Existential Therapy

Existential Anxiety: The Opportunity for Agency

Existential anxiety is a result of our own freedom to make choices, our responsibility for ourselves, the inherent meaninglessness of life, and the inevitability of death. Existential dread is another term for this type of anxiety, which differs from what we generally...

Situated Freedom in Existential Therapy: Ethics and Oppression

In a previous article about existential freedom, I mentioned that the principle of freedom grounds everything else in existential therapy. And it does, but let’s be real: many of us don’t have as much freedom as we want. Freedom is often limited in some way or...

Freedom in Existential Therapy: The Burden of Choice

Freedom drives all other existential concepts. Existential psychology holds that we are all born into the world with the freedom to shape our path through life. Rather than handing over decisions to religion, family, cultural norms and expectations, or some other...

Existential Authenticity: The Project of Becoming Yourself

Existential authenticity is the ongoing process of living in harmony with what we know to be most true about ourselves, our values, and our clear-eyed sense of reality. To do this, you’ll need to understand your beliefs, desires, needs, and personality traits. You can...

Existential Meaning: Creating Your Story

Meaning is at the heart of existential therapy: being born into the world without predetermined meaning, and creating (or failing to create) personal meaning as we go through life.  A maxim of existential philosophy is “existence precedes essence,” from Jean-Paul...

What Is Existential Therapy?

I became an existentialist in high school. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, just that I was caught up in what the point of being alive was. That question and similar ones (“Why are humans the way we are?” “Am I real?”) drove me for the next 20 years. Then, when...