They were hollow in life + yearning for more.
Choosing Life on Purpose. Join me Mar 28 for a live Existential Therapy Workshop.
They arrived in my office heavy with a question they couldn’t shake: “Is this all there is?”
Their life, as they described it, was a hollow reflection of expectations they had never chosen for themselves. Day after day, they moved through the motions of work, obligations, relationships, but through it all, they felt like an automaton going through the motions. They were observing life, not living it.
And this life didn’t feel like them. And maybe, they admitted, they didn’t even know who they were anymore.
For decades, their attention had been elsewhere. Anticipating the needs of others, fulfilling obligations, doing what needed to be done to survive. But the price of that devotion had been a gnawing emptiness, an eroding connection from themselves, and a creeping sense of death-in-life. It felt like they were a ghost moving through their own existence, silently screaming for their spirit to be heard, but even they couldn’t decipher the cry.
This is the essence of an existential crisis. The etymology of a crisis is a turning point, where the self demands attention. It is where identity, authenticity, belonging, meaning, purpose, and hope, the deepest existential needs, emerge, insistent and undeniable.
In that room, we began to trace the contours of their inner landscape. We didn’t rush. There was no quick fix, no tidy solution. Instead, we sat with the discomfort, witnessed the suffering. We named it, listened to it, and allowed it to breathe. Each sigh, each pause, each hesitant confession was a thread leading back to themselves.
We explored the weight of freedom and responsibility, as Sartre teaches, how even within constraint, the choices they had made, and the choices they could make, were theirs alone. We touched on values in action, Kierkegaard’s insistence that meaning is lived, not theorized, and how even the smallest intentional decisions could anchor them in authenticity. We acknowledged the impermanence of life, the grief they carried, and the shadows of mortality, following Yalom’s guidance that facing death illuminates purpose.
Through the silence, the questions, and the trembling moments of insight, a glimmer emerged. For the first time in years, they sensed the possibility that life could be theirs, not the life expected of them, not the life dictated by duty or fear, but the life they might choose. In existential therapy, the turning point is not a single revelation; it is a careful, patient awakening to the self that has always been waiting beneath the weight of routine, obligation, and unexamined grief.
In existential therapy, we meet clients at this very turning point. It might be grief, divorce, life transitions, empty nest, midlife reflection, menopause, trauma or simply the quiet yearning for more: more authenticity, more purpose, more life.
The work is in holding the space for the client to notice the stirrings of their own soul, to honour the questions that arise, and to take the sometimes trembling, sometimes bold steps toward inhabiting the self they were always meant to become. It is the sacred space where insight, courage, and transformation converge.
If you’re a counsellor or therapist wanting to explore this work, join the next workshop on Saturday March 28 from 10-11:30 AM MST, “Integrating Existential Philosophy into Therapy,” where we translate these philosophical concepts into practical, experiential strategies you can use with clients navigating life’s most profound turning points. Sign up here for an experiential, practical and theoretical exploration of existential therapy: https://www.thriveintegratedpsychology.com/products/live_events/existential-therapy-workshop
Or, for a deeper dive, pre-order the full existential therapy course, a comprehensive guide to integrating philosophy, therapeutic principles, and hands-on interventions for clinical practice. For lifetime access, self-paced, interactive learning, you deserve to invest in your clinical practice: https://www.thriveintegratedpsychology.com/courses/existential
To choose your life, again and again, with courage and consciousness, is the radical act at the heart of existentialism always available to you.