What are we searching for?
We want our lives to have meaning. We want to have a sense of purpose. We want to have hope, even when we seem to have lost our way.
There are two ways to look at life:
a) Me against the world
b) There’s a place for us.
The first way forces you to constantly try to prove yourself. The second way connects you to life. When you feel life is on your side, it takes away the sense of dissonance, even when the going gets rough.
Rather than dividing life events between “meaningful” and meaningless,” everything is meaningful! Each and every moment of life, as sure as your breath coming in and going out, has meaning to it. The meaning is right here, in the here-and-now. You just have to find what it is.
How do you go from dissonance to meaning?
Dissonance means feeling alienated from people because they’ve hurt you or ignored you or worse. Alternatively, you can feel alienated from yourself because of things you’d like to change, like fears, anxieties, depression or bad habits, or a self-image that isn’t very useful to you and holds you back from getting ahead in life. Thirdly, you can feel alienated from life itself, because of chronic pain, disabilities or experiences that have left you feeling like a helpless victim.
Why not just continue to be disconnected and alienated from people and from things that challenge you?
A person who is alienated is not a happy person.
The beginning of the path to healing is to stop fighting reality and stop running away from people and from life events, and instead, embrace them as’ teachers of meaning.’ You can find a way to connect to the situation or to someone you’re angry with by asking yourself what you can learn from it. This search for what you can learn, this attempt to attune yourself to the message, is what Frankl, the creator of logotherapy calls “meaning.”
Thus, Frankl frames the search for meaning as a process of hearing questions and answering them. He wrote: “Meaning is what is meant, be it by a person who asks me a question, or by a situation which, too, implies a question and calls for an answer…I must try hard to find out the true meaning of the question which I am asked.” (Will to Meaning, Frankl, p. 62)
Notice that Frankl writes about hearing “a question,” detecting the “true meaning” of the question, and understanding that the question “calls for an answer.”
So if you want to find a way to connect when you’re feeling alienated you’ll need to listen to hear.
1) What was said
2) The true meaning of what was said, or the message it carries.
3) How you are called/personally addressed by this message
4) Your response to the question in the form of attitudes or actions
For example, if someone wants the window opened and I want it closed, the reality carries a message: someone is hot and I am cold. I am personally addressed by this message: someone is making a request of me.
In a broader sense, not only the person but the “situation” is addressing me, and asking me a series of questions. To what extent do I need to take care of myself and to what extent do I need and to take care of the other? Does this pose a value conflict for me? What is that conflict about exactly? What makes me prefer one response over another? What makes it challenging for me? What would I like to be able to do? What am I capable of doing? What will be the effect of one course of action or another – on myself, on others, on the world? Will I feel good about myself? Will I feel resentful? All things considered, what do I think is the best course of action?
As numerous as the questions, so are the answers. My response will depend on my degree of concern for the other, protection of my own needs, the extent to which I have “heard” the particular way in which this is challenging me and my willingness to rise to meet the challenge.