Freedom to choose. By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

March 2025

 

“So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I like this quote very much. It sings to me, especially after last year’s brush with serious illness and near death. Live abundantly, drink deeply of the springs of existence, don’t waste your time. Live and choose wisely.

 

We may or may not live again, who actually knows. Whether or not consciousness manifests in other bodies after our physical death, this is finally unknowable. Right now, this life we live is it.

 

Too much time in most lives are lived as though what is happening in this instance is just a preparation, a practice run, for a better life. But in this way, the experiences of now are somehow set aside, until we die – meaning lives are spent in anticipation: a dream for perfection, or heaven, or whatever.

 

Frankl’s observation about living now is living in all its messiness. This doesn’t mean just going along mindlessly with whatever crops up; what it does mean is living life with purpose. We are, after all, given free will and a sense of determination for living meaningfully, for us individually and as a community. Enough research has found that when we give up  a sense of a meaningful life we fall into despair and deep depression.

 

Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997), neurologist, psychologist, philosopher was a holocaust survivor, spending four years in three concentration camps. He lost his family and his wife and, effectively, was forced into the realization that the search for meaning matters to psychological health. Afterall, what was the point of all the suffering?

 

Several years ago when my brother and I travelled to Estonia to catch up with our relatives there, I asked my Estonian aunt what it was like under Russian rule during USSR times (the Soviet Union only recognized the independence of Estonia in 1991) and said, “Remember you are always free in your mind.” She was Estonia’s first paediatric surgeon, trained in St Petersburg. She knew really tough times, but difficulties didn’t constrict her. Freedom to think, yes, but Frankl goes further, freedom to choose what you respond to. 

 

It is hard not being reactive to everything, and this requires conscious effort.  I was put to the test repeatedly while sick in bed in hospital.  I had to practice equanimity (evenness of mind) on a minute to minute basis and sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes, I really didn’t. My temper flared in the face of what I perceived as the stupidity of others. It flared when things didn’t go smoothly and without fuss. It flared when my breakfast wasn’t the one I’d ordered. It flared when the nurse couldn’t come and elevate my legs to relieve the pressure sores that were forming on my heels. When I was cold and someone had taken away the extra blanket. When…. this and that happened. Suffering is no different a time for practicing self awareness and choosing one’s responses than when everything is going well.

 

How can we achieve equanimity and responding to things that affect us with conscious awareness?

 

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom,” so said Frankl.  This space is not somewhere where the mind is filled with conditioned responses, nor platitudes, but a short interlude in which a fairer response is possible. In Buddhism, this space between in where a compassion arises.  This is what I see the meaning of my life is: to know compassion and express it not just in times of comfort, but stress and awkwardness. We humans are beings of great potential. We can choose cruelty and greed and can choose fairness and love.

Whatever  we choose arises from our decisions, not the conditions in which we find ourselves.  

 

 

Learning to be ourselves by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

 

 

Learning to be ourselves by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

A girl, born twenty or sixty or two hundred years ago to a woman who was dislocated from her family by war, thrown out of sync with usual ordinary things, develops severe asthma and needs, according to her parents, constant monitoring. She was never left alone. All the little girl knew was struggling to breath. The more she struggled, the tighter the parental vigilance and control of her life. Literally, there was no air to breathe and she did not find herself as herself, but always as something looked over by others. In time, the asthma subsided, but her feeling of being in the public space never really did.

 

Everything in her place had to be kept clean and untainted by the lingering presence of another person, her clothes had to be washed after visiting other people, her furniture had to be taken outside and scrubbed down if anyone else had touched it; her place was her place. Very OCDish. Still, though, his mother came and entered her place, still telling her what to do, to think, to eat. Her life outside her mother’s presence was indeterminate and a bit chaotic, because she still didn’t really know who she was. She was getting older, but still trapped in that purgatory of undifferentiation. Mother, at one point, decided daughter should marry the nice guy over the road, and she did. This life, though, was not her own.

 

 

It is critical that children find their own feet. For sure, support and security is essential, indeed critical for human and animal development. Without security and support a little infant does not develop confidence to venture out into the world without intense anxiety. This is the principle of attachment theory as described by John Bowlby (1907-1990). Security and support, and low levels of caregiver anxiety, where a crying infant is attended to straight away, gives the little one a sense that it is safe to simply be him or herself, in process of self differentiation. The process of self differentiation (learning what one is and  is not responsible for) is in turn, the development of emotional intelligence.

 

Depression, anxiety, certain psychosomatic disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorders are associated with not being able to determine the boundary between oneself and others, as well as knowing that the mind of others cannot be completely known and is not one’s own, though an empathy with them is possible. In these conditions, ambiguity is not tolerated and conclusions about things is fitted, far too quickly, into a familiar account of things, even though a non-differentiated state is an ambiguous one. The familiar account of things can be the stories of family, culture, and personal experience that has become ingrained, and offers some sense of security.  For example, the person who says, “I can’t have a normal relationship because I am always rejected,” stymies themselves right from the word go by the story they have. “I will be rejected because I am always rejected.”  But, really, maybe it isn’t so.

 

When we develop a capacity to look at our circumstances by gathering and discriminating and weighing up other explanations for what we have hitherto assumed to be true, we can begin to untangle assumptions about our world and work out where we individually stand on matters concerning ourselves. Untangling our accounts of things as we know them, is part of the process of increasing emotional intelligence and lowering our propensity for depressive illness. Such a process also loosens us from our past.

 

Learning what one is and is not is the basis of discovering our uniqueness and celebrating it. Learning what one is and is not is a work that continues throughout life. Mothers and sons and daughters, of whatever age can engage in developing this knowledge, for what used to be a condition of the past doesn’t need to continue to be a condition of the present. Nothing is set in stone.  This is where therapy becomes very useful indeed. I am, and you are and together we can find new ways of feeling, of living.