The Instinct to Reach
Everyone knows what it feels like when life goes awry and something in us reaches outward.
It’s usually not in the most dramatic ways at first. Nothing catastrophic. Just a small disruption. A conversation that leaves a strange aftertaste. A plan that falls apart. A decision that doesn’t sit right. The quiet sense that something is off.
We are not neutral toward disorder. We notice it. We feel it. And almost immediately, we respond.
Human beings are meaning-oriented, pattern-seeking, and deeply sensitive to justice, even in small doses. We expect the world to make sense at least most of the time. We expect effort to correlate with outcome. We expect people to behave within certain moral boundaries. When those expectations rupture, the mind does not only observe the rupture. It resists it. We push back.
Sometimes that resistance looks like frustration. Sometimes it looks like anger. At other times it looks like rumination, anxiety, or a restless search for explanation. But beneath the surface, there is often a single movement taking place: we are appealing to something beyond ourselves to make sense of what just happened.
Thinking back, we can see that this appeal is not a learned behavior. It is a human reflex. Watch a young child stumble or become frightened. Before they assess the damage or decide how to respond, they look instinctively toward a caregiver. The appeal precedes understanding. No instruction is required.
When order breaks, we reach.
Psychologically speaking, this makes sense. The mind is built to resolve discrepancy. When reality does not align with expectation, the nervous system activates. The brain looks for cause, meaning, or remedy. We search for something that can restore equilibrium. That “something” might be a person, an idea, a system, or a story we tell ourselves.
Viktor Frankl gave language to this impulse when he described what he called the will to meaning, which he defined as “the innate desire to give as much meaning as possible to one’s life.”1 In his view, this orientation is always active. We are never neutral toward our circumstances. When meaning is threatened, the psyche does not remain still.
In other words, when life disrupts our internal order, we instinctively look outward for stabilization.
What’s striking is not that we do this, but how quickly it happens. We appeal before we analyze. We reach before we reason. This suggests that the impulse runs deeper than logic. It is closer to attachment than argument, closer to orientation than explanation.
Still, the instinct itself is not the issue.
The problem is not that we appeal. The problem is where we direct the appeal.
In modern life, we have no shortage of substitutes. When something feels wrong, we reach for distraction. We scroll, we numb, we busy ourselves. Or we reach for outrage. We replay the offense, rehearse our case, sharpen our moral stance. Or we reach inward, attempting to regulate ourselves with self-talk that sounds confident but feels hollow. Or we reach for control, tightening our grip on routines, plans, or outcomes that promise safety but rarely deliver peace.
Each of these strategies makes fair psychological sense. Each is an attempt to restore order. But most of them inevitably fail over time, not because they are immoral, but because they are structurally insufficient. They ask finite mechanisms to carry infinite weight.
Outrage can name what is wrong, but cannot heal it. Distraction can silence discomfort, but cannot resolve it. Control can create temporary stability, but it cannot reach the wound of injustice or loss that caused the reaction in the first place.
The ancient Psalms gave voice to this long before modern psychology did.
Through laments.
Different from reflection. Far from resignation. A lament is a protest that still believes someone is listening. It is the refusal to treat disorder as normal or final. When the psalmists lament, they are doing something both profoundly human and strangely radical. They are taking the instinct to appeal and giving it a proper address.
Rather than scattering their protest across substitutes, they bring it directly to God.
This is where the theology of lament becomes psychologically stabilizing rather than destabilizing. Lament does not deny pain. It organizes it. It does not suppress anger. It directs it. It does not resolve injustice prematurely. It names it clearly, without letting it metastasize into bitterness or despair.
The Psalms of lament are remarkably honest about what goes wrong. They speak openly of betrayal, oppression, sickness, loneliness, and fear. But they never treat these realities as ultimate. They speak to God about them, because the psalmists are convinced that God is the proper recipient of their appeal.
From a psychological perspective, this matters. When pain has an address, it becomes speakable. When it is speakable, it becomes integrable. When it is integrable, it loses its power to fragment the self.
One of the strengths of lament is that it keeps ethical and moral clarity intact. The psalmists do not dissolve injustice into vague discomfort. They name wrongdoing as wrongdoing. They do not pretend that evil is neutral or that suffering is simply a mindset problem. They resist the pressure to normalize what should never be normal.
This resistance is healthy.
At the same time, lament does something else that is equally important. It prevents the one who laments from becoming what they condemn. By bringing protest before God, the psalmist implicitly submits their own life to the same moral standard. Lament is not just a cry for intervention. It is a practice of accountability.
This may be why lament prayers so often move toward praise.
The movement from protest toward praise is not emotional whiplash, but reorientation. Praise reasserts what is most real when circumstances feel overwhelming. It does not seek to erase grief. It frames it. It says, in effect, that disorder is real, but it is not sovereign. In terms of our psychology, this matters because despair thrives when pain becomes the defining feature of reality. Lament refuses to allow that collapse. It holds suffering and hope in the same frame without forcing resolution.
Notably, the Psalms do not rush the movement. Some laments stay unresolved longer than others. A few never fully emerge into praise at all. That honesty is part of their power. Faith is not presented as emotional consistency, but as relational persistence.
For the modern reader, this has important implications. Many people today are functioning well by external measures. Life may be stable. Work is steady. Health is acceptable. Relationships are intact. And yet, injustice, loss, and disorder are still visible everywhere. The Psalms suggest that personal comfort does not exempt us from lament. Noticing a breach in what should be is reason enough.
Lament trains us to care about more than our own equilibrium. It keeps our moral sensitivity alive without overwhelming us. It teaches us how to protest without becoming corrosive, and how to hope without becoming naïve.
At its core, lament answers a quiet question every human being eventually faces: when something breaks, where do I take it?
The Psalms reveal that God intends to be the one who receives our protest, our confusion, and our appeal for justice. Not because he is fragile or insecure, but because he is capable. Not because he demands it, but because nothing else can bear it.
Perhaps the most honest spiritual practice is not suppressing our reaching, but choosing where it goes.
When order breaks, we will appeal to something.
The question is whether that something can actually hold the weight we place on it.
Notes
- William F. Ryan, "The Will to Meaning," URAM 36, nos. 1–2 (2013): 31–46.
