SUPPORT FOR WOMEN IN SANTA BARBARA, CA IN-PERSON & ONLINE ACROSS CALIFORNIA
Existential Therapy for Identity and Purpose
There are parts of being human that cannot be reduced to a diagnosis. Questions of identity, meaning, purpose, belonging, freedom, love, and mortality are woven into our psychological lives.
Existential therapy offers a place to engage these questions with depth and curiosity, and to consider what it means to live a life that feels increasingly like your own.
What makes a life worth living?
We spend much of our lives learning how to function within the world we inherited. Existential therapy creates space to ask something deeper: What matters to me? What gives my life meaning? Who am I becoming, and how do I want to spend the time I have here?
These questions often emerge during periods of transition, loss, uncertainty, disillusionment, or growth, but they are not problems reserved for moments of crisis. They are part of being human.
Therapy gives us a place to engage the tension between freedom and responsibility, connection and isolation, meaning and uncertainty, while becoming more conscious of the values and desires that orient our lives.
Together we’ll explore
Questions of meaning, purpose, and direction
Identity and the process of becoming more fully ourselves
Life transitions and periods of uncertainty or disorientation
Freedom, choice, responsibility, and the fear of making the wrong decision
Loneliness, belonging, intimacy, and our need for connection
Mortality, grief, loss, and our relationship to the passage of time
Spirituality, mystery, and questions that may not have tidy answers
The tension between the life we inherited and the life we want to create
Together we’ll explore
Questions of meaning, purpose, and direction
Identity and the process of becoming more fully ourselves
Life transitions and periods of uncertainty or disorientation
Freedom, choice, responsibility, and the fear of making the wrong decision
Loneliness, belonging, intimacy, and our need for connection
Mortality, grief, loss, and our relationship to the passage of time
Spirituality, mystery, and questions that may not have tidy answers
The tension between the life we inherited and the life we want to create
My Integrative Approach to Identity and Purpose Therapy
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Existential therapy engages the fundamental questions and tensions of being human. Rather than offering prescribed answers, the work creates space to examine meaning, freedom, responsibility, mortality, connection, and the choices through which we participate in our own lives. The aim is not to resolve every uncertainty, but to develop a more conscious relationship with how we want to live.
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Our sense of identity and purpose is shaped not only by conscious choice, but by the unconscious. Psychodynamic work helps us explore the inherited stories, early relationships, defenses, longings, and internal conflicts that influence who we believe we are and what we imagine is possible for our lives.
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Some of life's larger questions cannot be answered through thought alone. Mindfulness and embodied awareness help us listen more closely to our emotional and physical experience, creating space for intuition, desire, grief, uncertainty, and other forms of knowing that can be difficult to access through intellect alone.
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A life that feels more fully inhabited.
Existential therapy does not promise certainty about who we are or what we are meant to do. Instead, it asks us to become more intimate with the questions.
As we become clearer about what matters, we can begin to distinguish inherited expectations from our own values and desires, make choices with greater intention, and participate more fully in the lives we are already living.
The work is ultimately an orientation toward greater capacity for meaning, connection, responsibility, wonder, and engagement with the brief and mysterious experience of being here.
Get in touch
If something you’ve read here resonated with you, feel free to write me a message and we can set up a time to chat. I would love to meet you.