How Logotherapy Can Benefit Everyone
Logotherapy is not only relevant to people who have experienced severe traumas in their lives.
For the past one year, I have been very curious about Logotherapy. So much so that a few months back, I enrolled myself in a Logotherapy Diploma, and I can’t wait to become a Logotherapist!
What drew me towards this psychotherapeutic approach was essentially how Viktor Frankl caters to a spiritual aspect of the human experience. In his book: The Doctor and the Soul, he talks about the application of spirituality as an integral part of any treatment regimen — when it comes to dealing with a physiological illness, the doctor should not only aim at treating the biological issue but also help the patient in healing their spiritual side. He asserted that every doctor must treat the soul of the patient. Dealing with an illness, especially one that requires one to be in treatment for months and years at length, can easily take a toll on the individual who’s experiencing it. Every person who receives a tough diagnosis goes through immense pain psychologically and spiritually. And in his book, Viktor Frankl explains how essential it is for the doctor to help the patient find meaning in their diagnosis and experience. The patient does not have to perceive the illness as an arbitrary manifestation of bad luck which they need to endure if they want to get back to living a normal life, but they can approach it from a space where they aim at finding meaning in the illness; where they understand that the illness is here to teach them something about life that they must learn. Nobody chooses to be ill and nobody deserves to be ill, but if life puts it upon us, it expects us to persevere through it with integrity. Blaming life for making us go through something that we did not want or choose to is a redundant practice. Our integrity strengthens we choose how we respond to something that we did not want, desire, or anticipate coming towards us.
Now that we have spoken about how Logotherapy approaches physiological illnesses, let us try and understand how it helps in healing psychological traumas in our lives. Experiencing loss of any kind is a traumatic event and this form of therapy aims at helping the individual find meaning in that event.
When something bad happens in our lives, we always have someone who says “Everything happens for a reason.” Our immediate response to such a statement usually is, “Yeah? Well, what’s the reason behind this ridiculous thing that has happened to me?” In that moment, there is possibly nothing that explains the pain that life has caused us. But, if we are self-aware enough, a few years down the line, we comprehend the meaning of that event and accept it for what it meant. Why? Because we would have never been where we are today if events of such nature had not been bestowed upon us by life.
One can say that every moment determines the trajectory of our lives, but Logotherapy would say, how we respond to every moment in our lives determines how it unfolds. I know that it is hard to lead life with this awareness because more often than not, we are in an autopilot mode, and we need to be in it to adapt to life. Trying to be mindful about how my fingers are moving to type this article right now will be a waste of my resources because I need those mental reserves to help me write this article. Therefore, I must operate on autopilot for a lot engagements in my life. However, if a friend comes to me in this moment and showers a litany of problems on me, I can take a moment before reacting and choose to respond in that moment. And that is the exact space where the concept of choice comes in. If I react to my friend with defensiveness, it is very likely that we would end up fighting and it would cause a dent on the friendship. But, if I take a moment and acknowledge the anger building in me because of them, and then choose to remind myself that their behaviour towards me has more to do with them and less to do with me, then it is likely that I would not personalise their words and perceive it as an attack. Instead, I would genuinely empathise with them in that moment and let them be whoever they choose to be because they have their own reasons for being who they are!
The key element is, every person comes with their own vantage point: you have yours, they have theirs. And if we get to dissecting both of these vantage points, each of them will seem as valid as the other. Hence, the goal is to not let the fight become about the vantage points. The goal, in fact, is to engage in a discourse and understand where the other person feels you failed them and check with yourself if it is possible for you to fulfill what they expect out of you in a given situation.
Logotherapy emphasises that there is something beyond humans, and that is life. If the human chooses to transcend and acknowledge the presence of something beyond them, the human will lead a meaningful life. It focuses on helping the individual see beyond themselves; moving away from the self and looking at the other, doing something for the other. The other is an integral factor in making one’s life worth living. And this is not only a Logotherapy phenomenon — Dan Gilbert, a social psychologist who studies happiness has found that human beings experience more happiness when they do something for someone else vis-à-vis when they do the same thing for themselves. This is not to say that if you do something for yourself, you are not going to be happy. It just reflects on the idea of adding value to someone else’s life too, time and again, just like you add to your own life.
Furthermore, just like we have seen how Logotherapy helps heal one through the past, and facilitates one in leading a more meaningful present, it also draws significant attention to one’s future. When we have a dream that we want to make it our reality, we formulate an action-oriented plan on how we can manifest that dream. While pursuing and living that plan, more often than not, we come across obstacles. These obstacles that weren’t a part of our plan demand perseverance; it is very easy to give up on our dream in these moments and take those obstacles as signs that suggest we aren’t meant for our dream. However, from a logotherapeutic standpoint, we can choose to remind ourselves of the meaning of that dream exactly when the moment demands us to give up on it. This way, we endure and achieve what we desire because we refuse to give up on any dream that is meaningful to us.
If I were to put the power of Logotherapy in one statement, I’d say: It helps us in acknowledging, accepting, appreciating the not-so-good parts of life. And as human beings who are going to always experience pain, it is essential to build that hardiness.
