Quite likely you’ve arrived here because you’re interested in philosophical counseling or in the lifelong learning services LifeMap Center provides.
For sure, if you have a mental or emotional disorder, or even think you might have one, you want to seek out a psychotherapist or other mental health expert for professional help. If you are a believer, there may be times when your faith is shaken or when you need help discerning God’s will. At such times you will most likely turn to your priest, your minister, your rabbi, your imam, or some such spiritual advisor.
But let’s suppose you would like to explore with someone a personal concern that is neither a mental or emotional disorder nor a religious dilemma, an issue, in other words, that does not fall clearly within the domain of the psychotherapist or the spiritual director. If that’s where you find yourself right now, then philosophical counseling may be what you’re searching for.
To put it another way, your issue may not concern mental or spiritual health as much as it does the perplexities, dilemmas, and just plain resistance, sometimes crushing, that life deals most of us from time to time. If so, yours may be the type of life issue–an existential issue–where a philosophical counselor may be helpful.
On what types of life issues do philosophical counselors work with their clients? The possibilities are wide-ranging, as this partial list suggests:
. . . issues, for example, involving the meaning and purpose of life; issues about one’s concept of happiness and the good life; about identity, motivation, and self-actualization; about personal goals and life direction; about self-mastery versus other-directedness, authenticity versus self-deception; about values, relationships, and commitments; about tough decisions, especially those involving mutually exclusive alternatives; about duties to others and to oneself; about reversals, endings, and new beginnings; about losses and separations, death and dying; about self-empowerment, and — perhaps most importantly — about self-knowledge.
These are some “real world” issues we might explore together in philosophical counseling. Quite a list, isn’t it? No doubt you can think of other issues that might be added.My counseling approach is nondirective and dialectical, based on a Socratic model of gently guided, never controlled, interaction between the two of us (or more of us, if we have group counseling).
As noted in my essay Philosophical Counseling: Philosophy Meets Psychology, it is just because we are all naturally philosophers that philosophical counseling makes so much common sense.
As we jointly explore your issue, my role will be to help bring out your “philosopher within.” Our goal will be that “insight through mutual reflection and dialogue” for which LifeMap Center was created.
You as an informed consumer will want to be sure philosophical counseling fits your specific needs. For that reason I do not charge for our initial in-person consultation at LifeMap Center in either Wilmette (Linden Square Business District) or Chicago (Streeterville, between the Magnificent Mile and Navy Pier).
For a listing of our lifelong learning services (adult education, philosophy cafes, and private instruction), please open our Lifelong Learning link.We accept all major credit cards and will consider sliding-scale payment arrangements.
Check our FAQ’s for additional information. And please don’t hesitate to contact me with any further questions you might have. I look forward to hearing from you.
Last, like many people I know, you may take comfort in these encouraging lines from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:
Be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Patrick Keleher
President, LifeMap Center