existential-analysis.com* is a psychotherapy practice located in Glasgow, UK offering over 27 years of clinical experience (NHS and private practice) to help patients address the full spectrum of simple to complex problems: mental, cognitive, behavioural, emotional, relationship, psychiatric, and existential (concerning life meaning and purpose).

☞ Individuals, couples and groups can receive skilled, experienced, professional help and support in-person, or online via high-quality video conferencing wherever you live in the world.

*former domain name therapyglasgow.com

Counselling and symptom-management approaches are available in this practice, and can provide relief from anxiety, stress, worry, depression, loss, bereavement, distress and confusion when you are troubled. You can quickly understand and create more effective ways of coping within a fairly short period of time.

Specifically tailored meditation and yoga tuition is also available for relief from over-thinking, addictive impulses, anxiety, insecurity, panic attacks, and other difficult emotional states, subject to assessment of your core needs, presentation, and history.

Depth psychotherapy is focussed on identifying and resolving the root causes of your struggles, including more serious or enduring problems that you may have tried to solve by other means. Deeper work offers you the opportunity to better understand the causes of your problems, and resolve long-standing issues, pain and suffering; to overcome ingrained habits and unsatisfying ways of relating to others. To make new lifestyle changes that are good for you and your relationships. And to create more authentic ways of experiencing and living your life.

Depth psychotherapy is:

• analytical: focussed on helping you to clarify and deepen your understanding of yourself

• somatic: concerned with your relationship to your body and what you are doing with your emotions

• existential: formed around the big perspective of your life in the context of personal meaning, mortality and the time you have left on Earth, the unique value of your own experience, self-reliant empowerment, and walking your own path independent of other people telling you how you should be

• trauma-informed: focussed on resolving unfinished business from your past that causes you pain or hardship in the present

• neurology-informed: geared to understanding what you can do to support and heal your nervous system

• experiential: tailored to help you experience your life with more depth instead of turning everything into over-thinking

• holistic: Existential Analysis and Integrative Psychotherapy encompass the childhood, family, workplace, social, political, economic, lifestyle, environmental, physiological, and spiritual contexts that produce our emotional and mental disturbance and suffering.

• human: unlike the trend in using phone apps, A.I. advice, youtube videos, and technology to help people temporarily calm and reassure themselves, psychotherapy in this practice is about human relationship and its power to heal us through genuine human contact and understanding, sharing personal truth, through empathic connection, intuitive wisdom, vulnerability, and the development of emotional and spiritual intelligence to deepen our appreciation of life.

Combined with somatic approaches like yoga and meditation, dietary changes, improved sleep hygiene, psychotherapy in this practice offers a unique, holistic way of working that treats you as a whole person with a history, lifestyle, context, values, views, and aspirations, rather than a collection of unwanted experiences that many of us may try to medicate and numb out of awareness. Psychotherapy can include additional supports as standard, such as:

• detailed assessment at the start of our work, with a list of therapeutic tasks core to your needs and hopes for change

• tailored one-to-one yoga tuition: for helping you exist more in your body and less in your thoughts

• various forms of meditation and guided awareness practices: to help you build skills in controlling your mind instead of letting your mind control you

• art therapy: for individuals who find it easier to access emotions and experiences through images, music, movement etc

• specific protocols designed by this practice: for helping patients recover and heal their nervous systems and resolve conflicts within their psyche

• extensive resources: articles, courses, guided meditation audio, and optional support between sessions when required

• socio-cultural and spiritual: we live embedded in political and spiritual contexts that profoundly influence our direction and mindset

If you want more than symptom relief and techniques to tide you over, psychotherapy in this practice is a path for re-humanising yourself in a world that is being rapidly and deliberately de-humanised. Human life can be an experience for growing your consciousness into greater sanity, love, power, and wisdom, so that you can live well emotionally, mentally, physically, morally, and in line with your nature. In this sense, Existential Analysis is for individuals who want to re-learn how to be more human, more themselves, and who may be fed up trying to squeeze themselves into a mould dictated by society.

Working at deeper levels of your psyche can allow you to realise that ‘symptoms and diagnoses’ are merely surface ways of labelling human nature. They are not who you are. Nor are they defects of your character. Depth psychotherapy aims at building self-reliant mental health and wellbeing by learning to understand, accept, and see the value in the being that you are. And thus what your mind, body, emotions, and conscience are actually saying to you through your symptoms; not in words, but in feelings, intuitions, tensions, habits, avoidances, dreams, and thoughts.

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." ~ Søren Kierkegaard

We live in an era where there seems to be no such thing as ‘normal’ any more. Where the value of being human is being rapidly eroded by routine dependencies on social media, escapism, technology, consumerism, division between people, mindless obedience and conformity, and uncritical acceptance of the powers that be, for example. Many of the things we were told would make our lives easier, have in fact made them harder and less human in many ways. Real, human connection and individual mental stability are suffering as a result.

Ask yourself whether you are fully valuing, respecting, understanding, appreciating, and caring for yourself as a person right now. Ask how authentic your relationships are and whether you are truly happy in them. Ask whether or not you feel free and secure in life, and whether it is meaningful enough. If not, then it is possible to find ways to live in a state of greater awareness, skill, conscience, responsibility, fearlessness, self-reliance; with perspective and appreciation of the life that you are, so that you can find greater peace with your Self.

It is possible to quickly get to the core of what you struggle with, and to resolve it wherever humanly possible. All you need (and this is no small thing) is the courage and conscience to face yourself, so that you can deepen your understanding of how and why you are as you are. And then to do the straightforward work you need to do to form a new, more self-reliant, self-respecting path of wellbeing for yourself. This is true whether you have a diagnosis or not.

See the SERVICES page for more details on specific problems patients bring to, and resolve, in therapy.