E172 | How to Live Courageously (Existential Psychotherapy w/ Emmy van Deurzen)

Emmy van Deurzen, one of the leading figures in existential therapy in the UK and internationally. Emmy has over fifty years’ experience as a psychotherapist, has published more than thirty books, and was the first chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy when it was created in 1993.

Her new book, Beginning to Live: The Art of Existential Freedom, is a guide to existential therapy. Not so much a self-help book, but, as Emmy puts it, a compass for navigating life’s difficulties. In it, she explores how we can face the fundamental questions of existence: uncertainty, meaning, freedom, mortality, and our relationships with others.

In this conversation, we discuss existential therapy, what it means to be truly free, how to face life’s difficulties without turning away from them, and how we might begin to live more courageously.

Emmy's new book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginning-Live-Art-Existential-Freedom

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

Check out The Thinking Mind  on Substack: https://substack.com/@thinkingmindpodcast

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You do not have to render back to the world what the world gave you. You are the center where change happens. You are the space in which you can shift from what was done to you to what you are going to do back to the world. And that is magic. You are the place where the transformation and the magic happens.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Today I am super happy to be in conversation with Emi van Derzen. Emmy is one of the leading figures in existential therapy in the UK and internationally. She has over 50 years of experience as a psychotherapist. She's published more than 30 books and was the first chair of the UKCP, the UK Council for Psychotherapy, when it was first created in 1993. Her new book, Beginning to Live: The Art of Existential Freedom is a guide to existential therapy, which she describes as not so much a self-help book, but a compass for navigating life's difficulties. In it she explores how we can face the fundamental questions of existence, uncertainty, meaning, freedom, mortality, and our relationship with other people. Existential ideas have always been incredibly useful for me when I've been thinking about some of the problems in my life and in my training in mental health. So for me to get the opportunity to speak to someone of Emmy's depth and breadth of knowledge is very, very exciting. Emi's work is also very personal. She grew up in the Netherlands after the Second World War, surrounded very much by the reality of suffering. Her neighbors were traumatized by war, she had family members who had been sent to Nazi concentration camps, and her lifelong work has been shaped by the question of how do we, in the face of suffering, in the face of all of these tragedies, how do we live life more fully? Today we talk about existential therapy, some of the facets of existential philosophy which she finds most helpful, what it truly means to be free, how to face life's difficulties without turning away from them, and how we might begin to live more courageously. This is The Thinking Mind. As always, thank you so much for listening. And now here's today's conversation with Emmy Van Derzen. Emmy, thanks so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

We've talked about existential philosophy a little bit on the podcast, not as much as I would have wanted to, and really, of course, you're the ideal guest to speak to that about. One of the things that interested me about your background is, as far as I can tell, you studied philosophy before you went into psychotherapy, which is an uncommon path, but to me makes a lot of sense. People often use philosophy in a derogatory sense, which bothers me. Like they say, oh, this is all it's all a bit philosophical. That was actually a comment made about my podcast a few years ago after it started. That's a good podcast, but it's a bit philosophical. And my reaction to that is, yeah, it's philosophical. I think that's a good thing. Can you comment on the value of studying philosophy as a foundation for psychotherapy?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Totally, yes. So I did a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Montpellier in France. And then I started working as a psychotherapist. I had also been through the psychiatric training of my then husband. So I went to courses with him and I went on his placements with him, so I had that kind of informal training. And I was given a post in the hospital of Saint-Alban, which is a very special psychiatric hospital in France, where Franz Fanon also was trained, by the way. And they gave me a post as a psychologist because up to very recently psychology and philosophy had been one discipline in France. And so there was still a complete acceptance that understanding something about different systems of how we think about the mind and how we think about life and how we think about death and how we think about the universe is extremely relevant to one's conversations with patients who very often have great trouble making sense of things for themselves and who are often lost in views of the world that get them into knots. So, yes, I found it incredibly helpful. In fact, I found later I went back to university, did another first degree in psychology and a training in clinical psychology and a training in psychoanalytic type psychotherapy, well, Lakanian psychotherapy. And then later on, I went back to do a doctorate in philosophy because I found philosophy to be far more important than my clinical psychology training. Although, in fairness, the clinical psychology training was pretty essential as well, and I was very glad to have it. But then the philosophy training allowed me to listen to people at a very different level, to listen for their spiritual concerns, their ideological concerns, their world view, to understand where they were coming from and to place myself in a position where I was trying to reach them where they were, rather than approaching them from a set perspective, a clinical perspective, where I was doing the kind of observing and categorizing and making decisions about psychopathology. So as I said, it was important to learn about that also. But if I had only done that, I think I would never have been able to become an existential psychotherapist because I would have lacked the depth of that connection that I learned to make through my philosophical background. And I must hasten to add that my training in philosophy in France was very different to the kind of philosophy training I would have had if I had done it in an Anglo-Saxon university. I became well aware of the distinctions between continental philosophy and well, linguistic philosophy and philosophy of mind as it is practiced in Anglo-Saxon culture. And I think it is that continental way of doing philosophy that is so highly relevant to psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

That I resonate a lot with everything you've said. I I obviously I don't have a formal background in philosophy. I haven't studied it to the extent that you have. I wish I had. But to the extent that I understand some philosophy and have been exposed to some philosophy, I do feel it has allowed me to swim in much deeper waters with my patients and clients than I otherwise would be able to. So I feel very similar that the psychological understanding, psychiatric understanding in my case, pretty essential. You know, they're the nuts and bolts, if you like. But that additional philosophical layer allows you to go to a much deeper place. Even when I talk about cases with my colleagues, you're able to bring in a dimension that adds something entirely new and I would say incredibly valuable. In a way, a lot more malleable, I think, than pure psychiatric and psychological approaches. By malleable, I mean much more able to adapt to the theory, to the particular problems within the that the individual is facing. Whereas it feels like psychological and psychiatric diagnostic systems often feel a bit um clumsy, clumsy, stiff, yeah, cumbersome. Whereas philosophy can be very precise.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Where, as I learned very early on, to, as Kierkegaard said, to go find the person where they are and to learn to listen for what their parameters are and to speak with them about the way the world seems to them, and then to engage with that and help them make better sense of that, rather than come to them and shift the perspective and impose this very regimented structure on them in which maybe sometimes they say, Oh well, that's helpful. Now I know who I am because I am this diagnosis. But actually, overall, what it means is that they lose out on the depth of their own experience.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

They devalue it.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Could you give us a little bit of an introduction to existential philosophy? So I understand it's a huge area, many different notable philosophers in this area. But for the uninitiated, what is existential philosophy about? What are some of the core tenets or principles?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Well, first of all, I am an existential philosopher and not an existentialist philosopher. So there is a small movement in philosophy, in continental philosophy that is existentialism, and that is essentially people like Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleponty, Albert Camus, and that whole school of post-structuralism as well. But I take it much beyond that. So that's an interesting school of thought, and there is much to be taken from that. But previous to that, you have philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Siren Kierkegaard or Arthur Schopenhauer. You also, going way further back, have people like Baruch Spinoza, who had a philosophy which is extremely helpful in understanding human existence. And beyond that, I go back to the Greek classics, you know, to the Athenians. I love Socrates, he was my first love from when I was a teenager, and he is who brought me to study philosophy and Plato and Aristotle, and of course the Stoics, who are, well, a very particular again take on how to live your life, but who are extremely useful in being down to earth and tackling the very practical elements of human existence. So those are a few of the influences that I would use, and many others besides, because contemporary philosophy has some very interesting existential branches with the work of people like Martha Neussbaum, for instance, and with the work of the pan-psychists. So pan-psychism is a very interesting new way to look at human existence that is totally relevant to an existential approach.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

And so, how would you describe your personal integration of all these philosophies? What are like some of the core philosophical principles you stand by?

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Well, the main one would probably be phenomenology. So that's Edmund Husserl, who I haven't mentioned yet, and Franz Brentano. Because learning phenomenology taught me about science is only half the story. It is about trying to approach reality in an objective way. But in order to complete that, you need also a subjective approach. So phenomenology shows you how to systematically approach what you are observing or what you're engaging with, both from an objective and a subjective way, and to also look at the process that happens in between what happens for you as the observer and what you think is happening in who you observe, i.e. your client or your patient, but also what is the process with which that is happening. So there are always those three elements.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Yeah. So to understand, I guess phenomenology is understanding that you may posit you may want to position yourself as an objective observer, but it doesn't mean you are, because your own perception of the world will have its own biases, uh, emphases, exclusions, and phenomenology, I suppose, is understanding that. So getting very close to your first person perspective, and then also understanding other people are working, walking around with their first person perspectives and they all collide with each other. And so we have to be a little bit humble when we're placing ourselves as objective or pure objective observers.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

Yes, yeah. So you can see how that is so appropriate for a psychotherapeutic work. It's, if you like, the philosophical alternative to transference, counter-transference. It is to be constantly aware of what's happening for you as the therapist, to be aware of how you're using different processes of dialogue and conversation to approach the situation, but also be aware of how the client or the patient is experiencing and how they are responding to you, and how each of your biases is coming into that conversation and is inevitable. This is what you learn from phenomenological practice, that you cannot just get rid of your bias. Your bias is the angle through which you approach something, it is your lens, it is, you know, important, it's part of how you make sense of the world. What you have to do, Husserl said as a mathematician, is to put your bias in brackets. It's an equation. So you need to uh be aware that um you need to deal with that bias, but that doesn't mean that you can get rid of it. You deal with it first, and then it becomes part of the equation.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

I mean, that makes a lot of sense, and I think a lot of the suffering and interpersonal suffering and conflict that happens between people is because people really aren't aware that they're seeing the world or other people through a lens. They're not aware of the lens, and therefore they think they're kind of seeing reality as it is and not realizing how much of the picture they're missing.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah, we lose track of that all the time. We we assume that the world is as we perceive it, and it takes quite a lot of living and learning to start to see the limits of your own perception and of your own of the way you make sense of the world. And it takes even longer to begin to appreciate that other people are in that same position, and that when they disagree with you, that doesn't mean that they're attacking you. It is just that what you're saying doesn't quite make sense to them because of the lens through which they are looking. When you're a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist or psychologist, you need to make yourself available to understanding that for the both of you. You cannot approach that situation assuming that the other has to make that effort for you. The onus is on us to make that communication perfectly clear.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

A lot of people associate uh existential philosophy with a kind of pessimism, like especially when they associate it, I suppose, with the kinds of things Nietzsche said about the deconstruction of grand narratives, the loss of religious um metaphysical safety and comfort. Uh, but is that true? Is it necessary that uh abiding by existential philosophy means that you fundamentally have a pessimistic view of life and of the world?

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Well, my particular form of existential work seeks to be balanced, to allow for the dark side, and to allow for the light to come in as well. So it is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Pessimistic, it seeks to allow for dark and light, because that is how we get perspective in the world. The dark side is necessary and the suffering is necessary for us to appreciate a lot of things in the same way in which physical pain is necessary for us to keep our bodies safe, but the light is necessary for us to see and make sense of things, so we need both those. And there are many different existential philosophers, some of which are more inclined to optimism and some who are more inclined to pessimism. But I guess most people are thinking of existentialism and particularly of someone like Camus, who spoke about life being absurd, and especially his novels, in which he kind of paints quite a dark picture of humanity. And bear in mind existentialism came about out of the Second World War and the French occupation by the Nazis, and therefore there was a lot of darkness in their thinking. But that doesn't mean that thinking about human existence necessarily means that you become pessimistic. You only become pessimistic if you don't see the whole picture yet.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Yes. What so what can the more optimistic side of existential philosophy look like, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 19:21

Well, my particular existential therapy always works with the paradox, which is the tensions of human existence, and to make a person aware that they can work with both sides of the equation, and beyond that, they can solve the equation, and that means they can dialectically transcend these oppositions. They can learn that we are born and we die, and yet, you know, in that tension between birth and death, we create a life in between. Now, if we're scared of death, then we'll probably either try to be as jolly as we can and have as much fun as we can and hide away from it, and if we get overwhelmed by the fear of death, we might freeze and never want to leave our room anymore. But if we stand in that opposition and we allow ourselves to see that we have this whole field in between to work with, then it's like a blank canvas that we can experiment with and learn from and enjoy, you know, discovering and life becomes more like an adventure, really.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

I think what you just said is extremely important, and I would encourage listeners to rewind and listen to it again because it's so easy to zone out when you're listening to a podcast. But I feel like what you said is so profound. So you're saying the quality of our life, ironically enough, is in part influenced by our relationship with death. If we have a dysfunctional relationship with death, you know, maybe we're too afraid of it, maybe we want to avoid it, that might lead us down a bad path, maybe hedonism, for example, or a certain uh refusal to engage with life, we might become reclusive. But actually, living life of a high quality demands on some level that we face the prospect of our death with a kind of forthrightness. That's what I'm getting. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Absolutely right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

There's also something about uh, I guess what I I've liked about existential thinking is there's a freedom in it, in that yes, you are sort of freed of grand narratives that may have restricted a lot of people's actions in the past, like major religious institutions. And things like that. Now, freedom, as I as we we can get on to talk about, isn't as easy as people think it is. I think in our, I'm curious what you think about this. I think in our culture, we consciously worship freedom and strive for it, and unconsciously we're terrified of it. And we don't realize actually how terrifying freedom is. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Totally. Absolutely true. And most of us are more terrified of freedom than wanting freedom. And when we do get to have freedom, we very quickly commit to something or other, or we become so totally confused that we feel at a loose end. And freedom, if you look at it, is to not be committed to anything. It is to be free-floating and to be available to all possibilities and all opportunities. So it can never last. We have to engage. There has to be commitment and responsibility as well as freedom. And again, it's a question of how you're going to use both those sides, how you're going to commit and how you're going to make sure you don't get taken over by your commitments and retain some space in your life where there is some free movement. Freedom is always limited. You can never have total freedom. Total freedom would be death. Life always requires you to be engaged with certain things. For instance, earning your keep, making your living, surviving, relating to other people, making sense of things. I mean, there's so many commitments in a day that we cannot often taste any freedom at all. And life can often become very full so that we don't know in what way to move anymore. And we stop being able to be aware that we have this gift of life, of consciousness, of time, of responsibility, of the capacity to make something of what we have been given. And when you stop being able to live with that gift and to make something of that gift, life can become quite unpleasant, and it can feel like you're in the chain gang, you know, where your every moment is spoken for and you're being told what to do and you're regimented and you have to just keep your head down all the time. That is a complete loss of freedom. But so many people live like that. And then when a catastrophe happens to them and all of that is shattered, those structures that they used to curse and hate are shattered, then suddenly they're at a loss. They actually are tasting freedom, but it is not what they thought freedom would be like at all.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Yeah, I mean, this is something I see a lot. So people often feel beholden to other people or other organizations, as you said, and they fantasize about freedom and they think, you know, if only I were on my own, then I could do whatever I want. But then when an opportunity for freedom presents itself, that doesn't just mean, you know, again, a hedonistic life. That means, okay, now we have to figure out what do you actually care about. And usually what people care about demands some level of responsibility and attention. Like if you want to build your own dream career, that's a lot of work and a lot of introspection and a lot of um a lot of effort that is required to build your dream career. It's not an easy task, even if you have resources, even if you have the time. And so when given that the presented with the opportunity for freedom, I think a lot of people then unconsciously retreat and will, as you've said, I think find something else to shackle them so they don't have to call because I guess freedom demands that you contend with yourself. And that that's actually the hardest thing to do is to contend with yourself in that way.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

The best example is people living for decades, looking forward to their retirement, and you you know what I'm going to say, and then retirement comes, and it's like, hell, what am I going to do? This is emptiness. Freedom feels like emptiness, and it's true. They have to recommit. And if they don't recommit and they end up watching daytime television all day long, they go downhill very quickly indeed. They discover that commitment to what you want is the most freedom you can give yourself. And there is a real art to that, you know. There is an art to retirement, and there is an art to being rich. People who suddenly uh get uh a lottery win or something like that are in that same position. They initially think, oh great, now I can do what I want, and they go on all these holidays, and that becomes very empty, and they start to panic because there's nobody else with them anymore. They're the only one on that holiday, and it's like, what is my life like now? I have lost my job, I've lost a lot of friends, people just want things from me. Who am I going to be now? And that is quite a big question. Then you have to start from scratch in that freedom, in that empty space, you are confronted with not just who you are, but who you are going to become by the actions you're going to undertake and the way in which you're going to live and the things and the people you're going to choose to commit to.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Absolutely. And this is one of the reasons why I'm a big advocate of telling people either to like try start their own business or to try and get into self-employment, or even if they're employed and they like their nine-to-five job, to even approach their nine to five with a self-employed mindset. Why? Because I think a self-employed mindset encourages you not to run out the clock on your day and think, well, I'm getting paid my salary. I just have to be in this building to survive and do the minimum that's expected of me. And people will live their whole life like that. But a self-employed mindset makes you think, okay, I have I happen to have an hour on my hands. What do I want to get out of this hour? Therefore, what do I care about? What do I value? What do I want to commit to or take responsibility for for this hour? And then that can be a really useful microcosm for their life. Because that's you know the same thing we're talking about is like how do we make the most of this time? And I really believe in starting with small building blocks. Start with half an hour and an hour before you move on to your whole life, you know, steps like that.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

You know, that's the only way somebody who has a mental illness is going to get out of there by beginning to take very small baby steps and to build it up and to gradually get the confidence and to build life up, building block by building block, and to gradually get back this amazing sense that actually they are the architect of their own life, and they are in charge, and that thing of being in charge of your life is what I call existential freedom. Because existential freedom is what you do with that overall freedom. It is how you recommit, what you make of that time available to you, rather than just thinking of freedom as that empty space and you know, happy go lucky doing nothing.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So now that we understand a little bit about what existential philosophy means and what an existential approach might look like, how does that apply to psychotherapy? So if someone's seeing you force therapy, how might that be different to, for example, how might that be different to, for example, a cognitive behavior therapist or a psychodynamic therapist or something like that?

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Well, let's just say that the objective is quite different to start with. So our objective is to work very much together, and it is a cooperative effort, and it is about figuring out what your life is like at the moment, what you've made of it to date, and what the problems with that are, and where you would like to get to, and what is of most value to you, what is most important to you, and how you create meaning in your life. And quite often, of course, people haven't a clue about any of those things, so that can be quite a long path, and we have to start slowly, but we always start, as I always say to my students, start with the maximum point of pain. Start by facing the pain in a person's life with them. And once they begin to see that they're brave enough to do that, everything else starts to look easy. And then they begin to see that just that very act of becoming brave enough to face the pain makes such a difference. It kind of clears away the fear because that's what they're afraid of. They're afraid of the pain they're feeling, of the bad memories, of the bad relationships, of the things they have done or said that they regret, all those sorts of things. So if we tackle those together and we discover that that's part of a human life, that is what happens in a human life, and we can face it, we can understand why it happened, how it happened, and we can assume it. We can make it part of who we are without judgment and condemnation, and we can draw conclusions. We can because of that, we begin to know how we would like to be, who we would like to become, and how we want to live. And then the steps towards that begin to gradually become obvious. As the Buddhists say, when you start walking the path, the path appears. That is very true in existential work as well.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Yeah, and I I also pulled a quote from Kierkegaard, which I think, or not a quote, but something Kierkegaard believed from your website, which I think applies here, which is on your website, you're right. Kierkegaard believed that truth could ultimately only be discovered subjectively by the individual in action.

SPEAKER_01 34:04

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

This is something I've believed for a long time. I've never heard it phrased quite like that, but it makes a lot of sense to me. And in that in my experience, whenever I've tried something new, it's been an act of discovery. It's almost like you're throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. You try something new, and something interesting is going to happen. It may not be what you want, it may not be pleasant, although it could be pleasant, but you're you're learning if you're like doing a real-time laboratory laboratory experiment.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Right, exactly. It's like science, it's a living laboratory. Life is like a science experiment, a lifelong science experiment. So that's fun, you know? It's a journey of discovery. And in that process, the learning is not just interesting, it's vital. Every time you figure something out, because you've tried it this way and that way, and you realize this is how it works, every time you learn something, your life becomes easier and more satisfying and more fulfilling because you're actually getting it. It's just like getting good at riding a bicycle or swimming or doing any kind of sport. At first it seems very complicated and impossible, but as you learn some of the techniques and you learn some of the facts and you experiment with yourself and how you take to that, you begin to make it your own and you begin to realize that every bit of the experiment helps you get more proficiency. And as your proficiency increases, your courage increases and your joy in living increases as well. When people come to therapy, they're often sad. Well, you know, they say they're depressed, but they're actually disappointed in life, or they feel oppressed, or they feel despondent, or they've given up on themselves, or they've never yet really engaged with life. All of those things people call depressed, but it's all different things. And when they start to realize what has brought them to that particular place, they realize in that place, yes, things are impossible and disappointing, but when they move forward and they open up and they start exploring, there is a lot to be amazed about, and they are much more capable than they ever imagined they were. That's almost always the case.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Something I like about listening to your approach is that it counters, I think, one of the main criticisms of therapy in general, maybe particularly this criticism tends to be directed towards psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy. I don't think it's particularly valid, but it's the criticism that therapy is about dwelling on the past, and dwelling on the past, of course, isn't going to be a good thing for someone's mental health. But listening to your approach, it sounds like the you know, there might be some talking about the past, but certainly I'm getting the impression there's a huge direction towards the future, and what do you want, and what do you want your look like, what do you want your life to look like in quite tangible terms?

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Well, there is a lot of looking at the past, but in a learning way, in a positive way, because the past will change as we get more familiar with it, because the way people remember their past is always very partial and very limited, and there are many more things that have happened to them that they have forgotten that they can dig into and find some positive nurturance from. That's point number one. Point number two is that life is a constant figure eight. We're here in the middle, which is the present moment, but we're constantly retrieving back experiences from the past and thinking back to the future. And so in therapy we learn to do this journeying along the timeline in a figure eight. Yeah, what was that like then? What is it like now? What do you want it to be like? We play with time, it's time travel as well as travel in space. All of those things are part of being a person in a world, playing with space, playing with time, playing with infinity even at times.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

And if I could add a point three, which is kind of adding on to point two, people often haven't made important connections between their past and things they may still do very much in the present, and that a lot of things which get us in trouble in the present are usually coping strategies that have developed to deal with a that may have been quite useful in the past, but now are not really fit for purpose. So, like a common example might be uh something like being reclusive from the world might be useful. Uh, if you have abusive parents, you know, hiding from the world can be protection, but now it means you know you can't get the kind of job you want, or the kind of friends, or the kind of partner. And so even psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy can be helpful because you can come to understand, okay, yes, this this may have been helpful, then um it's still can I I still feel the hangover of that today, and that will put them in a position of choice. Okay, maybe I could do something different. Um, so I think I don't really I never really agreed with that criticism, but it feels particularly invaded thinking about your approach, where you are, in contrast to some other therapies, really explicitly asking the client, you know, really fundamental questions about what do you want your life to be about and how can we get you there and what does that look like, which I find really heartening.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Yes, absolutely. So this is where I would quote Sartre because he was very good on this point, especially in his later work in Critique for a Dialectical Reason, or in his book on truth and things like that. Um, or in on his Flaubert, you know, he did this long case study of Flaubert where he shows this dialectical relationship for a person with their past history, and how we do have to learn from that. And what he said was what you are today is what you make of what was made of you. So what you have been given is something that has made you into something because you were a kid or a teenager and you didn't know what it was and what to do with it. But now those givens are there for you to play with and make something else out of you. You do not have to render back to the world what the world gave you. You are the center where change happens. You are the space in which you can shift from what was done to you to what you are going to do back to the world, and that is magic. You are the place where the transformation and the magic happens.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Yes, and I guess change is a very important word. I I also like the word flexibility because a lot of uh mental health conditions they may take very different shapes and sizes and forms, but a big feature that underlies lots of different mental health conditions is a sense of rigidity that underlies depression. You know, I kind of see the world as a difficult place and I see myself as worthless, and that's very rigid. Obsessive compulsive disorder is similar. I have these thoughts which I'm a slave to, which make me very anxious, and I have to do these compulsions in order to alleviate that. Even in something like psychosis, I have these very rigid beliefs that people are trying to harm me, and so I think people have a tendency, even if you don't have a mental health condition, people tend have a tendency to stagnate and become more rigid in their thinking. This is a classic trope of getting older. But in my mind, it's not an inevitability. I think people just need to be taught, just like you need to do something like yoga to keep your body flexible. You need to do some things to keep your mind flexible, and mental flexibility is very conducive to good mental health.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

And of course, life is about being in movement. Life is to be aware of that movement and to go with that movement. And what people tend to do is to be afraid of life and to stop it moving and to keep it stable and steady because they don't trust themselves being able to be in the flow. But to learn to be in the flow is an amazing thing to do. It's literally like learning to surf on the waves rather than go under in them, and to not be afraid of the waves of the ocean, but to know that you are capable of Of going with them and that they will actually carry you and to trust life. People just don't trust life at all. They equate life with what other people do to you or what is required of you, instead of with this openness and this freedom and this movement that is for each of us to make something of that is valuable and enjoyable.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

Why do you think this is a widespread phenomenon? Because I agree with you. This sense of being in a victim position is very common, the sense of life is what's done to you, and you have no authorship over that, and this uh lack of introspection is very common. Why why do you think it is so common in modern times?

SPEAKER_01 44:51

Because our worldview is a materialistic worldview, and we think about ourselves as if we are objects, and so we think about ourselves as having been made out of clay and been fashioned in a particular shape, and as if we're kind of stuck with that. We completely not allowing ourselves to see the freedom that human existence actually provides you with, which is the capacity for free thinking and for changing and for making all sorts of different choices. I mean, philosophers are even trying to make people believe that there is no such thing as free will, which is quite an extraordinary thing to do, and for anyone who has worked in this field, that is completely ridiculous idea because we know from our everyday observations that if we don't engage in conversation with our clients and patients, they stay stagnant and they get worse and worse and worse. But when they are engaged in this exploration and they begin to see that there is another way, everything comes to life again, and they begin to act and relate in a different way, and life starts to look different to them, and they begin to realize that they do actually have options, and they are not condemned to act out what their parents did to them or what society did to them or what they are afraid of, they can make it different. They are like an artist, they can make their life into a work of art. Now, if that is not free will, then what is?

SPEAKER_00 46:54

And what would you say? Just getting to your point about like modern life and people having freedom, what would you say to a critic who might say something like, Oh, but modern life is so difficult, and economically times are so hard, and it's so difficult to buy a house, and there's so much so many bad things happening geopolitically, and you know, there's many arguments you can make about why life is terrible. And what what would you say to that kind of criticism?

SPEAKER_01 47:22

I would say they're right. Modern life is incredibly complicated and difficult and impossible, but so was life 50 years ago. You know, try living in the 50s as I did as a girl, and was confronted with parents who were traumatized by the Second World War and who had been through a famine and in a house that was tiny because all the houses had been bombed to the ground and you didn't know where your food was going to come from and you still had coupons. And try living in that environment, for goodness sakes. Or try living two centuries ago, or try living in the Middle Ages when your life was probably 30 years in life is difficult, life is challenging, and every day is a challenge for you to do something with these challenges on your path, and that's the good bit of it. That it's not a given that stays the same, it changes all the time, and you can learn the rules of the games and you can get good at them, you can start enjoying them, you can start figuring out how you get around the obstacles or how you avoid the obstacles. There are many things you can do to make this work for you. You can also engage with making the world a better place. You can also say, yes, it is difficult and horrible, and I don't like it, and then you get really engaged and then you begin to realize that it doesn't have to be like that. You're part of this world and you can make a difference. So get going with it, and you'll start to see your view of it changes dramatically.

SPEAKER_00 49:19

Yeah, I mean that when whenever someone whenever I'm talking with someone and they're bringing up, oh, life is so difficult because of X, Y, Z reasons. Yeah, I totally agree. And you wouldn't want to underplay the difficulties of our time. Um, but I always bring up the world wars, you know. Remember that that time less than a hundred years ago where our civilizations went to almost annihilated each other and remember the Holocaust and remember all of these things that happened. Uh, and I think it's so helpful because it's I I mean when people criticize modern times, again, many things to criticize, but we'll obviously cherry pick information which suits our narrative. If we have a pre-existing feeling and narrative that life is terrible now, we'll choose the things that's that complement that feeling, like geopolitical instability or it's difficult to buy a house, but they won't emphasize, for example, oh, I have the in access to the entirety of human knowledge in a supercomputer that they didn't even have a computer as good as this on the rockets that went to the moon, but now I have it basically for no cost or low cost. I now have AI technology that can help me answer any question. You know, people are very uh selective in their evidence for this.

SPEAKER_01 50:32

They are, they are, and they're not counting their blessings at all. I think all the things you mention are absolutely true. And more than that, one of the things I deeply value living in the 20s is that I am connected to so many good people via the internet. And, you know, all these ways we now have of figuring out who are like-minded and who are willing to put energy into a new project. Or it is absolutely extraordinary the way we can be linked in and the way we can meet the right kind of people for the things that are important to us. That simply wasn't possible. People forget this. We lived in very isolated worlds that were often very, very boring and where there was very little information, you know. People take it so for granted. As a kid, I used to have to bicycle to the library and search down the shelves to find information and you know, carry books home and figure things out and then think, oh well, I don't know what this means. It was complicated, it was really hard work to acquire knowledge and understanding. It's so easy now. So there's no excuse. We don't improve the world in the ways it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 52:11

Do you worry that the ease is part of the problem that's uh part of why we might be regressing psychologically as a culture is because things are way too easy and therefore we're not developing any kind of uh resilience, ability to tolerate discomfort, delay gratification.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

Yeah, absolutely. Spot on. That's extremely important. I see it all the time. People are incredibly adverse to making effort and to figuring things out, or to learn to do the hard work so that they can trust themselves, and so they end up living in a victimized way. A lot of people live in a victimized way. It's not that they have been victimized, it's that they believe that that is what's been done to them, and that's how they hold themselves. Instead of thinking, how can I find my little path out of here? They're thinking, Oh, why am I in this place? And they don't see all the many different paths ahead of them that they can take, and they have an amazing array of possibilities to get out of their stuck positions, but they just don't try because there is something about the culture that says you are a consumer and therefore a patient or a victim, somebody who has things being done to them rather than an actor and a person who can make a difference and who can change things. But actually, you are all of those things. You are the navigator of your little life, the only person who is in control of what's gonna happen to you in your life, and you forget that.

SPEAKER_00 54:14

I feel like I'm being coached now. I feel like I'm your client and I feel inspired. And uh, I'd like to underline something you said, which is the hard work that's required to trust yourself. I think a lot of people feel despondent because they because and I think this might be out of awareness for those people, they don't really trust themselves. So you might feel anxious. How am I gonna get this all done? How am I gonna meet my work deadlines? How am I gonna be a good wife or a good husband or what have you? It's because they don't necessarily trust themselves. And what you're saying is crucial that trusting yourself requires work because you kind of need to test yourself in life and see what you're made of, and that helps people calm down because you say, Okay, actually, when I was in this stressful situation, I did fine, it wasn't perfect, but I did fine, and that builds a library of evidence and reference experiences that actually, yeah, I can handle myself when things are tough.

SPEAKER_01 55:14

Exactly. Confidence is built and earned, and it's never given. And people expect to be a confident person, and they say, Oh, so-and-so is confident, I'm not confident, I can't do that. The point is that person gained their confidence in their own way, it doesn't matter how, that was their path, but for you right now to get that confidence means to strike out, face your anxiety, engage, learn by trial and error, and discover what is interesting to you, what you want to put your energy into, and discover, as with physical exercise, that the more you practice your life and the more you try out new things, and the more you discover what you're good at, and b that you can probably do almost anything you try. If you just do it for long enough and you're careful enough, you amaze yourself. Most people can do many more things than they think. They're very selective, they only want the things they think are nice, but actually, doing lots of different things creates that self-confidence and makes you aware that your anxiety is not an obstacle. Anxiety is the bloody energy that your body is giving you for free as soon as you start opening your eyes and think I have to do something about this, or oh, there's a possibility there, that raises your anxiety straight away. And instead of retreating in fear and saying, Oh, I'm anxious, oh, that must be dangerous, I'm not doing it, feel that. Feel that sense of energy that is building and get going and do it. And then your confidence builds and your capacity for thriving on anxiety builds too.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

And I guess it's it's that's why it's so important to pay attention to the ways we dispel things like anxiety and other negative emotions, because you're saying anxiety and other negative emotions are this important signal, this almost calling to say, okay, this is something worth looking into. Uh, but many people might dispel their anxiety by complaining, venting, you know, gossiping, using drugs or alcohol, using Netflix or pornography. And these these things obviously bring our levels of negative emotion down, but then they're a missed opportunity because now you don't have that energy, that that frustration, if you like, that if attended to directly, you could use to do something interesting or useful.

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Well, you're saying it very clearly. All the mechanisms people use are mechanisms of consumption. They turn themselves back into a passive consumer to calm themselves down and not have to feel their aliveness. That's what they do. Is it any wonder that in our world large percentage of people complain of anxiety and even larger percentage of depression? These are the two basic emotions we all feel every day, and we have to learn to work with them. We feel anxiety to engage with the world and to do new things and to learn, and we feel depression or sadness every time we have a loss. And we have losses every day, all the time. Every minute somebody says something to you and you think, oh god, that wasn't good enough or that wasn't right, and you feel a little bit of you know, depressed, disappointed feeling in yourself. If you let all that accumulate and get to you, you will start talking about yourself as in that low place. And if you don't allow yourself to go with the anxiety upwards to explore new things, anxiety becomes terrifying too. Both those things are inevitable experiences every day of your life, and we have completely forgotten that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:01

Yes, and maybe one thing I might bring in as well to this discussion is the sense that, because I feel people might listen to us and and misinterpret what we're saying as something like, you know, depression isn't real, you just have to get on with it, or anxiety is no big deal, it just means you're not working hard enough. That's not exactly what we mean. Uh I guess what I'll speak for myself, I would say, you know, depression, anxiety, and things like that, very difficult. I think it's important to have a sense of self-compassion and a sense that not everything in your life obviously is your fault. Maybe many bad things may have happened to you. You may have indeed been victimized. Um, but self-compassion shouldn't exist without some form of also self-challenge. Like, what do I want? How could I go about getting it in my life? How could how could I how should I treat myself like I would like to be treated? And it's this careful balance. Compassion, accepting not everything is your fault, but many, many things are your responsibility. And in my view, it's like this balance is one of the things people find it hard, it's hardest to get right. Because I think some people go way too hard on the self-compassion without challenge, and other people go way too hard on the challenge with no self-compassion. I think that could be equally toxic. And it's like, how do you ride the line in between? Which is something we're trying to do as therapists, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:21

That's right. So it's about balancing. But I'd also like to say, of course, when you're working with people who have really high levels of anxiety and panic attacks, something has gone very wrong with them. They're out of that homeostasis, they are not functional at that moment. So that is an exceptional situation. What I'm saying is that that is an extreme form of anxiety. And what you need to learn is to learn to relish your anxiety and not let it accumulate in that pathological way. And the same is true for the depressed side of things. You need to learn to let go of things and not aim for perfection and allow the losses so that it is a sort of gentle movement and it is imbalance and there is a homeostasis, you know, there is a swinging of the pendulum, if you like. But again, with depression, if you have bottled up all your losses and you have not dealt with them, and you have never allowed yourself the tears, and you have never allowed yourself the release of these things, then it comes to a point where it does feel like a darkness that you cannot escape. Those things are all too real, the terrible anxiety and the terrible depression. All I'm saying is that that is an extreme situation, and you can learn to deal with your anxiety in a very different way, so that it's actually an active anxiety, and with your sadness in the same way, so that it's an active sadness, and you learn to let go and release that tension. If you don't release that tension, then you can never find your secure place, and your secure place becomes a depressed place. And if you can't allow yourself to be lifted by your anxiety into action, then that too becomes a terrifying prospect. So those things, those symptoms of so-called mental illness are really symptoms of bad living, of overwhelm, of you having lived through circumstances that have made it impossible for you to be balanced in your anxiety and your sadness and in your ups and downs, and where your system has become out of sync with itself. And that is a real problem, and we do need real solutions to that. But I'm also talking about what it means to live in a balanced way because it's not sufficient to look at the problems, we also need to have a good picture of where we can get to, and what it means to really begin to live in a way that is satisfying and that is uplifting and that makes you feel like life is worthwhile.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:48

Worthwhile despite the fact you can also acknowledge that it's so tragic.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:52

Yeah, and that there will be lots of really terrible moments in it. You cannot change that. Each life has terrible moments of deep sadness and disappointment and loss, and each life has terrible moments where we have to rally around and do incredible amounts of work and biting our teeth together in order to get out of a predicament as well. All of that remains true.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:24

I'd like to shift gears a bit and talk about uh less about psychotherapy and more about psychotherapists. You've been involved in you know training institutions, and I'm sure you've seen a lot of um training therapists. What do you think makes for the foundations of a good therapist?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:43

Well, you have to be very curious, I think. That's the first thing. If you don't have that natural curiosity about the human condition, then you're going to come to all of your clients and patients in um in a way that That is perhaps not very engaging. I think your clients need to find you a person who really wants to be there with them and who genuinely find them interesting. That's the first thing. The second thing is that I really in existential training, I really look for people who have had some life experience. So I like people who come to it as a second career or who have been parents already. Parenthood is a very challenging situation which makes you ready for the ups and downs of life and understanding other people and empathy and self-compassion to traveling, does that, reading a lot. Basically, you have to know life a little bit. And I also look for whether people have had difficulties, whether they have been through times of catastrophes and trauma, and have found a way to surface from that and to learn from that, and whether they have that gentle kindness that comes with having been in a bad place yourself. I think that helps a lot as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:28

And when you're working with therapists early in their training, what are some common mistakes or misconceptions that you see happening over and over again?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:37

Well, jumping in for the person, you know, this is where Heidegger always comes in very, very helpfully. Heidegger makes the distinction between jumping in for a person and trying to solve their problems for them, or knowing better than they know what is good for them, or jumping ahead. He spoke about jumping ahead, and that means getting to a place, if you like, where you have a helicopter view or a bird's eye view of human existence. So you see things in a wider perspective, but you don't impose that on the person, but your interventions come from that place where you can throw some light in the darkness.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:25

Yes, and even the interventions themselves are an opening, an opportunity for exploration rather than a closing, saying, you know, I'm your therapist telling you this is the reality that you're experiencing.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:38

It is a dialogue. And a dialogue means that two people are speaking through something. That's what it means. It's not a dual logue, which would be two people talking together. It's about speaking through something, traveling through a problem, and looking at it from many different sides in that phenomenological way, going around the houses and throwing light on it from many different angles, and therefore beginning to see the problem for the first time, and to see where you might get out of the problem too. And that is what starts to happen if you do it in the right way. People start to say things like, Oh, I see it now. That's what I was doing. Oh, but I could do that very differently, or I'm not doing it like that. Well, of course, I've been doing that all the time. Of course, they react like that to me. You know, it's like people just have these aha experiences of suddenly seeing the thing that was an obstacle disclosed as a possibility.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:56

And what do you think? What are the mistakes we're making as a field in psychotherapy? Do you think there are any major blind spots or any things we should be discussing more, which we're not discussing now?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:09

Well, obviously, I'm going to say psychotherapy lacks in the existential dimension mostly. It's only really existential therapists still who do that, who have that sense of looking at a person's attitude to life, looking at their worldview, understanding where they're coming from, understanding how life works. Most psychotherapists don't really understand how life works. If you have one theory about it, you know, like a Freudian theory or a Jungian theory, you're only coming to it from one angle. You're not really looking at it in a round, and you're not giving your clients the benefit of all those many different ways in which they can make sense of things.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:07

Yes. I feel like acceptance and commitment therapy, I'm not trained in it, but I feel like acceptance and commitment therapy is quite good in from what I understand, helping people discover their values and live them out. Maybe not with an explicitly existential framing, but um that's one kind which I think is helping people to do this.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:27

I think that is one attempt at bringing existential work into a kind of CBT type framework which could be sold to you know an organization like the NHS, but it lacks the depth and the breadth of a full-blown existential approach, but it does pick out some of the salient aspects of existential work. So yeah, I'm quite fond of it as an NHS approach. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:57

Are there any books on existential therapy? You could obviously we recommend all your books, and you have a new new book out or new book about to come out called Beginning to Live: The Art of Existential Freedom. Do you have any other books that you might recommend which were particularly influential for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:14

Oh, I read a lot of Rollo May in the days when I was trying to work things out for myself. I think in some ways he was the most inspirational. Obviously, I would say read some of these philosophers, you know. Read um Camus Myth of Sisyphus, it will help you a great deal. Read uh uh Nietzsche's book, read read his Zarathustra, it will inspire you. Um, maybe read Paul T. Leach, The Courage to Be. Um, read some Rollo May books, definitely. Um, I would also recommend some of my colleagues. You know, I work with the existential movement worldwide with with colleagues like Kirk Schneider in California, read some of his books. Uh, Alfred Langley, who is a logotherapist, who used to work with Viktor Frankel for many years, read some of his stuff. There are many, many authors that will widen your scope on what you're doing as a psychotherapist, and that will widen your scope on how you're living your life.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:32

Amy, thank you so much for coming on. We're out of time, but it's been lovely to speak with you. Uh, I will point listeners in the direction of your new book. I'll put a link in the description. Uh, but thank you for thank you so much for coming on. We'll have to have you back at some point in the future.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:47

Cool. That was fun. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:50

Thank you.