Integrated LifeCounselling & Therapy

What Is Existential Counselling and Therapy?

Some of the things that bring people to counselling are not really problems to be solved. They are questions. What matters to me? Why does this hurt so much? Am I living the life I meant to live? Existential counselling takes those questions seriously, instead of treating them as symptoms.

I see counselling and therapy as three processes happening more or less at the same time. The first is the immediate issues that are creating discomfort in your life: sadness, fear, anxiety, relationships or substance abuse, to name a few. The second is a broader understanding of your world view: how you engage with your reality, and how you make sense of what you can and cannot control, which often gave rise to your struggles in the first place. The third, and often the most neglected, is finding meaning in your distress, and seeing the value in a struggle. In the words of Viktor Frankl: “Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”

That thinking sits underneath much of my work, alongside the person-centred relationship described on my Approach page. It is also personal to me: it is how I made sense of my own life after a flying accident. This page explains, in plain language, what existential counselling is, where it comes from, how it has shaped my own story, and what it can look like in practice.

What it is

Existential therapy starts from a simple observation: being alive confronts every person with certain facts that no amount of success or comfort removes. We will die. We are responsible for our choices, even the hard ones. We are each, in some way, alone inside our own experience. And we have to find, or make, a reason to get up in the morning.

Most of the time we manage these facts by not looking at them. Work, family, routines and plans do a great deal of that for us. When something shakes them loose, such as a loss, a diagnosis, a failure, a birthday that lands differently, or a habit that has stopped working, the questions come to the surface. Existential counselling does not try to talk you out of them. It helps you face them with someone beside you, so that they can become a source of clarity and direction instead of dread.

It is not a technique, a programme or a set of exercises. It is a way of listening, and a way of understanding what a person is going through, that treats you as someone capable of choosing how to meet your own life.

Three thinkers behind it

Many people have shaped this approach. I lean on three in particular.

Irvin Yalom is a psychiatrist and writer who taught at Stanford for many years. In his book Existential Psychotherapy he describes four “givens” of existence that people struggle with: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. His other books, such as The Gift of Therapy and Staring at the Sun, describe with great plainness what happens between two people in a therapy room. For Yalom the relationship itself does much of the healing, and every person needs a therapy shaped to them.

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to found logotherapy. In Man’s Search for Meaning he describes how, even under the worst conditions, people kept a measure of freedom: the freedom to choose their stance towards what was happening to them. He argued that our deepest drive is not pleasure or power but a will to meaning, and that meaning can be found in what we do, in whom and what we love, and in how we face suffering we cannot change.

Rollo May was an American psychologist who helped bring existential thinking into mainstream psychology. In books such as The Meaning of Anxiety, Love and Will and The Courage to Create, he wrote about anxiety as an ordinary part of becoming yourself, about choice and commitment, and about courage as acting in spite of fear, not as the absence of it.

Others, among them Simone de Beauvoir and Edith Eger, also shape how I think, and are named on the Approach page.

Rollo May: the person and the counsellor’s work

May’s first book, The Art of Counselling, was first published in 1939 and revised in 1989. In it he makes a point I find humbling: every counsellor works from some picture of what a person is, whether they admit it or not. A counsellor who never thinks about this will simply assume that you should become like them, or like their hero, or like whatever ideal their culture holds up. A wise counsellor, May says, draws that picture up consciously.

His own picture rests on four principles:

These four are quietly at work in how I counsel. I don’t assume I know who you should become. I treat you as free to choose, and as unique. I take your relationships seriously. And I take your longing for meaning seriously, whether or not you have a word for it.

May also wrote about what the therapist is for. As I understand his work, it comes down to four primary tasks:

That last task sits close to Frankl’s will to meaning, and to the third process I described at the start.

The questions it takes seriously

Death and time. Knowing that our time is limited can be frightening, and it can also sharpen what matters. Many people who face an illness or a loss describe seeing their lives more clearly, and wishing they had not waited so long. After my accident I could no longer keep this one at arm’s length.

Freedom and responsibility. We are freer than we often feel, and that freedom has weight. Choosing means giving something up, and not choosing is also a choice. Counselling can help you see where you have been living by someone else’s script. I had to see that some of the choices I had been living by were never really mine.

Isolation. Even in close relationships, no one else can live your life, or feel it from the inside. Existential work takes loneliness seriously, and looks at how to be close to others without losing yourself. I met this one first-hand too.

Meaning. When the old reasons stop working, a person can feel empty, flat or lost. Frankl called this the existential vacuum. The work is not to hand you a meaning, but to help you discover and build your own. The life I had built no longer answered the question of what it was for, and I had to find that answer myself.

How it became my own story

I did not come to existential thinking through books first. I came to it through my own life. When I was 34 I had a flying accident, and I describe what followed on the Crisis and Trauma page. What I want to say here is what it did to the ideas on this page. All four of Yalom’s givens, isolation, death, meaning and freedom, stopped being theory and became glaring, unavoidable facts of my own life. I had built a career and a way of living on assumptions I had never examined, some of them inherited from my family. The accident exposed them.

For a long time I tried to numb the emptiness that followed, and that only prolonged the search. What began to change things was asking for help, and then making a different choice about what to do with what had happened. I tell more of that on the About page.

Changing my career and studying psychology was my way of making meaning out of what had happened. Frankl writes that meaning can be found in what we do, and the work I chose after the accident was exactly that: putting my effort where it could mean something.

His central idea became practical for me. We cannot always choose what we are given, but we can choose our attitude towards it. My given was limb loss. I could not change it. I could choose how I stood in relation to it, and that choice has shaped everything since.

It also gave my days a purpose. What I have learnt, I now get to pass on to others, not as instructions, but as something they can make their own: to personalise it, and to direct it towards their own meaning-making. That, more than any technique, is why I do this work.

Addiction and the search for meaning

Addiction is one of the places where these questions show up most clearly. Alcohol, drugs, gambling and other habits often begin as a way of coping with anxiety, pain or boredom, and for a while they work. Seen existentially, they are also a way of escaping what is hard to face: the weight of freedom, the ache of loneliness, an inner emptiness of the kind Frankl described. The substance or the behaviour becomes a substitute for meaning, and it slowly costs more than it gives. I know something of this from my own experience, which I describe on the Addiction page.

This does not replace the practical work with cravings, triggers and relapse. I do that too. But recovery tends to last when something is built to take the place of what the habit was doing: connection, purpose, a life worth being present for. It is also why shame and judgement help so little. The existential strand of my addiction work looks at the meaning of the suffering that addiction brings, and at how that experience can become a process of growth. There is more on the Addiction and Dual Diagnosis page.

Meaning in the second half of life

Many people reach midlife, or later, having done what was expected of them: a career, a family, a place in the world. Then a quieter question arrives. Is this it? Carl Jung compared life to the course of the sun, with a morning spent building a place in the world and an afternoon that asks what it was all for. I entered the second half of my own life in what I can only call an existential void, and I know how disorienting that is.

The second half brings losses of its own: children leaving, work ending, the body changing, parents and friends dying, and a growing awareness of time. It can also bring more freedom to choose what matters, less need to impress, and more honesty about what you want. Frankl’s three avenues to meaning, what we do, whom and what we love, and the stance we take towards what cannot be changed, stay open at every age, and often grow more important.

Existential counselling gives this stage room to be explored, not rushed past or treated as a malfunction. People often arrive with a sense of loss, and may leave with a clearer sense of what they want the years ahead to hold. There is more on the Life Transitions, Meaning and Purpose page.

Becoming a self

Rollo May wrote that becoming yourself takes courage: the courage to express your own being, even when that brings anxiety or disapproval. Most of us spend years becoming who others expect us to be, whether parents, partners, employers or the culture around us. The cost often shows up later as low self-worth, resentment, or a sense of living on the surface.

Existential thinking treats the self as something formed through our choices, not something fixed, and so something that can keep developing. In counselling that can mean noticing where you have been performing, what you actually value, and what you want to be true of your life. Frankl added an important point: we find ourselves less by looking inward alone than by reaching beyond ourselves, towards a person, a task or a cause that matters to us.

May also saw that not all anxiety is a malfunction. Some of it is the cost of caring about something, or of changing. That does not mean anxiety should simply be endured. Where it is overwhelming, we work on it directly, and sometimes alongside medical care. More on Self-Esteem, Self-Awareness and Identity.

Empowerment: freedom and responsibility

In this approach, empowerment is not about feeling positive or being told you can do anything. It is about recognising the choices you do have, including the difficult ones, and taking responsibility for them, while being honest about the limits that are real. May described freedom and destiny as belonging together: we are free within a set of givens, such as our history, our body and our circumstances. The work is to find what is yours to decide inside those limits.

That is why the approach can be both gentle and demanding. I don’t tell you what to do, and I don’t take your choices away from you. I help you see them clearly, understand what is holding you back, and find the courage to act. The difference between “I have to” and “I choose to”, even when the circumstances stay the same, can change how a life feels.

What it looks like in the room

In practice, existential counselling is a conversation. We begin with what has brought you, and with the practical work of understanding it. Alongside that, a quieter conversation often develops about what matters to you, what you are afraid of, what you have been avoiding, and what you want. Some sessions are mostly about a specific problem. Others wander into questions of meaning, fear or choice.

There is no set programme, and no homework unless it helps. I draw on other approaches where they serve you, but the thread running through the work is that you are the expert on your own life, and that your questions deserve to be taken seriously. The relationship between us matters more than any technique. Honesty, warmth and being listened to are part of what makes change possible.

Is it for you?

It may suit you if you feel stuck in a way that practical advice has not touched, if you are in a time of transition or loss, if you suspect that something deeper sits beneath your anxiety, low mood or habits, or if you simply want to think honestly about your life with someone who is not trying to fix you. It is not only for people in crisis, and you do not need any interest in philosophy. Plain language is fine.

Counselling is not always enough on its own. Where a psychiatric assessment, medication, a diagnosis or other medical care would help, I will say so and help you find the right person, and we can continue working alongside them.

If you would like to read more

The thinkers are worth reading in their own words: Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy, The Gift of Therapy and Staring at the Sun; Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning; and May’s The Art of Counselling, The Courage to Create and Love and Will. Several books on this theme, including Man’s Search for Meaning, Staring at the Sun and Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, are on my recommended reading list on the Resources page.

Getting in touch

Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form, and tell me a little about what is happening. You don’t need to find the right words, and it doesn’t have to feel serious enough first.

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