Existential-Humanistic Therapy

What is it like to be you, right now, in this life?

This is the question at the center of existential-humanistic therapy. Not as a question to answer quickly, but as something to stay with — to circle around and feel your way into. Most people arrive at therapy wanting something. The anxiety to ease, the relationship to work, the weight to lift. That matters, and it's a critical part of this work. But if you stay with your experience long enough, you may start to notice that beneath the desire for change, there's something else — something that wants to be seen, not just solved.

Most approaches to therapy offer a new framework — a different way to understand what you're going through, a different set of tools. There is value in this, and for a time it can work. But existential-humanistic therapy starts somewhere different. Rather than offering a better explanation for your experience, we turn toward the experience itself — how you came to build the life you did, what you might be protecting, and what it costs. From here, a different path opens — one concerned with both the practical difficulties of life and the deeper patterns shaping it from within.

What the Work Feels Like

If you were to sit across from me, the first thing you might notice is how the work moves. We begin with what is present — whatever is alive in your experience when you arrive. From there, we attend to what unfolds: the thoughts, feelings, tensions, and associations that emerge as we slow down enough to notice them.

The body is central to this process. Much of what shapes our experience lives beneath conscious thought — in the gut, the chest, the jaw, the places where tension collects without our knowing. I stay curious about these somatic sensations as they frequently point toward something that matters — something the mind may not yet have found words for.

Over time, as our relationship deepens, patterns within your experience start to emerge — in how you speak, what you avoid, where your energy rises or drops. These patterns slowly reveal the structure of your life — a web of associations and lived experiences built over years of navigating existence.

As we bring awareness and understanding to this process, what gets revealed is how you learned to organize yourself around what felt difficult, what felt possible, and what had to be set aside. This is a process of encountering, and then discovering how your own map was built from the inside out. In time, the question shifts: who would you like to become?

This way of working draws from existential philosophy, humanistic therapy, Gestalt therapy, psychodynamic thought, and contemplative practice. Each offers a lens for understanding how experience organizes itself and how that organization can shift as we bring intention and awareness to it. The foundation remains existential, but the work is integrative and responsive to what each person needs in the moment.

Beneath the Surface

Most of us arrive at therapy with a specific concern — anxiety that has become unmanageable, a relationship that is not working, grief that will not resolve, a sense of being stuck in a life that no longer fits. These experiences matter and deserve attention, but they also tend to point us somewhere.

You might notice this as a kind of paralysis when facing a significant choice — not because you lack information, but because the weight of choosing feels difficult. Or as an ache for closeness that coexists with an impulse to keep others at a distance. Or as a flatness, a sense that nothing quite matters. Or as an awareness — sometimes sharp, sometimes just beneath the surface — that life is finite, and that this awareness colors everything.

The existential tradition calls these the givens of existence — the conditions every human life contends with. When someone is frozen by indecision, we are often working with freedom. When someone feels as if nothing matters, we are working with meaning. When someone holds others at a distance while aching for closeness, we are working with isolation. These givens form the foundation of how I listen, what I attend to, and how I understand what is moving beneath the surface.

The Encounter

What makes the existential-humanistic approach distinct from other forms of therapy is the quality of the encounter between two people in the room.

Existential-humanistic therapy is not something done to you. It is something that happens between us. I show up as my authentic self — not a distant observer but someone present and connected with what is happening in the room. The therapeutic relationship created is not a technique applied to your experience. It is the space in which your experience becomes visible in ways it cannot when you are navigating it alone.

When both people show up fully, something shifts. The patterns and structures we have been exploring — the ones built over years, often invisibly — begin to surface in the room, in how you relate to me, in what you move toward and what you pull away from. Old ways of organizing can be felt and examined rather than just described. And something new can emerge — not because it was planned, but because the relationship made room for it.

This is true whether I am working with an individual or sitting with a couple navigating the tensions of freedom, responsibility, and connection within their relationship. The encounter is not a technique. It is the ground on which the work stands.

Who This Work Is For

People arrive at this work from many directions — some through a specific struggle, others through a recognition that something in their life no longer fits. Some come having done years of therapy elsewhere and wanting to go deeper. Others come having never sat in a therapy room before.

What connects my clients is not a diagnosis or a level of self-awareness but an orientation — a willingness to be met honestly. If you sense that understanding your experience might change how you live — this work is likely for you. It does not require philosophical literacy or the right vocabulary. It only requires showing up.

The Tradition

Existential-humanistic therapy draws from two traditions that converged in the second half of the 20th century. Humanistic psychology brought the conviction that human beings are not broken machines in need of repair, but whole beings capable of growth, meaning, and self-direction. Existential philosophy — the tradition of philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre — brought a willingness to face the foundational realities of existence: that we are free and therefore responsible, that we are mortal, and that meaning is not given but created.

Clinicians like Rollo May, James Bugental, Irvin Yalom, and Kirk Schneider shaped this intersection into a form of psychotherapy that is both philosophically grounded and deeply relational. Their work informs how I practice — not as a set of techniques to apply, but as a way of understanding what it means to sit with another person and take their experience seriously.

For a deeper exploration of these ideas, visit The Existential Lens.

Existential-Humanistic Therapy in Eugene, Oregon

I offer existential-humanistic therapy in Eugene, Oregon for individuals and couples, with both in-person and telehealth sessions available statewide.

If something here resonates, you are welcome to reach out. You can also learn more about my background or explore who I work with.

This orientation shapes how I work across the full range of what brings people to therapy — anxiety, depression, grief, relationship conflict, life transitions, choice and direction, and the existential questions that run beneath them. You can explore any of these to see how this approach meets specific experiences.

For ongoing reflections on therapy, philosophy, and the human experience, visit The Existential Lens.