What is Existential Therapy?

We all face moments shaped by loss, transition, disillusionment, grief, or the subtle ache of wondering whether this is really the life we meant to live. These moments are as much existential as they are psychological. And, in my view, they deserve a kind of therapy that does not fixate on pathology, but instead meets us with honesty and depth that respects the complexity of the human condition.

Existential therapy begins from a simple but demanding idea: human lives are not problems to be solved. Rather, we are complex, meaning-making beings living in an unpredictable world. We are free, but also responsible. We are finite, yet capable of leaving an enduring impact. We are social, and yet can feel profoundly alone. At times, these tensions are enough to make anyone feel a sense of vertigo.

As Søren Kierkegaard put it in The Concept of Anxiety, existential angst is “the dizziness of freedom.” It arises when we glimpse how open life truly is, how many directions it could take, and how uncertain any single choice can feel.

So what does all of this mean for therapy?

Existential Therapy Meets You Where You Are

In practice, existential therapy is nothing like a philosophy class on Nietzsche or Sartre. Nor is it abstract or aloof. Existential therapy is grounded, collaborative, and concerned with the real questions people carry with them, such as:

Who am I becoming, and is that who I want to be?
How can I accept uncertainty, loss, or the unknown?
What kind of life feels meaningful to me?
How do I live authentically in a world that often asks me to perform or conform?

Existential therapy does not offer one-size-fits-all solutions. It is not about fixing symptoms in isolation from the larger context of a person’s life. Instead, it offers an intentional space to pause, reflect on choices, and re-engage one’s freedom with courage and clarity.

From Philosophy to Practice

While existentialism clearly informed therapeutic approaches such as Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, many of the ideas that continue to shape existential therapy were developed by philosophers who were not therapists at all. They were thinkers attentive to the profound contingency of their own lives.

Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, emphasized that “existence precedes essence.” This suggests that we are not born with a fixed identity, but instead create ourselves through action and choice. His work is centrally concerned with authenticity, freedom, and the tension between individual agency and being seen, judged, or defined by others.

Another important anchor comes from Simone de Beauvoir, who recognized the social and political dimensions of existential struggle, particularly for women. In The Second Sex, she writes, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” With this single sentence, de Beauvoir captured the existential project of identity in a world shaped by power. Her work reminds us that meaning-making always occurs within systems.

For this reason, existential therapy, at its best, is not only personal. It is also socially aware. It invites reflection on how lives are shaped by patriarchy, capitalism, racism, colonialism, and other forces that condition freedom. To engage with these questions in therapy is often an act of reclaiming one’s life.

Modern Existential Therapists

Although existential therapy is rooted in philosophy, its contemporary clinical forms have been shaped by therapists such as Irvin Yalom, whose writing explores freedom, isolation, meaning, and mortality in deeply human terms. Emmy van Deurzen is another important figure, emphasizing the creative possibilities of living with life’s ambiguities and tensions held in view.

In my experience, existential therapy often integrates well with narrative therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and somatic approaches. Taken together, these modalities respect a fulsome account of human experience, including relational, social, physiological, psychological, and philosophical dimensions.

Whether you are feeling anxious, stuck, lost, or ready for change, existential therapy offers more than coping strategies. It offers an invitation to engage with your life as something worth examining, worth shaping, and worth living on your own terms.

If you are interested in exploring how this approach might fit your therapy goals, consider booking a free, 15-minute consultation with me.

Books to Explore

• Simone de Beauvoir (1949/2010). The Second Sex (trans. C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier). Vintage.

• Emmy van Deurzen (2012). Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy in Practice (3rd ed.). SAGE.

• Viktor Frankl (1946/2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

• Søren Kierkegaard (1844/1980). The Concept of Anxiety (trans. R. Thomte). Princeton University Press.

• Jean-Paul Sartre (1943/2003). Being and Nothingness (trans. H. Barnes). Routledge.

• Irvin Yalom (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books.

When the Ground Opens Beneath Us

It is mid-January in Saskatchewan, and the air is mild. I step outside without bracing myself. My shoulders do not tighten. My breath does not turn sharp in my chest. I can walk without the small calculations that winter usually demands. There is something strangely buoyant about it.

And yet something in me recoils.

The relative warmth at this time of year carries a strange ambiguity. It feels good in my body, while feeling wrong in my gut. I know, in the way one knows something before it becomes a sentence, that this is not what January used to be. The ground should be sealed. The sky should be a canvas for ice crystals and sundogs, reflective in a way that throws light back into space rather than trapping heat in. Instead, today feels slushy, humid, and almost springlike.

This is one of the shapes climate distress takes. Not panic, not even fear in the ordinary sense. More like a kind of vertigo. The world gives me something pleasant, and I cannot receive it cleanly.

We have become used to talking about extreme events—about fires and floods and storms. Those are real, and they leave their mark in obvious ways. But another part of this story unfolds more slowly, through long stretches of stagnant weather. Weeks of smoke. Months of drought. Days of heavy rain. A polar vortex that refuses to loosen its grip. A heat dome that sits like a lid on a city. These patterns are not in our heads, but in the earth’s jet stream that behaves differently than it once did, leaving weather stalled and heavy.

These are not just meteorological facts. They are experiences that enter the nervous system. They shape how time feels, how we move through the seasons, how we vacation, and how much time we spend connected to nature. Perhaps most worrying is that these experiences often change how the future shows up in our imaginations.

Climate-related Distress

Some of the people I work with name climate-related distress directly. Many are afraid for the planet, for their children, for the lives they thought they would have. Others come in speaking of exhaustion, irritability, a strange difficulty with making plans, particularly in the summer months, when wildfire smoke is most oppressive. Clients do not always connect those feelings to climate change, but I believe the connection is there all the same, woven through the stories we tell ourselves and the anxieties we navigate.

Existential therapy has always been concerned with what happens when the ground beneath us no longer feels solid. Irvin Yalom wrote about the givens of existence, which include death, isolation, freedom/responsibility, and meaninglessness. And those existential pressures become concrete whenever the thin veneer of consumer bliss is peeled back to reveal what matters most. Climate change sharpens our awareness of the basic needs for all living beings—clean air, drinking water, food security.

In the grip of climate anxiety, the thought of death becomes not only personal but collective. A sense of isolation deepens when it feels as though individual actions make no difference. Freedom and responsibility become too heavy when every choice feels inadequate. Meaning itself begins to wobble when the future looks less like a horizon and more like a question mark.

What Continues to Hold

From this angle, climate anxiety is not a malfunction. It is a response to being awake in a world that is changing faster than our inherited ways of making sense of it.

Kierkegaard called anxiety the “dizziness of freedom.” Not because freedom is pleasant, but because it confronts us with the fact that we are responsible for what we do with the world we find ourselves in. Climate distress carries that same vertigo. It tells us that what we care about is at risk, and that our lives are entangled with something we feel in our bones as much as we understand with our minds.

What often makes climate-related distress harder is that so much of this is carried alone. Many people tell me they do not know where to speak about their grief for melting ice or disappearing species, about their anger at political inaction, about their shame for continuing to live inside systems they did not choose. These feelings do not always fit into dinner conversation or workplace small talk. Such thoughts can make a person feel strange, or excessive, or out of step with family and society.

Indigenous leaders have been reminding us for generations that land is not a backdrop. It is a relation. To feel the loss of it is not sentimental. It is a recognition of kinship. In a settler culture that taught us to treat the earth as a resource rather than a relative, climate distress can feel isolating because it runs against the grain of how belonging has been framed.

The work of existential therapy is not to make these feelings go away. It is to ask what they are pointing toward. What do you love that feels endangered? What are you responsible to, even when the future is uncertain? What kind of person do you want to be in a time like this?

On days like this one, when the air is warm, I find myself standing in that tension. I let my body enjoy the ease of walking outside in January. I also let myself feel the unease that rides alongside it. Neither cancels the other. Together, they tell a more honest story about where we are.

If you are carrying something similar, a mix of pleasure and dread, gratitude and grief, you do not have to hold it alone.

I host a free Climate Café at Inner Agora Counselling on the last Wednesday evening of every month from 7 to 8:30 PM, in person in Saskatoon. These gatherings are not about solutions or debates. They are spaces to speak, to listen, and to let the many faces of climate emotion be present without being fixed. You can learn more and register by following the link below.

Books to Explore

·       Britt Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (2022). Alfred A. Knopf Canada.

·       Hope Jahren, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here (2020). Vintage Books.

·       Kate Schapira, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World (2024). Grand Central Publishing.

·       Sarah Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (2020). University of California Press.

A Portkey to Grief

Objects That Carry Us Back

This time of year transports many of us back to childhood, where memories, attachments, and losses sit next to each other at the dining table. The smells, sounds, and sights orient us toward how culture, especially family culture, binds us to the past. Some of us find ourselves face-to-face with the most challenging givens of existence, as Irvin Yalom calls them—responsibility, finitude, perhaps even a sense of meaninglessness.

More than any other time of year, late December seems to bring an enduring process of grief closer to the surface. Perhaps this is so because we’re not as alone with our losses at this time. We connect around a sense of longing for those who came before. To me, the season of joy and peace seems as much associated with grief.

I remember the way it felt as a young girl at Christmas time, coveting the once-a-year, shiny, beaded ornaments on our tree—decorations that return to my hands each year. These objects are familiar in a way that still lives in the body of a younger version of me. Holding them and placing them back on the branches brings up a particular way of being with what has been lost.

Facing Finitude

Borrowing from Harry Potter, where a portkey abruptly transports someone from one location to another, philosopher and psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow uses the term to name moments that fully transport a person through time and space to the very same physiological state that marked a particular trauma. In this way, these tree ornaments are a kind of portkey—not to trauma, but to grief. They take me instantly to something I experience as the Welsh describe with an utterly untranslatable word: hiraeth.

Many of us encounter these kinds of portkeys during the holidays—moments when the present opens directly onto the past. Memory does not arrive as a story we choose to tell, but as a way the world suddenly feels again. Past becomes present through ritual, repetition, and sensory detail. Loss registers, and grief feels more like a lifelong process—akin to learning or growth. Yet, re-entry into the grief process often, paradoxically, pauses time, even as life continues to move on all around us.

It’s no wonder, then, that the holidays bring us into closer contact with questions of finitude and meaningfulness. Our shared stories reflect this recognition. Think of Dickens’ Scrooge, confronted by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, forced to face his life through the lens of its end. This nighttime encounter is not comforting, yet it resonates with holiday themes. Layers of cultural metaphor build on one another here.

The Darkest Days

Today, December 21, is the darkest day of the year. The stretch from Winter Solstice to the New Year has long invited reflection on the meaning of life. In these dark days, something shifts in how time is felt. We might even begin to remember that the days will once again become longer, brighter, and ready to grow. The future comes, even as grief remains a part of us.

Therapy can be a place to meet grief like an old friend. A place to sit with how it reorganizes a life over time, to notice what returns each year, what it brings, and what might now be possible to carry differently.

Books to Explore

·       R. Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (2007). Routledge.

·       Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843). Penguin Classics

·       Matthew Ratcliffe, Grief Worlds: A Phenomenological Study (2022). MIT Press.

·       J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000). Bloomsbury.

·       Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Knopf.

The Inheritance of Survival

There are moments in therapy when I’m reminded that our struggles did not begin with us. Much of what we call anxiety or negativity is the echo of a long lineage of survival. An important insight from the existentialists is relevant here: anxiety is part of the human condition. Further, our negativity bias is what kept our ancestors alive. The vigilance that still tightens our breath, the inner critic that scans for failure, the fear that tries to anticipate harm—these responses are part of our survival. They helped our ancestors notice danger, protect themselves, and stay connected to the groups they depended on.

We inherit these responses in our nervous systems and in our families. Over centuries, people adapted to hardship, scarcity, violence, domination, and powerlessness. There have been times when surviving meant suppressing emotion, pleasing others, watching for danger, or carrying shame as though it could protect us. These strategies still live in many of us, even when the danger has passed. They surface automatically, the way any survival mechanism would. We come by them honestly.

From Suffering to Compassion

When I view suffering in this way, something shifts. Some distance grows between myself and the stories that shaped me, and inside that space is a broader recognition of humanity. Tracing our patterns back beyond our individual lives creates a similar distance from which mutual recognition grows. The urge to condemn ourselves loses some of its force. We can look at our thoughts and habits without confusing them for our identity. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” we might begin to ask, “What helped us survive?”

This wider view is not about excusing harm or avoiding accountability. Instead, it offers a deeper context for responsibility that grows from understanding rather than blame. Patterns that once felt shameful begin to look like remnants of strategies that carried someone through fear or instability. When we acknowledge how human beings have long adapted to hardship, uncertainty, scarcity, or powerlessness, compassion emerges as a response to our shared fragility. We gain the pause needed for steadier attention. Parts of ourselves that once appeared as flaws begin to look like adaptations that were trying to keep us safe.

In therapy, moments of being understood in these ways can create reciprocal clarity. We begin to see ourselves with fewer distortions, shaped less by old defensive stances and more by what is present, what has served us well, and what we want to change. This kind of recognition becomes a meeting point where dignity can replace judgment and where self-compassion becomes a workable practice. When suffering is held in that kind of exchange, change becomes less about correction and more about allowing new responses to take shape.

Choosing is a Creative Practice

Understanding where our patterns come from doesn’t make them vanish. Therapy offers a place to sit with what we have inherited and consider how we want to relate to it now. Meaning grows through discerning which adaptations still serve us and which ones are ready for revision.

Agency develops gradually, through the recognition of our shared vulnerability and the choices that recognition makes possible. Each moment brings an opportunity to respond to old strategies with new intentions. We can soften the grip of inherited fear, interrupt familiar loops of self-punishment, and offer care to the parts of ourselves that once had to stay hidden. We become more conscious participants in our own lives rather than passive carriers of what came before.

In this sense, therapy becomes a creative practice. We shape what we have inherited into something more coherent and workable. Our adaptations become sources of insight rather than evidence of flaws. The future we move toward becomes something we participate in forming, guided by what matters most and supported by a fuller understanding of how we came to be.

If this approach sounds interesting to you, I invite you to book a session with me.

Books to Explore

• Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020). Mariner Books.

• Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (2022). Riverhead Books.

• Sarah Petton, Your Resonant Self (2017). W. W. Norton and Company

• Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011). Harperwave.

• Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy (2001). Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Making space for what matters

It can be hard to hear ourselves think these days.
Notifications ping, opinions stack up, and the pace of life leaves little room for reflection. Even our inner world can begin to feel crowded with self-doubt, imagined futures, replayed conversations, or quiet pressures to do more, be more, fix more.

In a culture shaped by speed and self-improvement, slowing down to consider what truly matters can feel indulgent. Yet that pause may be one of the most necessary things we can offer ourselves.

Stoic Lessons on Focus and Freedom

The Stoic philosophers were no strangers to uncertainty. Living through war, exile, illness, and political upheaval, thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca were writing from within the challenges of their own lives, not from a distance.

One of their central insights is the distinction between what we can and cannot control. Marcus Aurelius captured this clearly:

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

This is not an invitation to withdraw from the world. It is a practice of returning to what matters:
What kind of person do I want to be?
What values do I want to uphold when life feels uncertain or overwhelming?
What remains within my influence, even now?

These are philosophical questions, and they are also therapeutic ones.

Philosophy as Groundwork for Therapy

Long before psychology became a discipline, people turned to philosophy to consider meaning, suffering, agency, and the shape of a good life. Many contemporary approaches to therapy—including existential therapy, narrative approaches, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—continue this lineage.

Like philosophy, therapy asks us to pause and reflect, not only on how we feel but on what we believe and whether those beliefs support the life we want.

Are we living in alignment with our values?
Are we acting with integrity, or simply reacting from habit or fear?
Do we notice the stories we tell ourselves, and do those stories still hold up?

Therapy creates space to discern what is worth listening to.

Making Space

Clearing the noise does not mean turning away from the world. It means approaching the world with greater honesty and steadiness.

Sometimes this begins with very practical work:

• noticing thoughts and emotions
• regulating the body
• untangling internalized beliefs or outdated narratives
• responding differently to old triggers

Beneath all of this is something deeper: reconnecting with what you care about so your life begins to feel like it’s yours again.

In this sense, therapy can serve as both anchor and compass, helping you stay grounded while orienting toward something meaningful.

What matters to you?

You do not need to have everything figured out to begin therapy. You only need enough space to think clearly, feel safely, and ask the kinds of questions that open possibility.

I offer 60-minute sessions for couples, adults, and adolescents across Saskatchewan and other parts of Canada (in person and online). My approach draws on philosophical inquiry, narrative work, and evidence-based practices.

Books to Explore

• Marcus Aurelius (ca. 180/2002). Meditations (trans. G. Hays). Modern Library.

• Epictetus (ca. 108/2008). Discourses and Selected Writings (trans. R. Hard). Penguin Classics.

• Seneca (ca. 65/2018). Morals of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency. Andalus Publications.

• Donald Robertson (2019). How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. St. Martin’s Press.

• Massimo Pigliucci (2017). How to Be a Stoic. Basic Books.

Therapy begins with questions

People often come to therapy searching for answers to questions like:
Why do I feel this way?
What’s wrong with me?
How do I fix it?

These are understandable questions, especially in moments of loss, confusion, or uncertainty. Yet therapy rarely begins with answers. More often, it begins with the kinds of questions that widen our perspective rather than narrow it.

Cultivating Open Inquiry

Therapy is not a search for perfection but for understanding. It offers a deliberate slowing down and a turning toward what has been avoided or overlooked. When we begin to ask questions with openness rather than urgency, the nature of our struggles can shift.

We might begin to ask:

• What truly matters to me right now?

• What am I resisting, and what might that resistance be protecting?

• Who am I becoming through my choices?

• What kind of life could feel more coherent, or more my own?

These questions do not promise clarity all at once. They invite awareness, and awareness creates movement. The process is not about replacing pain with positivity but about meeting one’s life with honesty and curiosity, allowing values—not avoidance—to guide what comes next.

Collaborative Meaning-Making

Therapy is neither passive reflection nor advice-giving. It is a collaborative process of interpretation and meaning-making, marked by slow and steady change. Many clients arrive with patterns that have become invisible to them—habits of thought, emotion, and expectation that shape how they live. Together we begin to notice these patterns, to name what has been unnamed, and to discern what can be reimagined.

My role is to help trace these connections, to listen for coherence beneath the surface of experience, and to bring context to what may have felt isolated or senseless. The goal is not to fix what is broken but to understand what has been adaptive, and to consider what might now be ready for change.

Through a trusting therapeutic relationship, reflection, dialogue, and practice, this work leads toward greater psychological flexibility and a stronger sense of agency. That wise, grounded sense of Self allows us to act in ways consistent with our values, even when certainty is out of reach.

Therapy may begin in conversation, but it soon becomes a form of creative thought. When we ask deeper questions, we open the possibility of authentic inquiry into who we are and what we value most.

Ready to begin?

I offer therapy for couples, adults, and adolescents across Saskatchewan and Canada, with both in-person and remote sessions available. Whether you're carrying a problem that feels too heavy to name or finding it difficult to see where to turn, I’m here to help you explore what matters and what’s next.

Books to Explore

• Michael White & David Epston, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990). Norton & Company.

• Rollo May, The Discovery of Being (1983). W. W. Norton & Company.

• Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011). HarperWave.

• Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). Beacon Press.

• Stephen Joseph, Authentic: How to Be Yourself and Why It Matters (2016). Piatkus.