Unit on Existential Therapy

Slide 1: Existential psychotherapy

Slide 2: Ratings for Natalie Rogers

• Warmth -- 5.92
• Genuineness -- 5.53
• U+Regard -- 6.00
• Verbal listening -- 6.31
• Nonverbal listening --6.38
• Empathic understanding -- 5.61
• Clear goals -- 5.23
• Directiveness -- 3.84
• Insight-oriented --4.81
• Overall -- 5.26
• Would I see her? --5.00

Slide 3: Being-in-the-world

• How we live our life makes a significant difference.
• Do we visit all the rooms in our house?

Slide 4: How are our lives safer because of fear?

• They help us recognize the problem.
• They motivate us to cope with the problem.

Slide 5: How are our lives poorer because of fear?

• Avoid responsibility for our acts.
• Avoid recognizing we have choices.
• Avoid anxiety and play it safe.
• Avoid real intimacy.
• Stay busy so we do not become aware of our fundamental aloneness.
• Stay busy so we do not become aware of the finiteness of life.

Slide 6: Neurotic anxiety is not good.

• Choices are opportunities, not problems.

Slide 7: Sometimes “life happens”

• Force us to become aware of a problem.
• Force us to reconsider how we live life.
• Cause us to accept responsibility for the direction of our life.

Slide 8: Existential anxiety

• Makes us aware of the “big issues.”
• Helps us steer an effective path through life.
• Helps us become aware of separations from:
• Self
• Others
• World
• Cannot be lived with 24/7, but should be revisited from time to time.

Slide 9: Subjectivity

• The I and very different you can be integrated into a common we.
• The otherliness of the other person is not something to be tolerated, it is instead something to behold, something that enriches the beholder.

Slide 10: Can we see each other without making each other objects?

Slide 11: Can we touch and really understand each other?

Slide 12: Can we do both?

Slide 13: Logotherapy

• Find meaning in life -- even from the terrible
• Change meanings to those that are more healthy and adaptive

Slide 14: How can you do this?

1. 1. Listen and understand their worldview.
2. 2. Communicate your understanding.
3. 3. Only when your client recognizes that you   understand, can you begin to shift meanings.

Slide 15: Specialized techniques (Lukas, 1984)

• Reframing -- searches for the positive in the situation.  Must wait until client feels heard.
• Paradoxical intention -- encourages client to do what client is afraid might happen.  Returns control to the client.
• Having a panic attack any time, any place, sounds scary.  I wonder whether you could practice having panic attacks over the next week…
• Dereflection -- redirects focus from the maladaptive to the healthy.
• You’ve been spending a lot of time worrying about your daughter -- and driving you both crazy!  Perhaps this would be a good week to find something else to do.  You’ve talked about wanting to [fill in the blank].

Page by jms
URL= http://psy1.clarion.edu/jms/cptexistentialpp.html

Last modified September 14, 2001.