The Existential Approach
Care Coordinator
This blog is presented by Yamid Montalvo, LPC. For more information, please visit Martin Counseling.
Main Focus: Seeks balance between recognizing limits and opportunities to transcend and achieve. It focuses on understanding the person’s subjective views of the world.
Key Concepts:
Self-awareness: Recognize the responsibility associated with the freedom to choose and to act.
Existential Anxiety: The basic unease that we experience when we become aware of our vulnerability and our inevitable death.
Death and Nonbeing: Death awareness is an awakening experience that can be a useful catalyst for making significant life changes.
Search for Meaning: Create meaning through work, loving, suffering, or through doing for others.
Search for authenticity: Living authentically entails that we are true to ourselves. This kind of living can provide a deep sense of inner peace.
Applications
Action: Address concerns, not just behaviorally and intellectually, by maximizing capacities to transform self. High priority is given to the quality of the relationship as a healing force. The main function is to display the ways to constrict awareness and the cost of such constrictions.
Goals: 1) Enable yourself to become truthful to yourself, 2) widen perspectives on yourself and the world around you and others, 3) clarify what gives meaning to present and future, 4) successfully negotiate and come to terms with past, present, and future, and 5) learn better ways of communicating with others.
Phase One: Identify and clarify assumptions about the world
Define and question how you perceive and make sense of existence
Examine values, beliefs, and assumptions to determine their validity
Reflect on their own existence and examine your role in contributing to problems in living
Phase Two: Examine the source and authority of any present value system
Through self-exploration, obtain new insights and restructuring of your values and attitudes
Get a better idea of what kind of life you consider worthy to live
Develop a sense of internal valuing process
Phase Three: Put what you have learned into action
Implement your examined and internalized values in concrete ways
Discover your strengths and put these capabilities to the service of living a meaningful existence.
Reference:
Corey, G. (2012). Theory and practice of group counseling. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.