Myths of Life – Identifying and Removing the Myth of Limitation

Existential angst is the name given to the awareness (through lived experience) of one’s existential condition. One who experiences existential angst comes face to face with the existential limits of their existence. For example, through the experience of eg. uncertainty, meaninglessness or endings or death, the resultant anxiety reflects their aloneness in making sense of their existence. As each of us proceed through our lives, we are bombarded with challenges to the fixed ways in which we define ourselves and our worlds. The unpredictable nature of others’ behaviour or our own challenges us to embrace the co-constructed nature of our phenomenal selves. We can either choose to resist through unrelenting attempts to restore the status quo or we can choose to see ourselves as ‘works in progress’.

Resisting the existential nature of our existence can lead to breakdown whereas embracing the anxiety of our unfixed selves offers breakthrough to a life well lived.

Existential supervision is a process of assisting psychologists, psychotherapists and counselors to work more effectively with their clients. This is the aim of all forms of professional counseling supervision but existential supervision is different. Focus is specifically on ‘how the therapist is’ with their client, since the premise on which an existential way of working is based is on the co-construction of the relationship between practitioner and client. Thus ‘the client that comes to see a therapist is a different one that comes to see another therapist’. This is an important distinction. The client is different and their story will be different because it is seen through the eyes of a different therapist. Also, the unique interaction between them will bring forth a different content and delivery specific to that relationship.

Thus, existential supervision focuses on how a practitioner is with their clients – how they make themselves available as a vehicle for clients to experience themselves and take responsibility for their lives. Existential supervision also challenges the therapist to see their own blind spots of where they are colluding with social and cultural myths that negate them taking responsibility for their life choices – and choice of assisting their clients.

Relationship counseling helps individuals understand themselves and their relationships better. Socially, a relationship is typically considered to be that between two individuals who are intimately and psychologically connected as a ‘we’. Social and cultural expectations of what it is to be a ‘we’ are seen existentially as social limits to choice within relationship. These expectations are effectively myths – unquestioned assumptions of how we should, ought or must be in this thing we call ‘relationship’.

Relationship Counselling from an existential perspective encourages the couple or ‘we’ to put aside traditional notions of how they should think, feel and behave. Instead, it encourages them to examine how they are in relationship to their partner and their unique experiences of their created co-construction called ‘their relationship’. A shift from the word ‘relationship’ to ‘relating’ allows for dynamic, self-chosen ways of relating to another and opens up pathways to expand our ways of creating this potentially rewarding dimension to our existence through ‘relationship’.