The Space Between What Happens and Who You Become

Viktor Frankl once wrote:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is your power to choose your response.
And in your response lies your growth and your freedom.”

I come back to this quote again and again. Not because it’s neat or comforting, but because it’s true on so many levels.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, discovered something profound through unimaginable suffering: We can endure almost anything if we can find meaning in it.

Meaning doesn’t erase pain. And it doesn’t make suffering pretty or spiritual overnight.
But it changes our relationship to what we’re living through.

This insight became the foundation of his work in logotherapy,  the idea that humans aren’t primarily motivated by pleasure (as Freud believed), or power (as Adler proposed), but by meaning.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote that meaning arises in three main ways:

1. What we create
Our work. Our creativity. Our contribution. The way we serve or express ourselves.

2. What we experience
Love. Beauty. Nature. Art. Moments of true connection.

3. How we face unavoidable suffering
Our attitude. Our courage. Our inner stance when we can’t change the situation.

This last one matters more than we like to admit. Because suffering without meaning can break us.
But suffering with meaning, even fragile, emerging meaning,  can transform us.

And this is where sovereignty begins.

Frankl taught that even when everything is stripped away, one freedom always remains:
the freedom to choose how we meet what happens to us.

Not what happened.
Not who caused it.
Not whether it was fair.

But how we meet it.

That space, between stimulus and response, is where our power lives.

It’s also where growth is born. When I am triggered, I allow myself to feel all the emotion associated with it so that I’m not suppressing anything or spiritually bypassing it. And then I feel gratitude for the trigger because it immediately lets me know where I need to do a bit more self development work.  That in itself gives it meaning, even before I investigate!

Once I dive into the roots of it, then things get interesting. This is where I start connecting the dots! Looking at repeating patterns, noticing how long the behaviour has been going on! I do this for my clients too.  So many layers start to peel away…

I’ve learned this not from theory, but from life experience.

When I had Covid and was flat out for 21 days, I chose to receive the stillness. I used the uninterrupted time to meditate deeply and face fears I’d been outrunning.

When I had shingles a couple of years ago, I learned how to stop. Truly stop.
I lay in my sun lounger all day, doing nothing except allowing my body to heal, and discovered the world did not collapse because I rested.

During my Dark Night of the Soul, when I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, I remembered something important: I’d been here before.

Everything I’d lived through had passed.
And I was the only one who could walk myself back out again.

Healing comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s meditation. Sometimes it’s grief. And sometimes it’s Graham Norton, laughing my way gently back into alignment!

Meaning doesn’t have to be heroic. It just has to be true.

This is often the moment my clients move from asking:

“Why is this happening to me?”
to
“What is this trying to awaken in me?”

That question alone changes the nervous system. It moves us from collapse into curiosity. From victimhood into agency. My belief that everything is Divine is what has grown from this practice.

Frankl was clear about one thing above all else: Love is the highest source of meaning.

Not love as romance or attachment, but love as perception. The ability to see the essential spirit of another. (Side note: don’t lose your sense of what is true in the ‘here and now’ when seeing the spirit of another…I’ve been lost in someone’s potential before…that he never levelled up to in the ‘here and now,’ it can create false expectations!)

In the concentration camps, thoughts of his wife sustained him,  even before he knew she had died. He wrote that love “goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.”

This aligns deeply with my own work. I guide women back to self-love, ancestral love, and soul-level connection because this is where meaning is born. Not in fixing yourself, but in remembering yourself.

So many women I work with believe freedom lies in changing their external reality. The job. The relationship. The circumstances. But true sovereignty begins internally.

It looks like stabilising the nervous system, grieving fully, clearing shock and trauma, reclaiming personal power, choosing meaning that actually fits your soul.

You may not be facing concentration camps, but you may be navigating emotional manipulation, nervous-system overwhelm, loss of identity or purpose, spiritual disconnection, grief, or be carrying around inherited patterns of giving your power away.

But none of that means you are broken.

You are not broken or powerless. Meaning can be made from even the darkest experiences.
Suffering can awaken purpose. And you can choose how you meet your life again.

Not by bypassing the pain, but by walking through it, consciously, and rebuilding from the inside out.

Embodied.
Spiritual.
Ancestral.
True.

That space between what happens and who you become? It’s still yours. Forever.

Book a Compass Mind Shift call to see how I can help you tap into that transformational space: https://bit.ly/SOMindshift