A Good Life Despite Everything: A conversation between Sabine Indinger and Jukka Packalén — full transcript
You can watch the full interview at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvC0rOGvQIk
Sabine Indinger
Good to be here. Thanks for having me for this conversation. My name is Sabine Indinger. I work as a meaning-centered counselor and educator, and I lecture on Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. I’m in a slightly awkward position today because I also wrote the foreword for this book we’re going to talk about, so you can safely assume I am not impartial and not neutral when it comes to this book. But this discussion will let our listeners and viewers come to their own conclusions. I’m very enthusiastic about the book — it’s called A Good Life Despite Everything: Practical Wisdom from Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience. There’s a lot to unpack, and that’s why I’m very happy to be here with the author, Jukka Packalén. Jukka, please introduce yourself to the audience.
Jukka Packalén
Thank you very much, Sabine, and thank you for being here with me. It’s truly special for me to do this with you, because our history goes almost nine years back. I found your article “Meaning Is What Is Meant,” and you sharpened a very important point about Viktor Frankl — that meaning is at the same time personal, situational, and objective. When I realized that, everything opened up. It is up to me to search for objective meaning in my own life circumstances, and with that I’ve run ever since.
After we got to know each other, I started to study logotherapy at the Viktor Frankl Institute Finland with Timo Purjo, who is a philosopher and logotherapy educator, now also internationally. I completed the Academic Associate in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis with him, and then continued my studies at the Viktor Frankl Institute Australia with Dr. Paul McQuillan. After that I received an accreditation in logotherapy and existential analysis, in 2020, I believe. I think of myself as a logotherapist, but I don’t do clinical work. What I do instead is educate people about Viktor Frankl’s philosophy, because I believe it’s a wonderful form of self-therapy and bibliotherapy. Reading Frankl, or reading texts that convey his thoughts truthfully and in a lived way, is of paramount importance. Viktor Frankl’s philosophy is my philosophy of life.
Sabine Indinger
We will dive into your background more deeply, but I want to stay with the title for a moment — A Good Enough Life Despite Everything. Why did you feel the need to write this book? You wrote at one point on social media that you poured your whole heart into it.
Jukka Packalén
It goes a long way back. First, a slight correction: the idea of the book is that a good enough life is enough — because almost every life, if we’re honest, entails suffering in one way or another. But the actual title is A Good Life Despite Everything, so that’s how you’ll find it in bookstores.
The need to share what I know goes back to around 2011 or 2012. I had been in trauma therapy for two or three years because of complex trauma. When I started to understand what it really is, I realized that all the information available was directed at clinicians — nothing was written for those who actually suffer from complex trauma. That was true at the time; it has since changed. I took it as my mission to understand this suffering as well as I could, and to share it with people.
It helped me immensely to know that a part of me is broken — my autonomic nervous system gives me a lot of problems, terrific anxiety, terrific depression — but that’s not all I am. I’m also a noetic, or spiritual, being, and on that plane I can rise above my suffering and direct myself toward what is actually valuable. This resonated very strongly with me.
I published my first book, for trauma survivors, built on that philosophy together with Lauri Rauhala’s philosophy — a Finnish holistic thinker, a kindred spirit to Frankl, who was actually inspired by Frankl’s work as well. I continued studying and found out how to take care of all of me — my nervous system, my overwhelming emotions — and Rauhala’s holistic conception of the human being, which is a bit more elaborate than Frankl’s, helped me see it all as one full picture. I wrote a book about that holistic picture of trauma in 2024, and it was well received among trauma survivors.
But I felt I had said everything I needed to say about trauma in that book. What I still felt deserved more attention is that when we discuss Frankl’s philosophy, we usually dive straight into the noetic or spiritual capacities and stay there. I think it’s valuable to understand, on a deep level, the holistic entanglement we are as beings. Our suffering — whatever it is, trauma or a broken leg or a failed marriage — is a holistic entanglement. It resonates in the body, in our psychological responses, in our noetic capacity. Pain can be so overwhelming that we can hardly think, and a person who can’t think clearly isn’t likely going to be directed toward meaning and values. So I thought this needed to be shared in a generalized way, so that anyone could get into this thinking. The result is A Good Life Despite Everything.
Sabine Indinger
I want to dive into Frankl’s philosophy and its place in the book more later, but you’ve said that the foundation of the book is actually Lauri Rauhala’s philosophy. He’s a philosopher barely known outside Finland — he wasn’t known to me either. Can you introduce him, and say why the world should care about him?
Jukka Packalén
He’s absolutely not well known outside Finland. There are traces of him being known in the analytic psychology community, and two Finnish logotherapists, Timo Purjo and Anne Niiles-Mäki, have written about him in English. But for me, while Frankl is my philosophy of life, Rauhala is my philosophy of understanding what it means to be human — a slightly different thing. I think of both thinkers every day.
Rauhala is surprisingly similar to Frankl: he lived a very long life, over 100 years, and like Frankl, he had one leg in psychology and the other in philosophy. His first job was as a hospital psychologist, and his work there was essentially to classify patients — and he felt this wasn’t doing anyone real good. That’s why he trained as a psychoanalyst: in analytic psychology, especially with Jung, the underlying thought is that there’s meaning in a person’s symptoms — an inner logic, even if not meaning in the Franklian sense.
Rauhala built on that to create a hermeneutic, phenomenological philosophy for analytic psychology, and later expanded it into a philosophical foundation for any activity centered on understanding a human being. One of his key insights is that human consciousness — the collection of our experiences — cannot be studied with natural-scientific methods. That’s a category error. Biology works beautifully to explain a broken leg, but not what a psychotic experience actually is, from the inside. That’s the gist of Rauhala, in the shortest version I can give.
[Note, added for clarity: according to Rauhala, every dimension of what we are — our psychological and noetic consciousness, our body and our life situation — needs to be met with adequate methods.]
Sabine Indinger
Thank you. I also loved how you present Frankl’s philosophy in Chapter Two, structured as Ten Meditations. Why call it that, and how did you land on this approach?
Jukka Packalén
Honestly, part of it is that “meditations” sounds fancy. But the real reason is that there’s already plenty written about Frankl in a textbook manner, and I don’t think I could add much there. What I can add is something that expands his thinking by connecting it to other thinkers, and ties it to lived experience — my own experience.
One of the most important things about chasing meaning, as I understand it, is that we are unique, and we need to find meaning uniquely, in the unique situations of our lives. What better way to convey that than to explain how it’s played out in my own life? It leaves me vulnerable — I write about ridiculous stuff, painful stuff, funny stuff — but that’s lived life, and lived philosophy is my mission.
Sabine Indinger
That’s one thing that stands out to me — it’s a very personal book. It makes you vulnerable, but it also makes the book relatable, bringing philosophy down to lived experience. If you’re comfortable, I’d love for you to talk about how you describe dissociation from the inside — it’s a concept people are afraid of, even when they experience it themselves.
Jukka Packalén
That’s a wonderful and difficult question — not difficult for me to speak about, since I’ve spoken about it plenty, but because it’s an experience that can look like many different things. First, an important distinction: I don’t see trauma symptoms like dissociation as pathological states. I see them as unusual states of human consciousness — a term Lauri Rauhala uses. It’s a continuum, not a black-and-white line between normal and pathological, and everyone experiences it somewhere on that continuum.
On the innocent end, you have things like highway hypnosis — in Finland we call it maantiehypnoosi — where you drive without being aware of driving at all. Or daydreaming; I’ve always been a great fantasist, and as a boy it helped me cope with rough situations, imagining myself on stage with a great musician. On the more disruptive end, dissociation can be extreme emotions you simply can’t fight — an emotion takes over so fully you lose contact with your everyday self, and afterward you wonder, “why did I react like that?”
The purest form I’ve experienced myself is losing track of time entirely — sitting in an armchair, thinking two minutes have passed, and two hours are gone. When I used to dissociate more, I’d climb into bed and simply not exist for a while, not sleeping, just gone, until my body started to ache from lying still so long. Nowadays this happens rarely, and briefly, only under real stress.
This is, I think, fair to say about almost anything psychiatry sees as pathological: it’s an experience people have, on a continuum, and the line we draw calling it a “disorder” is fully arbitrary. The same is true of anxiety, depression, and especially so-called personality disorders — a construct I dislike, because you can fully explain serious relational difficulties without pathologizing language.
That’s one of the things I’ve tried to do in this book. You won’t find diagnoses in it, but you’ll find a way to understand even extreme inner experiences kindly, and ways to cope better with them. If we see ourselves as carrying normal, if difficult, experiences, we understand we can take responsibility for them and work on them ourselves too. That’s the working principle behind everything in the book.
Sabine Indinger
That ties nicely into the subtitle — practical wisdom from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. You’ve also included “Try This” sections throughout. Is there one you’d like to highlight?
Jukka Packalén
Let’s do one thought experiment for each dimension, so we can see how we’re holistic beings.
For meaning: if you want more of it in your life, think today, or tomorrow at the latest, about how you can be more loving toward someone — more accepting, more gentle. How can you give yourself to another person. Offer them something that consoles them, helps them, orients them toward meaning. Never belittle another person’s suffering. If you say “snap out of it,” the result will be the opposite. But if you tell someone, in a way that truly resonates, “I get it, and it’s human, and I feel it with you” — and then move forward together with the meaning that’s still available — that’s a hard skill, but it’s the right one.
For the psychological dimension: when you feel something truly uncomfortable, or you’ve acted in a way that wasn’t aligned with your values, be gentle with yourself. This is one of the hardest skills I’ve had to learn. I think of myself as a descendant of the Vikings — fearless warriors, but not self-compassionate by nature. A Finnish man isn’t, by default. But I’ve learned that when I’m in pain, I can put my hand on my chest and say: I acknowledge this pain, it’s real, it’s there, and it’s okay — we’re going to be okay.
For the bodily dimension: ancient healing traditions, especially in the East, have always known how important the vagus nerve is for regulating our stress response. Here’s a simple one I love, not in the book: imagine you’re a bundle of cooked spaghetti and relax all of your muscles at once — you have no muscles, no tension anywhere. Relaxed muscles and stress don’t live in the same body, so if you consciously relax everything, you’ve already alleviated the stress reaction.
Recovery is too underrated in today’s society. People give up on proper sleep to live busy lives, and I think that’s one of the most costly mistakes you can make when coping with a stressful life.
Sabine Indinger
Frankl always asked people studying logotherapy not to treat it as a closed system, but to expand it while keeping its core intact. I think you’ve done a wonderful job of that. You give us tools for the psychological and bodily dimensions too — Internal Family Systems being one of them. Can you introduce us to it, and to Frank, who’s part of your own internal system?
Jukka Packalén
Internal Family Systems was developed by Richard C. Schwartz. It’s a non-pathologizing way of working with our psychological dynamics — not as one closed, single mind, but through the dynamics of inner parts everyone has by nature. This isn’t a new idea; you can trace it back to Plato’s tripartite structure of the mind, through Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and various therapy schools since.
Schwartz arrived at it through his clients, who kept using “parts” language naturally — “a part of me agrees, but a part of me disagrees” — and talking about a “Self” that felt absent in certain moments: “I wasn’t myself when I did that.” He started experimenting with talking directly to these parts, and found that they respond.
Self is not a part — Self is what Frankl would call our spirit, our noetic side: self-directing, compassionate, creative, loving, the caring center that can negotiate with the parts. Parts believe they have no alternative but to do what they do.
In the book, I introduce a part of mine called Frank, named after Frank Zappa, because he shares traits with him. I’m someone who sees big-picture connections and hates tinkering with details — not Frank. Frank is a perfectionist. If I have no relationship with him, he takes over completely, and I burn out. That’s happened more than once.
Inspired by IFS, I started approaching his insistence with curiosity instead of resistance, and after years of internal dialogue — usually late at night, when Frank starts insisting we plan every detail of tomorrow — we’ve reached a kind of truce. Frank fears that if we make mistakes, we’ll look bad in the eyes of the world, a fear he learned in childhood, when mistakes were physically dangerous around my father. That fear is completely understandable. But he’s come to understand that if he runs the show constantly, we burn out, and then he doesn’t get to create anything either. So he plays along now, within healthy boundaries.
I think many of us have a perfectionist part, hidden or explicit. The IFS approach is to ask: who are you, what do you believe, why do you feel you have to do this every time, and what would happen if you softened up a little? Over time, that becomes a natural, ongoing dialogue. A fundamental IFS belief is that there are no bad parts — only parts driven by a fear or a pain they’re trying to protect us from. Even the biggest troublemakers can become real resources.
Sabine Indinger
Thank you for that. You’ve briefly touched on Polyvagal Theory already — can you say more about it?
Jukka Packalén
If there’s one thing to understand about Polyvagal Theory, it’s that we are beings who thrive when we feel safe. That’s far from self-evident — many people think pushing hard is when we thrive, and there’s a smidgen of truth to that, but overall, safety is the actual foundation.
Polyvagal Theory describes something like a sixth sense: neuroception, the perception of danger or safety, operating automatically, constantly, below the threshold of awareness. Even sitting here recording this interview, my neuroception registers a bit of danger — because I might make a fool of myself, and often do. As social beings, status and belonging mattered enormously in our evolutionary past; being excluded from the group could mean death. So neuroception picks up on things like the imagined scenario of someone watching this and thinking I sound like a crazy person talking about his parts — and that resonates in my body as real stress, automatically.
When neuroception deems us safe, we’re centered, thinking clearly, capable of real engagement. This connects to co-regulation — we read other people’s states automatically. If you were stressed right now, my nervous system would pick it up, the same way a group of apes reads one alarm call and the whole group reacts, then settles again together once the threat passes. This all happens in nanoseconds, far before conscious awareness catches up.
I’ve gone to real lengths to make my home as safe as possible — lighting, sound, reducing sensory overload — because my neuroception is especially sensitive to danger. We’re constantly, often unwittingly, exposing ourselves to overwhelming sensory information, much of it self-inflicted through our devices and environments.
And because co-regulation goes both ways, we can dysregulate each other just as easily as we can soothe each other, without saying a word. We need to be mindful of our boundaries, and realistic about how much social engagement we can actually tolerate — not in terms of introversion or extroversion, but in terms of what our nervous system actually needs. If the nervous system breaks down, there’s nothing left to work from. I know that from direct experience.
Sabine Indinger
This sums up the book beautifully. One more topic I want to cover: humor. Frankl saw it as a real resource, though it’s often frowned upon in more serious schools of psychology. I think you’re a great example of using it — normal humor, dark humor — in your own life.
Jukka Packalén
I’ve worked with therapists who were so dead serious that everything felt like being back in a strict Latin class. I find it strange that we wouldn’t take the respite humor provides. I understand completely Frankl’s descriptions of the black humor used in the concentration camp barracks.
Humor is a spiritual, noetic resource. The moment we frame something humorously, we’ve already taken noetic distance from our troubles — the first step toward finding meaning in a hard situation. It’s a lifeline. Sometimes laughing is genuinely all we can do. And it’s also a physiological shortcut: when you laugh, your muscles relax, and you move into what Polyvagal Theory calls the ventral state — from stressed to regulated, almost instantly.
Sabine Indinger
You’re turning 60 soon, and there was a time you didn’t expect to reach that age. What do you want the next decade to hold — for you, for the book, for the world?
Jukka Packalén
I don’t need anything more for myself. I have a beautiful life — a disability pensioner with a difficult nervous system and periods where I barely exist, but also a loving wife, two rescue cats I love like my own children, and good friends who show up for me even at my worst.
What I want to do is give the world what I still have left to give. I see a real need to bring logotherapy to Scandinavia — there are three logotherapy institutes in the Nordic countries, two of them accredited, and all of them in Finland. In Scandinavia itself, there isn’t a single one, and very little literature in Swedish. I’ve already written three-quarters of a Swedish-language book on Frankl’s philosophy and therapy, which I hope to release later this year, and from there I want to keep spreading this holistic understanding — maybe through reading groups, maybe in other forms I haven’t fully worked out yet.
I have to be realistic about my resources — I get a couple of hours of genuinely clear, productive energy most days, sometimes not even that. But I have meaning, and purpose, and values that pull me forward rather than drive me: goodness, love, truth, and beauty. Beauty through music, truth through writing and research, goodness by giving my work to the world, and love by staying open to those who suffer, and doing what I can, from my own small, limited life, to help.
Sabine Indinger
The book is A Good Life Despite Everything: Practical Wisdom from Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience, available through various channels. What’s your wish for the book — how you hope it reaches its readers?
Jukka Packalén
If there’s one thought I’d want a reader to leave with, it’s that a good enough life is enough. Everyone suffers — we just don’t always see it, because people keep it to themselves, while media shows us either catastrophe or picture-perfect happiness. But happiness itself is an unrealistic goal; something will hit sooner or later. The realistic goal is to build a life that can hold that.
Life was never here to promise us anything. The only real promise is more trouble ahead, for all of us. So we need to find peace with that — through a keen sense of everyday meaning, taking care of what our nervous system actually needs, being gentle with ourselves, and fine-tuning our lives so that all of this can become real, a little, every day.
Sabine Indinger
Thank you. Thank you.
Jukka Packalén
Thank you.
Arctic Search for Meaning 