A Concise Introduction to Existential Counselling

Martin Adams, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781446208441, 9781446208434
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

?A concise introduction to existential counselling is a superb addition to the literature on existential counselling and psychotherapy. Martin Adams provides an excellent overview of the field for those who are new to it at the same time as distilling key features in a way which will be valuable for experienced practitioners? - Meg Barker, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Open University

A Concise Introduction to Existential Counselling is just that: a brief and accessible pocket guide to the underlying theory & practice of the existential approach.

Addressing everything a new trainee needs to know and do in a way that is entirely accessible and jargon-free, this book:

- Provides a short history of the existential tradition

- Puts key concepts into contexts, showing how theory translates into practice

- Discusses issues in the therapeutic process

- Shows how to work effectively with whatever the client brings to the session

- Addresses the significance of existential thought in the wider world

This book will be the perfect companion to new trainees looking to embark on their path to thinking and practicing existentially.

Martin Adams is a practitioner and supervisor in private practice and a Lecturer at the New School of Psychotherapy and Regents College, both in London.

1

An Overview of Existential Counselling

Chapter overview

In this chapter, I will introduce the reader to existential counselling and to some of the ideas that underpin it. I will begin with an account of some existential counselling. Like all written accounts, it is of course edited and anonymised – no account can ever be complete, as meanings are too variable and life is too complex for this. All we can do is aim for some narrative and existential truths. This account will be referred to from time to time throughout the book to illustrate the points under discussion.

Following this, I introduce the ideas by considering the history of the existential perspective and the aims and objectives of existential counselling. From there, I move into some of the key ideas that underpin it and talk about how we can learn to see the world existentially. Finally, I talk about some of the ways that the existential approach to counselling has been misunderstood.

Some excerpts from an account of existential counselling

The first contact Maria made with me was when she phoned to make an appointment. She said she did not know anything about counselling but a work colleague had suggested it might help and she got my name from an internet directory.

She arrived on time for her first appointment a few days later and I showed her in and indicated which of the two similar chairs she was to sit in. I let her take a few moments to get accustomed to the room and then asked her to tell me a bit more about what had brought her here today. She told me that she was unfamiliar with counselling, so I wanted to make her first experience of it welcoming but also challenging, to give her an idea of how it worked. I also wanted her to leave the first session with the feeling that she could possibly understand herself and her motives better. I wanted to start where she was and I needed to know ‘Why now?’

She said she was 32 years old and had broken up a month before with her boyfriend of eight years, David. The break-up had thrown her so much that she was not able to sleep without getting drunk and her work was suffering. While not being actually sceptical of it, Maria was not sure how counselling could help with her problem which she could see no solution to. She did not find talking about herself easy. It was so unlike her, as she was a ‘coper’.

I asked her to say more about her relationship with David. She said that he was her first real boyfriend and ‘He was staying at my place and he just woke up one day and said that we didn’t seem to be going anywhere and that he wanted a break … he shouldn’t have done that, should he … we hadn’t had a row or anything … I don’t understand’. It transpired that they met each other through work and started going out together with other colleagues and gradually ‘sort of decided to be with each other’, although they had drifted apart a number of times, being uncertain about whether or not they belonged together. She continued: ‘but I always thought it would be OK … perhaps it never really started … but he said he’d get back to me in a few weeks and now I just don’t know what to do. I’ll wait and see’. David had recently got a job elsewhere and they did not see each other so much. She talked in a rather detached way about him which made me curious about her strength of feeling so I asked her if she missed him. She answered me sharply and said, ‘Well of course I do, what do you think, anyone would wouldn’t they?’ Her reaction surprised me, but as it was the first session I let it go. It was as if she had come up against a brick wall in her life. By this time it was nearly the end of the session so I asked her what it was like talking to me, a man, about these things. She said, ‘better than I imagined … but what can I do?’ The question was partly directed towards herself but I replied that as far as I was concerned, there was a value in talking the issues over with another person, me, but that we could come back to this issue again if she felt she needed to. More than anything though, I felt that she needed time to talk and think out loud with someone else. My judgement of being with her was that she valued this.

It seemed to me that she was in a crisis of meaning. Prompted by David leaving, she realised that her previous way of living was simply not working for her any longer. I was curious about what she found meaningful and her principal sources of meaning seemed to be located outside of herself – in her work and in David. This seemed to me to be worth exploring at some point.

At the start of the next session, she looked at me, waiting for me to start, so I asked her what came up for her after the last session. She said, ‘It was odd but good … I realised I just don’t talk to people about myself, never have, I haven’t spoken to David, I need to wait till he tells me what he wants, then I’ll know where I am’. I was curious about how it was she didn’t talk to people so I asked her about her family. She said she had had a ‘normal’ upbringing: ‘everything was fine, I don’t remember much about it’. She has two brothers, one older and one younger. Both her parents are still alive and active and her brothers are ‘doing well, married and children and everything, but not as well paid as me, I’m the success’. She said this slightly sarcastically so I asked her what she meant by ‘success’. With some reluctance, she said that she did not do many exams because she ‘did not feel clever enough … maybe that’s why my job is so important’. I asked her to clarify what she meant. She said that having a career had been important in her family and that being the middle child and also a girl meant that she had to work especially hard to catch up. She had put relationships second to her career. ‘I thought a relationship would just happen by itself, but it hasn’t and I don’t know what to do.’ The way she said this felt to me different from the way she had said it earlier; she seemed more able to tolerate not knowing what to do. Another issue was that she had to decide whether to apply for promotion at work: ‘but I’m not really that interested in the work. I feel I’ve got to apply and get it’. I asked her what she meant by ‘got to’. She looked at me again with that familiar slightly puzzled look and said, ‘everyone’s expecting it’.

She was caught in the dilemma of wanting two apparently opposite things – a relationship and a career – without really knowing why she wanted either or how she was going to get them. At the same time as clarifying her life’s hopes and intentions, I needed to continue to monitor how she was with me, a man, and how she viewed what we did together, in order for it to be optimally challenging.

In another session later on, she started saying, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what you asked a few weeks ago about whether I missed David and it’s odd – I miss his company but I don’t know if I miss him – we liked different things. When the two of us were together, we’d just watch TV … we didn’t talk about much … but at the same time I always thought that he would make me happy, sort of make my life complete. Maybe I liked the idea of being with him more than actually being with him’.

The time when David was supposed to tell her what his plans were came and went, with no word from him and almost unnoticed by Maria. She had begun to talk less about David and her work and more about relationships, about how she didn’t really know how to ‘do’ them, about how she thought they would just happen, and what she wanted to do in her life, about her ‘normal’ family who she didn’t see that much and that she was ‘fine’ with this. She talked spontaneously more about her early experience – about arguing most of her childhood, until he left home, with her eldest brother – ‘you know, the one I don’t talk to any more’. In fact, I didn’t know. This was the first time she had mentioned it. I let it pass and asked her what it was like not talking to him. ‘I don’t like it’, she said. ‘I always wanted him to admire me the way I admired him … maybe all this time I’ve been trying to prove something to them. But it never got me anywhere. I’m confused. I came here to talk about David and all I’m talking about is my family … I know I should be though … but everything seems more of a mess than before.’ She wondered what the point of coming to see me was, if it wasn’t going to give her some answers. Although this question was only partly directed at me and I acknowledged her confusion, it was mostly directed at herself. As she said, ‘it’s not really just about David, is it?’ Again, although a question, she did not need me to answer it. She knew the answer. It was about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

Meanwhile, she gradually became more comfortable with me, as shown by her ability to sit in silence and be with her own thoughts. On these occasions, which were actually no longer than a minute or two, I didn’t have any particular need to break the silence, as it was obvious to me that she was working things out in my presence. At the end of one of these instances, it was the end of the session and after I reminded her that the time was up, she said, ‘Yes … I was a long way away … that was good … thanks’.

Some sessions later, she started with, ‘You know what, I’ve grown to look forward to coming to see you. I used to dread it. You remember everything I’ve said, I can say anything I like here – work things out for myself’. She talked about how she made notes of what we talked about so that she could continue working on things in the breaks between sessions. And she had started to remember her dreams for the first time and ‘you know what, they are really interesting, I never paid them much attention before. I had one about you, you were talking to a colleague and I couldn’t hear what you were saying but I knew you were talking about me, you seemed happy’. Exploring this revealed her surprise that I was able to enjoy her company. She talked about deciding that her priority in life was now to sort out ‘this whole relationship thing because, and I’ve never said this before, I’ve always said the opposite, that I do want to have children sometime. It’s been holding me back and making me put energy into work when I don’t know if I want to. I may do, but it was like I had to. I don’t know what I want to do but I don’t want to die without having done anything I wanted to do’. She talked about a man she worked with and realising for the first time that she liked him. What was strange about it was that until that time she had never considered whether she liked a man, only whether he liked her. ‘That’s weird, isn’t it – how come I didn’t know if I liked someone?’ I asked her if she had liked David and she said, ‘No, I don’t think I did, my parents did, I respected him and admired him, but no I didn’t … I’m glad I’m out of it actually’. I pointed out the difference between that and how she was when she started and asked her what she meant.

She said, ‘It was like I was only half awake, that it wasn’t what I wanted, it was OK, but not what I wanted’. I said, ‘So, what do you want?’ She said, ‘Good question, I’m not sure, but I know I’m more able to find out now’. She said, ‘I feel lighter, sort of different, like I’ve got a new toy and I’m learning how it works, I don’t want to lose it’. One thing she did know she wanted was that she had always wanted to go travelling. I asked her why she had never done it. ‘I always thought it was a waste of money, that I should work instead … but that’s silly, isn’t it; it’s like, if not now then when; I might die tomorrow.’

Over the subsequent weeks, Maria talked about initiating conversations that went well with her eldest brother, and also with her parents about their experience of her growing up. It also surprised her that they were both encouraging of her plans to travel and wished they had done it when they were more able to.

Maria was beginning to make choices about her own life on the basis of what she wanted and needed, rather than on the grounds of what she thought she wanted, or what she thought others wanted for her.

The work drew to a close because she was planning on travelling for a year. ‘It’s scary and exciting and I’ve got to do it. Can I let you know how I’m getting on?’ I replied that I’d be pleased to hear from her.

A brief history of existential counselling

To find the origin of existential counselling, we need to go back to the ancient Greeks. Practical human issues, finding out about and trying to live the good life were the focus of Greek philosophy, and the Greek myths are examples of living stories that describe how these human issues can be understood.

In Greek, the word philosophy means ‘love of wisdom’ and existential counselling is a contemporary form of applied philosophy that seeks to assist people in acquiring the wisdom to understand and live their lives with a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

Socrates established a way of thinking systematically about human issues and held that we should examine both the familiar and the unfamiliar to find their meaning. The familiar is often more difficult to examine, simply because we assume we already know about it. In fact, this makes it all the more necessary to examine because we are usually wrong.

Contemporary existential counselling

More recently, existential counselling can be traced back to the influence of the 19th century philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, and since then existential philosophy has been applied to every field of human endeavour, from art and architecture to literature, politics and work, as well as to counselling. Existentialism is too important to apply just to counselling.

Existential thought has also influenced many of the major counselling figures. One of Sigmund Freud’s influences was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and Freud also maintained a friendship with the Swiss existential pioneer Ludwig Binswanger until his death. Later on, Carl Rogers had a long association with Rollo May, while Fritz Perls was influenced in the beginning by both existential philosophy and phenomenology. In this way, existential ideas have therefore found their way into other therapeutic perspectives but often in a watered down and sometimes distorted form.

Paradoxically, its broad base is one of the reasons why existential ideas are not better known. Another is that, until recently (Deurzen 2012; Spinelli 2007; Deurzen and Adams 2011), existential counsellors have tended to value their freedom and have been reluctant to talk systematically about their practice.

As Mick Cooper (2003) notes, there is not one existential therapy, but a number of existential therapies, just as there are a number of psychoanalytic, humanistic and cognitive therapies. This means that although all existential counsellors agree on the same basic principles, they can also have differing views on them. It is this dynamism and diversity that gives the existential approach its particular strength, flexibility and resilience.

It has also evolved in different directions in different countries. Daseinsanalysis developed in Switzerland and is an association of the ideas of Martin Heidegger with psychoanalysis, while logotherapy was developed by Viktor Frankl in Austria out of his experience in a concentration camp. In the USA, existential therapy has become linked with humanistic ideas (e.g. Bugental 1978; Schneider and Krug 2009).

By virtue of our history and location, this book represents the contemporary British model of existential counselling, which, while staying close to its philosophical and phenomenological roots, is also very practical (Cohn 1997; Strasser and Strasser 1997; Strasser 1999; Spinelli 2007; Manafi 2010; Deurzen 2010; Deurzen and Adams 2011). It holds to the principle that it should be possible to describe everyday experience in everyday language.

It is likely that some things you come across in these pages are familiar from other therapeutic perspectives. This is not a problem and just goes to show that some elements of other practices can be consistent with existential practice. Existential counsellors are ready to engage with other therapeutic methods when appropriate, but they always do so in a philosophical and therefore critically aware manner.

The aims and assumptions of existential counselling

Existential counselling considers that individual differences and difficulties are related to the wider givens of the human condition that we all share, rather than being personal deficiencies or symptoms to be removed. It works on the principle that by recognising our habitual patterns, understanding what triggers them and how we inadvertently maintain them, we are put in a better position to understand not only our strengths and limitations, but also the choices we may have overlooked.

Alongside this is the knowledge that it is a part of the human condition to deceive ourselves about our motives and intentions. It is here that as existential counsellors we can be invaluable because we will understand human fallibility and know how to challenge it. At all times, both the counsellor and client are considered active and independent, and the counsellor will aim to promote a cooperative relationship with the client and be alert to those highly significant moments when there is a lack of cooperation.

The counsellor will work with the client in their s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Dedication1
• Preface
• 1 An overview of existential counselling
• 2 Some key ideas in existential counselling
• 3 Putting theory into practice
• 4 Working with what the client brings
• 5 Issues in the counselling process
• 6 Understanding and working with particular issues
• 7 Being and becoming an existential counsellor
• Glossary
• Notes on some important existential thinkers
• References
• Index