Time-Limited Existential Therapy. Alison Strasser
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resonance with other human beings about all that it is to be human, in a world that is replete with both limitations and possibilities.
It is also the space that, as therapists, we share with our clients in that we too are travelling on a journey through life’s tribulations, despairs and joys, in search of meaning within lives without inherent meaning and living with all of life’s paradoxes – all part of the process of coming to terms with living and dying. Ontology also facilitates our mutual caring or concern, which Heidegger describes as interconnectedness with others.
In practice, our exploration of ontological concerns merely reflects our innate sense of what it is to be a human being and doesn’t describe our personal response to these givens. Although the ‘givens’ described above may be immutable, the way we perceive or interpret them and the attitude we take towards them is always open to interpretation.
Individualising: Our Ontic Responses
Inasmuch as the ontological layer is made up of elements that are common to all humankind, the ontic layer reflects our individualised and cultural responses to the universal ‘givens’.
Hans Cohn succinctly describes the distinction between ontological and ontic thus:
an ontological enquiry explores those aspects of Being which are ‘given’ and inescapable … But each of us responds differently to these ‘givens’ of Being and creates his or her specific world within the all‐encompassing world of Being. An exploration of the specific way in which each of us is in the world is called ‘ontic’.
(Cohn, 1997, p. 13)
The inner segments of the wheel that circle the central core are known as our ontic responses and give flavour and depth to our personal being‐in‐the‐world. They both reveal our personal relationship to each of the ontological givens and represent the various different processes used during therapy. Each of these segments indicates both the descriptive ‘how’ of working within the phenomenological process and the ‘what’ of the existential theme under inquiry.
Each of the individual segments within this central part of the wheel illustrates the principal themes that indicate our lived experience, our individual responses to the immutable, ontological givens described above. The segments are both separate and flow into each other, framing the exploration that occurs with clients. As with all themes, they can be explored individually but are not seen in isolation as everything is connected to the whole of an individual’s experience.
The Ontic ‘Leaves’
Working with the phenomenological process is the relational approach to being‐with the client. The process itself creates a space for both client and therapist to notice, watch, re‐ascribe or ‘open up’ to their experience, allowing other choices to come to the fore. (Chapter 6)
Establishing safety. As a counter to the experience of uncertainty, we all attempt to create safety. In psychotherapy, contracting and establishing the frame helps to create an artifice of safety. (Chapter 7)
Discovering anxiety is to acknowledge life’s uncertainties and inconsistencies, revealing that anxiety is a sine qua non of existence. ‘We must all face inevitable death, groundlessness, isolation and meaninglessness’ (Yalom, 1980, p. 485). Therapy helps us to explore how we live with and respond to our anxiety. (Chapter 8)
Revealing the relationship refers to the notion that we are always in relationship – a significant component of existential therapy. (Chapter 9)
Exploring the four worlds is the recognition that we experience and live simultaneously in our physical, social, private and spiritual worlds, an experience which is integrated into our being‐in‐the‐world. (Chapter 10)
Clarifying the worldview is the exploration of our personal principles and the process of gaining understanding about how our belief and value systems both serve and give us our freedom yet have the potential to become entrenched or ‘sedimented’, filtering and often limiting our worldview. (Chapter 11)
Working with paradox and polarities acknowledges that everything has an opposite, which is often contradictory. Not everything is reconcilable, neither is it necessary to be so. This recognition opens us to an understanding that opposites can coexist and thus to a more comprehensive and complex both/and experience rather than the more common either/or position of splitting our experience into reality‐polarising opposites. (Chapter 12)
Identifying choices and meaning is at the heart of existential philosophy, which contends that we are forever making choices in light of the meaning we ascribe to the situations in which we find ourselves. (Chapter 13)
Integrating mind and body is a view that expresses how we experience life through our thinking and our emotions and simultaneously sense through our bodies. (Chapter 14)
Understanding authenticity helps connect an individual to their story in a manner that reveals not only their personal world but also how they affect and influence others and the environment in which they exist (Chapter 15)
Each of the individual segments within this central part of the wheel illustrates the principal themes that indicate our lived experience, our individual responses to the immutable, ontological givens described above; they will be explored in Section 2. The segments are both separate and flow into each other, framing the exploration that occurs with clients. As with all themes, they can be explored individually but are not seen in isolation as everything is connected to the whole of an individual’s experience.
There is always a flow, an interaction between the ontological and ontic where the ontic is our personal and individual response and our actions to ‘the concrete, changing and practical aspects of existence’ (van Deurzen & Adams, 2011, p. 154). Mortality, for example, is an existential given but each of us will respond differently to the idea of death, whether it be to live in eternal fear of its imminence, to live every day as if it were our last, to live in denial of death or to live with awareness of the inevitability of death and to manage the impact on us of this awareness.
Core of the Wheel: Time and Self
In this updated version of the Wheel of Existence, the segments revolve around time and the ever‐changing self at its centre.
Time as one of the tenets of existence refers to how we engage with or experience time and temporality within the dimensions of the past, present and future. Time is the way we relate to the hum of temporality and all of the other ontological givens.
Time itself is a social and personal construct that furnishes us comfortably with a convenient structure as we move from birth to death, from day through to night, from experience to experience, from moment to moment. Time is closely connected with endings of all types, evoking different reactions, and is worked with and addressed in therapy.
The Wheel of Existence figuratively demonstrates how time can be deemed as the centre of our existence. It informs every micro‐second of our waking and sleeping life and influences the way we understand our past, live in the present and imagine the future. Time both influences and interacts with all the elements that constitute the ‘expression of the sum total of our particular way