Is it possible to transform a difficult time or challenging experience into something meaningful?
In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl shares how suffering can reveal your purpose and make a dark time more bearable. Here are three ways you can implement his insights right now.
1. Look for opportunity, even in dark times
Frankl spent more than 3 years in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. During this time, he realized that a hopeless situation can still hold possibility. He became aware that “an exceptionally difficult external situation” can allow you to grow spiritually beyond what you thought possible.
Frankl made the deliberate decision to continue to see life as valuable and his current situation as a test, allowing him to gain insight into his immediate reality. For him, it meant viewing his situation as an opportunity to cultivate the values this challenging time can teach him, instead of just mindlessly forging ahead: “Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.”
This decision, to view camp’s difficulties as a test of his inner strength and character, made him realize that if he continues to take his life seriously, he can find deeper meaning and understanding despite his circumstances. The act of reframing his thinking during an impossibly dark time became proof of his belief that his reality can change.
2. Find your purpose in the suffering
While in the concentration camp, Frankl’s purpose started to become clear and helped him to find a mental escape from camp life. He began to visualize himself in a lecture room, teaching about the psychology of the concentration camp, and found that this kind of thinking allowed him to rise above his situation and view his current reality as in the past. Frankl’s new purpose for the future provided an antidote to suffering in the present.
German psychologist Friedrich Nietzsche’s words became particularly meaningful to him during this time when he said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. This “why” or purpose, often excavated through suffering, is the very thing that illuminates our path forward.
Frankl’s new-found meaning provided a much-needed goal that helped him survive his current situation. But it also became more than that, his vision enabled him to inspire his fellow camp mates. Whenever he found the opportunity, he tried to give them “a why — an aim — for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.”
Frankl could see that a future goal restored his camp mates’ inner strength and helped them to fight the mental distress of the concentration camp: “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future… And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.”
3. Focus on decisions that are still within your control
Frankl made a point of not allowing his outer reality to become his inner condition. He realized that how people treated him didn’t have to be a reflection of how he viewed himself, and this gave him freedom. He found that everything can be taken from him except one thing, which he described as: “The last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
While camp life stripped him of almost everything, Frankl noticed that there were still things within his control and that he didn’t lose all his agency. He found that his value as a human being “is anchored in higher, more spiritual things and cannot be shaken by camp life.”
But how could he possess such a freedom? Frankl realized that he can access his spiritual world by focusing the importance of every choice he makes: “Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become moulded into the form of the typical inmate.”
Frankl showed that when outer circumstances are at their worst, and you have very little control over what is happening, a shift inwards towards the decisions you take can move you forward: “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”
Frankl’s insights serve as a reminder that we always have more power in any circumstance than we realize: “Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him — mentally and spiritually.”
Did you know?
Man’s Search For Meaning was originally published in German in 1946. It became an instant best-seller with the release of the English translation in 1949 and has since been translated into more than 50 languages. At the time of Frankl’s death in 1997, the book had sold over 10 million copies and was voted one of the ten most influential books in the United States in two separate surveys.
Why did the book resonate so widely?
Frankl ascribed the success of Man’s Search for Meaning to the “mass neurosis of modern times” since the book addresses the fundamental question of what gives life meaning. He believed that the meaning of life doesn’t lie in ease or convenience, but in taking on responsibility and working towards a purpose:
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
— The Will To Meaning, Viktor Frankl