Humanistic therapy and existential therapy have a lot in common. Both approaches see you as a whole person. Both value your experiences, choices, feelings, and ability to grow. Both can help you understand yourself instead of simply focusing on a list of symptoms.
So, what makes them different?
The main difference comes down to what each approach tends to focus on.
Humanistic therapy often focuses on personal growth, self-understanding, self-acceptance, and becoming more fully yourself. Existential therapy focuses more directly on questions about meaning, freedom, choice, responsibility, relationships, and the uncertainty that comes with being human.
The two approaches can also overlap. In fact, modern existential-humanistic therapy brings ideas from both traditions together.
At Vedder Counselling, we offer existential therapy in Chilliwack, Salmon Arm, and online across British Columbia. If you would like to explore your options, call us or book a counselling session with one of our registered clinical counsellors.
What Is Humanistic Therapy?
Humanistic therapy focuses on your ability to grow, understand yourself, and make choices that reflect who you are.
It developed partly as a response to approaches that focused heavily on unconscious conflict or observable behaviour. Humanistic psychology places more attention on your lived experience and your ability to make choices and develop your potential.
Carl Rogers played an important role in the development of humanistic therapy. His person-centred approach emphasizes empathy, acceptance, and a genuine relationship between the therapist and client.
Your therapist does not simply tell you what to do.
Instead, therapy gives you space to understand your feelings, explore your experiences, and develop a clearer sense of yourself.
For example, imagine that you constantly feel like you are disappointing other people.
You might have spent years trying to be the person your parents, partner, friends, or workplace expected you to be.
Humanistic therapy may help you ask:
- What do I actually want?
- What do I feel when I stop trying to please everyone?
- Why do I find it so difficult to accept myself?
- What would I choose if I trusted myself more?
The goal is not to turn you into a different person.
It is to help you understand yourself and live in a way that feels more genuine.
What Is Existential Therapy?
Existential therapy often explores the deeper questions behind your struggles. Your counsellor may use different existential therapy techniques to help you explore these questions and better understand your experiences.
Existential therapy explores meaning and purpose, freedom and choice, responsibility, identity, relationships, loneliness, and connection. It can also help you explore death and loss, uncertainty, authenticity, and major life changes.
The American Psychological Association describes existential therapy as an approach that focuses on free will, self-determination, and the search for meaning.
Existential therapy does not assume that you can control everything that happens in your life.
You cannot control every loss, illness, relationship, decision made by another person, or unexpected event.
But you can explore how you respond to what happens.
For example, imagine that you spent 20 years in the same career and suddenly lost your job. You may feel anxious about money. You may also wonder who you are without that job.
Existential therapy gives you space to explore those questions.
Humanistic vs Existential Therapy: What Is the Main Difference?
Both approaches care about your personal experience. Both can explore your emotions, relationships, choices, and values.
The difference often comes from where the conversation goes.
Humanistic therapy tends to place more emphasis on personal growth, self-acceptance, and reaching your potential.
Existential therapy tends to place more emphasis on meaning, freedom, responsibility, choice, and the realities that everyone eventually faces.
These differences are not absolute. Many therapists combine ideas from both approaches. Existential-humanistic therapy is one example. It combines existential philosophy with humanistic psychotherapy and focuses on areas such as meaning, freedom, authenticity, presence, and agency.
| Humanistic Therapy | Existential Therapy |
| Focuses on personal growth and self-understanding | Focuses on meaning, purpose, and how you want to live |
| Emphasizes self-acceptance and personal potential | Emphasizes freedom, choice, and responsibility |
| Explores your feelings, needs, and experiences | Explores deeper questions about life and existence |
| Often asks, “Who am I and what do I need?” | Often asks, “What gives my life meaning?” |
| Helps you become more authentic and accepting of yourself | Helps you make sense of uncertainty, choice, loss, and major life questions |
| Can help with self-esteem, relationships, identity, and personal growth | Can help with identity, purpose, grief, major life changes, loneliness, and feeling stuck |
| Carl Rogers strongly influenced the approach | Thinkers such as Viktor Frankl and Rollo May influenced existential therapy |
| Often focuses on your potential for growth | Often focuses on how you respond to the realities of life |
How Are Humanistic and Existential Therapy Similar?
Despite their differences, humanistic and existential therapy share many important ideas. Both approaches focus on your personal experience and give you space to understand yourself, your relationships, your choices, and what matters to you.
1. Both Look Beyond Your Symptoms
Depression, anxiety, grief, and stress can affect how you feel and behave. But humanistic and existential therapy do not look at you as a collection of symptoms.
Your counsellor may want to understand what is happening in your life and how you experience it.
For example, if you feel anxious, therapy may explore more than the anxiety itself. You might talk about what feels uncertain, what you fear, what has changed in your life, or whether you feel stuck in a situation.
These conversations can help you understand where your feelings come from and what they may be telling you about your needs, relationships, or current situation.
2. Both Place Importance on the Counselling Relationship
A strong relationship with your counsellor can make it easier to talk openly about things you may normally keep to yourself.
Both approaches value empathy, respect, honesty, and genuine connection. Your counsellor listens to you without treating you as a problem that needs to be fixed.
For example, you may feel afraid to talk about a decision because you worry that someone will judge you. A supportive counsellor can give you space to explore that decision without telling you what you should do.
You do not need to pretend that everything is fine. You can bring your real thoughts and feelings into the counselling room.
3. Both Give You an Active Role in Therapy
Humanistic and existential therapy do not treat your counsellor as someone who has all the answers.
You bring your experiences, concerns, and questions into each session. Your counsellor helps you explore them, but you remain involved in deciding what you want to understand and what changes you want to make.
For example, you may realize that you keep saying yes to other people even when you want to say no. Therapy can help you understand why this happens and explore what you want to do differently.
The goal is not for your counsellor to make decisions for you. It is to help you understand yourself well enough to make choices that feel right for you.
4. Both Help You Develop a Deeper Understanding of Yourself
Sometimes, you know that something feels wrong but cannot explain why.
You may feel unhappy even though your life looks good from the outside. You may keep putting other people’s needs before your own. You may achieve a goal you worked toward for years and still feel unsatisfied.
Therapy gives you space to slow down and look at these experiences more closely.
You may start to notice patterns in your thoughts, feelings, relationships, and choices. With a better understanding of yourself, you can begin to think about what you want and what you may want to change.
What Does Humanistic Therapy Focus On?
Humanistic therapy often explores your inner experience and your potential for growth.
Your counsellor may help you explore:
Self-Acceptance
You may be hard on yourself without even realizing it. You might constantly think you should be doing better, feeling happier, or handling things more easily.
Maybe you tell yourself, “I should be further ahead,” “I should know what I want,” or “I should be stronger.”
Humanistic therapy can help you understand where these expectations come from and why you hold yourself to them. It gives you space to accept your feelings, recognize your needs, and develop a kinder and more honest relationship with yourself.
Personal Growth
You may want to make changes but feel unsure where to start. Humanistic therapy can help you understand what you need and what may be holding you back.
For example, you may realize that you have built your life around other people’s expectations. You may then begin making choices that better reflect your own needs and values.
Authenticity
Authenticity means living in a way that feels true to you. That does not mean saying everything you think or ignoring other people’s needs. It means becoming more aware of what you genuinely feel, value, and want.
What Does Existential Therapy Focus On?
Existential therapy often explores the deeper questions behind your struggles.
Meaning
You may have everything you thought would make you happy and still feel empty. Existential therapy can help you explore what gives your life meaning. That meaning may come from relationships, creativity, work, family, learning, helping others, spirituality, community, or something else that matters to you.
You do not need to discover one perfect purpose.
Meaning can develop and change throughout your life.
Choice and Responsibility
You cannot control everything. But you often have some choices available to you. Maybe you cannot change how another person treats you. You may still be able to decide what boundary you set. Maybe you cannot change the fact that your children have grown up and left home.
You can still decide what you want this next stage of your life to look like.
Existential therapy can help you distinguish between what you cannot control and where you still have a choice.
Uncertainty
Life does not come with complete certainty. You may not know whether a relationship will work, whether a career change will succeed, or what your future will look like. That uncertainty can create anxiety.
Existential therapy can help you explore how you respond to uncertainty instead of waiting until you feel completely certain before making a decision.
Mortality and Loss
Existential therapy can also explore difficult realities such as death, grief, aging, and loss. These subjects can feel uncomfortable. Yet they can also change the way you think about your relationships, priorities, and time.
You may begin to ask what matters most to you now.
Which Therapy Is Better: Humanistic or Existential?
Neither approach is automatically better.
The more useful question is:
“Which approach fits what I am experiencing?”
Humanistic therapy may feel like a good fit if you want to:
- Understand yourself better
- Build self-acceptance
- Explore your emotions
- Develop greater confidence
- Understand your needs
- Make choices that feel more authentic
- Work through relationship concerns
Existential therapy may feel like a good fit if you want to:
- Explore your sense of purpose
- Understand why life feels empty
- Think through a major life decision
- Explore questions about identity
- Cope with grief or major life changes
- Understand loneliness or disconnection
- Explore freedom, choice, and responsibility
- Build a life that feels more meaningful
You also do not have to choose an approach based on a label alone.
Many therapists draw from more than one therapeutic approach. Modern existential-humanistic therapy, for example, brings humanistic and existential ideas together rather than treating them as completely separate systems.
You can also choose between different ways of attending counselling, such as in-person vs virtual therapy.
Can Humanistic and Existential Therapy Help With Depression or Anxiety?
Both approaches can explore the experiences that may sit underneath depression or anxiety.
For example, anxiety may come with questions about uncertainty, identity, relationships, or the future.
Depression may sometimes involve feelings of emptiness, disconnection, hopelessness, or loss of meaning.
Therapy can help you explore these experiences while also considering practical changes.
Existential therapy does not suggest that every mental health concern comes from a lack of meaning.
Depression and anxiety can have many contributing factors. Different people may need different forms of support.
A qualified mental health professional can help you understand what kind of care may be appropriate for you.
Talk to a Counsellor at Vedder Counselling!
You do not have to figure everything out on your own.
If you feel lost, disconnected, stuck, or uncertain about what comes next, counselling can give you a place to slow down and explore what is happening.
At Vedder Counselling, our registered clinical counsellors provide a supportive space where you can talk openly about your experiences, relationships, values, choices, and goals.
We offer existential therapy in Chilliwack, Salmon Arm, and online across British Columbia.
If you are unsure whether humanistic, existential, or another counselling approach fits your needs, you can talk with a counsellor about what you are experiencing and explore your options.
People Also Ask
Is existential therapy a type of humanistic therapy?
They are closely related, but they are not the same. Humanistic therapy focuses more on growth and self-acceptance, while existential therapy focuses more on meaning, choice, freedom, and responsibility.
What is the main difference between humanistic and existential therapy?
Humanistic therapy focuses on personal growth, self-understanding, and becoming more authentic. Existential therapy focuses more on meaning, purpose, choice, uncertainty, and how you want to live.
Can a therapist use both humanistic and existential therapy?
Yes. Many therapists combine ideas from both approaches to help clients explore their emotions, personal growth, values, choices, and sense of meaning.
Is humanistic therapy good for anxiety?
It can help you understand the feelings, needs, relationships, and experiences connected to your anxiety. Your counsellor can help you decide what approach best fits your concerns.
Is existential therapy good for depression?
It can help you explore feelings of emptiness, disconnection, loneliness, or loss of meaning. However, depression can have many causes so you may need other forms of support as well.
How do I choose between humanistic and existential therapy?
Think about what you want to explore. Humanistic therapy may suit you if you want to focus on self-acceptance and personal growth. In contrast, existential therapy may suit you if you want to explore meaning, purpose, identity, or major life decisions.
