Existential Therapy
A Depth-Oriented Integrative Approach
By Dr. Johnathon Neda, Orange County Existential Psychologist in Costa Mesa-Newport Beach.
What is Existential Psychotherapy about?
Existential therapies can prompt us to enter life more fully and therefore feel more fully alive. An existential approach to psychotherapy is ultimately about our relationship to Being-in-the-world—a nuanced appreciation of the way in which we relate to our uniquely personal experience of existence. This can clear the way to not only experience more choice in relationship to others but also can open us up to a larger experience of life.
It’s a well-rounded way of working with people to help them become more internally free. Increased freedom is expressed in using one’s powers and abilities to choose in the face of limitations, ambiguity, and adversity. Finding our sense of direction in the world can be challenging as we confront and deal with the unexpected changes that life throws to us—and the necessity of making choice in the thick of that uncertainty. Therefore, intensifying awareness on one’s own capacity to resolve difficulties in living facilitates the process of therapeutic change. Sometimes, finding our way forward in life and rising above tragedy entails recognizing our freedom to adopt an attitude toward a given set of circumstances.
Psychological Application of Existentialism
There’s no single or unified system of thought that signifies existential therapy—it’s a tapestry of thought. Existentialism is all about an individuals’ existence and how they deal with it. As a response to the scientific-positivist narrative, existentialism is a philosophy concerned with human subjectivity. The subjective aspect of our individual existence has to do with the actual or perceived quality of our life. The philosophy (and psychological application) of existentialism does not come from an elitist perspective and therefore, it’s where the full world gets voice.
To the extent that clients can engage in a deeper level of encountering their subjectivity (when confronting their painful life challenges), the existential-experiential dimension of healing or change involves working experience-near.
Bringing Awareness to our Internal Life
The existentialist movement or attitude is a perspective that focuses on uncovering, illuminating, and capturing the deeper (subjective) structures of (personal) experience. The use of descriptive methods (e.g., phenomenological analysis) are designed to orient us within our exploration of a given phenomenon—bringing us closer to the actual but overlooked context of our lived-experience.
Through an existential-experiential approach, we bring awareness to our internal life because to be out of touch with our subjective center is to minimize or stand apart from the place inside ourselves where we genuinely experience our day-to-day lives. In other words, we are the gatekeepers of whether we let our genuine experience filter through to our awareness. In therapy, client and therapist collaborate in a shared effort to shorten the gap between the client’s genuine experience and their fuller awareness of that experience.
Reaching the Core Issues
In addition to helping clients alleviate personal discomfort and change intrusive habit patterns, experiential challenges can unlock the [client’s] unacknowledged or deeper motivation for seeking therapy. Opening awareness to the dormant reasons for entering therapy can really cut to the core issue at hand and speed up the client’s growth process.
Feeling More Fully Alive
Existential psychotherapy is ideally suited to an individual who is seeking an experience of feeling more fully alive. For instance, this form of therapy may be particularly relevant to someone who is languishing, having suffered from enduring prolonged distress that has led to a diminished sense of vitality.
It’s a therapeutic modality that promotes a revived sense of engagement with existence and can help open us up to a new attitude toward living. It’s a powerful form of therapy that can reconnect us to our fundamental relationship to life and our own very intimate way of being in the world. It’s a life-altering therapy that will help you discover how to live a more deeply satisfying and productive life.
Life is Calling Out to Us
An existential perspective helps a person reengage with life instead of shrinking from it. This is particularly relevant in our digital social media age where there tends to be an over attachment to vicarious living through our digital devices. Where relationships have become relationships with devices rather than with people.
It’s a therapy that helps clear the way for you to make a comeback, to recommence your life, to reestablish new and worthwhile directions in your world. In doing so, clients may uncover new dimensions of themselves but they also may avail themselves of a new appearance of reality—to perceive life in a way they’ve never quite experienced it before.
Procuring a Guiding Purpose for Your Life
In comparison to the more mainstream or medically-oriented approaches, existential therapy is the one that reflects upon and emphasizes the importance of procuring a guiding purpose for your life. Articulating your greater purpose helps you become more conscious of a larger perspective for your life direction and trajectory. The development of a wider vision of your life is derived from the main source of what is deeply meaningful to you in your life. The clarity of vision that evolves from doing your inner (psychological) work shines through in your conduct as you intentionally function out of that central perspective of life.
Response-Ability
Existential responsibility points to the genuine ability to respond to one’s self and take a stand on one’s being. There are 3 key unifying ideas that dominate this particular existential model of psychotherapy:
What are the Overarching Aims of Existential Therapy?
1. Exercising your power to reflect upon and discern the range of things (e.g., values) that are of real importance to you in your life.
2. Deploying the use of one’s entire human organism (e.g., mind-body-spirit) to cast light on and grasp what it is that is ultimately meaningful or significant regarding the direction of your life.
3. After we discover a keen sense of what really brings you joy in living, we then develop the courage to take a stand, affirm life, and sustain a commitment to move closer to what inspires you and connect with those things that are of fundamental importance. In taking an involved stance, you are responding to the call of your guiding purpose in life and this will be shown through everything you do. In other words, the way you see your life unfolding can make your life unfold that way.
A Fuller Vision of Life
In summary, this existential approach to psychotherapy culminates in articulating a fuller vision of your life. Once acheived, holding this perspective helps ground you as it re-orients you towards operating out of the fuller vision of life you created for yourself.
If you are interested in learning more about a holistic approach to transformative healing, see my section on the experiential level of immersive therapeutic engagement. Experiential psychotherapies have their roots in the humanistic tradition of psychology and resonate well with a depth psychological approach to therapy, such as an existential framework. Emphasis is placed on being present to one’s inner depth, which can play a central role in discovering the fuller potential available to us. Click here to learn more Experiential therapies.
