• what people are on when they have certain diseases like
  • [[cancer]]
  • [[ms]]

Existential Psychotherapy§

Existential Psychotherapy: Death, Freedom, Isolation, Meaninglessness§

Source

According to Existential Psychotherapy, some psychological disorders are the result of individual’s inability to reconcile themselves with certain characteristics of the human condition.

Best treatment for this is

• self reflection
• philosophical exploration
• expansion of awareness
• acceptance of the human condition

Existential Psychotherapy has roots in…

• Phenomenology: Individual’s immediate experience and personal grasp of reality is primary and the appropriate subject of concern.
• Humanistic Psychology: Individual has the capacity to change and direct their life and fulfill the innate human desire to live fully and realize one’s highest potentials.
• Existentialism: Life’s Ultimate Concerns are…

Death§

The ultimate boundary that limits and structures our existence. The fear of death greatly influences our internal experience. Lurking beneath our every waking moment is a death anxiety which subconsciously influences our behavior, and structures our worldview.

We all have Death Anxiety. We try to alleviate this thru symbolic immortality…

1. Biologically - living thru ones children
2. Theologically - belief in an afterlife / reincarnation.
3. Creatively - living thru one’s works.

"A denial of death at any level is a denial of one’s basic nature and begets an increasingly pervasive restriction of awareness and experience. The integration of the idea of death saves us; rather than sentence us to existences of terror or bleak pessimism, it acts as a catalyst to plunge us into more authentic life modes, and it enhances our pleasure in the living of life." (Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom)

Freedom§

It is assumed that freedom is intrinsically desirable, but quite frequently individuals are apprehensive about freedom, and can even develop a “fear of freedom”.

Free means responsible for one’s own life.

“One who fails to live as fully as one can, experiences a deep, powerful feeling “existential guilt.” That is a positive constructive force, a guide calling oneself back to oneself.” (Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom)

Isolation§

Existential isolation, referring “to an unbridgeable gulf between oneself and any other being”. The fact that becoming an individual entails isolation explains why many people cower from the task of becoming an individual, preferring instead to alleviate their feelings of loneliness via conformity and immersion in the masses.

The path to becoming an individual requires that one not flee this isolation, but embrace it, suffer it, and develop the ability to "actively face the feeling of being alone and abandoned by the world."

Meaning of life§

"Meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything."

Many existentialists have stressed that the ultimate meaning of human existence is unattainable. this does not preclude one from finding personal meaning, or meaning to one’s own existence.

One way to create a meaning for our-self is Self Actualization. Aristotle asserted that the proper end, or aim, of each thing is the realization of its own being, or the actualization of its latent potentialities. individual’s proper end is to actualize the latent capacities within “Become who you are”. This is a difficult and arduous task requiring self-knowledge, commitment and courage – and is thus a purpose or meaning worthy and sturdy enough to support one’s life.

In every human being there is an active will toward health, an impulse toward growth, or toward the actualization of human potentialities. But at once we are confronted with the saddening realization that so few people make it. Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or of self-hood, full humanness, self-actualization.”(Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Abraham Maslow)

“…the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown. What on a lower level had led to the wildest conflicts and to emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher - level of the personality now seemed like a storm in a valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that, instead of being in it, one is now above it.” (Carl Jung)

Tags§

#existentialism #psychology #literature-notes

Pharmacotherapy is therapy using pharmaceutical drugs,[1] as distinguished from therapy using surgery (surgical therapy), radiation (radiation therapy), movement (physical therapy), or other modes.

#therapy #surgery #radiation #movement

Pharmacotherapy is therapy using pharmaceutical drugs,[1] as distinguished from therapy using surgery (surgical therapy), radiation (radiation therapy), movement (physical therapy), or other modes.

#therapy #surgery #radiation #movement

Pharmacotherapy is therapy using pharmaceutical drugs,[1] as distinguished from therapy using surgery (surgical therapy), radiation (radiation therapy), movement (physical therapy), or other modes.

#therapy #surgery #radiation #movement

Pharmacotherapy is therapy using pharmaceutical drugs,[1] as distinguished from therapy using surgery (surgical therapy), radiation (radiation therapy), movement (physical therapy), or other modes.

#therapy #surgery #radiation #movement

The Liberation of Cosmic Insignificance Therapy§

Metadata§

• Author: [[Tim Ferriss]]
• Full Title: The Liberation of Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://tim.blog/2021/12/15/the-liberation-of-cosmic-insignificance-therapy/

Highlights§

• The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized the suffering of Hollis’s patient: “Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
• It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred.
• To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate—because it means you’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile if your finite life is to mean anything at all. This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?
  • Tags: [[favorite]]
• A New York writer and director named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself starting to think of as “possibility shock”—the startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough.
• Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and over-demanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.