Existential therapy is an approach that focuses on the lived experience. It aims to explore your sense of understanding of the world and thereby to give meaning to your decisions, options, choices and responsibilities. It is not associated with a particular personality/psychological development theory but rather tries to elicit your take on the meaning of things. Meaning and associations of the lived experience depend largely on the interpretations and stance made in the session rather attaching a theory to them. This allows for a therapeutic process to be an open, honest and very much connected to the relevant difficulties of the client.

An Existential approach to therapy does not strive for a cure of a specific symptom nor to help you feel happy or better. These things may come as a consequence of a more fundamental aim: bringing about a greater sense of understanding, insight and awareness; shed light on unexplored issues and enable you to act or think differently. By allowing the person to unravel with another person tangled or stuck issues, this approach moves an experience, memory or feeling on in a different way.

Existential therapy draws upon existential philosophy, including the writings of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, Camus, Derrida, Wittgenstein and others. It has influences from Eastern and Greek philosophy and can be illustrated well by writers such as Dostoyevsky, Paul Auster, Franz Kafka and artists such as Hopper, Rothko and Freud. Moreover, the existential approach aims to construct the therapeutic process as an encounter that helps to think about life without attaching judgments or any other concepts other than the well being of the client.