Doing ‘therapy’ is a very challenging and complex puzzle; encompassing an assortment of jigsaw pieces, some so elusive they don’t even make their way into ‘therapy’ (I am thinking here of all the times I was 5 or 6 sessions into working with a youth, only to find out they were deprived of some basic necessity like poor sleep quality or access to nutritious food… ‘Why did they never bring that up?’ I always think to myself, yet the answer must be evident in that the problem is sometimes so overwhelming, so daunting… a momentary respite from it’s demonic grip is all we can hope for… Even if it means sitting for 30 minutes with a strange psychology student who would take deep breaths with them with promises of a better tomorrow).

The problem of human suffering is one that the greatest of minds have sought to answer; philosophers, artists, theologians and the everyday person finding some level of meaning or apathy (‘why does life even matter anyways?’). I met a therapist in my 2nd year as a psychology practicum student who was an ordained Christian minister and practiced from the Existential orientation. He would sit patiently with teenagers and use ‘therapy’ to explore much larger questions; who were we at a fundamental level? Where were we heading as a global society? Were our flaws as a species enough to deteriorate the materialistic progress we had made? Why did God make us so sinful, when he was All-Good? And most importantly, what did any of this even mean for you sitting here in the throes of your own mental or spiritual suffering?

The training I had received from the University of Houston was behavioral. Operationalizing the human being as a set of numbers; the mean, the mode, the median. Very empirical, methodical and objective. The ‘therapy’ being driven by the frequency or duration of behaviors which matched the short-term goals (decrease of x behavior and increase of y behavior over z amount of time). Although this level of analysis is immensely useful to any clinician, at a theoretical level, it didn’t match my paradigm of the human essence. We were not plot coordinates to be transfigured, but spiritual beings to be understood.

I have written a whole chapter on the convergence between existentialism and spirituality on the Publications tab.