The Existential Was Never Meant to Be Solved Alone

Leaving my weekly session with an existential therapist, I find myself reflecting on the interaction. I notice a modest phenomenological shift: an awareness of a distant sense of safety I often experience after these sessions. Mortality, meaning, and the ineffable rest less heavily on my chest. I can’t recall any specifically illuminating insight or revealing moment from the session. Nothing new actually came up.

Still, over the year we’ve worked together, the original concern has shifted significantly. I entered therapy to address several fears: that my life was a statistical jackpot from a billion-sided die, amounting to nothing, fleeting and gone forever; and the dread that saturates my consciousness whenever I encounter endings—the end of my own life, the loss of meaningful relationships, or aspects of my identity that age was making harder to inhabit: being an athlete, embedded in the zeitgeist, bold, a risk-taker. I now understand that change is constant, that my identity is a social construct and finding an authentic self beneath my ego is liberating, and that purpose and meaning can be located wherever I observe that a role, value, or responsibility feels more important than my own comfort and desires.

The knowledge I have gained is significant, the clarity reassuring, the conversations more collaborative, vulnerable, and experiential than I have found elsewhere. Yet nothing has been converted into a new perspective. While I sometimes gain access to another possible way of seeing the world, particularly when a session goes especially well, that access remains elusive. The concrete benefit of this work is best described as less intense fear, breaking free of it more often, and choosing not to dwell on dark ruminations. This is valuable growth, yet that other way of being remains mostly out of reach. I pause in the car to feel for the access I experienced in the session, and I sense a quiet awareness that I am allowed to free myself from social norms. I notice that I am aware of what it feels like to accept rather than resist, and I’m grateful that it has not slipped away. However, while I’ve also encountered what I consider the hoped-for qualitative shift I’m seeking—an embodied, mentally quiet stance where time seems to stop, beauty and poignancy exist all around me, and I feel as though I’m the right size, fitted into my place in a vast web—that feeling above all others remains elusive.

Driving home, I see the wreckage of a raccoon that appears to have been struck at least two days earlier. For a moment, I’m arrested by the absurdity of such an elegantly made creature being reduced to this—that it could happen instantly, accidentally, pointlessly. It feels like life’s meaninglessness made self-evident by how easily life can be stopped.

The thought expands to all life. To my own life.

Any new feelings I carried from therapy are suddenly gone, replaced by the dread I entered existential therapy to address. With one hand, I begin to reach for my phone, the impulse to reconnect with my therapist half-formed before reality interrupts: the therapist is not available and will not be for seven days.

“How do I navigate these feelings between sessions?” I ask the empty passenger seat.

I have no religious community to turn to and no self-soothing practice robust enough to transform the feeling. I try calling a friend who occasionally discusses existential questions. It goes to voicemail, as it usually does. Then, with a cold feeling of exposure growing inside, I turn up a Spotify playlist titled “Keep It Light,” sing loudly and poorly, keep my eyes on the road, and resolutely crowd out the thoughts that threaten to hijack my day.

As the claustrophobic thoughts return to wherever they wait below, one question voices my doubt about existential work. While therapy has taught me so much, can an hour a week prove stronger than the fears I face alone for the rest of the week? This question surfaces two more: Can this therapy actually lead to a fundamentally different relationship to endings, mortality, and freedom? What supports can help me protect this progress during the week between sessions?

These are the questions this article is concerned with. Does existential therapy, as it is currently delivered, recognize that it is highly unlikely to lead to qualitative change in the relationship clients have with their existential concerns, given that its own theoretical foundation argues that such change requires more than an hour of exposure, among other necessary conditions? Has it explored how to address the gap in supports that might allow gains made in session to remain accessible once the client returns to ordinary life?

I am not an existential therapist. My background is in philosophy, psychiatric rehabilitation, developmental psychology, and recovery-oriented mental health practice, and I approach this as a theorist interested in how psychological change is produced and sustained. My investment is also deeply personal: I have spent much of my life trying to find a livable relationship to mortality, meaning, and metaphysical insignificance. I do not want to live my life in an analytic, detached space from which I am constantly seeking to make enough sense of reality to uncover a way of acknowledging what reason has shown me while allowing me to live my life with love, presence, authenticity, connection, and purpose.

I stopped my work with my existential therapist for the reasons I want to address here. The sessions had value, but the relief I sought—a true shift in how I relate to the world—felt impossible. The sessions were too short, too infrequent, too little to change what was reinforced everywhere else. So I explored why the therapy felt like a poor fit. What I found was deeply frustrating: the field knew what I needed. Its practice model was not designed to deliver it. These disconnects between theory and practice will be explored here in the hope of raising awareness so the secular institution that has committed itself to helping people like me might reconsider its methods. However, before looking at this more closely, some background may be helpful.

When I chose to major in philosophy, I would say, “I’d rather be right than happy.” I don’t regret that choice, but I do have to address it. Looking at the world without hoping for a metaphysics that could reassure me while withstanding rigorous examination left me where I think many people are these days: seeing religions as reassuring fantasies, life as a statistical anomaly, and us as inconsequential organisms cursed with self-awareness. I read all the existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Sartre, and their message was bleak: don’t look away. Bear it.

I’ve come to believe that that is asking too much. Yet where was an intellectually honest belief that softened the bleakness? I examined other cultures, particularly those from which our civilization is not descended: hunter-gatherers and their animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism. What I found was that I could believe they shared something true. At the heart of all the spiritual traditions I explored was peace: a way of fitting into the totality of what exists that feels profoundly right, a sense of being here in the present moment, a shedding of ego where nothing needed to be resisted or fought out of fear of existential annihilation.

Unfortunately, I’m a middle-class American with too much education, and I simply don’t know how to feel what they feel. Alan Watts made it clear for me: I live in an analytic relationship to things, where I am separate, an individual. His message was simple: nothing changes about reality, but if approached from that embodied, right-hemispheric, accepting place shared by those spiritual traditions, instead of cause and effect, there was flow. Instead of an individual, I was nature in a certain shape. Instead of being the subject while everything else was the object, we were connected. So I understood the problem. It was how I’d been taught to relate to the world. But that didn’t get me any closer to inhabiting a stance I could comprehend.

Rather than join a monastery, become a Buddhist monk, or become a renunciate of some type, I asked what wisdom existed in the world I’m familiar with: the world of medicines and PhDs, doctors and experts. That led me to existential therapy and, to my unending surprise, the therapist understood what I was seeking. We even made some progress. Then the hour would be up and I would walk out onto the street with its cars honking and pedestrians jostling one another, my schedule, job, concerns about status, and how I was doing in life. I didn’t want to participate, but the training ran deep and I was surrounded.

Whatever insight I might have approached in session never stood a chance. So I looked at other cultures again, even the religions that dominated Europe and the Middle East, our civilizational ancestors. I looked at how life was organized around the church or mosque. I looked at how tribes were organized around community, ritual, and shared challenges. What occurred to me was the density of those communities. Members were immersed in their existential answers. That immersion existed in the Catholic Church of a few hundred years ago—and still survives, but without its previous cultural dominance—the mosques of today, and the tribes of thousands of years ago. What was I immersed in? Competition, veneration of youth culture, ageism, thinking constantly, even when there was nothing to think about. So I researched existential therapy for its theoretical foundation. What I was looking for was right there:

As a clinical field, existential therapy has arrived at some very sophisticated theories about why we ask these questions and what we need to find answers we can both believe and live with. Existential therapy does not generally treat the person as a sealed mind with an isolated set of symptoms. Much of the modern field understands identity, experience, and ways of being as formed through relationships, embodiment, choice, and engagement with the surrounding world. Yalom valued encounter, intimacy, group process, and the therapeutic relationship. Van Deurzen situates human beings across social, physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Existentially influenced traditions have also expanded beyond individual psychotherapy through group, systemic, social, ecological, and participatory approaches. The current APA map of humanistic-existential psychology includes relational and systemic approaches, group psychotherapy, ecopsychology, community psychology, participatory research, and social advocacy (American Psychological Association, 2026; Federation for Existential Therapy in Europe, n.d.; van Deurzen, n.d.; Yalom, 1980).

This is the field’s stance on the needs of the individual to achieve and sustain change: community that reinforces it. Learning this felt like a betrayal. I cannot reconcile the gap between theoretical knowledge and application. The feeling of betrayal is made more acute by the field’s claim to be the clinical recourse for people like me. I come back again and again to the same question: how can a field present itself as dedicated to addressing a particular type of problem and not attempt to do so in a way that is aligned with its own understanding of the solutions? I imagine a cardiologist telling a client, “I could prescribe a statin, but that’s not really how we do things around here.”

The field offers relief of the type I’m seeking. The literature even identifies qualitative state shifts as real targets of practice. Specifically, existential therapy consistently describes goals such as:

• a different relationship to mortality,
• greater authenticity,
• increased freedom and responsibility,
• deeper meaning,
• greater capacity to tolerate uncertainty,
• richer engagement with life,
• transformation of one’s way of being in the world. (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, 1999; Federation for Existential Therapy in Europe, n.d.; van Deurzen, n.d.; Yalom, 1980)

But how does what the field believes is required to achieve these goals line up with the interventions it offers? The session itself can be very meaningful. A well-trained existential therapist can encourage a client to remain present with an uncomfortable feeling and engage the fear they may want to address but be too frightened to face. The therapist in these situations can act as a proxy for the community that made such direct contact with deeply held fears manageable. They can share the client’s concerns, so the client is not alone with them on a deeply private level. The therapist can explore why a client feels their life is empty, their life lacks meaning, or endings are simply abrupt accidents of a complex and indifferent universe. They can support a client in both seeing what they fear differently and relating to their own place in the world differently. They can also assist in identifying purpose, recognizing meaning, and exploring identity by helping the client shed or look beneath socialized thinking to interact with the self that was socialized. This can reveal—or provide fertile ground to develop—what feels authentic rather than reinforced.

All of this can be true and a single hour a week can still fail to instantiate actual state change. The field evaluates its own efficacy. I reviewed its conclusions with hope. Perhaps I’m a tough case and the difficulty I experience isn’t representative of the outcomes many others achieve. However, the way efficacy is evaluated exposes a subtle bait-and-switch. The dominant outcome literature primarily evaluates dimensional changes in distress, meaning, anxiety, spiritual well-being, or related constructs. I found very little asking whether a qualitatively different existential orientation has emerged. The clear implication of asking an incremental question is that the client is assumed to still hold their original perspective. The metric only asks whether the original perspective is somewhat less unsettling (Breitbart et al., 2015, 2018; Vos et al., 2015).

So this is the first question for the field: if the research explains how to achieve state changes and clinical targets include those shifts, why would measures of success target substantially smaller gains? I am not saying that existential distress that has moved from an 8 to a 5 is valueless. But what happened to a different relationship to mortality or transformation of one’s way of being in the world?

I don’t want to minimize the challenge of delivering such a large outcome. The changes sought by clients and named by the field face substantial resistance. Modern Western culture doesn’t only conflict with peace, depth, meaning, or presence. It actively trains people to relate to the world in ways that create isolation, fear, competition, future thinking, the ideology of control, self-referential cognitive organization, and status. I don’t want to suggest that delivering on its target outcomes is in any way easy. Rather, I want to ask: if the field sees this obstacle, why has it shaped its delivery without incorporating it?

Existential therapy has not ignored the value of carrying existential concerns through relationship, shared practice, and communal life, nor has it imagined its role as confined entirely to individual therapy. However, there is a stark contrast between what is understood to be necessary and what is available to us. This is where I am critical: to claim authority as a quasi-medical field focused on existential distress, to know what we need to make meaningful relief obtainable, and not to incorporate that knowledge into the modality invites reproach.

Based on the theoretical framework underlying the field, it would be reasonable to assume that the structure required to deliver the relief sought by clients might be substantial. The historical and anthropological record gives reason to take that assumption seriously. Across many documented societies, orientations toward identity, obligation, death, grief, and the larger-than-human world have been carried through shared practices rather than left entirely to private reflection. Meaning has been enacted through kinship, labor, role, story, ritual, ceremony, and participation in a socially maintained world. The field itself recognizes that this is part of what people have historically needed to maintain a worldview (Bird-David, 1999; van Gennep, 2019).

Yet this knowledge is not reflected in the structure of the interventions. Where was the collective? How did I support and nurture a stance I only accessed for an hour per week? I tried yoga, retreats; I even learned to spin fire. These helped, but they didn’t approach the density of experience with that other way of being that I needed if I was going to do more than look at it as though watching children playing through a window from a room only I inhabited.

If existential therapy is the secular response to this need, it seems fair to ask: if what’s needed to embody a real change is immersion, shared ownership of private fears, interdependence, and the absence of things to worry about controlling—including whether we look good, earn enough, are socially permitted to be proud of our professions, and are allowed to grow old—where is the space to access it? If the field’s own theoretical framework and clinical targets describe a state that is on the far side of dozens of meaningful bonds, being seen and witnessed through ritual and ceremony, finding purpose in what matters more than what we do to ourselves, and sharing that purpose with others, why is none of this provided, even imperfectly?

Imperfectly is a very important qualification on this ask. The field cannot recreate dense, highly visible, interdependent communities. It cannot instantiate a mythology. It cannot be what was lost. However, it can see the week between sessions as central to efficacy. What to do with that time is a question that can be given attention. Some low-hanging possibilities might include an existential crisis warmline and a downloadable manual to launch a peer-to-peer support group similar to the numerous anonymous groups. Such a group could potentially grow into the type of interconnected network common to the anonymous format. Envision that community, given how robust the model has proved to be. Allowing invested laypeople to form and join Existential Distress Anonymous—until a better name comes along—might eventually make a real community available.

The governing bodies already have guidelines supporting community involvement. Our society is bereft of ritual and ceremony even though they have always been used to facilitate change internally and collectively. The landscape of events that could benefit from rituals and ceremonies is expansive and requires only creativity and persistence to explore how they may be introduced. A weekly group session could become an expectation of the field to supplement and support individual therapy sessions (American Psychological Association, 2026; van Gennep, 2019).

The field can recognize that existential weight is often carried collectively without making collective support part of its ordinary provision of care. It may know that without such support, real change is unlikely. To have that knowledge and then actively refrain from creating interventions to meet the needs the field itself has identified warrants a hard look at how existential therapy is done. After all, millions of people just like me are seeking relief from the cold knowledge that an unflinching look at the stories of older and radically different cultures presents.

For myself, it has left me without a path to walk. I have cliffs to leap from all around: accepting that none of my goals are meaningful and living contentedly, picking berries and savoring sunsets; trying on those Buddhist robes and not talking for a month; radically rejecting everything I’ve been taught to value; reading Carl Jung’s work and having a go at individuation; or immersing myself in yoga culture, astrology, or paganism—none of which feel authentic or manageable. I am ready to walk a secular path toward a way of relating to myself, others, and the totality of things that feels potent, natural, and harmonious.

I just don’t know how. A secular guiding field to learn from, practice with, and turn to for support when I lose my way would sure be welcome.

***

References

American Psychological Association. (2026). APA handbook of humanistic and existential psychology (L. Hoffman, Ed.). American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/apa-handbook-humanistic-existential-psychology

Bird-David, N. (1999). “Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40(S1), S67–S91. https://doi.org/10.1086/200061

Breitbart, W., Pessin, H., Rosenfeld, B., Applebaum, A. J., Lichtenthal, W. G., Li, Y., Saracino, R. M., Marziliano, A. M., Masterson, M., Tobias, K., & Fenn, N. (2018). Individual meaning-centered psychotherapy for the treatment of psychological and existential distress: A randomized controlled trial in patients with advanced cancer. Cancer, 124(15), 3231–3239. https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.31539

Breitbart, W., Rosenfeld, B., Pessin, H., Applebaum, A., Kulikowski, J., & Lichtenthal, W. G. (2015). Meaning-centered group psychotherapy: An effective intervention for improving psychological well-being in patients with advanced cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 33(7), 749–754. https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2014.57.2198

Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. (1999). Brief humanistic and existential therapies. In Brief interventions and brief therapies for substance abuse (Treatment Improvement Protocol Series, No. 34). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64939/

Federation for Existential Therapy in Europe. (n.d.). About existential therapy. https://www.existentialtherapies.org/about-existential-therapy/

van Deurzen, E. (n.d.). Existential therapy. https://www.emmyvandeurzen.com/existential-therapy

van Gennep, A. (2019). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.; 2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909). https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226629520.001.0001

Vos, J., Craig, M., & Cooper, M. (2015). Existential therapies: A meta-analysis of their effects on psychological outcomes. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 83(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037167

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.