How to Protect Your Mental Health When Your Body Breaks Down
He was cruising at 25.9 miles per hour, the fastest he had ever ridden. Perfect road. Slight tailwind. A hundred fifty mile charity ride behind him and a triathlon ahead. And then there was a brown blur in front of his tire.
Two and a half weeks later, Dr. Daniel Franz sat down across from Dave Rodriguez on The Vitality Journey Podcast with a fractured pelvis and a recovery timeline measured in months. Dave, meanwhile, had just cut a long-awaited England vacation short after six days of illness he still does not have answers for.
Neither of them planned this conversation. It happened because both of their bodies gave out inside the same thirty days.
Here is the question that came out of it, and it is the question most people never think to ask until they are already in the middle of it: when your body is working against you, how do you keep your mind intact?
This post is inspired by our latest episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast. Watch the full conversation here.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Preparing for Trauma
Dave asked the question directly: how does a person protect their mental and emotional health after a traumatic physical event or a severe illness?
Dr. Dan’s answer was not what most people want to hear.
“After trauma, it’s too late. Resilience is a way of life.”
Dr. Daniel Franz
That is not fatalism. It is a call to build now, while things are fine.
Dr. Dan is a logotherapist, trained in Viktor Frankl’s psychology of meaning, with roughly thirty years of clinical practice. He points to what Frankl called the tragic triad: pain, guilt, and death. Three things every human being will face. If suffering is a certainty, then treating it as a surprise is the actual mistake.
His guidance is simple and unsentimental: when you are on your highest highs, know that life will deal you cards that hurt. Build the capacity now, because you cannot build it in the emergency room.
Four Deposits That Fill the Resilience Bank
Dave gave the idea a name that stuck: the resilience bank. You cannot withdraw what you never deposited. Here is what the research and Dr. Dan’s clinical experience say goes in.
- Physical training builds mental capacity, not just muscle.
Dr. Dan was told repeatedly that his conditioning was the reason he would bounce back faster. Dave heard the same thing after two years of training three days a week. But the deeper return is mental. When you push your body past what you thought it could do, you learn something about yourself that transfers directly into crisis. As Dr. Dan put it: a broken pelvis will not break me, even on the days it feels like it will. - Spirituality reframes the ceiling.
A sense that something exists beyond yourself, whatever form that takes, does specific work in a crisis: it tells you this is not the end of the story. Dr. Dan says he has had to call on that constantly in recent weeks. Dave described reading a memoir in England, from a woman whose illness was far worse than his, and watching her wrestle with trust in God while she suffered. Dr. Dan seized on that word. Wrestling is not a failure of faith. It is the practice of it. - Social connection is the deposit most people underfund.
This was the one Dr. Dan named as most surprising in his own recovery. Not the neighbors you wave at, but the people you can call and say, I cannot mow my lawn, can you help. He had people driving hours to knock on his door. Dave came home from England to find a friend had stocked his kitchen with food he could actually keep down.
That last detail matters. It was not the groceries. It was that somebody paid attention to the specific shape of what he was going through.
- Humor, moral compass, and the defiant human spirit.
Frankl’s phrase for the last one. Sometimes the move is to laugh at your own infirmity. Dr. Dan spent a portion of the interview blaming a Sasquatch for the groundhog that ended his season.
Learning to Be Gentle With Yourself, Especially If You Are Bad at It
Both men admitted the same weakness on air.
Dave: “I don’t know how to be sick. I don’t do sick very well.” His pattern for decades has been to push through and take the next mountain. Dr. Dan’s has been identical.
The problem is that pushing through is a strategy that only works from a position of strength. Dr. Dan named the thing that finally corrects it: eventually your body simply informs you that you are resting now, and you no longer get a vote.
His current daily practice is not complicated. He allows himself the extra sleep he used to refuse. He asks his wife to handle the dogs. He prays, meditates, and listens for what his mind, spirit, and body actually need before the day starts.
Stuck Between Who You Were and Who You Are Becoming
Not everyone reading this is recovering from an injury. Many are stuck in a different way.
Dave calls it the liminal space, from the Latin limen, a threshold between rooms. You are not where you were. You are not yet where you are going. You are standing in the hallway.
Neither man scripted it, but Dr. Dan uses the exact same term, and he connects it to Frankl’s idea of becoming: the state of knowing you exist here, not being satisfied with it, and sensing that something is calling. Life is asking you a question and you cannot make out the words.
His prescription for that state is a single verb: explore.
- Go experience something. A coast, a mountain, a culture that is not yours.
- Create something. Write, play, build, make.
- Invest in someone or something larger than you.
- Examine your attitude toward the parts you cannot control.
Those three categories, experience, creativity, and attitude, are Frankl’s three roads to meaning. All three are available to you right now, including in a hospital bed.
Three Myths Worth Correcting
Myth 1: You deal with trauma when trauma arrives.
By then you are spending capacity you did not build. Resilience is a way of life, not an emergency response.
Myth 2: Not knowing is easier than bad news.
Dr. Dan named the two worst sources of stress: randomness and powerlessness. A hard diagnosis at least comes with a path. Ambiguity comes with neither, and prolonged ambiguity produces learned helplessness. If you are in an undiagnosed season, take your mental load seriously, because the uncertainty itself is doing damage.
Myth 3: Asking for help means the relationship is failing.
It is the opposite. Dr. Dan observed that the modern instinct is to ask an AI or a search engine first, which sometimes helps and sometimes points you badly wrong. Real help requires a person, and a person requires a relationship you built beforehand.
The Question Nobody Could Answer
Near the end, Dave laid out his honest frustration. A woman stood in his living room with tears running down her face saying she needed this coaching, badly. He gave her his phone number, his email, and an open invitation. Nothing happened. Not then, not since.
So how do you move someone from I need this to I asked for it?
Dr. Dan pushed back on the premise. He does not think it is unanswerable. He thinks there are so many answers we get stuck choosing among them. His own is unglamorous: keep having the conversations, keep publishing them, keep living the life you are recommending. People watch. Eventually one of them decides to find out more.
The Takeaway
You will face something. Your body, or someone else’s body, will make a decision without consulting you. The mental and emotional health you bring into that moment is the health you built before it.
Fund the bank now: move your body, tend your spirit, build real relationships, and keep your sense of humor. And when it is your turn, do the simple, hard thing.
Ask for help. Help is there.
Watch the full conversation with Dr. Daniel Franz on The Vitality Journey Podcast.
Ready to find out what your life is actually calling you toward? Explore The Calling Quilt™ coaching: https://www.destiny-works.com/the-vitality-journey/
Full Transcript
Dave: So what do you do with your mind and your emotions when your body’s working against you? What do you do when you’ve experienced some sort of illness or trauma and you’re struggling with that? How do you keep your wits about you? Keep your humor, keep your joy, and keep your mind strong going through trauma. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on The Vitality Journey Podcast.
So welcome back to The Vitality Journey Podcast. I’m excited to reintroduce you to a friend that we had on this podcast several months ago, Dr. Daniel Franz, who has been providing help for people for many years. I’m thrilled to have this conversation. We’re going to go into some deep places and to some hopeful places and helpful places. So if you’re in a struggle zone yourself, pay attention. This is going to be good. Dr. Dan, welcome back.
Dr. Dan: Dave, thank you for having me. Always a pleasure chatting with you. I’m so excited for today’s conversation, an unexpected conversation. I can’t wait to see where it goes.
Dave: So here’s why we’re talking about this today. This is not just a philosophical discussion with Dr. Franz and me. This is personal, and we’ll tell you our stories in a minute to bring you up to speed on why we’re going to have this conversation. But a reminder: Dr. Dan, you’ve been helping people for 25 years, right? Or is it longer than that now?
Dr. Dan: Yeah, we’re looking around 30 years or so.
Dave: 30 years. 25, 30, it’s been a while. Okay, so you’ve been helping people in mental health, in meaning. You do some coaching and you do some other types of therapy that I want to talk about, like psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, and we’ll get into that later. But the idea is helping people where they are, to either get healthy, get better, move into life with more strength. What’s the big idea for your calling? How would you describe it?
Dr. Dan: Well, all of those fit in some way, Dave, but as a logotherapist, I specialize in meaning and helping people find meaning. I often like to say all those things I was trained in some 30 years ago, the great big diagnostic and statistical manual, depression, anxiety, PTSD, that is nothing like what I see in the office today. And I do believe, and maybe it’s partially my bias, maybe it’s where the world is, we have a crisis of meaning. We have a deficit of meaning. So I feel uniquely called to focus on that with all of those things you just mentioned.
Dave: Good. Well, we want to come back to that. I want to dive more deeply into that, because I resonate with it, because of what I’ve been trying to do for a number of years and how people work with calling. So we’ll come back to that.
But let’s get personal for a second here. The fact of the matter is we both help people with multiple dimensions of their life. And it hit me, because of what you’ve been through and what I’ve been through, that sometimes the question is: when our bodies are struggling, how do we keep our minds in order? How do we not lose our minds?
First, your story, then I’ll tell my story, because both of us have had this happen in the last 30 days. So what happened to you?
Dr. Dan: It’s kind of funny. We had no plans to do this until it obviously came up, and here we are.
Dave: Yeah.
Dr. Dan: So it’s been about two and a half weeks ago. Dave, I was on top of the world. Everything felt great. Marriage was beautiful. Look, my wife’s always beautiful. Marriage was great that day. Work was going. I had all kinds of projects working for me. I was feeling groovy. I had an early morning meeting at 8 a.m. to plan a retreat. I said, you know what, I need to get out on my bike. I need to log some miles. I was transitioning from a 150 mile charity ride a couple weeks before to a portion of a triathlon, so I needed to get fast and get long.
I went out with that intent. Conditions were beautiful, Dave. No wind, maybe a little tailwind. The road was beautiful. Everything was clicking. I was hauling. I was moving. Consistent speeds I haven’t hit before. And I remember thinking to myself at that point, somewhere out there, that life is so good right now.
Dave: You chuckle, because you know what’s coming.
Dr. Dan: You know what’s coming. I was hitting some consistent speeds. I looked down at my bike computer. I’ll never forget the number, Dave. 25.9. I was cruising at 25.9 miles per hour, and the next thing I know I looked up and there was a brown blur in front of my tire. So: 25.9, brown blur, and then the pavement got very close. I landed on my head. Left, thank God.
When I headed out, within the first couple of blocks I thought, man, it is breezy out today. And I realized I forgot my helmet.
Dave: Oh, no.
Dr. Dan: Yeah, there was that brief moment of, you haven’t needed it, why go back? Just get going. And then there was that other part of my conscience that said, no, silly, go get your helmet. Thank God I did, because we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Dave: Oh, my gosh. You didn’t tell me that part of the story. Wow. Okay, so you put your helmet on.
Dr. Dan: I put my helmet on, headed out, was flying. I like to say it was a Sasquatch, maybe a Chupacabra. Something quite mythical got in my way. More than likely it was a large groundhog.
I flew off the bike, landed on my head first, then shoulder, then elbow. Some good road rash, still healing. And then landed on my left hip. So everything was pretty shredded, laying in the street trying to figure out what to do next. And I realized I couldn’t move, couldn’t get up. I was just sitting there hoping a car didn’t come by too quick, because that would have changed the story as well.
I was able to get my arm up and flag down an amazing young Marine who stopped and basically just stood with me and directed traffic. He said, hey, I’m here to help. What do you need to do? What can you do? I said, let’s find my phone and we’ll call my wife. It was so early. She was still asleep, I believe. Fortunately, her uncle lives nearby, and he got out there, found me quick enough. We tried to get into his truck and they helped me stand up, and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t get in the vehicle. So thank goodness the local EMTs were nearby. We got them there and got to the hospital.
Did a lot of testing, and it turned out to be a fractured pelvis. Fortunately, what’s the fancy word? Non-displaced, meaning it wasn’t shifted. It was one of those things where they couldn’t tell me much other than, literally, one of the professionals said: go home, rest, and don’t do anything stupid.
Dave: Now what do they mean by that?
Dr. Dan: Now, Dave, I’m capable of some pretty stupid decisions in my life. You push what you can and you rest when you can. And that’s been a big part of my journey: learning what pushing and resting and listening to my body means.
Dave: Okay, so no surgery is planned?
Dr. Dan: No surgery.
Dave: Okay. But still, what are they telling you for recovery time? When do you get on the bike again?
Dr. Dan: You know it, that’s exactly it. I think I had a momentary lapse of consciousness when they told me the number, because it ended in months, and I probably didn’t want to pay attention.
Dave: Wow. So I want to come back to that. And I’m so sorry that happened to you. I can’t imagine, and the pain. I know you’re sitting there and you look put together and everything, but I’m sure there are days where the pain still visits.
Dr. Dan: No, all day, every day.
Dave: Wow. Yeah. So I want to come back, because one of the things I want to talk about, although this is a horrible situation, is that a lot of the people watching this podcast are going through their own physical issues.
And here’s mine. Mine’s a very different sort of physical problem, but still troublesome. My wife and I were on vacation in England, one of those trips you’ve been waiting for a long, long time to go on, because you know you’re not going to go to England all the time. First of all, the first two days were great, and then that heat wave hit. I don’t know if you all followed the news, but Europe went through a massive heat wave. The problem is, in England there’s no air conditioning. So for four days we were in 95 degree heat and it was awful. We couldn’t sleep or anything.
Anyway, we got through that. I thought, okay, we’ve cleared it, the weather turned nice. But then I got horrifically sick, and I will spare the details, but let’s just say that I spent more time going between the couch and the bed and the bathroom than I ever have in my life. It was awful. So much so that, I was sick for six days, and my wife couldn’t drive, because driving on the left side, I had learned to drive on the left, she wasn’t ready to do that. So I’m thinking, do I need to go to the hospital? What do I need to do? Because I was getting sicker and sicker.
Make a long story short, we called it. We called the vacation over. We came home four days early. And as a matter of fact, even as of this recording, I still have one more test I’m going through tomorrow. I’ve been through every kind of test to figure out what’s going on. So far I’m feeling better, but we still don’t have answers. Again, not a fractured pelvis, but I don’t know what you call it. Everything has been physically up in the air for the last couple of weeks.
And when I knew you were going to be on the podcast, we compared notes, and I realized, okay, we’re both struggling with a thing.
With what you do, here’s the question, because at some point everybody is going to go through some sort of physical trauma. Their body is going to go through something, either broken or an illness. Here’s the question I have for you as a mental health professional: how does a person protect their mental and emotional health after experiencing a traumatic physical event or a severe illness? Is that a good enough kickoff question for you, Dan?
Dr. Dan: I love that question. I think also, just to comment on your situation, Dave, for most of us human beings, the not knowing is far worse. At least I know, and I have a path, and I know what my path is, and I know what needs to happen to heal. Not knowing, there are two of the worst sources of stress: randomness and powerlessness. That would generate learned helplessness in many people. There’s great research on that.
So the idea of not knowing where our stresses come from, not knowing what is going on with our body or mind, can be one of the worst stresses and sometimes pretty terrifying.
Dave: Yeah, we both went through some stuff, very different, but both, as you said, very traumatic. So the question: how do you take care of yourself after trauma?
Dr. Dan: Well, Dave, after trauma, it’s too late. You can do it, but in the end: pain, guilt, and death, Frankl’s tragic triad, three things that human beings will all go through. We know we will all suffer. And so if suffering is a reality in life, know this, recognize it, and prepare for it.
Know that when you’re in your peaks, when you’re on your highest highs, for me, getting on that bike ride, just coming off a beautiful vacation with my wife in the mountains, beautiful scenery and pictures, and life was so good. When you’re at your highest highs, know that life will deal you some cards at some point that are going to hurt in one way or another: mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. And so we prepare for that. We develop what we call resilience, the ability to bounce back after hard times.
Dave: You say prepare. You prepare by developing resilience prior to the trauma.
Dr. Dan: Correct. Resilience is a way of life. Recognizing that you’re going to have to deal with something sooner or later. So be prepared. You know, the old Boy Scout motto: always be prepared.
Dave: So how do you develop resilience? How do you fill the resilience bank?
Dr. Dan: Oh, great question. I love that idea, the resilience bank. It is a well studied idea, unfortunately not a well publicized idea.
There are, let’s see, I believe there are either nine or 10 different ways to build resilience. Some of my favorites: obviously, exercise. You get out there and you push your body in ways that are safe, well, theoretically safe, unless there are groundhogs or Sasquatches involved. Whether that’s walking, running, hiking, biking, swimming, yoga, whatever it might be, there are many, many ways to push your body to that point where you realize, oh wow, I can go a little bit further and grow stronger.
And that definitely can help with physical trauma. I was told many times: wow, the fact that you were training, and that you had just done a hundred mile bike ride, really helped you. You’ll bounce back quicker.
Dave: Yeah, and I actually had people say the same thing to me. You’ve gone through a lot, but the last couple of years I’ve given myself to three days a week meeting with a trainer, and they’re saying you’re much better off as a result of that, even though it doesn’t feel like it right now.
Dr. Dan: Absolutely. And with that, when we push ourselves physically, we learn mentally what we’re capable of. We learn things like: an unknown illness or a broken pelvis will not break me. It feels like it will sometimes, but we can push past that.
Dave: Okay, so there’s the physical. Work on the physical. Putting cash in the resilience bank.
Dr. Dan: Absolutely. That’s, in my mind, probably the easiest one. Some of the harder ones, I don’t know if they’re hard, they’re just different: spirituality. Well researched. A sense of spirituality, knowing there is something out there greater than ourselves, religion, God, the universe, whatever it might be, can prepare us to recognize: this won’t keep me down. There’s something better. I will hit more peak experiences. There’s something out there for me.
And I know for me personally, in the past couple of weeks, I have had to call on that sense of spirituality and to recognize it’s going to be okay.
Dave: Yep. And you pray differently, of course.
Dr. Dan: Amen, absolutely.
Dave: I was reading a book while I was in England, going through all this, from a woman who’s going through ten times worse of a situation than you and I are facing. At the same time, she’s also been wrestling with her understanding of God, but the whole thing has forced her to put her illness in the context of: who do I trust? How do I trust God in the midst of this? It was very helpful for me to read it, even though my situation was just a small fraction of what she’s going through.
Dr. Dan: Well, and that’s, I love that word: wrestling. I believe we need to wrestle with God and our spirituality regularly. And then sometimes in a situation like this, it feels like hourly, maybe.
Dave: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so physical, spiritual. Other resilience builders?
Dr. Dan: Absolutely. Again, in my past few weeks, I recognize just how important social connection is. Building that network, that community. Not just the people you live next to, but the people you can reach out to and say, hey, I can’t mow my lawn right now, can you give me a hand?
Look, I even have to ask. I had so many people knocking on my door and texting me and stopping over from hours away just to ask. Well, a lot of them first had to ask, hey, how’s your wife doing? Because we know what you’re like to deal with sometimes. So is she okay? Are you being nice to her? So that community was there to take care of my wife, and then to be there for me, to allow me to break down when I recognize, I think you mentioned that earlier, when we recognize we’re not in control of our bodies, sometimes our minds can do unpleasant things.
Dave: Yeah. We got off the plane, walked in the house, and there on the counter of our house, a friend of ours had gone and bought us groceries that were, for me, illness appropriate. Type of groceries, things that I could eat. But the fact that somebody paid specific attention to what we were going through meant the world.
Dr. Dan: Yeah. Some of my funnest, well, not just people stopping by, but people recognizing that healthy eating was going to help my recovery. I have never seen so many amazing fruit baskets in my entire life. Some were covered in chocolate, some were just healthy. They’ve been delicious.
Dave: Mine basically boiled down to what do they call it, the BRAT diet. Bananas, rice. That’s basically what I was limited to. I will say this, here’s the side benefit: I look thinner. I’ve lost a lot of weight. I didn’t want to get it this way, but anyway. I digress.
Okay, anything else you want to add to the resilience bucket?
Dr. Dan: There are so many other ways. I don’t want to take the entire time, but having a strong moral compass, developing a good sense of humor, what Frankl calls the defiant human spirit. Sometimes we have to laugh at our own infirmity. There are a lot of ways.
I know you’d mentioned resources. Dr. Steven Southwick has since passed, but I had the pleasure of meeting him years ago at a Logotherapy World Congress, and he wrote a well researched, spectacular book called simply Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges. I recommend Southwick everywhere I go when we have these kinds of conversations.
Dave: Let me ask you this. What have you been doing on a daily basis? Maybe you’ve already mentioned some of it, but what are you doing when you wake up in the morning and you’re facing the pain? What are you doing to your mind as you face a day of pain? Does that make sense, what I’m asking?
Dr. Dan: Absolutely. Well, everything’s had to change, Dave. I used to be up with the dogs and take care of them at 5:45. And now I have to ask my wife to do that. I have to ask for help.
So in my quiet moments, and maybe that’s one thing that’s important, in learning to listen to my body, I am unable to get up as early as I want to, and sometimes I just have to allow myself a little extra sleep. In those moments, prayer is important. Meditation. Being silent and listening for what my mind, what my spirit, what my body needs at that point.
Dave: Being gentle with yourself. That’s one way to say it. I’m not good at it, so I like the fact that you were able to say it.
Dr. Dan: Well, no, I’m not good at that either.
Dave: Because this is the thing my wife and I have been talking about. When things are great, you can push through, you can take the next mountain. That’s my modus. It has been my modus my entire life: pushing through, and let’s go and do this. But you know what, that’s not good when you’re down. There’s a level of gentleness you need to have with yourself.
Dr. Dan: Yeah. So, not only is it not good, in my experience and maybe yours as well, sometimes it’s just not possible. I’ve had many days where I’ve stuck to that same, I’ve been living that way for quite a while, for a few decades. And at some point my body says, oh, you’re going to rest now. And I have to listen.
Dave: Yeah, the fact of the matter is, I know this about myself: I don’t know how to be sick. I don’t do sick very well. I just don’t. And my wife, when she’s listening or watching to this, she’ll be rolling her eyes, because she knows, when she gets ill, she’ll lie down, she’ll take naps, she’ll do what she needs. Not me. I try to power through.
At any rate. Hey, side note, let me go back. Here’s the book. You might find this interesting. K.J. Ramsey has written a book called The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive. Isn’t that title great?
Dr. Dan: It’s beautiful.
Dave: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive. It’s dark, it’s humorous. She is a Christian, but she’s going through a level of deconstruction in her faith and trying to find God in the midst of it. At any rate, I read it, I just couldn’t put it down. Her illness is way, way worse than anything you and I are facing. But The Place Between Our Pains. I highly recommend the book.
All right, let’s shift gears. Not that I want to walk away from what you and I are dealing with, but you have already referenced several times in our conversation Viktor Frankl and meaning and logotherapy. I know it’s at the heart of, would it be safe to say it’s not just the heart of what you do, it’s the heart of who you are. Is that accurate?
So can you give us the overview? What is logotherapy? Who is Viktor Frankl? Give us the introduction to the concept.
Dr. Dan: Absolutely. So logotherapy is Dr. Frankl’s psychology of meaning. He was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, scholar, helper, in the early 1900s.
He had started formulating these ideas at a very young, precocious age, when he woke up one day, I believe he was maybe seven, and he said, why am I here? I’m going to die sometime. Why am I here? As a seven-year-old. As a 17-year-old, he was corresponding with Sigmund Freud, writing back and forth, challenging Freud on his ideas. So, a highly intelligent young man, went on to the Austrian schools and universities and grew that way.
For us students of history, if you’ll remember, Austria in the early 1900s was not the opulence that it once was for centuries before that. It was formerly the seat of the Habsburg dynasty, one of the longest standing dynasties. Freud kind of grew up in a previous era where that opulence shone through. Whereas Frankl was post World War I. And again, for students of history, Austria was not on the winning side of World War I. And so their dynasty was diminished to, I believe, around one-tenth of its original size. Unemployment ran rampant. Poverty.
And he, as a helping professional, had to find ways to help. And he formulated this idea that man is a being in search of meaning. And he went out and did amazing things. He formed clinics. He helped a lot of youth. The suicide rates in Austria at that time were astronomical. He helped to bring them down in his areas.
And then, of course, World War II breaks out. Hitler invades Austria. And Frankl has a decision. He’s a scholar at this point, with a visa to the United States. And he is prayerfully trying to understand: what should I do? And through a beautiful story, in a conversation with his father, he says, you know what, my duty, my responsibility, is here with my family. He forsakes his visa and knows eventually, even though he is a scientist and a scholar and a helping professional, a medical professional, he’s a Jew, and he knows he will eventually be picked up.
And he spent over three years in the Nazi concentration camps and had to take those ideas and put them to work for himself and the people around him. And when he was liberated three years later, within the first two weeks of liberation, he wrote, I believe, one of the greatest books of mankind and one of the Library of Congress’s top 10 of the last century: Man’s Search for Meaning.
Dave: I’ve read it. It is a great book.
Dr. Dan: It’s amazing. The first hundred pages, literally, you can tell this is a man on fire trying to get these ideas and experiences out of his mind. And so the first hundred pages are quite dramatic. They are truly his experiences, what he witnessed and lived through in the concentration camps.
Dave: So you said that his focus on meaning was prior to World War II. He was already operating with that as a mindset in the therapy he was offering to people, right? Because he was a therapist too, right?
Dr. Dan: Correct.
Dave: So how do you think his time in the concentration camp, I guess the question is, did he look at the idea that meaning all of a sudden was put to the test as maybe the ultimate test? Can meaning get me through this?
Dr. Dan: Absolutely. He had inhabited those theories for years. He had lived them and passed them on to other people. But now, in such an incredible time of struggle and suffering, some of the worst in human history, he had to use these ideas to truly work for himself.
Dave: Yeah. Which goes back to our original conversation about suffering and essentially finding meaning. There are other things that people pursue in life. Why did he believe meaning trumped pleasure and power, for instance?
Dr. Dan: Well, again, I think when we look at the great theorists and philosophers of our time, we often have to look at the times when they were coming up. That time in Austria, he recognized many people were struggling with meaning. Whereas Adler, one of his mentors, grew up in a different time and thought it was all about power. And of course Freud, in the time he was in Austria, people were very stifled, wearing those great big collars and being all bound up even in their clothing. He thought, well, we need pleasure.
And so Frankl’s lived experience was, people are really seeking meaning in a somewhat meaningless time in history. Don’t get me started on how that corresponds with our times today. I’m sure we’ll touch on that.
Dave: Yeah, we could go on and on about that. But yeah, go ahead.
Dr. Dan: Right. So just the idea that that’s what he witnessed, that’s what he experienced. And he was formulating that for a long time and lived it. That’s what he saw in his area.
Dave: Okay. So, all very fascinating. Maybe it would help those who are listening right now or watching right now if you could describe, when you have a client or someone you’re working with, and you want to start, I don’t know how you’d say it, walking them through the idea of logotherapy or meaning. How would you do that? Can you give us a case study, for example, of how you help somebody with this?
Dr. Dan: Yeah. So I think it starts from the very first minute they come into the office. My favorite question to begin with is: how can I help? And that’s one of the primary techniques of logotherapy, if we look at techniques. But as you said, it’s just kind of natural to who I’ve been as a practitioner for my entire career. And fortunately, my studies in logotherapy helped validate that and solidify it.
It really is the process of Socratic dialogue, just good questions to help people start to understand it. I don’t sit and lecture, well, this is logotherapy, and here’s all the things you need to know. No, it comes out organically through a conversation about: tell me how I can help. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your day.
One of my favorites, and I learned through my studies it was one of Frankl’s as well, is: tell me about a day in the life. No, not like that. Tell me, from the minute you wake up, what time do you get up? Why do you get up at that time? What do you do? Do you take the dogs out first? Do you make coffee for yourself, for your wife? Tell me, just break down a day in a week.
And when I hear that, I’m looking for, I’m listening for: okay, where is the meaning? What draws you into life? Why do you get up at 5:30 instead of eight or nine o’clock? And it’s interesting. Many people that get up at 5:30 have some meaningful reason why. For me, when I’m not broken, it’s for the dog and to make my wife’s coffee. But for other people, some will honestly tell me, and it’s a sad story: I just kind of wake up whenever, and don’t really feel like getting out of bed. And there’s a red flag right there.
Dave: So you’re listening, they’re telling you their story, you’re listening and you’re forming in your mind, at least, see if I’m getting this right, you’re forming in your mind: here’s what seems to be their sense of meaning. Here’s what meaning is to them. Is that what you’re doing?
Dr. Dan: Absolutely.
Dave: Okay, so once you get an idea, what do you do next? How do you direct them? Do you help them refocus on meaning, shift meaning, find something they’ve never thought is meaningful? I’ll just let you take it from there. How would you do it?
Dr. Dan: Those are great questions. Well, first we start to identify where the meaning is in life at that point. What keeps you going? What gets you out of bed? What pushes you through your day? What brings you home at night? And so we really look to crystallize those and strengthen them, really to point out, hey, this is where you’re really finding importance, purpose, meaning.
But then we look at new ways as well. And many people, as I said, in our times today, we live in one of the safest, freest, most open times in human history. But as Frankl predicted, and as we see, sometimes with that freedom we lose responsibility, we lose values, and we’re in a time of changing values and morals. And sometimes people feel aimless.
So we find where the meaning is now, but then also look for ways to cultivate and discover new meaning. Now there are three big ways we do that. Our experiences, what we take from life, what we go do: seeing mountain vistas, oceans, love, different kinds of experience. What we create, our creative values. For many of us that’s work. We express our creativity through work and giving, but it’s also through just playing a song on the guitar or making a piece of art.
So we have experience, creativity, and Dave, what you and I have been talking about all day: our attitudes, especially our attitudes toward uncontrollable, unexpected suffering.
Dave: Yeah. And so in time, as you meet with someone and they start to understand this, can you tell when understanding is starting to dawn on them? What do you see happen in someone who starts to get a handle on this? Is it joy? Is it hope? All of the above? What happens in someone who’s getting it?
Dr. Dan: Yeah, well, the first thing I see is that light bulb above their head just start to shine. That’s the way I conceptualize it. But it is, I mean, they find meaning. They start to speak differently and they share, like you said, joy, success. Many people, especially in our times, a diminished fear of failure. So many people today are afraid of failing instead of failing upward. All of those things: humor, a levity in life.
Dave: A lightness. That’s the word I was going to use. Lightness, because everything feels so heavy.
Dr. Dan: Right. Absolutely.
Dave: Yeah. That’s interesting. Here’s what I contend, or I shouldn’t say contend. My perception is that so many of the people, the clients that we work with, people are stuck in liminal spaces. They’re not where they were, and they’re not yet where they’re going to be, or should be, or whatever. And they’re stuck in this hallway in between what was and what is not yet. And the word comes from the word limen, which means a threshold between rooms.
So when a person’s in a liminal space, and maybe somebody who’s listening or watching today feels stuck or feels lost, how would you, or Frankl, encourage them? What would you encourage them to do now if they find themselves in that liminal space?
Dr. Dan: Dave, I am bursting with ideas here. First of all, we did not script this, but your use of liminal space equals my use of liminal space. And so often I get people looking at me, but what does that mean?
Liminal space is also what Frankl called becoming. And he wrote very often about becoming. We have this place here where we know we are and we exist, and we’re not quite satisfied with it, and we know there’s something calling to us. Life is asking us a question, but we don’t know what it is or what to do about it.
So my guidance is: we explore. We try to see where that liminal space is guiding us. We look for ways to experience meaning. Do you need to take a drive to the ocean and see what it feels like? Do you need to go see a mountain vista? Do you need to travel to some other culture? Do you need to invest in somebody or something greater than yourself? Do you need to explore what love really is in a relationship and a commitment? Do you need to create?
I know there have been times in my life where I felt that liminal space, that sense of becoming, where I knew there was something I needed to give birth to. I just wasn’t sure what it was. But when I put pen to paper and I start writing, or I meditate for those ideas to come in, it’s changing. And so when we’re in that liminal space, we explore.
Dave: So this, I’m going to lead to an impossible to answer question. So just prepare yourself.
Here’s what I’m sitting here listening to you and thinking. If a person is in that space, my word, they need to sit down with Dr. Dan. They need to go through The Calling Quilt™ with me. They need to do something that will move them to a sense of meaning and what life is calling them to be.
So here’s my frustration and the unanswerable question. If we get them in front of us, the chances of breakthrough are high, because we’ve seen it with the people we’ve worked with. When we introduce the idea of meaning and calling into a person’s life, change happens. They love it.
Here’s my frustration and the unanswerable question, and that is: how do we get people to that point? Because not only are people in liminal spaces, not only are people stuck, but they are feet in cement stuck.
Quick story. I had a group of people over at our house and I was explaining the kind of coaching we offer. And there was a woman standing there and tears were pouring down her face. And she said, I need this. You’ve probably seen this. I need this so badly. And I’m like, you have my phone number. You have my email address. You can drive right up to my house, I’ll sit down with you, I guarantee you it’s going to change things.
What has happened since? Bupkis. Nothing.
So the unanswerable question is, how do we get her and others to the point where they say, I need this? There’s the unanswerable question. So go.
Dr. Dan: Oh, Dave, let’s go. I’ll philosophically debate you, I’ll argue with you there. I don’t think it’s unanswerable. I think there are so many answers that maybe we get stuck in it. Because, like you said, we know, here’s the way I conceptualize it: when people ask for help in the right places, amazing things happen. But we live in a time where people are afraid to ask for help. Our sense of asking for help is, what does the AI have to say? What can I Google about my situation? And sometimes that helps a little bit. Sometimes that can be really misdirecting.
So, Dave, the answer is, we continue to do what we do. We have these conversations that we publish to other people. We write books, we talk to people, we live the life that we encourage other people to live. And they see that, and they’re like, okay, there’s that crazy bald guy on screen with a broken pelvis. He’s got something figured out. How do I find out more? We keep doing what we’re doing, Dave.
Dave: I want to bookmark that. It’s so simple: learn to ask for help. Ask for help. And now I’m circling back to, well, maybe you’re not asking for help because we really haven’t cultivated the relationships. But it’s simple and hard. There are reasons why people don’t ask for help, we don’t need to go into it. But if people would ask for help, help is there. That’s the bottom line. Help is there.
Dr. Dan: Absolutely.
Dave: All right. This is really good. This is really helpful.
I do want to talk about one more thing, because you have a form of therapy that you are trained in and you offer. And maybe I’m not saying this properly, you can correct it. It seems like this is a more intense form. Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy: does it fit within the logotherapy universe?
Dr. Dan: There are going to be misconceptions, so I want to disabuse people of the misconceptions about psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
How does it fit in the meaning universe? Well, very simply, right from the start, when I began my studies in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, the theorists there speak of making meaning out of psychedelic experiences. And I rebel against that a little bit. I said, no, no, no, we don’t make meaning. We discover meaning. That’s more logotherapeutic. It’s there.
So psychedelic experiences can generate what we call mystical experiences. It taps into different parts of our brain that lay dormant day to day. And so we have this experience wherein we can look into our unconscious, our subconscious, we can look into our heart’s desires, without that more robotic part of our brain, the part we call the default mode network, that daily, get up, do this, you’re not good enough, you’re going to fail, maybe you won’t succeed. All those negative messages we give ourselves that are kind of helpful in keeping us in cohesiveness with society, but can be detrimental in discovering meaning.
So yes. I was deeply rooted in my practice of Frankl when I started to read into this a little bit and study a little bit more. And as I dabbled in the different literature, I said, okay, I got it, I have to go deeper. And so I submitted to, I think it was about a 300 hour, very intensive one year course in the theories and the practice and truly the research of what is emerging in the field of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And obviously, in the news, we’re now realizing that this has been researched and studied and practiced for some time now.
Dave: And even what the U.S. government just, what was it, was it legislation, what happened that opened the door for more psychedelic assisted psychotherapy to be approved in the United States?
Dr. Dan: So the president, back, it was so funny, Dave. I had just returned from a kind of a personal retreat, but a business retreat, researching retreat centers in Costa Rica to host psychedelic assisted work, because it’s been a part of their culture, their indigenous culture, for thousands of years.
I get back. That’s Saturday morning. I got back late. My wife and I are having coffee, catching up. I’d been gone for a week. And I wasn’t paying attention to my phone. I turned to my phone, like, my goodness, what is going on? The phone is blowing up. People are contacting me. Did you see what just happened? It was that morning that he signed the executive order.
And ironically, that day I had an appointment with my state congressman to talk about it. Look, we need to find a way to decriminalize this in our area. And he looked at me and said, Dan, we have 600 million dollars earmarked for research in the state of Indiana. He said, now look, nothing happens quickly in politics, but it’s going to happen. And I said, wow. And so his name’s been everywhere. If you go look into the Indiana legislature these days, his name’s everywhere. But I’ll keep it to myself for now.
Dave: Okay. So the door is opening and it is going to help people. Could you, for those people who are like, wait a minute, this is just drug use: what is a session like? How does psychedelic assisted psychotherapy work? What do you do?
Dr. Dan: So there are a few points that we focus on, regardless of the entheogen or the psychedelic we’re using. Entheogen meaning positive substance.
Set and setting are crucial. You’re in a therapeutic environment. When we use ketamine, which is currently legal in all 50 states, I can use it in my office, you can go to a clinic up the road. We prepare for it. I set up my office in a way that is soothing. I am present. And so we go through some therapeutic motions.
How is that different? I’m not going to use any band names here, but from the rock star way of using psychedelics, where you take a handful of mushrooms, you don’t weigh them, you don’t know what they’re like, I’m going to give these a try. And you put them in and you go to a concert. What happens? Those substances do what those substances will do. They bring up images and thoughts and ideas deep in your subconscious that you might not be ready to deal with. So here you are on the lawn at some concert venue, having a great time, and all of a sudden your mind goes, but have you thought about this?
That’s a recipe for what they call a bad trip, a difficult experience, because you’re not in the right set and setting to make it therapeutic. Millions of people have had good experiences doing that, not necessarily legally, so I don’t disparage it. But to use it therapeutically, you’re in the presence of, you’re working with somebody who is trained to be therapeutic in it.
So set and setting is vital, but also the preparation. You don’t just call me up on Thursday and say, can I come do ketamine in your office on Friday? No, that’s not happening. So we go through weeks of preparing for it, understanding what may emerge and what the different substances are like. And then of course there’s the after effect of integrating, making meaning, discovering meaning, finding the therapeutic value in it.
Dave: Yeah. Are there risks to this?
Dr. Dan: Of course. There are risks to everything. But they’re not the ideas that have been sold to us back in the 80s. Your brain will not fry like an egg in a frying pan. You will not develop permanent psychosis, because we go through a process of medically evaluating you first.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Psychosis may happen if you already have a genetic propensity to some kind of strong mental health issue in your early age, in your late teens, early 20s, when the brain is still forming. There’s that potential. Later in life, when our brain is crystallized and we’re kind of on the downhill slope, you’re not going to develop a permanent psychosis if done right. Now, if you’re ingesting unhealthy amounts of these substances, yeah, bad things can happen.
Everybody has heard, let’s go ahead and put the elephant out there, everybody’s heard the story of Matthew Perry and his ketamine experience. Mr. Perry was consuming inappropriate amounts of the substance, given to him by a practitioner who was writing far too many prescriptions. So yes, if you’re doing this without the supervision of a professional, there’s the potential for it to go off track.
Dave: Honestly, I think it’s fascinating, and what I’ve read is the chances of healing in intractable cases, people who have struggled for years. It seems like, and obviously you know this because you’re doing it, it seems like it’s providing hope where maybe hope was not there.
Dr. Dan: Oh, that’s a beautiful way of saying it, Dave. Again, I can feel the emotion right here. I have seen so many cases. I recorded a, I don’t know, it may have been a three hour podcast, it seemed like minutes, with an Iraq war veteran and a friend of his who was the podcast host. His experiences, what he went through beforehand, just the hopelessness, the suicidality, the fear, the psychoticism, and what just a few experiences did that years of our modern Western psychotropic medication couldn’t even touch.
Dave: Wow.
Dr. Dan: I think by the end of that podcast, all three of us were in tears. It was beautiful.
Dave: That’s awesome. Great story to end that part on. And I want to wrap this up. We’ve been talking a long time, longer than I thought.
Dr. Dan: That’s why I love getting together with you, Dave.
Dave: I love talking with you, Doc. Let me do this. Let’s wrap it up this way, because I’m going to give you the last word.
Somebody’s listening, watching, who is in one of two places. Either, like you and me, they’re in some sort of struggle zone right now, either physical, or they’re in that space we talked about, they’re in that liminal space, they’re not where they want to be or need to be, they’re kind of stuck. Either they’re hurting or stuck.
Is there some sort of, can you drop some hope and some encouragement to somebody in that place that maybe can help them take the next step? Is that too nebulous for you?
Dr. Dan: No, that’s beautiful. I love that.
I’m going to start with one of my favorite quotes from Frankl that I always mingle: everything can be taken from a man except for one thing, his ability to choose his response in difficult times. His ability to discover meaning. You can lose everything, but you always have the ability to choose, regardless of your situation in life, how broken you are or where you’re at. You can always choose.
So choose. Choose hope, choose help. And there are so many, we live in a time where we get to choose our inputs more times than not. You don’t have to wait for the five o’clock news. You can go read Man’s Search for Meaning. You can read Dr. Southwick’s book on resilience. You can listen to more podcasts from Dave. You can go find my podcast, The Meaning Project. Or you can get online and look up the nearest coach, mentor, or psychotherapist near you and schedule an appointment.
And I know I’ve talked about this with you before. You go to an appointment. All right, it’s your first time. It feels a little weird. The second one, all right, that’s pretty cool. By the third, you’re like, I’m not sure this is working for me. Okay, then find somebody else. As professionals, we recognize I may not always be the right person for somebody.
Dave: Tell me that. That’s cool. I respect that.
Dr. Dan: I know a whole bunch of people, one right here on camera with me, that I can refer you to.
Dave: Same here.
Dr. Dan: There’s always an opportunity to get help. There are always people like you and I out there who want people to be better than they are, who want to see them through that liminal space. All you have to do is ask for help and have the hope that you can be helped.
Dave: Beautiful. Wonderful. That’s going to be the period on the whole conversation. I’m grateful for you, Dr. Dan. And again, your podcast is called The Meaning Project.
Dr. Dan: You can always find out more about me at my website.
Dave: Beautiful. And you can always check in with me at destiny-works.com and see the kind of coaching we offer.
So bottom line is, friends: if you’re suffering, if you’re in a liminal space, if you’re struggling with hope, get help. Seek help. And you can choose. You can choose. It is within your power to choose.
This has been helpful. Dr. Dan, thank you so much. Everyone watching, thanks for joining us on this episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast. I wish you well in your own vitality journey. We’ll see you sometime down the road on your own vitality journey.