Skip to main content

The Search for Meaning

When I was in grad school, I read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.  If you haven't heard of him, Dr. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist that was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in the Czech Republic in 1942 with his wife and parents.  He spent time in Auschwitz, where his mother and brother died. Dr. Frankl was separated from his wife when he was moved to a satellite camp of Dachau (Turkheim) while she was sent to a different camp, where she later died.

In "Man's Search for Meaning" Dr. Frankl tells the story of his life in Nazi concentration camps in vivid detail, but what is so striking about his writing is how he explored one seemingly simple concept - attitude - and how this often made the difference between life and death in the camp.  Those who were able to accept their circumstances as beyond their control while seeking some form of meaning in their experiences fared far better than those who fell into depression and despair.


“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” 

Last week I wrote about a concept called "Emotion Focused Coping" which can be useful when we face a problem without a solution, something that people living with chronic medical illness often face.  We can do so much to improve our health and treat our symptoms, but there are some aspects of chronic illness that are beyond our control.  Trying to solve unsolvable problems can drive one batty (that's a technical term).

A third type of coping is something called Meaning Focused Coping.  While Dr. Frankl didn't come up with this term, it embodies his perspectives that came from his experiences in the camps.  When we face a negative situation, we find enriching, meaningful elements in them and focus our attention there.  For some it's appreciating the little things in life.  For others it may involve advocacy efforts or blogging about their condition.  There is no right way to engage in meaning focused coping.  The point is to find meaning in your situation, no matter how bad it may seem.  Preliminary research suggests that people who use meaning focused coping strategies have better long term health outcomes.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

Yes, I'm telling you that finding meaning in your illness will help you feel better.  However, meaning focused coping is probably the most challenging of the 3 strategies I've talked about.  So how the heck do you do it?
  • Find some benefit from your illness.  Since you were diagnosed, are you more patient?  Have you learned to slow down in life?  Do you appreciate the people in your life who are truly there for you? No matter how small it may seem, there is usually at least one positive change that happens when we're forced to live with an illness.  For me, I've met some amazing people because of Crohn's disease - my practice partner, Steph, Andrea & Megan from The Great Bowel Movement, my Camp Oasis family to name a few.
  • Adapt your goals.  Lets face it, having an illness can throw a wrench in a lot of our plans.  Evaluate your goals in light of your new circumstances and make adjustments.  It's OK to give up on goals that may no longer be feasible and substitute them with viable alternatives.  Forgive yourself for having to make these changes if it feels like you're giving up too easily.
  • Reorder your priorities.  Things that are important in life move up and down the priority ladder all the time.  You can do a little exercise here by drawing a ladder on a piece of paper with several rungs.  On each rung, write down your priorities before you were diagnosed.  Repeat this process for your life as it is today.
  • Don't discount the little things.  Yes, it's a bit cliche.  But it's true.  Take time out of each day to stop thinking about anything but the present moment.  Turn off your cell phone and stare out the window for 10 minutes, taking in the scene in front of you and not thinking about all the things you need to do.  This is a little strategy we call Mindfulness Meditation.  You can read more on that here.
“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions."


With that, nothing brings about a sense of meaning like the weekend.  Happy Friday!

Best,
Dr. T

Popular posts from this blog

So You Have IBD During a Pandemic

Hey! What's going on? Been pretty boring over here in Chicago. Ok I don't need to elaborate on what the hell is going on in the world. We are being bombarded with information - some accurate, a lot inaccurate - about this pandemic. It's very easy to become completely overwhelmed by it all. We've been forced, pretty damn quickly, to completely overhaul our way of life for the greater good. To reduce the strain on our healthcare system of the sick and dying. And us humans are generally bad with rapid, monumental change that we really don't have a lot of say in. Our little reptilian brains do what they're supposed to do (prime us for fight or flight or freeze) but our advanced "thinking" parts of our brain have to interject with all sorts of unhelpful thoughts, thereby sending some of us off the rails. Before we start, turn off the news. Seriously. In the days following 9-11 we found people who consumed more 24-hour news channel information were mor

Psychosocial aspects of having an ostomy

This past Saturday, Tiffany and I had the honor of speaking at the United Ostomy Associations of America's Regional Midwest conference. I was assigned the task of speaking to the patients, and Tiffany addressed the partners or caregivers. I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from my talk. I only had an hour for my session, and with about 100 people in the room, it was not nearly enough time. I love bullet points, so here you go: We are all different! Every ostomate is different and not one size fits all for the emotional/mental aspect either. Who had months to talk about an ostomy and weigh pros/cons? Who was this a more sudden decision for? Who had cancer? Who had IBD? Something else? Who had an ileostomy? colostomy? urostomy? Who has a temporary? Permanent? Multiple temporaries? What age where you when you got your ostomy? Under 20, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60+ Who was single when they got their ostomy? With a serious partner when they had it? Some find a stom

IBD & Medical Trauma

Medical trauma is such an under-recognized issue for the chronnically ill. It's a hard topic to talk about because it can seem like we are pointing fingers at healthcare workers. Maybe that's why there are only, now, 4 studies on the topic in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). If you are someone who treats people with IBD please know I am not here to demonize or criticize. I am both a patient and a GI psychologist. I know the medical system from both sides. I know how messed up and broken it is. But ignoring this or rationalizing it away as only affecting a few folks is wrong. So let's talk about it. Post-traumatic stress (PTS) is the term we use for medical trauma due to technicalities in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTS can be less severe that full on PTSD, or it can be full on PTSD. Regardless, the symptoms are identical: Feeling hypervigilant/on-edge (increased