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 mental, emotional, relationship, psychiatric, and existential problems.

☞ 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

Short-term counselling and symptom-management approaches are available in this practice, and can provide relief from anxiety, stress, worry, distress and confusion when you are struggling.

Specifically tailored meditation and yoga tuition is also available for relief from over-thinking, addictive impulses, anxiety and other difficult emotions, subject to assessment of your needs.

Medium- and longer-term depth psychotherapy is focussed on identifying and resolving the root causes of enduring problems, which offers you the opportunity to resolve long-standing issues; to make new lifestyle changes, and 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 thoughts and words

• 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 apps, A.I., devices, and technology to help people calm and reassure themselves according to an idea of normality programmed into a computer code, psychotherapy in this practice is about human relationship and its power to recover our humanness, through human contact, sharing personal truth, empathy, intuitive wisdom, vulnerability, and the development of emotional and spiritual intelligence.

Combining Existential Analysis and Integrative Psychotherapy with somatic approaches like yoga and meditation, dietary changes, improved sleep hygiene, psychotherapy in this practice offers a unique, multi-faceted 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 medicated and numbed out of awareness. This 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, whether we believe in them or not

If you want more than symptom relief from a phone App that calms you down temporarily; or code-driven advice from A.I. software; or glib ‘hacks’ and techniques from an online influencer, Existential Analysis and Integrative Psychotherapy in this practice is a path for re-humanising yourself in a world that is being rapidly and deliberately de-humanised. You are not a “hackable animal” to be controlled, programmed, or standardised to think, walk and talk like everyone else. Nor is your life a problem to be solved by more information and technology. Nor are you a workhorse whose energies and dignity are to be abused by an employer or other authority figure. Human life is an experience for growing your consciousness into greater sanity, love, power, and wisdom, so that you can live well emotionally, mentally, physically, morally, naturally, spiritually. In this sense, Existential Analysis is for individuals who want to re-learn how to be more human, not become better replicas and mimics of a majority who are increasingly problematising their humanness by the day.

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; not in words, but in feelings, intuitions, tensions, dreams, and thoughts.

Emotions like anxiety, anger, resentment, guilt, envy, and intrusive thoughts and unwanted behaviours, for example, are not symptoms of defect, abnormality, or disease. They are sane responses to aspects of your humanity that are being neglected. An existential approach does not treat difficult experiences as medical symptoms (unless they are proven to be biological in nature), but as purposeful and meaningful expressions to be understood. With this approach you can stop stigmatising yourself, and instead begin to identify and understand the original causes and purpose driving your present struggles. And learn to understand the deeper wisdom and language of your psyche: something self-help books, A.I., therapy apps, and youtube videos cannot reach in us. ‘Symptoms’ and ‘conditions’ can then be resolved emotionally and energetically, rather than continuing to believe yourself to be weak, flawed, defective, or in need of chemical or cognitive adjustment.

The seeds of the kind of suffering that psychiatry, medicine, and much of psychology codifies and labels, often lie forgotten in our early social conditioning, routine mistreatment, the false beliefs we form about ourselves and the world, and in our forgotten fears and traumas from as early as infancy. They lie in the dysfunctional society we have been creating and our responses to it. These origins in our relationships emerge later in adulthood, particularly under stress, as deep and enduring insecurities, physical tensions and difficult feelings in the body, problematic behaviours, procrastination, dysfunctional relationships to Self, other people, food, substances etc; internal mental conflicts, self-loathing and guilt, struggles with mood and depression, stress, phobias and addictions, relationship friction, and other types of inner torments that can adversely impact our mental and physical health.

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

We live in an era where the value of being human is being rapidly destroyed by routine dependencies on escapism, technology, division, mindless obedience and conformity, and uncritical deference to Artificial Intelligence, for example. All the things we are told would make our lives ‘easier’. The natural human being and human authenticity are becoming scarce as a result. Existential Analysis is a de-pathologising and re-humanising approach to human relationship. It is all about your actual, lived experience as a unique being. Something that a technocratic mindset will never appreciate.

In our work, whilst we can use psychiatric and medical terms to refer to aspects of our habits, ways of relating, and mental states, each of us is ultimately expressing some aspect of our own unique, human nature and particular history and perspective. Rather than judging and reducing yourself to a stigmatising and self-limiting diagnosis, and advice offered by a computer program, a more useful question is whether or not you are defeating yourself as a person, or realising your greater human potential. And if not, how we can find ways to help you live in a state of greater awareness, skill, conscience, responsibility, grace, empowerment, self-reliance, perspective, and appreciation of the life that you are, so that you can be at peace with your Self.

Whether or not you see yourself through the lens of a psychiatric or psychological term - like ADHD, or narcissism, depression, phobia, alexithymia, personality disorder, mood disorder, bulimia/ anorexia nervosa, body dysmorphia, addiction, or whatever your label - our task in psychotherapy is to speak in plain terms about what you are experiencing and doing; and what helps or hinders you. And what alternatives and different paths you could take to either adjust, adapt, or overcome your problems.

Having extensive experience in working with severe and enduring conditions given psychiatric labels, including those considered by some as ‘untreatable’ such as narcissism (which is now a cultural ‘pandemic’), it becomes possible to get to the existential core of what you struggle with, and to re-humanise it as something purposeful and entirely natural. 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 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.