Love Focus Helps POWS Survive

Prisoner of war survivors, Dr. Frankl and Captain Coffee, were given what is perhaps one of the greatest learnings in life as they were forced to discover their freedom to choose what they thought about. This allowed them to feel and to express what was important to them emotionally at their core, namely, what they loved and cared about.

Frankl thought of his beloved wife. Coffee spent time creatively visualizing doing the things he loved to do with his loved ones. In effect, these men ran movies of their memories in their minds. Despite the abominable environmental conditions, they held on to the conviction that someday they would be free. You could say that both men supplied supporting soundtracks to their movies of hope that involved being with their loved ones again. In Frankl’s case, it involved a vision of seeing himself talking publicly about what he went through in order to prevent this kind of inhumanity from ever happening again.

Two men I had the privilege of knowing personally also indicated that they had survived their experience in Nazi concentration camps by focusing on what they loved. This enabled them to transcend the horrible circumstances.

In the following passages, Frankl described in a very moving way how he survived by accessing the pleasure of the treasure of love within his heart. He recalled marching in the darkness just before the dawn. The chill of the “icy wind,” and the pain of the butts of the guard’s rifles hitting him, kept him moving. Suddenly, his focus shifted.

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth … proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers … that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: ‘The salvation of man is through love and in love.’ I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings …in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment."

Later on, after the prisoners had reached their work site, Frankl describes how imaginary conversations with his wife kept him going. They helped him overcome the “emptiness” and the “desolation.”

"I did not know whether my wife was alive and I had no means of finding out…but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death."

Exercising our inner freedom does not only mean focusing on people we love, but on anything we love. In the act of loving, even if only in our imaginations, we feel full inside in spite of the circumstances. For example, I also recall the story of a man in a prison camp in Vietnam who loved golf and played golf in his imagination on a daily basis. It was reported that once he regained his physical health after his release from prison camp, and was again physically able to play golf, he played better than he had prior to his incarceration. This not only illustrates how focusing on what we love can save us: it attests to the power of using our imagination to focus on what we would love to see happen. This man focused on playing great golf, something he loved to do, and just focusing on what he loved helped to bring it about.

• Today, consider how, in contrast to Frankl and Coffee, those who did not survive must have run negative movies and soundtracks of hopelessness, e.g., imagining and telling themselves, “I’ll never get out of here; I’m going to die here.” We can imagine them focusing on the bleakness of their surroundings. Clearly, Frankl and Coffee both, in effect, ran hopeful soundtracks or engaged in positive self-talk that enabled them to triumph over the horrible conditions they had to endure for years. Coffee claimed that his faith that God would return him to his loved ones helped him endure. Certainly, by imagining a future where he is going to be reunited with his loved ones, he makes himself feel better and more hopeful; moreover, he also keeps himself healthy since his positive outlook is likely to boost his immune system. Do you think thoughts are likely to boost or depress your immune system?