What does relational-existential psychotherapy look like in action?
We are led by the directions that you want to go in. We talk about what you’re feeling and thinking, what is happening in your life right now, what pain and difficulty needs tending to, what you want, what you don’t want. We discuss what remains unresolved from the past, what the future looks like, what you’re noticing talking about it all right now. We take a deep dive into what it feels like to be you, in your life, with your people, in this world, at this time.
We look at what meaning you make of the things that happen in your relationships and the fundamental belief system that you have about yourself. Together, we look at how your current and past relational experiences have shaped you and how you feel about yourself and your life now.
If you have feelings to process of your experience living in the world, we make space for that. We can take stock of all the emotions around trying to be the human you want to be in the world–and in your relationships–while encountering the inevitable limitations and dilemmas the world imposes upon you.
Process material can be drawn from stories, memories, emotions, emerging thoughts, bodily sensations, metaphors and wordplay, dreams, art/culture references, and images that come to you as we speak. We take pieces of your experience and we connect, map and weave them together into deeper understanding. We also allow space to not know, but to wonder about it all together.
Things that occur in therapy can be a representation of your inner life and your relational world. Thus, we can also look at what is transpiring between us in our client-therapist relationship and in the experience of therapy, itself.
I pay close attention to your specific needs for feedback and guidance from me, and your need to be asked important questions. I strive to offer you my perspective through the relationship we build as the conversation unfolds. It’s a path we walk together.
Our conversations can be inspired by the vitality in self-awareness, in and of itself, but also by the power to change, to accept, to take meaningful action and discover different ways of experiencing life and oneself.
My approach to psychotherapy
A Relational approach
Relational psychotherapy, in theoretical terms, is an approach to psychotherapy that brings together branches of various schools of thought and sensibilities: psychoanalytic/psychodynamic, humanistic, trauma-informed, intersectional feminist, relational-cultural, and theories of attachment, trauma, self psychology, intersubjectivity, interpersonal neurobiology, and shame. In practice, though, what might that look like?
As a relational psychotherapist, I pay close attention to your experience of your own personal world of relationships with other people. We look at how that shapes your own self-experience as you move through the world. Much of our discussion focuses on your most significant relationships (intimate partners, family, friends, professional/academic) and sometimes what might be emerging between us, as client and therapist.
I encourage you to reflect on, and actively inquire of yourself, what you feel are the relational patterns you experience in your life. I want to know how you grew up in your family, who was around you, what happened in your younger life and how you learned–perhaps from a very early age–to be in relationship with others. That includes how you learned to stay safe through disconnection from others. Feelings and memories of having felt safe or unsafe, seen or unseen, valued or unvalued are important to talk about in relational psychotherapy.
I work with a primary guiding principle that shame is at the centre of many relational struggles and individual pain (with guilt and regret often not far away). I believe that this is one of the most important kinds of pain to share. The ways in which shame festers can be extremely unhealthy and need special attention.
Our process may consist of exploring different forms of traumatic experience and loss and our aim is to work together to integrate those experiences in a way that is more healed or resolved for you, and not buried and paved over while still having a deeply negative impact on your life.
I also pay close attention to your feelings and thoughts about your interactions in your wider social world, the parts of your social experience that involve the world of strangers and non-intimate others.
Further details of interest:
Very much a part of all the above is paying attention to your organizing principles.
Here is a list of relational questions for personal reflection or conversations with others, including in therapy.
An Existential lens
Existential philosophy applied to the individual: one’s experience of existence and the world – questions of how to live – reflections on truth and freedom – and, of course, death. It all sounds very serious and may even feel gloomy, or perhaps intellectual and distancing. The language of it may not resonate with you. That’s all understandable and yet, ultimately, it is about being honest and real with oneself in the pursuit of an examined life.
Existentialism encourages us to think about how to be responsible to self and to others, how to live ethically, genuinely and passionately, and what questions need to be asked of ourselves.
Here is a bit more on existential questioning.
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What an ‘existential’ approach* in psychotherapy means to me consists of two primary things:
Firstly, each unique person has multiple layers of self-experience that need attending to: physical (body, nature, material world), personal/psychological (mental health, inner world, self-with-self), social/world (self-with-others, relationship to society), and spiritual (meaning, beliefs, worldviews).
Our life in the world is relational on multiple levels and these realms of being are all interconnected and they intersect in countless ways.
Secondly, it’s essential that we not lose sight of our own mortality and the inevitable limits of time and opportunity that aging and death impose. We exist in many facets of existence that we don’t choose and these often determine what is and isn’t possible in our life. It’s not meant to be a ‘downer’, it is intended to awaken, contextualize, inspire and motivate. Our mortality is an opportunity, if we allow it to be.
The time is now. Memento mori (“remember you must die”).
We have some realities to accept, but we also get to identify all that is possible for us to live an emotionally healthy, self-aware, fulfilling and meaningful life. Existentialism applied to psychotherapy brings us to look at how to come to terms with one’s own humanity and potential within the givens of existence.
In relational-existential therapy, we can look at what is inspiring you, what hope you have for your life, where you are discovering meaning and purpose. We look at ways in which you are living authentically and in good faith, making the most of your freedom, creative human abilities and relational capacities.
We talk about ‘truth,’ what truths you want to live by, and what the truths are about you. We talk about what makes you feel enriched and fulfilled, seen and understood. We explore what allows you to live congruently and at peace within yourself.
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In the therapeutic conversation, whether a client and I name anything directly as ‘existential’, we generally are talking about existential issues. Anything that falls into areas of meaning and purpose, authenticity and individuality, freedoms and choices, responsibilities and dilemmas, ethics and morals, time, aging and death, the world situation, is existential at heart.
Anything that is a threat to our existence, either as individuals or as a planet/species, is an existential concern.
Anger, fear and anxiety related to unjust systemic oppressions, climate crises, pandemics, economic disparity, rapid evolution of technology and communications, international war, poverty and mass trauma, hostility and divisions in the world, destruction of nature: all existential, all contributing to our emotional landscape and day-to-day lives.
In conversations with me, we can sit with and try to understand existential suffering, the unbearable weight of being, ‘dark nights of the soul’, death anxiety and melancholia. Just being with it together can be a comfort even if deeply unsettling realities cannot be changed.
I very much enjoy conversations with clients about existential experiences they have in everyday life. To my own continuing delight, talking about death and mortality can feel incredibly connecting, moving and enlivening.
(*Special note: I have enormous gratitude to Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Emmy van Deurzen and NSPC for starting me on this existential psychotherapy path almost 30 years ago now).