How to Find Meaning in Suffering: Frankl's Hardest Idea

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The three posts in this series so far have introduced Viktor Frankl's argument that meaning, rather than happiness, is the primary organizing force in a well-lived life; the three pathways through which meaning becomes available; and the existential vacuum that arises when those pathways are insufficiently engaged. This fourth post addresses the concept Frankl himself considered the most specifically human of his ideas and the one that most directly engages the question of what to do when life refuses to cooperate with one's intentions.

Frankl's claim was this: even within unavoidable suffering, suffering that cannot be removed, alleviated, or changed by any act of will or intelligence, the human being retains the freedom to choose the attitude with which that suffering is met. And that attitude, chosen deliberately rather than defaulting to despair or bitterness, is itself a source of meaning and a dignity that no external circumstance can take away.

This is Frankl's most demanding idea, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than reduced to a motivational truism.

What Frankl Actually Meant

Frankl did not argue that suffering is good, that it should be sought, or that the appropriate response to avoidable suffering is acceptance. He was explicit on this point: suffering that can be removed should be removed. The attitudinal values pathway applies only to suffering that is genuinely unavoidable, such as irreversible loss, incurable conditions, and circumstances beyond human agency.

In those conditions, Frankl argued, something remains available that external circumstances cannot reach: the capacity to choose one's response. Not to feel differently about what has happened, grief, anger, and despair are legitimate and often necessary responses to genuine loss, but to inhabit those responses with awareness and choice rather than being entirely consumed by them. To bear what cannot be changed with some degree of dignity rather than bitterness. To remain, in some essential sense, the author of one's own experience even within conditions not of one's choosing.

He grounded this claim not in philosophy alone but in observation: the people he encountered during his years in Nazi concentration camps who maintained what he described as an inner freedom, a capacity for choice in their inner life, their attitude toward others, and their relationship to their own suffering, even when every external freedom had been stripped away. He was not romanticizing their suffering or suggesting it was anything other than what it was. He was observing that the human capacity for this kind of inner choice was real and that exercising it was associated with a dignity that the circumstances themselves could not eliminate.

The Connection to Contemporary Research

Frankl's clinical observations about attitudinal values find their clearest contemporary support in research on meaning-making after adversity. Studies of how people process difficult events consistently show that finding or creating a coherent account of what happened, what it means, and how it connects to a broader sense of identity and purpose is among the strongest predictors of positive adaptation (Park & Folkman, 1997). What matters is not the severity of the event but the work of interpretation that follows it. Research on post-traumatic growth points in a similar direction, though with important qualifications (explored in an earlier post on this blog): some people who experience severe adversity subsequently report not merely a return to previous functioning but positive change, including deeper relationships, a renewed sense of what matters, and greater appreciation for life (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). As that earlier post discussed, such growth is neither universal nor obligatory, and the instruments used to measure it carry assumptions about what growth should look like that do not travel equally well across cultures (Splevins et al., 2010).

What these lines of research share is a shift of attention away from the event and toward what follows it. The severity of what happened predicts far less than whether a person can engage with it rather than only defend against it, and whether the account they build of their life can be revised to accommodate it. The event is rarely the decisive factor. The stance taken toward it is.

This is the research-level expression of what Frankl described philosophically: the act of making meaning from suffering, finding in it something that connects to one's values, relationships, or sense of what one is here for, transforms the relationship to the experience without denying or minimizing it.

What This Looks Like in Practice

For accomplished professionals navigating the territory this blog has explored, Frankl's attitudinal values offer a specific invitation: to examine not only what you are pursuing but also how you relate to the difficulties and disappointments that pursuing it has produced, in light of the gap between external success and internal fulfillment, the meaning deficit that the existential vacuum represents.

Not all difficulty is the unavoidable suffering Frankl's framework specifically addresses. But the accumulated frustrations, the choices that didn't work, the relationships that ended, and the versions of yourself you've had to leave behind to become who you are all count as real experiences of loss. How you relate to them shapes both the quality of your present experience and the meaning you make of the life you are living.

The question Frankl's attitudinal values invite is not whether you can feel better about what has been difficult, but whether you can inhabit it with some degree of intention and whether you can bring the same quality of conscious engagement to your relationship with difficulty that this series has been exploring in relation to purpose, meaning, and intentional living more broadly.

Where This Series Has Arrived

Across four posts, this series has covered Frankl's argument that meaning matters more than happiness; the three specific pathways through which meaning is available; the existential vacuum that arises when meaning is lacking; and finally the attitudinal values that make meaning available even amid unavoidable suffering.

Frankl's framework, taken as a whole, is not a self-help program. It is a philosophical account of what it means to live humanly, with real choice, examined values, and full engagement across the range of experience. It is demanding in exactly the ways that matter: it asks for honesty about what actually gives life significance, the courage to make the choices that honoring that significance requires, and a quality of attention to one's inner life that sustained achievement-orientation often erodes.

The Monday posts running alongside this series this month have been exploring intentional living as a practice. Frankl's framework, in many ways, is the philosophical foundation of that practice: the conviction that a deliberately chosen life, organized around authentic meaning rather than inherited expectations, is both possible and worth the considerable effort it demands.

← Return to the beginning: Why Meaning Matters More Than Happiness

If this series has raised something worth exploring

The Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook offers a structured space to examine your relationship to meaning, what the three pathways look like in your current life, where the vacuum might be showing up, and what a more deliberately meaningful life might require of you.

→ Download the free Self-Coaching Mini-Workbook at beginnoticing.com

If you're ready to explore this further, the Your Next Step clarity call is a free 30-minute conversation about where you are and what might come next. Visit stepstochat.com

References

Frankl, V. E. (1946/1959). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press.

Frankl, V. E. (1969). The will to meaning: Foundations and applications of logotherapy. New American Library.

Park, C. L., & Folkman, S. (1997). Meaning in the context of stress and coping. Review of General Psychology, 1(2), 115–144.

Splevins, K., Cohen, K., Bowley, J., & Joseph, S. (2010). Theories of posttraumatic growth: Cross-cultural perspectives. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 15(3), 259–277.

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471.