"Chronic illness changes everything. At the beginning of many people's chronic illness journey, they may feel as if illness is an annoying detour that will be forgotten as soon as they can heal and get back to business as usual. As it sinks in that illness has changed them irrevocably, they realize that their pre-illness self is gone forever. This painful reckoning with pain, fragility, mortality and identity leads to an existential crisis. In addressing this crisis, existential therapy can be extremely helpful."
"Existential therapy "aims to illuminate the way in which each unique person comes to choose, create, and perpetuate his or her own way of being in the world (Akbari et al., 2023)." With its roots in philosophy, existential therapy provides a framework for looking at "the big questions": Who am I? Why do we suffer? What does it mean to be alive? Can there be meaning in the midst of pain?"
"Freedom: Existential therapy involves thinking a lot about freedom, choice and responsibility. It asks us to contemplate the ways in which we have choices even in the face of immovable limits. This is not to say that we don't have feelings about those limits. It is to say that we are encouraged to look for the ways that we continue to have agency."
Chronic illness alters identity, bodily integrity, and life trajectory, often provoking a painful existential reckoning with fragility and mortality. This reckoning commonly produces concerns about freedom, meaning, death, and isolation. Existential therapy provides a philosophical framework to examine who one is, why suffering occurs, and how meaning can persist amid pain. The approach emphasizes agency within limits, acknowledging choices in response to fixed constraints. The work involves engaging dialectical tensions rather than resolving them into simple answers. Existential work is highly personal, iterative, and ongoing, requiring continual adaptation as illness and selfhood evolve.
Read at Psychology Today
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