existential therapy
What Is Existential Therapy? Meaning, Freedom, and Psychological Change
An educational guide to existential therapy, existential counseling, and how licensed clinicians work with meaning, freedom, mortality, and isolation.
Existential therapy is psychotherapy that understands many psychological struggles in relation to the enduring conditions of human life: freedom, responsibility, mortality, isolation, meaning, and the need to choose how one will live.
What does existential therapy focus on?
Existential therapists may explore how a person responds to uncertainty, avoids responsibility, confronts limitation, creates meaning, or feels separated from others and life itself. Symptoms matter, but they are considered within the person’s whole way of being in the world.
The approach does not assume every problem is philosophical. It asks whether anxiety, despair, compulsive striving, or emptiness may also express a conflict about how life is being lived.
Existential anxiety versus an anxiety disorder
Existential anxiety can arise from awareness of freedom, uncertainty, death, or the impossibility of perfect control. It can be a normal feature of being human. An anxiety disorder involves clinically significant symptoms and impairment evaluated within a professional assessment.
The two can coexist. A skilled licensed clinician can address symptoms while also making room for the questions those symptoms may reveal.
What is an existential psychologist?
An existential psychologist is generally a licensed psychologist whose clinical work is informed by existential theory. The exact title, license, and training should always be verified.
Existential counseling likewise refers to counseling informed by existential ideas, but the provider’s license—not the adjective existential—determines whether it is regulated treatment.
How is existential therapy different from coaching?
Existential therapy can assess and treat mental health concerns. Existential coaching is nonclinical and better suited to developmental questions when treatment is not needed.
Actualization& does not currently provide existential therapy. This article is educational; a future-services interest list is available for care that may be offered following appropriate licensure.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Is existential therapy evidence-based?
Existential approaches include several models and are studied less uniformly than one manualized treatment. Consider evidence for the specific intervention, condition, clinician, and client.
Is existential therapy only about death?
No. It also considers freedom, responsibility, meaning, isolation, identity, choice, and authentic engagement with life.
Can existential therapy include spirituality?
Yes, when spirituality is relevant to the client and the therapist is competent to integrate it without imposing beliefs.
Sources and further reading