Is Existentialism the Approach of Our Time?

Could I have been a budding existentialist in my adolescence if I hadn’t survived two wars in the Balkans by the age of nine? Who knows. But the fact is that I much preferred lingering in stories that didn’t have feel-good characters and tidy endings to watching the latest episode of the family-friendly drama Seventh Heaven with my friends.

The anxious, self-loathing monologues in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground comforted me. The inner chaos portrayed in Hermann Hesse’s Demain normalized the contradictions crashing around in my own head. The sheer absurdity of life illuminated in Albert Camus’s The Stranger made me feel less alone.

The questions these existentialist writers grappled with were ones I was asking myself back then—and continue to ask almost every day—Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the point? This might make me sound like a dark, sullen person, someone you’d hesitate to call for a casual coffee date, not to mention a therapy session. But quite the opposite is true.

Sure, lots of people find existentialism depressing, pretentious, intense, or even obsolete. But lots of others, like me, find it mercilessly resonant. In my life, it’s opened my eyes to all I am and can be, while consistently refocusing my attention on the bigger picture of existence. The understanding and clarity I gain from facing bitter existential truths is worth every ounce of discomfort that accompanies the process.

Years after my first forays into existentialism as an adolescent, I went to graduate school to become a therapist and found myself having conversations with fellow students that often felt banal and rehearsed: Where are you from? What’s your favorite class? Do you like coffee or tea? After a few months, I went rogue and started asking people about the last time they cried, whether they were truly happy, and how they were taking responsibility for the role they played in society. If I felt inspired, I’d ask people what gave their life meaning, or how they felt about death.

Rather than shutting down or sidestepping my questions, most people I talked to opened up in a new way—which ushered in a sense of intimate connection. I’d always thought of myself as someone who didn’t like people much (I know, ironic for a therapist in training), but this shift made me realize it wasn’t people that vexed me, it was who we are all pretending to be.

When I discovered in my first semester that existentialism was also a therapeutic framework, I knew I’d found my calling. I devoured the works of existential therapist Viktor Frankl and then Irv Yalom. But I didn’t fully understand the therapeutic power of existential exploration until I was nervously sitting across from my own clients. Many of them were coming to see me after years of therapy that had successfully targeted behavioral patterns and thoughts—and yet they were still suffering, on a level they couldn’t quite understand or face. What we found together is that there’s nothing more healing than humanity, and nothing more human than facing the fundamental truths of existence.

Throughout grad school and for many years in my private practice, I felt like a pariah on the edge of mainstream psychology. While my colleagues studied CBT, DBT, and ACT, I practiced from an existential framework, studying inner consent and phenomenology. While they focused on bolstering client’s self-esteem and reducing their anxiety, I invited clients to deepen their anxiety and accept their inherent irrelevance—at least temporarily. And yet as paradoxical as it might sound, I—and my clients—felt comfortable with this work.

Existential therapy didn’t operate from the assumption that people needed to be fixed. It didn’t offer rigid, step-by-step processes to fulfill a promise or get rid of a pain point. Instead, it pointed the way to seeing beauty in messiness, meaning in absurdity, and agency in existence. I knew people avoided existentialism because it was “dark,” but I saw this perceived darkness as an effective tool to help people appreciate the light.

Ten years ago, existential therapy was fringe—but now, I’m finding myself at the center of a resurrected movement. As Rivka Galchen writes in her recent The New Yorker article “Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About it,” an existential perspective is more relevant than ever. We live in a world with a host of seemingly unsolvable problems, where humans are accessing more freedom than they know what to do with, where a pandemic has made us reassess the value of our lives, where AI is threatening the very definition of being human, and where we’re ultimately facing global catastrophe brought on by climate change. As a collective, we’re being forced to reckon with the dire consequences of our actions, and who better to hold our hand through this uncomfortable experience than existential therapists?

Mortality

I started to think about death at an early age, arguably too early—one consequence of being a child hiding in bomb shelters in Serbia in 1999, anxiously waiting for the phone to ring so I could confirm that my dad, who lived an hour away, was still alive. Or maybe it was a consequence of standing in line to receive our family’s daily ration of food and feeling the earth shake under my feet as missiles fell from the sky. Whatever the reasons for my precocious interest in death, I was eerily aware of my own mortality when most kids still thought they were invincible.

Death was a heavy suitcase I picked up as a as a child and haven’t been able to put down since. And truthfully, I haven’t wanted to. It’s an uncomfortable burden, but one that lets me know I’m still alive. And it’s because I’m alive that I get to carry the burden of death.

Alex, one of my clients in her late 20s, didn’t feel that way. She was a successful editor, who meticulously tried to ensure that everything in her life was “right”—from the décor in her apartment to her perfectly curated group of friends. I was surprised when she came to a session in tears one day after reading an article about our planet’s increasing loss of biodiversity.

At first, I was touched by her empathy for the planet; then I realized it wasn’t so much the earth she was mourning but her own mortality (and lack of control in the matter). Her anxiety had less to do with frog species disappearing and more to do with her own unavoidable death feeling tangible for the first time. Helpless and overwhelmed, she was wondering what the planet’s decline meant for her future—and if she’d even have one.

This session launched us into some vital and transformative personal work. Whether it’s related to climate change or not, death anxiety may show up in our therapy sessions—and if it doesn’t, you might consider bringing it up. After all, death plays an essential role in understanding our own and others’ humanity. The problem is, we’re not always in touch with what that role is. Existential writer Jean-Paul Sartre said, “I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.” Instead of perceiving death as something that saps meaning from our existence, what if it’s what makes our lives meaningful? Only when we know a resource is scarce do we truly value it. Once we understand death’s purpose, its presence is less scary.

After Alex read the biodiversity-loss article, we discussed the idea of death as it relates to life. I knew it made her uncomfortable, and like many people, she tried to avoid the topic by conveniently noticing my new earrings for the first time. But talking about difficult subjects, as I explained to her, can diminish their power. To help her explore her relationship with death—and life—I asked these three questions: If you were to die in five years, how would you change your life today? If you were to die today, what would you regret? Are you truly living your life while you have the privilege of being alive?

Many of Alex’s fears emerged during our conversation, but one thing was clear: the more she faced her own mortality, the more she wanted to change her life. If she was going to die in five years, she’d want to rethink her long-term relationship, quit her job, and move out of the city. She told me, “If I were to die today, my biggest regret would be caring too much about what other people think of me. It’s made me stay in relationships because I’m too self-conscious to be alone, work at a job I find unfulfilling, and prioritize personal conveniences over the future of our planet.”

The third question was the most difficult for her to answer. Are you truly living your life? After a long pause, she said, “No, I’m not.” This is why she was so scared to die; dying before truly living feels like a tragedy. We all assume we’ll have more time, but an article about the loss of bees and migratory birds posted on social media reminded her not to take time for granted.

When you explore death, it can be helpful to understand whether your client is scared of a future state of nonexistence or anxious about recognizing their current state of nonexistence, which is essentially a nonintentional state of living that creates inauthenticity and meaninglessness. As therapists, we can help clients change this state!

Although our exploration was painful, it was a wake-up call for Alex. She still had time to course correct and shift from a stance of feeling passively “thrown into existence,” as German philosopher Martin Heidegger might have described it, to accepting that she is here and asking herself, Now what? In other words, talking about the inevitability of death has the power to transform anxiety into urgency—passivity into action.

That doesn’t mean we throw our current lives away in one day. For Alex, it simply meant having the courage to tell her boyfriend she lacked autonomy in their relationship and challenging them to restructure their dynamic, shifting her focus as an editor to working with authors whose work advocated for meaningful change in the world, and making more conscious decisions about the environmental impact of the things she bought for her personal pleasure.

Responsibility

Recently, I was asked in an interview to choose the one word or concept I most want to be known for. Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, and Bessel van der Kolk seem to have a claim on trauma. Brené Brown is known for vulnerability, and Adam Grant has a firm grip on leadership. My answer was responsibility.

As an existential psychotherapist, I find it vital to explore the issue of responsibility with clients: how they contribute to their problems and if they’re willing to acknowledge their role in creating their current reality. It goes hand in hand with facing mortality and can be uncomfortable work, but it affords people a sense of power and agency that’s critical to them taking charge of their lives.

In Existentialism and Human Emotions, Sartre wrestles with the issue of responsibility a lot. For him, the core of existentialism is the notion that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that the simple fact we’re here is the single most important thing about us, and our essence is defined not by our biology, psychology, religion, personality, or anything else, but by the decisions we make about what to do with our existence. This existential view can be hard to swallow because it presents us with a dizzying freedom and inescapable responsibility for our choices.

The utility of this approach is clear when it comes to taking charge of individual decisions impacting our well-being. But what about big, global issues, like climate change, which I see as the environment holding up a mirror to the role we’re all playing in the death of our planet? Climate change may not be a focus of every therapy session, but I think it could be part of exploring the greater theme of responsibility and how we show up in relationships, at work, and in the treatment of our bodies.

Alex, who had a senior position, knew about responsibility in her work life. And yet, when I asked what that word meant to her, she began defining it as a form of self-blame. Rather than characterizing responsibility as a willingness to face the impact of her actions and change course if they don’t align with her values, she saw responsibility as a punishment––a spotlight for her mistakes. To her, responsibility meant beating herself up and internalizing the shame that came with not being perfect.

“What would it sound like to take responsibility without blaming, shaming, or labeling yourself?” I asked her. As we explored the answer together, Alex began to find the experience of taking ownership of her decisions and actions empowering rather than threatening.

In her work life, this shift changed her self-talk from I missed a deadline, and now everyone will know that I’m incompetent and don’t deserve this job to The deadline was unrealistic, and I failed to communicate that to my team. As a result, we missed our deadline, so now I have to prove my reliability and do things differently. It meant changing I’m selfish and gross for having prioritized frivolous wants over the well-being of the planet to I’ve failed to make eco-friendly decisions up to this point, but I’ll change my behavior moving forward.

Loss

Many therapists will be comfortable encouraging clients to embrace things like empowerment, agency, or responsibility. But what about encouraging them to embrace loss? That’s what I asked Alex to do as we talked more about how she was going to take responsibility for the climate change issues she now felt passionate about.

Pretty much every choice we make means facing an impending loss. Instead of Alex feeling like she had no choice going forward other than to give up certain conveniences, I wanted her to feel like she was surrendering those conveniences—deliberately, as a choice. It’s not so much that she can no longer use plastic bags, drive her car, shop fast fashion, or fly; it’s that she chooses to bring her tote, take transit, look for eco-friendly shops, and book fewer flights. She’s choosing how she shows up in the world, for the world, in a way that accurately represents who she is and her values. It’s about making sure she feels like her loss means something to her. The most important component of this process was ensuring that she was constantly aware of her agency and her “why.”

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl shares a story about an elderly gentleman whose wife had passed away, leaving him in immense pain. After some time, the man realizes the fact he’s suffering as a result of losing his wife means his wife doesn’t have to suffer as a result of losing him. This realization gives his suffering meaning, which makes is easier for him to bear.

An existential hack to dealing with loss is, simply, meaning-making. Loss is destructive when it feels meaningless. By finding or creating meaning, we transform the experience of loss from a passive event that happens to us into an active process we engage with. Instead of remaining powerless and overwhelmed, we reclaim our agency by actively interpreting and integrating the loss into our life narrative and future decisions. This is true when it comes to everything from our relationships to our environmental choices.

A couple of days ago, I had lunch with a political scientist who researches the factors that mobilize and sustain climate change movements. She shared how many scientists she knows avoid telling interviewers the whole truth about the direness of our situation. “They’re worried that being completely honest might create a global mental health crisis,” she said.

But as an existential therapist, I think the emotional turmoil that comes with facing reality is necessary to create change. As a field, we tend to shy away from pointing out difficult truths about the nature of responsibility because it can be misconstrued as blame. But maybe it’s our job to heighten our clients’ threshold for responsibility and the anxiety that accompanies it. Maybe if we were all a little more anxious now, we’d do more to mitigate climate change so that future generations won’t have to feel that way. I think we need to dispel the notion that any degree of suffering is unhealthy or detrimental.

For me, healing in all contexts means accepting reality and asking the question: What now?

ILLUSTRATION © DODOODLE