Existential Counselling & Psychotherapy in Practice by Emmy van Deurzen

Author:Emmy van Deurzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publisher
Published: 2012-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Determining values

When clients define and examine their own assumptions about the world it soon becomes obvious which of the assumptions can be abandoned because they represent old views and errors that they no longer need to hold on to. Some assumptions will be almost instantaneously discarded after they have been scrutinized closely. Alison, for instance, very quickly abandoned her idea that she was worthless and became aware that her trouble was more connected to a tendency to set more store by other people’s judgements rather than by her own. Learning to recognize, express and value her own views made a big difference in her life and made her very much more confident and therefore less ineffectual in the way in which she expressed her desire for her husband to support her more.

Other assumptions, even wrong ones, will be tenacious and clients will often seem unable to come to reason as far as these assumptions are concerned. Almost invariably this kind of stubborn assumption is rooted in a much deeper and more important aspect of the client’s view of the world, which concerns her beliefs about what really matters. It is this area of the client’s experience that the existential approach stresses. Although many cognitive approaches emphasize the importance of examining assumptions, all too often the assumptions are then either seen as the negative result of some learning process which needs to be corrected, or they are simply challenged as wrong. The existential method seeks to encourage clients into further examination of their assumptions and their underlying value system. What ultimately matters in existential work is to determine what it is that really matters to the clients, not what ought to matter to them or what the therapist dictates that should matter to them.

Often people are unsure about the values and principles that lie at the source of their assumptions and views about the world. They think that they do not have any special or hidden motivations or principles. Though people are often not reflectively aware of their own motivations, beliefs and desires, they make no mistakes in their discernment of likes and dislikes. What is not attractive, appropriate or desirable to them reveals their intrinsic internal guidance. This is what people often refer to as intuition, which is essentially a deeply felt sense of right and wrong.

They sense in some mysterious way precisely what it is they like and what they dislike, what seems to them good or what seems to them bad, without quite knowing where their judgement came from. Every single action, person, situation and thought is compared to the blueprint of individual standards, values and ideals. If it falls short, it is disliked automatically even without a deliberate, conscious thought-process having to take place.

Illustration

Alison, the protagonist of the previous illustration, knew very clearly all along that there was something she disliked about herself so strongly that it made her feel certain that no one else would want to be with her either. This dislike of herself, far

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