Practical Philosophy
I encourage people to engage with philosophical problems in session, and I take them seriously. While it’s certainly fun to talk about life and what it means, your personal philosophy has a very real and surprisingly large impact on your emotional health. Namely, it is impossible to feel confident in your perceptions and actions if you don’t have a solid sense of what is true and what is not; what is real and what is not; what is important and what is not.
Common Questions
- Why am I here?
- Is there a purpose to all of this?
- Does it even matter?
- Who decides on the rules for how I live my life?
- Do I even have any control at all?
- Is everything predetermined by some kind of god, or by the universe?
The insecurity of not having answers to these questions often leads us to feel helpless; too dumb, too weak, and too small to make any change in our lives. We become passive, and frustrated, and deeply unhappy with our place in the world and the universe.
Choice and Self-Determination
So, the purpose of existential therapy is this: to help you see that you are an active agent in your own life. The feelings you feel and the actions you take are real and meaningful. You are really here, and this is really happening.
Basically, there are things you can control, and things you can’t. The challenge of being alive, conscious, and self-determining has three parts:
- How do I figure out what I can control and what I can’t?
- How do I tolerate sometimes being out of control?
- How do I make confident decisions about the things that are within my control?
Existential Security
These questions cut right to the heart of what we call “self-confidence,” “self-esteem,” and “agency.” From the existential perspective, not having the answers is the source of existential insecurity, and this insecurity is the root of much of what we think of as “mental illness.”
The trick to building confidence and existential security is therefore to start finding places where you do have control and actively deciding what to do about them. Existential security builds just like our muscles do, just like our minds: the more you practice, the stronger it gets.
It’s not easy to find satisfactory answers for them, but it absolutely is possible. Chances are, you already know how you want to answer, but there’s something getting in the way.
Finding and eliminating this “something in the way” is the goal of existential psychotherapy. Once the block is gone, you are free to live your life in the best way you are able.