What is Existential Therapy?
As with most questions of “what is therapy”, there are a range of answers to “what is existential therapy”.
One key part of it, is that it sees people as subjects not objects. What this means is that people create themselves and their lives via their free will. They don’t have inner essences to give them purposes like objects that are made by people for certain reasons, e.g. toasters to make toast.
Based on this created life, then existential therapy looks to understand clients, by describing their life and then exploring it. This in turn elaborates a client’s worldview and sees if it is fit for current purpose. The key idea is that how you live is a continually created thing by you, and the acid test for it, is does it suit you.
Existential therapy, then works with you and your life, without presuming how life should be. Rather it is your unique life, and the idea is to create one that leaves you feeling good about.
In existential therapy, everything can be questioned, everything can be explored, assumptions and prejudices can be pushed to one side.
There are also topics that might be looked at, which some might see as the foundation of our experience.
Death: the lived sense of this, that many ignore until it comes.
Relationality: how we are created in and via relation and change with them.
Anxiety: as an inescapable aspect of life.
Uncertainty: given the basis of relationality, how this is an inescapable fact.
Isolation: how our worldview is isolated from those of others
Meaninglessness: where there is no fundamental reason to support our beliefs
How I work as an existential therapist. Is to see my clients as being unique, changing and different in different contexts. So very deeply to engage with them as a subject.
With the foundational questions of our existence, then I approach them with curiosity with my clients. Moved by the uniqueness of their world view then I explore with them, asking the big questions, the ones that don’t get asked, and the ones that it seems almost idiotic to ask, as everyone knows the answer to that.
With clients’ worldviews then my philosophical training enable to explore their worlds, which are\can be radically different to mine.
