Colin Matthews: Chartered Psychologist

Existential Therapy

"I would like to be remembered for doing the best I could with the tools I was born with"
J.K. Rowling, 2007

You might feel that you have not achieved the things you wanted to in life or simply want to achieve more. Whether this is to do with work, relationships or general life experiences, engaging in an existential based therapy can help you look honestly at what you want from life and what might be getting in the way of achieving what you want.

Existential therapy (or existential-phenomenological therapy) is a philosophically based therapy. It is therefore a holistic therapy rather than a diagnostic therapy. The concepts of 'mental illness' and 'diagnosis' such as depression and anxiety, are engaged with simply as explanatory tools to convey how we feel.

However you understand yourself, the existential therapist will look to broaden that understanding, attempting to gain a clearer picture of your various struggles, successes, ambitions and failures as you experience and express them. By doing this, the existential therapist believes that you will gain a clearer understanding of how you relate to yourself and others. Through that understanding, you can begin to recognise the choices that you are currently making and consider the effect of these choices on you and other people around you.

Existential philosophy believes that, although we do not, necessarily, have a choice about the things that happen to us (e.g. where and when we are born, who our parents are, the childhood we experienced), we still have the freedom to choose how we respond to these things. Existential therapy allows us to examine the choices we are making and determine the reasons for these choices. It also gives us the opportunity to consider how we might make different choices and the impact that this might have on the way we see ourselves and how others respond to us.

The main concepts in existential therapy are those of freedom, possibility, responsibility and angst (existential anxiety). The existentialist believes that we do not choose to be born and, although we are free to choose the timing and manner of our death, we are not able to choose to avoid death itself. Death is the end of possibility in our current form. Between being born and dying however, we are free to create ourselves as we wish. The responsibility of this freedom itself, however, can cause great anxiety. Life is generally seen as a struggle between the choices we actually make and the choices we would like to make, the way that we would like to be and the way that we are conducting ourselves in our daily lives.

The existential therapist will use the three basic tenants of phenomenology to help you gain a greater understanding of yourself. These are:

• To suspend biases and assumptions as far as possible in order to focus on, simply, how things are.

• To encourage you to describe your experience without necessarily interpreting it using such terms as "I was stupid", "I'm hopeless" etc.

• To avoid giving significance to one topic over another. Each item under discussion is treated as potentially having the same importance as another.

Existential therapy by its nature tends to be a longer term therapy and you should allow yourself a minimum of twelve sessions should you choose to engage in it. For many people, it can be extremely rewarding, challenging and enlightening. If you are at a stage in your life when you want to understand more about the choices you have made and the choices you could make, this would be an appropriate therapy for you.