As many readers know, I finished my APPA Certification in philosophical counseling a year ago. In fact, it was closer to two years ago. Since then, I’ve been a practicing philosophical counselor. I even have a page on this website for philosophical counseling services.

What have I learned? Has philosophy shown its power to help people with everyday problems? Have I gain any insights from my work? Or has the appeal to philosophy to solve practical matters flopped?

First of all, people haven’t exactly been knocking down my door seeking philosophical counseling services. But that’s normal and expected. Philosophical counseling is relatively new, and insurance plans don’t cover it. Furthermore, it’s not my first job. I haven’t exactly been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars advertising myself.

But I’ve had clients. And in this post, I’ll draw on my experiences working with two particular clients. We can draw some lessons from those cases. Of course, I’ll use artificial names in order to keep them anonymous.

First Case: Rita

Rita came to me as a young mother experiencing anxiety related to the health and normal life progress of her two young children. While she has had mostly positive experiences in therapy and is well versed on the history of psychiatry, she recently started having concerns about the social construction of mental illness, especially involving mothers.

More precisely, what resonated with Rita was the idea that therapists might import their own cultural assumptions about gender and worry. Perhaps most importantly, she thought therapists might too quickly dismiss the notion that anxiety expresses deeper life and existential issues. That’s a good topic for philosophical counseling.

And so, we explored these issue in our sessions. We explored both her anxiety and the natural of anxiety itself. It was tough to disentangle the extent to which her anxiety primarily concerned her children or existential issues in her own life. And we read a philosophical account of anxiety from Samir Chopra. Chopra’s competing existentialist and Buddhist accounts of anxiety provided us with a useful starting point.

Among other lessons, I think the most useful idea to come out of our sessions was the struggle to distinguish between useful and non-useful forms of worrying.

Second Case: Dave

Unlike Rita, Dave came to me looking to discuss the history of philosophy and philosophical ideas. However, we began with a couple of sessions on a specific issue Dave had. This concerned the nature of meaning, specifically applied to an important set of career decisions Dave needed to make.

Dave came to me with an interesting and varied background. He had moved in life from being a jazz musician to a jiu-jitsu expert and shop owner, and a tech industry worker. At the time we began, he was deciding between med school and law school.

In the course of our discussions, it was obvious that Dave had a sense of purpose. He wanted a career that allowed him to do important, meaningful work. His current role as a tech industry worker provided him with monetary success, but he didn’t find it meaningful.

We discussed different philosophical approaches to meaning. Dave found particularly attractive a subjective naturalist approach. This provided him with a basic framework for thinking about his upcoming decision.

Furthermore, Dave and I explored topics of his choosing that didn’t relate directly to his main topic of meaning and career. And we did so on a variety of topics. After those first few sessions, Dave sought guidance in exploring his philosophical interests with the help of someone – me! – who has taught philosophy for a living. In these sessions, we explored everything from ancient Greek eudaimonism to gender and social construction.

In a later email, Dave told me he had gotten into law school after a solid performance on the LSAT.

Final Thoughts

I chose these two clients because they show the diversity of experiences of clients who seek philosophical counseling. Whereas both clients approached me with common human struggles, our sessions proceeded very differently from this starting point.

With Rita, who already had experience reading and writing about anxiety, our sessions became philosophical dialogues. With Dave, whose interests were eclectic and who had less prior experience, our sessions were more pedagogical and closer to guided exploration.

I think both Rita and Dave gained something through our sessions. And I know they both challenged me. Examining the human condition on the fly isn’t easy.

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