Category: Existential Therapy

Depression: Notes on Life

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Currently reading various materials on depression and EA (existential analysis) approach is very life affirming.

Depression is defined as a blockage on the level of Second Fundamental Motivation, when it becomes impossible to see and experience the value of life, or fundamental value.

Life is then considered as an ability to build and keep relationship with “being here”.

Depression the can be viewed as complicated relationships with life.

Life is young, vigorous, connected with nature and body.

When we consider ‘life’, then it is dynamic and strong images, filled with desire. Depression on the other hand, when a person can not plug into life, enter into life, then he/she misses it, is not part of it.

What is life for me? How are we part of our own lives? How do we enter it?

Life – means to relate to what is. Life – as a force, connection to movement and change. Life brings us to relation.

The inner experience of life strengthens the attitude “I like to enter life and be in relation with it”. It makes it possible to understand a deeper level of “the value of life as it is”  – the fundamental value, how it is showing up in own biography and biographies of other people.

A few questions to consider:

“Do I like to live?”

“How I am here? How this relatedness impacts me?”

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These are notes based on the article:

Existential Analysis of Depression. Origin, understanding and phenomenological approach to treatment by Alfried Längle.

Published in Moskowskij psichoterapewtitscheskij zhurnal 48, 1, 2006, 53-82

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Should you have complicated relationships with life and would like to strengthen your subjective “like to live” – get in touch – I have some availability currently.

Info on my approach.

Happiness and relationships

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I’m currently preparing for the exam in my existential analysis educational program. It’s going to be on the 2nd Fundamental Motivation – Do I Like to Live? I’ve been publishing some notes from the material in my Instagram. Overall, the topics include – liking, dislike, coping reactions, turning towards, grieving, relationship (inner and outer), time, closeness, values, and emotions.

Currently I’m looking into section on relationships – and in the material there was a reference to the Harvard Study of Adult Development. As a researcher myself, I got curious to read more about it and refresh my garden of memory on that particular study. There are always new angles to it, as it’s been running for over 80 years now. Amazing initiative!

A very nice and concise summary can be found here: Good genes are nice, but joy is better in The Harvard Gazette, article by Liz Mineo.

Some take away points from the study as pointed out by Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

  • “The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health. Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too.
  • “Those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier, and the loners often died earlier.”
  • “Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains,”

From George Vaillant (psychiatrist who led the study from 1972 until 2004):

  • “The key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.” – “The study showed that the role of genetics and long-lived ancestors proved less important to longevity than the level of satisfaction with relationships in midlife, now recognized as a good predictor of healthy aging.”

Talk: Practising Existential Therapy by Ernesto Spinelli

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As part of the Continuing Professional Development I have joined the talk by Ernesto Spinelli “Practising Existential Therapy”. Overall it was very refreshing to be referred to the roots – therapia:

“Therapy in its original meaning tries to express the idea of the attempt to stand beside the other”.

E.Spinelli

Some notes to myself:

  • “The client is somebody who both wants to change, and wants to remain the same… then the existential therapist needs to choose himself or herself themselves to both those positions to the client desire to be different, and the clients desire to remain the same, and treat them as having equal validity equal value”
  • “The client is always right. And the therapist has no way of knowing initially, what the client is expressing.”
  • To describe something is to change it.
  • “Every problem presented by the client is also an attempt at a solution”.
  • “Changing any part or any aspect of a person alters the whole person, and in ways that are entirely unpredictable”.

A very important part of therapy – endings, was touched upon as well in the seminar. I feel like this topic is rarely addressed somehow.

And the final note, an analogy between the therapist and Dr.Watson:

“My sense of existential therapy is that it seems to remind us as therapists tried to be the best kind of Watson, that you can possibly try to be that Watson who really excites and invigorates and illuminates so that the wonderful detecting work that Holmes can do will be done.”

Ernesto Spinelli