Have you ever gone to someone for help and they gave you advice but their advice wasn’t helpful? They had an idea about what they would do if they were in your place but they are not in your place. You are. And their way is not the right way for you. Yet we all need outside help sometimes. What’s the alternative to advice-giving and advice-getting?
The approach in logotherapy is to help you find your own answers. Frankl compares the logotherapist to an eye specialist rather than a painter.
The artist reveals his personality through his art and shows us how he sees the world; an eye specialist helps us to see the world as it really is.
But there’s a problem with the eye specialist analogy. It implies that everyone is seeing the same eye chart that’s objectively there on the wall. And the therapist who presumably has better eyesight is seeing the world “as it is.” Wouldn’t he then be trying to get the client to see the “truth” as he, the therapist sees it?!
Clearly this is not what Frankl means to say because he explains that the logotherapist does not impose his values and perspective on the client.
In that case, how does he help the client see the world as it is, and what does it mean to see the world as it is? What does the logotherapist do? Frankl explains: “The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.”
What does it mean to “widen and broaden” the visual field? The logotherapist asks the kinds of questions that help people to see more than they saw previously, through their own eyes.
I had a client who was in the midst of a seemingly irresolvable conflict with someone. I asked her: “What did it mean to you that you felt victimized and at the same time felt horrible about wanting to recoil and hide from this person?”
She said it meant that she doesn’t want to get hurt and also doesn’t want to hurt someone else. There were certain things she couldn’t say to this person, either because she would hurt herself or hurt the other person, and she really didn’t want either of these things to happen.
In the process of answering questions about all of the possibilities of what she could do and what would happen as a result, she had a bigger picture of the situation. When she entertained the thought of telling her friend what she had originally wanted to say, it made her shiver and react with an adamant “I can’t.”
But now that she was seeing more alternatives and the implications of acting on them she was able to envision a new response on her part that would uphold her values of not hurting or being hurt. If she were to say it in this new way she would not feel threatened and she did not anticipate that her friend would react harshly either. Her friend would actually be surprised she thought, which would throw her off balance and open up a better, more engaged process.
“What has this experience done for you? Who have you become as a result of it?” I asked. “A wiser person,” she said, in the tone of someone who has found inner peace..
Up until our meeting she hadn’t approached the problem in terms of her values. I wasn’t leading her anywhere. I asked her questions that brought her into contact with her values, what she wanted based on those values, in addition to what she was capable of and who she wanted to be.
Once she looked at what her feelings were telling her and the possibility for personal growth this situation was offering, her field of vision became “widened.” She saw the significance of what was happening now and the possibilities of what could happen in the future. She understood what she wanted and what was holding her back. The answer she came up with was not offered by me. Once she saw the meaning of the situation, she got to her own answers.
The answers lie within you. Sometimes you just need help pulling them out.
(based on “The Essence of Existence” from “Logotherapy in a Nutshell” at the end of Man’s Search for Meaning)