Existential Therapy

Target Population
Both forms of therapy have been shown to be effective especially with people in institutionalized settings. While existential therapy tries to help people find meaning in their lives and through this help them overcome a crisis, SFBT tries to provide brief therapy that will enable the client to deal with future problems (Corey, 2013). Considering the nature of the two therapies it becomes apparent why they would work well with populations such as people in institutionalised settings. SFBT has shown to be effective when working with people in prison. A study conducted by Lindforss and Magnusson (1997) evaluated the success of SFBT when applied to Swedish prisoners in Hageby Prison. The study divided its participants into two
Both theories stress the client's ability to change and the fact that the client is the expert on their own life and worldview. Further both theories focus mostly on the client's future and do not concentrate on the problems of their clients past. They both believe that their should be an authentic and collaborative relationship between clients and counselors and that the client is in charge of their own change. Both therapies also do not stress diagnosis. Existential therapy in contrast to SFBT does not have a lot of techniques that are used in therapy. Therefore it serves well as a foundation of this integrative approach. When working with this foundation the counselor sees their client as capable of self-awareness, responsible and able to choose their own future, in search of meaning in their life and faced with anxieties that are part of the human condition. This can work well with SFBT techniques that are goal-oriented, positive, and focus on the future. Techniques from SFBT that can be integrated with the existential therapy foundation are pretherapy change, the exeption questions, the miracle question and scaling questions. Pretherapy change looks at what the client has already done to change before the first therapy session. This can help demonstrate to the client the importance they have in the design
Stan is a 35 year old man, who struggles with his alcohol dependency and his sense of worthlessness. The start of his therapy was court appointed due to his convictions of driving under the influence. However he does want to change his life, even though he does not know how to. He started to go to college and is studying psychology because he wants to be able to work with troubled children as a counselor or social worker. Furthermore he was able to leave some of his troubled past behind him which he is proud of. He has problems with socialising and easily gets intimidated by women. Further he had a difficult childhood and feels like he disappointed his family. He has thought of suicide in the past and often feels anxiety and guilt. He is determined to change his life and wants to feel better about himself and stop being dependent on alcohol (Corey,