In this chapter there is a focus on the expectations or Requirements that sustain an addictive lifestyle. It highlights that in addition to fueling resentments, Requirements also affect how one relates to potential high-risk situations, triggers, and stressful events in general. Chapter 1 of this workbook highlighted that oftentimes it is not the situation or event itself that creates emotional distress, but the Requirements individuals have (often automatically and out of awareness) for the situation or event that activate their I-Systems. Thus, a Recovery Resilience Practice does not focus on changing any given situation (crucial insofar as many distressful situations or triggers may be unavoidable) but focuses instead on changing the “who” one brings to that situation – the Natural Functioning self or I-System Functioning self.

Best known for his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl was a prodigy who became interested in psychotherapy in his high-school years. He was briefly associated with Freud’s and Adler’s groups, but soon departed from both to develop his own treatment methods. During World War II he was incarcerated in various concentration camps, and narrowly escaped death in Auschwitz, only to face the reality that practically all of his family members had perished and he was utterly alone in the world. Writing about his Holocaust experiences saved him from despair and suicide, and helped him to develop a method of therapy based on man’s “will to meaning,” which he called “logotherapy.” Frankl’s insight on the primacy and indispensability of meaning and meaning-making in life has had profound influences on subsequent developments in existential-humanistic psychotherapy, as well as on understanding mental health issues in refugees and survivors of traumatic life experiences. The chapter ends with discussions on the importance of finding meaning in work, creativity, spiritual merging, and love, as well as in suffering (transcendental meaning).