What I bring to the deeper questions

My background in philosophy gives me an additional framework I use when working with clients. It allows me to help them clarify goals in general, not just within the usual framework we think of as “mental health” or “addiction.” By asking questions in a particular way, I do not try to “show” clients “the truth,” but motivate them to seek for answers in a way they may not have done beforehand. In the case where they “shift” their perspective somewhat, my hope is that they can move towards a renewed appreciation for possibilities in their lives they may not have considered before. My larger goal is to inspire the client to approach a problem to be solved as an opportunity to approach their true self in a way and to a degree they may not have imagined doing so before.

In this process, I motivate clients to think about deeper questions that may lie below mental health symptoms like anxiety and depression, questions like “What makes a life meaningful?” My background in philosophy focused on the issue of free will and I will suggest questions like: How do we think about freedom and free will, when the larger society seems to deny that free will even exists? What is the relationship between our past and who we are capable of becoming?

The kinds of questions people bring to existential therapy

The people I am drawn to work with — and who are often drawn to work with me — are what I think of as seekers: individuals who take the inner life seriously and who want to understand their experience more deeply, not just manage it more effectively.

A practical understanding of what spirituality means

I have a practical definition of spirituality that I return to often in my work: relationship to my true self, to other important people in my life, and — for those who believe — to God.

I believe Westerners are experiencing a spiritual crisis today. Traditional religion has tended to make thoughtful individuals, especially males, assume that the primary goal in a religious framework is to focus on the objective truthfulness of religious claims. In my experience of teaching at a Catholic college for many years as well as my own spiritual work, I have found that the majority of people today get hung up on questions about knowledge and certainty, e.g. how do we know God exists; how do we know that he wants this or that, etc. When we look closely at all religious traditions, what we see is an emphasis on belief, or what is called “faith.” Not knowledge. This contrast tends to get confused and many of us miss the point of religion, confusing it with an intellectual exercise in becoming certain that the belief is objectively true.

Similar to all traditional religion, depth psychology emphasizes one’s lived relation to their true self. It is in the seeking that we experience a “finding” of our selves. Not in any specific outcome.

My approach to deeper spiritual questions — questions about meaning and purpose — focuses more on what contemporary spirituality calls the “lived experience.” Before becoming a therapist, I went through five years of discernment to decide whether I wanted to become a Jesuit brother. During this time, I became interested in seeking a more spiritual way of living. Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, makes the contrast between those who assume we have to “figure it all out” intellectually, and those who engage in the action of “seeking.” In his words: “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know… What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the critical thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called ‘objective truth’, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system…” (From Kierkegaard’s “Journals.”)

Questions about existential therapy in Albany, NY