Living With Meaning, The Pillar Of Logotherapy

Living with meaning is not to guide your existence in search of happiness. It’s finding a purpose and dedicating yourself to it. It is, above all, feeling good about who we are, what we have and what surrounds us, nothing more or less than that. However, in our daily lives, it is difficult to focus the mind, heart and gaze towards this existential goal, because what we often find is a clear lack of meaning.

The noise of stress, the pressure of anxiety saturating us with worries and negativities, the shadow of uncertainty… How can we find meaning in life when within ourselves we only find these realities? It’s complicated, it’s true. However, as psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said, the meaning of life is nothing more than the art of knowing how to live in oneself.

This is, without a doubt, the real secret of psychological well-being: working on our harmony and our internal balance. Something like this necessarily involves the development and achievement of good self-knowledge, and the application of much of the basic presuppositions of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy.

Let’s delve into this subject.

Logotherapy: learning to live meaningfully

On average, people only reflect on the meaning of life when adversity embraces them. It is at this moment that the classic questions come to mind: “why did this happen to me and what is the meaning of all this?”. Few acts have as much meaning for human beings as finding these meanings, even when everything goes wrong and fate hits us hard.

The Stoics, belonging to the philosophical school founded by Zeno of Scythius in 301 BC, defended that happiness consists in accepting things as we receive them. But let’s be honest… how to do this? We like the idea, it sounds good, but it’s not always so easy to gladly accept what happens to us. That’s why it’s so common to resist, get angry and suffer for what was lost or happened.

Irvin David Yalom, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, explains that learning to live meaningfully is something we’ve accomplished over time. It’s as if, at some point, people take that much-needed step towards inner introspection and then connect with their own needs to ask themselves what’s really relevant to them.

What is living meaningfully?

One of the figures who most approached the concept of living with meaning was Viktor Frankl. So much so that he conceived it as the pillar on which he supported his therapeutic approach: logotherapy. According to the Viennese psychiatrist, the desire to find an existential meaning is a need that almost all of us feel at some point, and the simple fact of doing this, of clarifying this idea, helps us in difficult moments.

• To begin with, something we must understand is that each person draws their own meaning in life. It is unique and particular to each of us. Also, it changes over time. According to our own circumstances and the goals we set for ourselves, this inner sense will vary in one way or another.
• This search is a motivating force for human beings. Each time we ask ourselves “What is most important to me right now?”, “What makes sense to me?”, we focus our attention on our authentic self in order to explore it. We are, therefore, facing an exercise in self-knowledge.
• Living with meaning also forces us to value our past and present experience. It is finding a harmony between what has always been important to us (our values) and what we ask for in life (our hopes).

This exercise influences psychological health because, when we clarify this dimension, we find a reason for being, a reason to get up every day, something to believe in, to fight for and hope for.

Logotherapy, the legacy of Viktor Frankl

We know Viktor Frankl basically for two things: for having survived two concentration camps during World War II and for his famous book In Search of Meaning . We must also remember that he was an outstanding professor of psychiatry, who wrote over 30 books and gave about 210 lectures at almost every university in the world.

Among his most notable legacy is undoubtedly logotherapy, a therapy that was integrated into the third Viennese school of therapy after Freud’s psychoanalysis. The engine that gives form and purpose to this psychological approach is to allow people to live meaningfully. That’s how he guided his patients to achieve this goal.

You have a body, a mind and a “soul”

Viktor Frankl’s therapy was not based on theology, that is, it was not religious. The concept of soul was a metaphor to refer to the true essence of the person. According to him, each one of us has a body, a mind and a soul that contains our history, that inner corner where our voice, our values ​​and our personality are located. One of our purposes would be to harmonize these three dimensions.

Everything you experience, good or bad, has some meaning

Every experience we live has a meaning, and we must identify it. Happiness, uncertainty, adversity, days of tranquility, passion, fear… Each moment has its own meaning that we must clarify.

You are free to reorient your life according to your own meanings.

Sometimes circumstances make us captive to certain realities. It is true. An abandonment, for example, leaves us alone, the loss of a job leads us to a moment of difficulty and uncertainty. Amidst these circumstances, each of us is free to tread the path we want, starting from our own vital meanings. Only then will we achieve well-being.

Living with meaning is committing to yourself by following what defines us, what encourages us even in times of darkness. Everyday life is already chaotic enough for us to distance ourselves from our essences, from that soul that Viktor Frankl spoke of. Let’s keep that in mind.