David Wakely, M.A. UKCP reg.
Counselling and psychotherapy

On this page, I explain some of the thinking behind my way of working existentially as a counsellor and psychotherapist.

Existentialism is a style of thinking which is rooted in the actualities of lived experience. It has become a major influence on psychotherapy due to its interest in states of consciousness, subjective experience and the challenges of human living.

Below, I have selected some of the themes that existentialism deals with and which are particularly relevant for counselling and psychotherapy.

Necessity and freedom
The importance of meaning
The importance of relatedness
The importance of past, present and future

Necessity and freedom

A central theme of the existential approach is the relationship between necessity and freedom. As human beings, we do not choose the basic physical conditions of our existence: the fact that we are born with this body, in this time and place; the fact that we are subject to basic physical needs; that we are vulnerable; and that one day we will die.

Similarly, we are not able to change our genetic inheritance, the things that have happened to us in the past, our cultural or familial backgrounds.

Yet within these constraints, there is a range of freedom available to us in the ways we can respond to our existence, the paths we choose to take, and the values and meanings we confer on our experience.

This is not a freedom that we are waiting to discover; we are already in the midst of it. We utilise it in every moment of choice and decision. Yet we do not always recognise our freedom, appreciate its extent or understand its full implications for our lives. One of the aims of the existential approach is to nurture a greater awareness of the freedom that each of us possesses within the limits of our worldly existence.

The importance of meaning

All experience is meaningful; the human mind no sooner perceives something than it seeks to interpret it. This process is so instantaneous that most of the time we are not even conscious of it.

Consequently, we rarely appreciate the extent to which the reality that we experience is held together by the meanings that we find in it.

In existential therapy, the types of problems that people bring - depression, anxiety, anger, relationship and sexual issues etc. - are explored with the intention of uncovering the unspoken meanings within them. Once these meanings are available to our conscious understanding, we are more able to question them; to experiment with alternative ways of thinking and behaving; to accept, reject or reframe them.

The importance of relatedness

An important theme in the existential approach is the nature of our relations with ourselves, with other people and with the world around us. A human being is never in absolute isolation from other people and other things. In every moment of our lives, we are relating to someone or something, even if this is in the realm of thought or imagination.

To put it another way, our minds our always engaged with something. Even in the experiences of isolation and loneliness, when we feel most cut off from the world, our pain is rooted in our yearning for contact with others; here, yearning is the form that our relatedness takes.

For this reason, the existential approach focusses as much on the "external" world of our relations as it does on the "internal" world of our thoughts and feelings.

The importance of past, present and future

People often think that the main component of therapy is an exploration of the past, uncovering the roots of present problems. This exploration can help us to understand ourselves better, but the focus of therapy is always on what we can do with this understanding in the present.

Just as we are constantly in relation to other people and things, so also we relate to time in different ways. Sometimes, especially in moments of great emotion such as joy or despair, we feel as if we are living in a pure present, with no thought of past or future. Other emotions such as nostalgia orient us towards the past, hope towards the future.

Our relations to time can also have a disturbed quality. A feature of depression is that the future feels blocked. For someone in the throes of depression, the first glimmer of daybreak comes when s/he can start to think constructively again about the future.

Similarly, traumatic experiences can sometimes have the effect of blocking off the past, making it inaccessible to memory. Even so, this past can cast its shadow over the sufferer.