learned.

All this is explained to me by Alberto Simoncini, a therapist specialized in grieving processes and author of the book The courage to break. A manual for rebuilding broken lives (Versos&Reversos Editorial, 2025). He knows what he is talking about, not only because of his consulting work, but also because of what he has experienced in his own life: a chronic illness diagnosed during adolescence and different periods of mourning and continuous moving have served to pour into his book a compassionate perspective on loss, suffering and the reconstruction of our lives when everything seems to be the same.

There are always losses and they come in many forms. It can be a loss of a person, but also of a pet, a friend, a job, an unwanted retirement, a bad diagnosis or a financial loss. "Every time we lose something important, our life loses meaning and we have to find it again," explains Simoncini.

Until we find this new meaning, we live what he calls a "broken life," a state in which everything has lost its reason for being, without hope and believing that nothing we have is what we had hoped for. "You can't rebuild anything that isn't completely broken, because then it would just be adjusting," he clarifies.

Sometimes we enter into a crisis and enter a toxic loop where, reviewing our life history, we believe that we have made mistakes in everything we have done. That if we had done things differently, everything would be better now. "No one is born with an instruction manual. We must do a personal work of kindness and self-compassion and tell ourselves that, at each moment, we did things the best we knew how," says the therapist. It is precisely from our mistakes that, throughout life, we learn so that they do not happen to us again.

Recovering consciousness

For Simoncini, rebuilding a broken life means giving it meaning again. "Meaning is love. When life loses meaning, love and the ability to love or be loved are lost. Therefore, finding meaning again means loving again and finding that love that gives meaning to life," he continues. How is this achieved? According to the author, by undergoing therapy with an external person who helps us recover our memories and their meaning, as well as doing a spiritual (not religious) exercise in which we can ask ourselves who we are, what we want in life, what is going well for us or what is not, and what we want to rescue from our former self.

Throughout this process, Simoncini has been able to observe how men always have greater difficulties when it comes to expressing their emotions. "The only people who ask me for forgiveness when they cry in consultation are men," he says. Unlike women, who have many more tools to express their emotions, the therapist regrets how men still need to make peace with their vulnerability and let out everything they have inside.

Each and every one of us is capable of overcoming grief or a crisis. "The big problem is when losses accumulate," says the author. "When not only does a partner or child die, but you also lose a job and are diagnosed with cancer, you need psychological help," Simoncini stresses. In addition, he also considers it very important to have a healthy and nourishing personal network of people to count on during these grieving processes. "It can be a family member, a friend or even a coworker. The important thing is that it is someone who listens to you without judging and who hugs you when you need it," he continues.

In other words, it is essential that, when we find ourselves immersed in the spiral, the people who care for us validate the emotions we are feeling. "Whether it is envy or anger, it is good to know that you have a right to it and that it is normal to feel that way, regardless of what others think," he points out. But it is more complicated when what is experienced is what he calls "phantom mourning." "These are mournings that exist, but that others do not see, such as the death of a pet, perinatal death or that of a lover. "Only you know that someone has died and many times you cannot go to the funeral or express your emotions," he laments. For this reason, he defends that we can always talk about the mourning of life; we must always be well, and it is normal.