What Is a Chronic Illness?

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Chronic illness raises existential concerns.

Four major existential issues involve freedom, meaning, death and isolation.

Existential work requires working in the complexity of dialectics.

Existential work is highly personal and ongoing.

Chronic illness changes everything. At the beginning of many people’s chronic illness journey, they may feel as if illness is an annoying detour that will be forgotten as soon as they can heal and get back to business as usual. As it sinks in that illness has changed them irrevocably, they realize that their pre-illness self is gone forever. This painful reckoning with pain, fragility, mortality and identity leads to an existential crisis. In addressing this crisis, existential therapy can be extremely helpful.

Existential therapy “aims to illuminate the way in which each unique person comes to choose, create, and perpetuate his or her own way of being in the world (Akbari et al., 2023).” With its roots in philosophy, existential therapy provides a framework for looking at “the big questions”: Who am I? Why do we suffer? What does it mean to be alive? Can there be meaning in the midst of pain?

Major Themes in Existential Therapy

Irvin Yalom, a noted existential therapist, outlines four major concerns of existential therapy: freedom, meaninglessness, death and isolation (Akbari et al, 2023). Each of these themes is present in the chronic illness experience.

Freedom: Existential therapy involves thinking a lot about freedom, choice and responsibility. It asks........

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