In my post , “Don’t Write A Resume”, I talked about the five ways you can know that you’re doing something that matters to you. Those five ways are:1) You’re willing to put in a lot more work than is actually required;2) You’re willing to give up other things that are important to you—time with my friends, going out, free time—in order to do what matters to you;3) You’re motivated primarily by internal satisfactions , not external ones;4) You’re willing to take risks;5) You choose to do something that you would not choose to do in another context .At the end of the post, I briefly mentioned that many people who are searching for their purpose in life wish they could have this kind of experience but haven’t had it and don’t know how to go about getting it. If you’re one of those people, you may feelConfused—why don’t you have it when other people do?Hopeless—if you haven’t figured it out by now, why should you expect that you’ll be able to figure it out at all?Wrong—you must have done something wrong. What other explanation is there?You may be feeling confused and hopeless but you’re not wrong. If anything, my experience is that you’ve been doing something right—namely, protecting yourself from experiences that you feel could be very dangerous.I’m not talking about physical danger—e.g., that you haven’t become a NASCAR driver because you’re afraid of crashing. I’m talking about emotional danger—most likely, the danger of feeling shamed and humiliated.Have you ever worked really hard on something only to get a critical or indifferent response?Do you ever make sacrifices and feel unappreciated?Were you discouraged from knowing what you really liked and encouraged to do what was expected—make money, please a parent, etc?Were you ever shamed for taking risks?All of these experiences can make you feel that it’s too risky to do what really matters to you. One way of protecting yourself from doing it is to not even let yourself know what you care about. In order to find what matters to you, then, you need to feel safe. Since, as the examples above show, these feelings of lack of safety begin in relationships—with parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, etc.—it usually takes having a different kind of relationship to allow you to feel safe enough to let things matter. Sometimes you can get this from a partner or a friend but it is also what a good therapy relationship provides. Unfortunately, people often avoid therapy because they’re afraid of experiencing the very same shame and humiliation they experienced in other relationships. So, if you want to have a life that matters but you’re afraid of taking the risk of therapy, how can you know whether a therapy relationship will be safe for you? I’ll talk about this in a future post.