Reasons to not be an existential therapist
I didn’t become a therapist until I was almost 40 years old.
Some folks who become a therapist in their forties have the great excuse of having already had a “career,” as we call it. Or maybe they’ve had kids. I had no such excuses.
To be frank, I struggled with jobs. In my twenties, I was 100% committed to being a writer and artist, and I worked nothing jobs in retail and food service. I got fired from jobs for “not smiling at the customers.” I lived below the poverty line so that I could avoid spending the time and energy needed to build a “career.” My goal was to write poetry, to get that poetry published, and of course, to be recognized as the genius of a generation.
There was another complicating factor, though, and that was that I kept either meeting or hearing about absolutely terrible therapists.
Years ago, at a burrito shop with a friend, we ran into his therapist. His EXISTENTIAL THERAPIST, he clarified.
It should be noted that this friend was . . . intense. He was, like many of the men I’ve gravitated towards, loud, assertive, and intellectually brilliant. He talked about a million miles a minute, and his mind leaped from Kant to Mogwai to Russian anarchist philosophy. This was what he was like, so when he excitedly saw his therapist and introduced him to all of us, no alarm bells went off.
Until the therapist simply . . . joined him.
The therapist began vigorously debating my friend. They immediately got into a heated exchange about . . . oh, one of the things philosophers argue about . . . and they just sat there, yelling at each other. My friend was, as he was wont to do, clearly getting high off the whole thing. And I get that. I get high off intellectual debate, too. But the therapist was also clearly getting high off it. At one point my friend gleefully told me, “This is exactly what our therapy sessions are like!! I’m basically getting a free therapy session here!”
Later, after the very annoying therapist had left to (as he of course had to announce to everyone) “have sex with one of my partners,” my friend kept reiterating that he was an EXISTENTIAL THERAPIST. This had the predictable effect of making me file away “existential therapists” under “pretentious, self-gratifying assholes.”
In which I try to not be a pretentious, self-gratifying asshole
To this day, when people ask me what existential psychotherapy is, I hesitate.
My first priority is to ensure they don’t envision my old friend’s jerk of a therapist. But there’s a bigger question at play. While that poly-before-poly-was-cool dick was doing a bad job at it, his engagement with my friend was an answer to a question, the question being: what is the role of logic and intellect in therapy? The therapist’s answer was patently wrong — therapy is not an intellectual debate — but he was at least answering the question.
You might think that my grad program in existential-phenomenological psychology would have answered this question, but alas, such a program left me with more questions than I started with. Also, existential and phenomenological psychotherapists tend to see their approach as having more to do with the person of the therapist, or how they do therapy, rather than prescribing what they are doing in sessions.
One thing I can confidently say is that existential psychotherapy is not a so-called “manualized” approach like CBT, DBT, or EMDR. I like to call these approaches 1-2-3 therapies: first do this, then this, then that.
The thing is, I’ve found that I sometimes need a 1-2-3. Sometimes the patient needs a 1-2-3. With complex and/or developmental trauma, many patients flail in emotional overwhelm. It’s an absolute lifeline when I can tell someone, “First, I want you to put your phone away. Second, every day for the next week, do this breathing exercise. And third, when X thought comes, here’s how you can respond to it.”
In my grad program, I did feel like the teaching for how to respond to emotional overwhelm was basically, “Sit with the patient. Allow them their feelings.” I tried this until I had my first borderline patient who was — lucky me! — literally my first patient. In my internship. First day on the job. It was a shit show, and I feel confident saying I did her absolutely no good at all.
So after grad school, I sought out the 1-2-3 approaches for trauma, which quickly became my specialty area.
Coming home (question mark?)
Maybe if I’d lived during a different time, I wouldn’t have returned to existential therapy. But the times are . . . something.
Many of my patients work in the tech sector. They have built things that, apparently, will make it impossible for their children to have a job. Other patients work in medicine, where the insurance-companies-turned-cartels dictate care for their patients. Others are being driven insane by their screen addictions and rising panic. Those who are religious potentially have some kind of a meaning-making system, but those institutions also have to navigate current questions about gender, politics, and nationalism. And those who aren’t religious have no easy solutions; reasonably, they aren’t going to just submit without question to a faith they don’t endorse, but that also removes the possibility of a ready-made community.
So, I caved. I went back to my existential books. I restarted intentional journaling about questions like, “What do I think a person is?” and “How do I feel in my current dialogue with technology?”
The annoying EXISTENTIAL THERAPIST at the burrito shop was, yes, doing it wrong. But I also can’t pretend that a quiet, “And how did that make you feel?” is the right response to every moment in therapy. In fact — and I’m sort of shocked to hear myself say this — I think that therapists may have become a little too obsessed with pure emotions. Our logical and intellectual needs are real. They, too, are always connected to our emotional beings, because we are animal bodies that generate a felt sense. And I’m finding a deeper need to engage with the questions of existentialism in my therapy work, and not simply chalk everything intellectual up to emotional avoidance.
Again, sometimes at the end of a post, I offer you a quick pause. Maybe close your eyes, close your laptop, and consider whether you need to stay on your screen after this. Maybe you do. And maybe it’s time for a break, time to stop scrolling and clicking and reconnect with the real world.