The shape of the life being considered — a different city, a different kind of work, a relationship honestly reckoned with — is vivid enough. The reasons for it are clear enough. And yet the move doesn't happen. The decision stays open. The tension, as a result, becomes the place where a significant portion of the actual life gets spent.
Staying in the tension this long is rarely about fear of commitment. The situation has a structure that makes movement genuinely difficult.
Kierkegaard observed that anxiety is not the feeling that something bad is happening. It is the feeling that the future is genuinely open — that real choices exist, that something is at stake, and that we are responsible for what we do with it. What produces anxiety is not the bad option but the good one. The life that might actually be possible.
When a decision involves staying or moving toward something else, the familiar has a particular quality. It is known. Whatever its limitations, it is actual — present, touchable, already understood. The alternative exists only as possibility. It lives in a future that cannot yet be accessed, and because it cannot be accessed, it cannot be fully known. What that means in practice is that the anxiety of considering it has no floor. You can think your way closer to it, gather more information, talk to people whose judgment you trust, make the list again — and the anxiety remains, because the thing that would resolve it is on the other side of a door that hasn't been opened yet.
The tension has a structural quality. Thinking doesn't exit it — it just continues inside it.
Action is the only thing that moves possibility into actuality. Once a decision has been made and lived — once the leap has been taken and landed somewhere — what was hypothetical becomes real. The new job is no longer something being imagined; it is something being experienced. And it is only then, on the other side, that you can begin to know whether it was right. Not before. The certainty being waited for, the one that would make the decision feel safe, is only available after it has been made. That's simply how decisions work. The confirmation is only available on the other side of making one.
What also becomes clear, on the other side, is what was given up. Every genuine choice forecloses something. The path taken means the other path wasn't. This is not a side effect of deciding — it is built into the structure of it. Loss is present in every real decision, and our resistance to that loss — the refusal to grieve what will not be chosen — is often what keeps a person suspended in the tension longest. Not because they don't know what they want, but because wanting it means accepting that something else will be let go of. That is its own kind of grief, and it deserves to be treated as one.
On the other side of the leap is something existential therapy takes seriously as a real possibility: the risk of joy. Not resolution, and not the life with the difficulty removed — but a genuine arrival somewhere that couldn't have been reached from inside the tension. That possibility is only available after the leap has been made, not before.
The people I work with in New York — in the West Village, Chelsea, Tribeca, Park Slope, and Brooklyn Heights — are often people who know, somewhere, what they want. What they are working through tends to be specific: grieving what won't be chosen, sitting with a future they can't yet access, and the weariness that comes from living too long between two things. Existential therapy is work that takes that tension seriously — not as a failure to decide, but as a genuine human condition worth examining carefully before, and sometimes through, the leap.
I work with adults throughout New York via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Existential Therapy
Existential therapy explores questions of meaning, freedom, choice, and identity rather than focusing primarily on symptoms. It treats emotional difficulty as information worth examining, not just a problem to be corrected.
What does existential therapy help with? It is well-suited for anxiety, life transitions, grief, and the persistent feeling that something is off even when life appears to be working. It tends to appeal to people who want to understand themselves more deeply, not just feel better in the short term.
How is existential therapy different from CBT?
CBT targets specific thought patterns and behaviors. Existential therapy is more concerned with the larger questions underneath — what a person values, what they are choosing, and whether the life they are living is genuinely their own.
Who is a good fit for existential therapy?
It works best for people who are reflective and willing to sit with uncertainty rather than looking for a quick fix or a structured program.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist providing existential therapy via telehealth in New York and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.