Existential Well-being Counseling: A Person-centered Experiential Approach

1. Well-being and Positive psychology.

• Getting tuned in to theories of well-being and positive psychology.
• Developing awareness of well-being counseling.
• Developing attitudes for well-being: gratitude, empathy and (self-)compassion, simplicity.

2. Existential approach: coping with human life.

• Getting tuned in to existential theories.
• Developing existential connection.
• Developing awareness of existential givens.
• Becoming sensitive to existential practice.

3. Dimensions of human existence: goals and values.

• Addressing questions such as: “Who am I?” “What motivates and inspires me in my life?”
• Improving awareness of different dimensions, goals and values in human development.
• Recognizing imbalances and problems in human existence.
• Practicing Focusing as a skill for self-development.
• Being aware of similarities and differences between Focusing and Mindfulness.

4. Life Journey: Existential challenges and Strengths

• Deepening life stories in the frame of existential and positive psychology.
• Deepening existential themes: freedom, responsibility, choice, loss, sadness, grief, fear, solitude, finiteness and death.
• Developing strengths: self-knowledge, anger, confrontation, conflicts, forgiveness, wisdom.

5. Meaning and Spirituality.

• Exploring sources of meaning in life.
• Expanding awareness to the spiritual dimension.
• Developing virtues for living meaningfully and well. Including Love as the meaning giving virtue by excellence

6. Person-centered approach: interpersonal conditions of growth.

• Developing growth-promoting relationships and presence.
• Developing non-judgmental empathic relating and responding.
• Developing authentic relating and responding and interactional confrontation.
• Developing process-sensitivity and process-diagnosis.

7. Experiential approach: body-orientedness and intrapersonal conditions of growth.

• Developing embodied presence.
• Developing awareness of pre-verbal senses and body expressions.
• Developing attitudes and interventions to facilitate intrapersonal conditions of growth.
• Extending Focusing to non-verbal expressions and working with dreams.

8. Processing emotions and overcoming intrapersonal blocks

• Being aware of commonest process-blocks such as feeling “nothing”, feeling overwhelmed, one part which is victimizing or attacking another.
• Being aware of different styles of processing emotions.
• Recognizing ways people get stuck in emotions.
• Having some idea about Emotion-focused therapy.

9. Integration: Counseling from a person-centered, experiential, existential well-being perspective.

• Integrating counseling skills.
• Knowing how to start and end a counseling process.
• Deepening skills for self-care and healing.