Philosophical Counselling is for you if…

The world isn’t making sense.

You feel locked into a trajectory not of your choosing.

You worry about the future.

You feel there is a disconnect between what you value and how you act.

You are unsure what it is you truly value.

You don’t know which beliefs are yours or simply the beliefs you have inherited.

You feel disconnected from the people around you.

You feel disconnected from the more-than-human world.

Life feels less than truly meaningful on more occasions than you care to admit.

There’s no higher purpose that genuinely enlivens you.

You feel stuck in a job, or worse, feel a strong sense of moral dissonance at work.

When you attempt to envisage the future, very little comes to you.

You feel like you have limited agency, authority or authorship in your life.

The creative capacities of your being feel stifled.

You don’t trust yourself to face life’s inevitable difficulty with courage.

Your capacity for criticality and reasoning aren’t quite serving the way you’d like them to.

You are truly excited by life’s big questions; What is real? What can be known? What truly matters? How should I act? How can my capacity for both abstract thought and concrete action serve a whole far greater than myself?

What happens in a Philosophical Counselling session?

A philosophical counselling session is a dialogue; a journey towards shared meaning. The process requires each party to pay attention, listen deeply and respond thoughtfully.

The counsellor’s role is to attune, deliberately question, and productively challenge. Through the process of doing this, your ideas are tested, broken down, tested again, and refined in a process that leads to anything from a deep recognition of uncertainty (which is entirely okay. A wonderfully refreshing point from which to begin a new process of exploration that serves your life) through to a crystal clear idea that might now shape your entire being going forward.

What will we focus on during a typical session?

If you opt for a less structured Socratic approach, a session could focus on any topic, challenge or insight of your choosing. It’s common for clients who select this method to prioritise this approach because they have a very specific thing they want to speak about. If you opt for the SMILE_PH Method (Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health), we will progressively explore your relationship to your body, your sense of self, your sense of belonging, your sense of the possible, your sense of purpose, and finally, the philosophical process and structure that brings the 5 previous topics together. This often takes its form in the Tetractys.

How can Philosophical Counselling help you?

Every person’s philosophical journey is entirely unique. What is universal, however, is that this is a meaning-making process likely to enhance the coherence of your thoughts, your speech and your actions. Your thoughts. Your speech. Your actions. This is a process that can inspire and empower you to live with greater authoricity; a healthy, dynamic combination of authenticity, authorship and authority. And it’s a process that often proves to existentially enliven people in ways they were previously unaware of.

It has been claimed that philosophical health will be to the 21st century what mental health was to the 20th. Let us work together to see if that proves true.

With φιλία (philía),

Nate