Existential therapy is orientated around the development of a deep relational bond with clients, which allows clients to explore the most fundamental aspects of their existence.  This includes questions like: ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ ‘What choices can I make?’ and ‘How do I face the limits of my circumstances?’

This workshop will introduce the existential approach to therapy, and focus on three particular aspects of existential work:

• Helping clients acknowledge their fundamental freedom and capacity to make choices
• Helping clients to face the givens of their lives, like death and the unattainability of perfect happiness
• Helping clients to find meaning and purpose in life

The workshop will combine a mixture of personal development exercises, skills work, discussion and theoretical input; and will be divided into four sessions:

The first session invites participants to consider, and discuss, key assumptions underlying the existential approach.  It then reviews the history and development of the existential approach to therapy and looks at key figures in existential therapy and its phenomenological foundations.

The second session explores one of the key assumptions underlying existential thought and practice: that clients have the capacity to make choices in their lives, and that through enacting their will they have the potential to find more satisfying, fulfilling and authentic ways of being.  We will: consider how this can be applied to therapeutic work, explore our own relationship to freedom and choice, understand psychological difficulties in terms of a refusal to accept one’s freedom and practice existential work with client’s choices.

While existential therapy holds that human beings always have choices, it also suggests that there are certain limitations in life that we always face.  This includes death, financial and economic restrictions, and the inevitable paradoxes of being. The third session will explore these limitations through focusing on – the ‘givens’ of existence; the tensions in our lives, and how this understanding can be applied to work with clients. We will examine transcripts of therapeutic work with clients addressing the limitations of existence.

The final session looks at how clients can be encouraged to address issues of meaning and purpose in life. We will look at: An existential understanding of human beings as purpose-oriented; personal reflections on our own meanings and goals; andunderstanding the link between meanings and psychopathology.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a greater understanding of the existential approach and will have developed ideas about how to incorporate existential understandings and methods into their own practice.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss the key assumptions underlying the existential approach
• Discuss the history and development of the existential approach to therapy as well as the key figures in existential therapy and its phenomenological foundations
• Explain how to help clients acknowledge their fundamental freedom and capacity to make choices
• Explain how to help clients to face the givens of their lives, like death and the unattainability of perfect happiness
• Discuss how clients can be encouraged to address issues of meaning and purpose in life, including an existential understanding of human beings as purpose-oriented; personal reflections on our own meanings and goals; and understanding the link between meanings and psychopathology
• Explain how to incorporate existential understandings and methods into your own practice

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