Existential Therapy in Seattle
For what stays wrong after everything checks out.
Practice details
Three ways people arrive
Nothing has changed, and that's the problem. Nothing is wrong in any way you could put on an intake form. But the meaning has gone out of your work, your routines, sometimes everything at once. You're not sick. You're facing real questions about what you're doing with your life and why the answers you had stopped working.
You're on the other side of trauma work. The processing did what it was supposed to. What's left is the question the trauma used to answer for you: what now, and what for. Therapists call this post-traumatic growth. I hold it as its own work, not an afterthought to the processing.
Or something has broken the structure. Quarter-life, midlife. The divorce, the retirement, the empty house, the diagnosis, the death close by. Something that organized your sense of what your life was for has changed — by your choice or not — and the old meaning doesn't cover what's here now.
What existential therapy is
A conversation — sustained, deliberate, more direct than most — about how you're actually living. Your relationship to your body. To other people. To your work and the things you care about. To time itself. That's where meaning lives or doesn't. When it goes, one of those has usually shifted, or been asking for attention longer than you knew.
All four of those relationships rest on facts nobody negotiates their way out of. The tradition calls them the existential givens. You will die, and you know it. You are free in ways that are frightening to take seriously. You can be surrounded by people and still be the only one living your life. And meaning isn't included with your life; it gets made, or it doesn't. Most of us arrange our days so the givens stay quiet. Then something turns the volume up.
Therapy in this tradition treats the questions as accurate rather than as symptoms to manage down. The work is building a life that can answer them honestly.
My MA is in Existential-Phenomenological Psychology from Seattle University, where I'm now teaching faculty — years of reading the philosophy closely and working out what it means for sitting with another person while they meet a given for the first time. The questions don't rattle me, and I don't need to convert them into symptoms to know how to work with them. You can read more about my approach.
Existential therapy and trauma work
In my practice these aren't separate. Trauma raises existential questions by force — about safety, trust, whether the world is the kind of place a life can be built in. And existential trouble often has old learning underneath it: conclusions about worth or belonging that formed early and respond to processing, not persuasion. We use both: EMDR, Brainspotting, or KAP when material needs to move, and the existential work for what the material was about. You can read the account of change underneath in How Therapy Changes Memory.
What sessions are like
Slower than you'd expect, and more direct. I don't hand out worksheets on meaning. The work is conversation: paying attention to what's actually showing up, staying patient with what hasn't found words yet, sitting with the question that matters instead of solving past it. Silence gets to do its work here. So does humor — this is not solemn work, whatever the philosophers' reputations suggest.
Some sessions are entirely conversation. Some move into processing when something old is clearly driving. When the question is what you want your life to be about, I often draw on ACT. We decide together, and you'll always know why we're doing what we're doing.
Is this right for you?
This work might fit if:
- The questions above feel closer to your trouble than any diagnosis you've been offered
- Symptom-focused therapy helped — and still missed the thing you actually came about
- Something ended, arrived, or was lost, and the ground hasn't come back
- You want a therapist who won't pathologize the questions or rush you to answers
It might not be the place to start if:
- You're in acute crisis — stabilization comes first, and we'd begin there
- You want a structured, symptom-targeted protocol and nothing else — which is a legitimate want, and I'd point you well
Research and further reading
- Existential therapies: a meta-analysis (Vos, Craig & Cooper, 2015) — fifteen studies with 1,792 participants. Support was strongest for structured meaning-centered programs, often for people with serious physical illness, a narrower thing than open-ended existential therapy.
- The therapy relationship and outcome: a 2018 meta-analysis — across 295 studies and more than 30,000 patients in many kinds of therapy, a stronger working relationship went with better outcomes. That’s an association; it doesn’t show the relationship does the work on its own.
Common Questions
Is existential therapy just talking about death?
No — though death is allowed in the room. Mortality is one of the tradition's four classic concerns, alongside freedom, isolation, and meaning. In practice, most sessions are about what you're doing with being alive: the marriage, the work, the choice that won't resolve, the flatness that has no name yet. Death mostly shows up as the thing that makes those questions urgent rather than optional.
How is this different from regular talk therapy?
Less by technique than by stance. I don't start by assuming distress is a malfunction to be corrected. I first ask whether the distress is accurate — whether the anxiety, emptiness, or restlessness is telling the truth about something in your life that needs to change. We examine what your reactions are responding to and what you want to do about it.
Do you combine existential therapy with EMDR or other processing work?
Yes — in my practice they're one thing. When what's driving the present is old learning, we process it with EMDR, Brainspotting, or, where clinically appropriate, KAP. When what's driving it is a question your life is actually asking, no amount of processing substitutes for answering it. Most people need some of both, and the sequencing is part of the clinical judgment you're paying for.
Is existential therapy evidence-based?
Partly. Structured meaning-centered therapies have controlled-trial support, mostly with people facing serious illness. Separately, the quality of the therapy relationship is one of the most consistent predictors of outcome across kinds of therapy, and I lean on it heavily. But the tradition as a whole is not a protocol and hasn't been trialed as one. Where a specific problem has a strongly evidenced treatment, I use it, held inside this frame.
Do I need a crisis of meaning to start?
No. Low-grade flatness counts. So does the sense of performing a life that looks right and lands wrong. Some of the best existential work happens before anything collapses — while there's still room to move, and choosing is cheaper. You don't need to wait until the questions are on fire.
Is this religious? Does it conflict with faith?
Neither. Existential therapy is not a belief system; it's sustained attention to the facts of being a person, and it works within a faith, after one, or without one. People carrying religious trauma are welcome here, and so are people whose faith is the deepest thing they have. What you make of meaning is yours; my job is the quality of the attention, not the conclusions.
Is existential therapy covered by insurance in Seattle?
Yes. It's billed as standard psychotherapy and covered by most insurance plans. I am in-network with several major carriers — the current list is on my rates page. For out-of-network plans I provide superbills, and I work with Thrizer to simplify out-of-network billing.
Does existential therapy work over telehealth?
Yes — of everything I offer, this work translates to video most directly, since its instrument is conversation and attention. I see clients in person in Capitol Hill and by telehealth across Washington State, Colorado, and Florida. Some people prefer the room for this kind of talk; others find the questions come easier from their own space. Either works.
How I think about this work → Approach
I'm not taking new clients right now. I plan to open inquiries in November, for sessions starting after December 5, 2026. If you need someone sooner, my availability page lists good places to start →