Existential Psychology

Growth and Well-Being

By  | 

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
– Rumi

If we include growth and well-being under the rubric of love, we see that Rumi’s advice is exactly what most good existential therapists follow to help their clients overcome their issues. When many of us think of the process of therapy, we think of trading maladapitve patterns of behavior for adaptive patterns of behavior, of working on ‘adjustment’, or of tweaking the underlying character structure.

Implanting a different set of values, beliefs, and personality traits is an uphill battle and a bad idea. It assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. People do change, but not in the way that most of us imagine. It’s not that you change who you are, but rather that you eradicate the obstacles to becoming who you are.

This concept respects the fact that all of us, underneath the muck, have a deep yearning for growth and self-actualization, just like a seed has a yearning to grow into a massive tree. If we can just create the proper conditions for growth and get rid of the barriers to it good things will happen on their own.

If you think in these terms growth becomes joyful even though it’s still a lot of work, because this growth respects and encourages who and what you are instead of trying to change who and what you are. If you have built barriers you can demolish them too, and when you do your growth will feel natural not forced, and the result will be a state of well-being.

Related posts:

  1. The Decision To Grow Is Also The Decision To Die Why is it that so many people, maybe most people, remain stuck in undesirable environmental conditions and dysfunctional patterns of behavior even when they’re aware that change is possible and that this change would benefit them greatly? Why do people choose stagnation over growth? The answer lies in the ever-present specter of existential anxiety, that […]...
  2. What We Are is Becoming One of the central paradoxes of human existence is that we are most ourselves while in the process of becoming something else. A world famous elderly musician nearing the end of his life was drilling scales on his favorite instrument when a student asked him “Why do you still practice?” He patiently replied, “Because I’m […]...
  3. Give Yourself Permission to Grieve Many of us carry around our unfinished grief our whole lives. We don’t give ourselves permission to grieve because we’re afraid of what letting down our guard might do to us. Grief is a dark, unknown abyss and the secret fear is that if we allow ourselves to sink into it we’ll never find our […]...
  4. Personal Evolution A comment I hear a lot from those who have grown cynical about their lives and relationships is ‘people don’t change’. This deterministic attitude is based in part on their own failure to evolve and in part on their subjective experience with family members, friends, and other important people. There are a few things I […]...
  5. Paradox Of Change “When I accept myself as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers Acceptance and change don’t appear to be related entities and in fact seem to be contradictory. Isn’t the desire to change just about any facet of life spurred by dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs? To us the central paradox […]...
  6. Take Credit For Growth Sometimes people believe they are responsible for things they had little to do with yet believe they had little to do with things they really are responsible for. We can probably thank the psychoanalytic mechanisms of repression and externalization for this phenomenon. It occurs all the time in the therapeutic setting, where credit for growth […]...
  7. Growth Ana is an accomplished yoga practitioner and an excellent instructor. When people who have never practiced hear this they are usually curious to know more, and during the conversation they inevitably say the same thing. I have heard it probably a hundred times. “I would love to try yoga, but I’m not flexible.” Ana always […]...
  8. Human Growth If we lived to be 10,000 years old maybe we could put off chasing our dreams or becoming the people we were meant to be. Many don’t adequately realize how short time really is, and they secretly believe they are going to live forever. This theme comes up over and over in therapy and I’ve […]...
  9. Human Growth Is A Continuous Process Most motivated people striving forward in their personal and professional lives make the mistake of constantly discounting their present progress in favor of some not so clearly defined future progress. Where they are is never good enough, it’s always where they’re hoping to get that’s good enough. But if and when they reach that far […]...
  10. What To Do When Encountering Resistance To Your Growth If you’re in the process of growth you’ll surely encounter resistance from the people around you, even friends and family members who purport to really care about you. This is because growth implies change and a change to any part of the interconnected social system ends up impacting the whole system. In other words your […]...
  11. Human Growth And The Garden The challenge and opportunity we face as humans lies in the fact that we become who we really are through our choices.  Most organisms are bound by nature, and do not have to worry about taking an active stand in their lives.  An oak seed, under the right conditions,  will grow into an oak tree.  […]...
  12. Waiting Patiently For Human Growth When you plant a seed, you don’t just water it one or two times and then give up, thinking “Obviously it’s never going to sprout.” You know that the process takes time, that even if conditions are optimal it will be months before you see the fruits of your labor. And though you can’t see […]...
  13. Grief And Growth Grief means you have lost something or someone dear to you. You desperately want that something or someone back although you know it’s impossible, so you desperately want what you see as the next best thing, which is to be rid of your painful thoughts and feelings around your loss. Approaching grief in this way […]...
  14. Don’t Let Anyone Else Derail Your Growth The growth you see happening in yourself hopefully feels significant to you because it is significant, but this doesn’t mean it will seem significant or even be noticeable to the people around you. This is a big problem for motivation because so much of our motivated behavior is controlled by reinforcements. There are few if […]...
  15. Growth Takes Time A lot of people schedule their first counseling session with unrealistic expectations. They have a question and expect an answer, something’s broken and they want it fixed. Exactly what is broken they don’t quite know and they might not be able to adequately formulate their question, but the secret hope is that the counselor will […]...
  16. The Process Of Growth Is Paradoxical Most people who decide to go to therapy to overcome various problems of living are looking for answers. They want these answers to be concise and concrete. Their mentality is basically, “Here’s the problem. What’s the solution?” And they can’t be faulted for this expectation. Seeking outside help is a tacit admission of the felt […]...
  17. Self-Actualization, Growth, Change, And Grief Self-actualization, growth, change, and grief don’t exist in vacuums. They are interdependent, each needs the other or is an outcome of the other. This is because each moment of becoming is a moment of change. And as we become who we really are we have to let go of who we were. A lot of […]...
  18. Deficit Psychology Versus Growth Psychology Many Western psychologists perpetuate the same cognitive bias in the therapeutic situation that the general population perpetuates in the wider sphere of life, and this is not only that minimizing the various problems responsible for dysfunction should be the focus of time effort but that upon the minimization of those problems the therapeutic alliance should […]...
  19. Focusing On Growth Or Focusing On Dysfunction There is no clear-cut answer as to whether clinicians should focus their attention on growth, on helping clients develop their potentialities, or focus it on dysfunction, on helping clients to cure their ill-being. But there is a qualitative difference between dysfunction and what we could call a baseline level of functioning. Symptoms of dysfunction cause […]...
  20. Growth Versus Stagnation Happy people find themselves in a state of growth. Unhappy people find themselves in a state of stagnation. Growth says “What I am today is not necessarily what I will be tomorrow.” Stagnation says “What I am now is all I will ever be.”  Growth is imbued with hope, with ever-expanding possibilities, while stagnation is […]...
Related Items