Theories of Counseling Chapter 6

Question 1

Existential Overview

Answer 1

• Philosophy focuses on exploring themes such as mortality, meaning, freedom, responsibility, anxiety, and aloneness as these relate to a person’s current struggle.
• We are free and responsible for our choices and actions.
• We are not victims of circumstance because, to a large extent, we are what we choose to be.
• Allow clients to recognize the ways in which they are not living fully authentic lives and to make choices that will lead to their becoming what they are capable of being

Question 2

Goals of Existential Therapy

Answer 2

• Assist clients in their exploration of the existential givens of life, how these are sometime ignored or denied, and how addressing them can ultimately lead to a meaningful existence.
• Help people face up to the difficulties of life with courage rather than avoiding life’s struggles.
• Helping clients face anxiety and engage in action that is based on the authentic purpose of creating a worthy existence.

Question 3

Therapist’s Role

Answer 3

• To encourage clients to consider what they are most serious about so they can pursue a direction in life.
• Assisting clients in facing the fear that their lives or selves are empty and meaningless
• Ask clients to allow themselves to intensify the feeling that they are nothing more than the sum of others’ expectations.
• Concerned about clients avoiding responsibility.
• The interventions existential practitioners prefer description, understanding and exploration of the client’s subjective reality, as opposed to diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.

Question 4

Existential View on Human Nature

Answer 4

• Understanding of what it means to be human.
• Respect for the person, for exploring new aspects of human behavior, and for divergent methods of understanding people.
• Human nature is captured by the notion that the significance of our existence is never fixed once and for all; rather, we continually recreate ourselves through our projects.

Question 5

The Basic Dimensions of the Human Conditioning

Answer 5

1. The capacity for self-awareness
2. Freedom and responsibility
3. Creating one’s identity and establishing meaningful relationships with others.
4. The search for meaning, purpose, values, and goals.
5. Anxiety as a condition of living
6. Awareness of death and nonbeing

Question 6

The Capacity for Self-Awareness

Answer 6

• The greater our awareness, the greater our possibilities for freedom.
• Because self-awareness is at the root of most other human capacities, the decision to expand is fundamental to human growth.

Question 7

Freedom and Responsibility

Answer 7

• People are free to choose among alternatives and therefore play a large role in shaping their own destiny.
• An inauthentic mode of existence consists of lacking awareness of personal responsibility for our lives and passively assuming that our existence is largely controlled by external forces.

Question 8

Existential Guilt

Answer 8

Being aware of having evaded a commitment, or having chosen not to choose. It can be powerful source of motivation toward transformation and living authentically.

Question 9

Authenticity

Answer 9

We are living by being true to our own evaluation of what is a valuable existence for ourselves, it is the courage to be who we are.

Question 10

Creating One’s Identity And Establishing Meaningful Relationships With Others.

Answer 10

• Each of us would like to discover a self or, to put it more authentically, to create our personal identity
• Courage entails the will to move forward in spite of anxiety-producing situations
• Clients will discover that there is no core, no self, no substance, and that the they are merely reflections of everyone’s expectations of them.

Question 11

The Search For Meaning, Purpose, Values, And Goals.

Answer 11

• The struggle for a sense of significance and purpose in life.
• Helping clients challenge the meaning in their lives.
• Meaninglessness in life can lead to emptiness and hollowness, called the existential vacuum.
• Experiencing meaninglessness and establishing values that are part of a meaningful life are issues that become the heart of counseling.

Question 12

Logotherapy

Answer 12

• Help clients find meaning in life.
• The therapist’s function is not to tell clients what their particular meaning in life should be but to point out that they can create meaning even in suffering.
• Suffering can be turned into human achievement by the stand an individual takes when faced with it.

Question 13

Anxiety As A Condition Of Living

Answer 13

-Anxiety arises from one’s personal strivings to survive and to maintain and assert one’s being and the feelings anxiety generates are an inevitable aspect of the human condition.

Question 14

Existential Anxiety

Answer 14

• The unavoidable result of being confronted with the givens of existence (death freedom, choice, isolation and meaninglessness)
• Arises as we recognize the realities of our mortality, our confrontation with pain and suffering, our need to struggle for survival, and our basic fallibility.

Question 15

Neurotic Anxiety

Answer 15

Anxiety about concrete things that is our of proportion to the situation.

Question 16

Awareness Of Death And Nonbeing

Answer 16

• Does not view death negatively but holds that awareness of death as a basic human condition gives significance to living.
• Death provides the motivation for us to take advantage of appreciating the present moment.
• Reflecting on the reality of death can teach us how to live fully.

Question 17

Counselor-Client Relationship

Answer 17

• The relationship is important in itself because the quality of this person-to person encounter in the therapeutic situation is the stimulus for positive change.
• Attention is given to the client’s immediate, ongoing experience, especially what is going on in the interaction between the therapist and the client.
• Therapists share their reactions to clients with genuine concern and empathy as one way of deepening the therapeutic relationship

Question 18

Buber’s Conception of the I/Thou Relationship

Answer 18

-Understanding the self:

1. I/It: relation to time and space, which is a necessary staring place for the self.
2. I/Thou: connecting the self to the spirit and to achieve dialogue

-Relating in an I/Thou fashion means that there is direct, mutual, and present interaction.

Question 19

Therapeutic Phase #1

Answer 19

• Therapists assist clients in identifying and clarifying their assumptions about the world.
• They examine their values, beliefs, and assumptions to determine their validity.

Question 20

Therapeutic Phase #2

Answer 20

• Clients are assisted in more fully examining the sources and authority of their present value system.
• This process of self-exploration shows people what kind of life they consider worthy to live and develop a clearer sense of their internal valuing process.

Question 21

Therapeutic Phase #3

Answer 21

-Helping people take what they are learning about themselves and put it into action.

Question 22

Strengths of Existential Therapy

Answer 22

• Focuses on choices and pathways toward personal growth.
• Focuses on the struggles of particular mark passages throughout the lifespan
• The existential approach can focus clients on significant areas such as assuming personal responsibility, making a commitment to deciding and acting, and expanding their awareness of their current situation.

Question 23

Best Populations for Existential Therapy

Answer 23

Most appropriate for clients who are committed to dealing with their problems about living, for people who feel alienated from their current expectation of society, or for those who are searching for meaning in their lives.

Question 24

Existential Brief Therapy

Answer 24

-Short-term applications of the existential approach require more structuring and clearly defined and less ambitious goals.

Question 25

Existential Approach in Group Counseling

Answer 25

• Members come to terms with the paradoxes of existence.
• Through the support that is within a group, participants are able to tap the strength needed to create an internally derived value system that is consistent with their way of being.

Question 26

Multicultural Positives

Answer 26

• Existential approach does not dictate a particular way of viewing or relating to reality
• Broad perspective
• Focus on universality, or the similarities we all share.
• Inviting clients to examine the degree to which their behavior is being influenced by social and cultural conditioning.

Question 27

Multicultural Negatives

Answer 27

• Excessively individualistic and ignore the social factors that cause human problems.
• Client may have very little choice because environmental circumstances severely restrict their ability to influence the direction of their lives.
• Many see it not possible to talk about the self and the self-determination apart the from the context of the social network and environmental conditions.