It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project that sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world, on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.
Simone de Beauvoir, 1994, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 15
Existential therapy challenges the notion of therapy as a technical or necessarily structured enterprise which strives to help a client function better, along contemporary western trends. Such as, assuming a good life is based on being physically, sexually, socially, and intellectually well-functioning or top performing. Existential therapy often destabilises the ground by challenging the assumptions that normalise a functional way of being. Instead, existential therapy encourages the individual to explore what has shaped them, supports them to face up to their situated-ness (alone, and in the world with others), and invites them to act and create from their many expressions, shaped by wounds and desires; to allow the effect to travel.
Clarity does not necessarily appear. Often an ambiguous and disorientated sense can emerge when we recognise that we cannot overcome our hurts or find a permanent state of ground. We also must accept we have to live our own existence – the joys and the struggles – whilst paradoxically being unable to escape the existence, dependence, and effect of and on the other. The other who is shaping us, often enigmatically, and confronting many of the same fundamental issues in life – including the therapist. Even in this ambiguity it can sometimes be helpful for clients to critically consider the associated values that might support the life they are on some level choosing to live, within all the limitations and conditioning they might be facing.
The ongoing questioning and investigation of how ethics and values (social and individual) are constituted is often seen as a complex and an incredibly valuable part of the process in existential therapy. Arguably this is held as a significant component for living a vital life both independently, and with others. However, in an existential therapeutic approach you are unlikely to be offered any fixed answers about what you value. However, hopefully a space will emerge in the therapeutic relationship whereby an invitation to examine, experiment, and piece together what you might desire, and in turn value, occurs. However, it is always within an understanding that resists the need for, or possibility of, any final or foundational resolutions. Thereby an openness to impermanence and flow, and the capacity to become curious, create and act might well be cultivated.
Reflections on living questions, without a demand for an answer, can be useful, such as:
- How do I understand desire, and what are my greatest desires?
- How am I affected by and affecting others?
- What are my motivations for valuing this?
- What values have I lived for, do I live for, want to live for?
- What are the foundations of these values, if any? Whose interests do they serve?
- How do I choose my values, have I chosen my values, how have they been influenced?
- How are my values engaged or disengaged in different dimensions of existence, such as, personal, physical, social and spiritual?
- How do I expand or limit my or others way of being and becoming in the world?
- How do I encounter and relate to my blind spots and the unknowable aspects that influence my actions?
- Can we create solidarity in our differences and do better together?
In short, existential therapy can be a way, and a space, to support clients to deconstruct how they have been translating their lived experiences in the world, discover some of their roots and desires, cultivate what and how their desires and values may have emerged, and encourage a generous creativity with the many active forces available for new possibilities and pathways, for themselves and others.
To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Susanna, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.
Susanna Petitpierre, UKCP accredited, is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor, providing long and short term counselling. Her approach is primarily grounded in existential therapy and she works with individuals. Susanna is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.
Further reading by Susanna Petitpierre –
On living as becoming – (part two)
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