Viktor Frankl Was Right: No One Can Take Away Your Choice of Response

We use Frankl’s insight in a specific context. It appears not in a discussion of personal growth or career development. It appears in the context of men who survived extreme abuse, men carrying severe PTSD, men for whom the standard vocabulary of therapeutic optimism would be an insult.

The choice of response is not a platitude for the comfortable. In Frankl’s original context — a concentration camp — and in the clinical context where my mentors applied it, it is the single non-negotiable resource that could not be taken away. Not health, not relationships, not history, not the body. Those can all be taken.

The choice of how to respond to what has happened cannot be.

What the Claim Actually Is

Frankl’s central observation was that between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is the capacity to choose. And no external event — no matter how extreme, no matter how dehumanizing, no matter what it has taken from you — can eliminate that space entirely.

Let’s translate this into direct clinical language: quit saying you need this or that to be able to function. You already have what you need. The capacity for choice was present before the trauma. The trauma cannot erase it.

This is not a denial of what happened. It is a refusal to grant what happened the final word. In Virginia Satir’s (the grandmother of psychology) words –it’s not the trauma, it’s the coping.

The PTSD Complication

This is not straightforward for men who have experienced extreme abuse or trauma. The nervous system does not process threat the way a rational model of choice-making assumes.

In my training and experience men who have developed some prior sense that choice was possible — even in small things, even early in life — tend to be more resilient when extreme events occur. They are not invulnerable. But the pathway back to functioning seems shorter. The sense that they had some agency over their response, however limited, had been partially established before the crisis arrived.

The implication our clinical work draws from this is practical: building the sense of choice before a crisis is preventive work. You do not develop access to this resource in the middle of the worst moment of your life. Ideally you have developed it in your upbringing. For the vast majority of us, that did not happen.

But the good news is you can develop the necessary skills.

Suffering

A formulation that I have found consistently useful in clinical work: if you tell yourself that you need a particular external condition to function — that you need acknowledgment, or safety, or this or that specific outcome — you are guaranteeing your own suffering. Not because you are wrong that these things matter. But because you have located the source of your functioning outside yourself, in conditions you do not control.

The inverse is not that pain disappears. The pain remains. What changes is the quality of the suffering. There is pain that comes from circumstances. And there is a separate, additional suffering that comes specifically from the position of victimhood — from the conviction that what was done to you has permanently removed your capacity to choose.

This is not toxic positivity. It is a genuinely different relationship to circumstance.

What the Practice Looks Like

The practice is deliberately ordinary.

What am I choosing today? Not in the large sense. In the immediate sense. In the small decisions that most men make automatically, without any awareness that they are in fact choosing — what am I choosing right now, and why? How does it affect me, others and the situation?

There is also a contemplative practice: acting as though the world is a better place than the evidence currently suggests. Not as a delusion. As a deliberate orienting perception.

What becomes available when you act from that assumption, even temporarily?

For Men Carrying the Weight of What Was Done to Them

For men working through abuse, addiction, broken relationships, or the wreckage of choices made from an earlier, less aware version of themselves — the question the clinical work keeps pointing to is this: it’s not what was done to me, but what do I choose now?

This is not minimizing the wound. The wound is real. The damage is real. What was done to you was real and it mattered and it should not have happened.

It is refusing to let the wound have the final word.

Across 23 military assignments, working with men who had seen things that most people never will, one pattern held without exception: the warrior is made in the cradle of loving kindness. The first and most important environment for building resilience is not hardness. It is safety. It is being held with genuine care before the difficulty arrives.

Unfortunately, most men haven’t been brought up this way. The care didn’t come, or it came wrapped in conditions, or it came from someone who was themselves running on empty. That is not an excuse, nor is it a verdict. It is the starting point for understanding why so many men arrive at difficulty already depleted — and why resilience built on toughness alone tends to crack under enough pressure.

The men who do not have that early foundation can still build the capacity for choice. It takes longer. It requires more support. But it is available to them.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• Where in your life have you placed the source of your healthy functioning outside yourself — in a condition you don’t control — and what has that cost you?

• What is one decision you made today that you treated as automatic — and what would it look like to have made it as a choice?

• What happened to you that you have been allowing to write the rest of the story — and is that the story you would choose?

A NOTE ON WHY THIS MATTERS

The men searching for “trauma recovery for men,” “PTSD counselling BC,” and “how to stop feeling like a victim” are asking, in different words, exactly this question. They are ready for a framework that takes their experience seriously without leaving them stranded in it.

Steven Keeler, RCC (#13218), CCC (#5926), RCC-ACS, LMFT, LPC, MFLC, has worked with men, families, and military communities for 35 years. Bestselling author of Leap, But How Will I Live, Eat or Pay for Gas? and host of The Art and Science of Transformation podcast, listened to in 24 countries. Office in Coquitlam — virtual counselling across British Columbia. About Steven · Contact