Bookmark

@dharn999, something that I find really helpful is to work with the four core issues of Existential Psychotherapy. If I feel really stuck, I will go back and examine those and contemplate how each one might or might not be at play in my current emotional state. It's a disarmingly simple concept - what's hard is being willing to go deep enough to really address them.

The four core issues are:
Freedom
Meaning
Isolation (and/or Abandonment)
Mortality

A relatively easy example of how to use this is when we experience the death of someone close to us.

- Our own feelings and fears about Mortality are obviously in play, and need to be acknowledged and addressed openly rather than repressed.

- If the person was someone very close to us, Abandonment is BIG and it must be acknowledged and accepted, even though it might feel selfish for us to feel abandoned in the face of the other person losing their life. It's not just real, it's totally normal. In some situations, Abandonment's cousin Isolation might also be an issue that must be addressed.

- And then there's Meaning - death will always cause us to question the Meaning of life - the key is to be open to that question instead of repressing it as we so often do. Some deaths are naturally easier to accept than others, but that doesn't mean that we don't still, deep down, question the Meaning behind humans' awareness of death, and our utter lack of knowledge beyond it.

- Freedom might be an issue when experiencing the death or abandonment of someone, depending on the circumstances (loss of resources leading to dependence on others, for example).

As others have said, digging deep to find childhood reasons for our emotional makeup is not necessary - you only need to accept that the way you personally react to the world is a result of what you experienced and learned in childhood, and move on to use tools such as these to examine what is at the core of your current distress.

When it comes to job stress, for example, I would definitely advise looking at Freedom.

If you open yourself up enough, which requires being honest with yourself and not letting your brain block awareness, you might come across some early experiences that formed your current reactions, which can be very rewarding. This happened to me when I was doing writing exercises during the SEP, and none of it was at all earth-shattering - just revealing and ultimately quite freeing.