For most people, the big mysteries of the universe inspire introspection. We ask ourselves questions about the meaning of life. We think about the world and our place in it.
But what if these questions bring up dread instead of wonder? How you cope with thoughts about existence can impact daily life and happiness.
Existential psychotherapy is a powerful method for addressing these types of negative feelings. It helps you understand life and your place in it. Existential therapists use science-backed techniques to help you build a better outlook and answer life’s biggest questions.
What is existential therapy?
Existential therapy (ET) is a type of talk therapy. It explores the human condition through a philosophical lens. This type of therapy explores your life experiences. It outlines how individual freedom, choice, responsibility, and mortality affect you.
Existential therapy asks you to face life's dilemmas and concerns. It explores fear and anxiety triggers like:
- The unforeseeable future
- Concerns about death
- The quest for meaning
Facing these truths head-on helps you find personal meaning and live authentically.
Existential therapy is a forward-looking approach to humanistic therapy. You may find it helps you conquer anxiety and fear. It can also help you deal with life struggles like:
What are the roots of existential therapy?
Existential therapy emerged in the mid-20th century. Philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger explored existence and life’s mysteries. Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom helped it evolve into a form of psychotherapy. These pioneers integrated existential philosophy with clinical practice.
The contemporary existential approach combines psychological research and therapeutic techniques. Using evidence-based practices with ET offers a holistic way to reframe mental health.
The 4 existential givens
It’s often said that “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Existential therapy takes a wider view. In this school of thought, four factors affect every life. These conditions govern much of your internal life and human experience, including:
- Death: The end of life is universal, but a therapist can help you reconcile your feelings. They can help you accept mortality and embrace living in the present.
- Isolation: This is the separateness each person experiences. It’s the sense of disconnect that can happen even when surrounded by others. An existential therapist can help you navigate this feeling. Through ET, you can bridge the gap with community and empathy.
- Meaning: This refers to our quest for purpose in life. Finding yourself and your life’s meaning helps you explore your values, beliefs, and both professional goals and personal goals. With the help of a therapist, you can understand and embrace your place in the world.
- Freedom: This is finding your autonomy to make well-aligned choices. A therapist can help you embrace your independence and own the consequences of your decisions.
Benefits of existential therapy
When you avoid dealing with negative feelings, they often come to the surface in other ways. Existential therapy can help you confront internal conflicts and reduce their impacts.
Committing to self-discovery offers mental health benefits that improve everyday life, including:
- Increased self-awareness: Exploring the human experience offers a deeper insight into your feelings. This exploration helps you understand the roots of disruptive feelings.
- Improved decision-making: Recognizing freedom and personal responsibility helps you embrace personal choice. Existential therapy enables you to define your wants and practice meaningful life planning.
- Stronger resilience: Understanding and accepting life's challenges helps you develop resilience. It puts circumstances in context for clarity.
- Lower anxiety: Exploring existential issues addresses fundamental concerns like isolation and mortality. Shifting the perspective on life’s challenges can help you better manage anxiety.
- Enhanced personal development: Therapy allows you to expand your self-awareness and growth. Existential therapy guides this process to align actions with true values.
- Strengthened relationships: By promoting empathy and connection, existential therapy improves your interpersonal relationships.
- Greater empowerment: Working with a therapist puts life in context. It helps you accept change as inevitable so you can work toward confident adaptation.
What feelings can existential therapy help address?
Struggling with existential issues can impact you in very specific ways. Feelings of sadness, anxiety, avoidance, and overwhelm are common. You may feel lost or like you’re lacking in direction.
Many clients come to therapy seeking relief from these common emotional experiences:
Ennui
Ennui is a deep feeling of dissatisfaction or listlessness. It often stems from existential anxiety. Feelings of ennui can lead to a sense of emptiness and disconnection. They can lead you to languish in your feelings and lose motivation. Existential therapy helps address these issues by prompting you to confront existential questions.
Anxiety and depression
Grappling with life's biggest issues may invite feelings of anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. It’s a common struggle, with over 20 percent of adults seeking mental health treatment in 2022.
Existential therapy can allow you to explore these concerns. Therapy can help you cope with life crises and find personal significance. It provides perspective to build a meaningful narrative for yourself. This calms anxiety and depression and promotes emotional resilience.
Feeling overwhelmed with choice
Sometimes, being spoiled for choice can be challenging. Choice overwhelm is a common indicator of existential anxiety. It leads to “analysis paralysis” that can stop you from seeing the best course of action.
Existential therapy helps navigate these choices. It helps clarify personal values and priorities to make well-aligned decisions. It tackles the issue to help you gain direction and find a purpose that eases overwhelm.
Lack of authenticity
Societal pressure and fear of judgment can make you feel existential anxiety. If you struggle with disconnection, your choices may not align with your personal values.
Existential therapy encourages self-exploration and reflection. It helps you uncover and confront your feelings. This facilitates a journey toward self-acceptance and authentic living.
The 5 key concepts of existential therapy
Existential therapy tackles the common feelings of anxiety, sadness, and ambivalence. ET helps you with communication and proven methods.
When seeing a therapist, your session will likely employ the following five techniques:
1. Open Dialogue
Transparent, honest communication between you and your therapist is essential to success. Work with your therapist to build a safe space to share vulnerable feelings.
2. Deep Exploration
Existential therapy asks you to examine your past experiences and beliefs. You will consider the meaning of your personal values. Through this process, you look at what you’ve repressed or avoided. This helps you understand how these thoughts affect your daily life. These explorations are the first step to knowing what you want in life. It enables you to change your thinking and get perspective.
3. Challenging Assumptions
Therapy challenges you to confront preconceptions about yourself, others, and the world. This critical examination helps you uncover how your assumptions impact your life. It opens pathways to new perspectives and possibilities for a more purposeful life.
4. Embracing authenticity
Self-expression is how you share the truths you’ve learned in therapy. Expressing your authentic self can be vulnerable, but it’s the ultimate path to freedom.
5. Creative expression
Art, writing, music, and other creative outlets help you explore and process emotions. Creative expression can clarify your thoughts and experiences. Art gives you a way to express feelings too difficult to put into words.
What to expect from existential therapy
Entering therapy is a journey inward. Like a physical journey, the terrain is challenging, but the process is rewarding.
In therapy, you and your therapist will collaborate to help you achieve peace of mind. You'll learn skills to cope with anxiety. A successful therapist is empathic, respectful, and resourceful. With the right partnership, you can explore your feelings with full support.
Therapy progress is not linear. You navigate layers of self-discovery and confront uncomfortable truths. In existential therapy, embracing authenticity is a central theme. You delve into the stories you tell yourself to understand them. You may work to reframe stories that no longer serve you.
Throughout the therapeutic relationship, a therapist guides you with empathy and non-judgment. They help you explore freedom, isolation, meaninglessness, and the fear of death to uncover how these influence perception. The ultimate goal is not to find easy answers but to build empowerment and resilience.
Here are some of the things you can expect from working with a therapist:
- A safe and non-judgmental space to explore deep-seated thoughts and emotions
- Guided exercises to help uncover your true self beyond societal expectations
- Personalized strategies and tools to help you navigate existential issues and uncertainty
- Support to identify patterns of behavior or thinking that hinder personal growth
- Feedback to explore realistic goals that align with your personal values and journey
- Motivation and accountability to create good habits and work toward goals
Existential therapy goals to strive for
Getting the most out of therapy is easier when you set and track goals and progress. Clients seeking existential therapy often work on one or more goals.
Some common goals you might pursue through therapy include:
- Understanding your values and beliefs better
- Embracing free will and living your own life
- Identifying and challenging life-limiting assumptions and behaviors
- Cultivating stronger self-awareness and authenticity
- Learning to cope with an existential crisis and uncertainty
- Enhancing decision-making skills to know what to do in life
- Improving relationships through honest and open communication
- Embracing creative outlets for self-expression
- Building resilience to face life's challenges and changes
Achieving any of these can help you feel more confident. Working with a therapist can help you reach your goals and experience a more peaceful life.
Other exercises to explore during existential therapy
Therapy works better as part of a broader shift in habits and perspective. The following complementary practices may help you enhance your experience:
Mindfulness practices: Self-reflection exercises and mindfulness activities help you stay present and reduce feelings of anxiety.
Techniques like meditation and deep breathing are effective in building awareness and acceptance. Mindfulness might help improve other support systems, such as building social relationships. Meditation helped build more socialization and reduce loneliness by 22% in some studies.
Journaling: Daily or weekly journal entries allow you to reflect on strong feelings. A journaling practice can enhance self-understanding and provide clarity on existential concerns. (Stumped on what to write? Start with these 90 prompts for self-exploration.)
Reading: Information helps you expand your worldview. Thinkers like Viktor Frankl, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre offer insights for personal growth.
Creative expression: Activities like painting, writing, music, or dance help us explore identity. These creative outlets can be cathartic and empowering. Creativity can boost general mental health as well. An American Psychiatric Association poll showed 71% of people who reported "excellent" mental health engaged in creativity more frequently than others.
Nature connection: Spending time in nature reduces stress and promotes mental well-being. Activities like hiking, gardening, or walking can help you feel connected.
Physical exercise: Physical health works hand in hand with emotional health. Exercise helps you cope with stress, release anxiety, and free trapped emotions. It also promotes neurochemical health. Studies show exercise increases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Exercise may be more effective than counseling and medications for managing depression.
Social support: Spending time with friends and family helps combat feelings of isolation. It puts emotional difficulties in context.
Coaching: It’s important to understand the differences between coaching versus therapy. Therapy often helps with emotional issues. Coaching can provide great supplemental support to your mental health journey.
Enhance existential therapy with coaching from BetterUp
Existential therapy offers you emotional insight and professional help with mental wellness. While ET has benefits, coaching offers a practical approach to existential challenges. A BetterUp coach can be your partner in exploring your feelings. They can help outline desired changes and support you to achieve your life goals.
Work with a life coach to build self-confidence, expression, and freedom. Get paired with a BetterUp coach today.
-1.png)
