Common Misconceptions in Therapy

✍️ How EH Is Different from CBT, DBT, and EFT

Most people who come to therapy have heard of CBT, DBT, or maybe EFT. And yeah, they’re popular! They offer structure, tools, and quick symptom relief, which fits neatly into a culture obsessed with optimization and output.

Existential Humanistic Therapy isn’t that. It’s NOT standardized. CBT was built to be teachable, scalable, and replicable; like an app. EH is something else: relational, alive, and unrepeatable. There’s no algorithm for presence.

🔄 CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)

CBT focuses on identifying and challenging distorted thoughts and behaviors. 

EH might ask: “What does it mean to live in a world where your worth feels conditional, and what happens if you stop performing for it?”

🔄 DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy)

DBT gives you skills to survive emotional storms. 

EH asks: “What truth are those storms trying to show you?”

🔄 EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy)

EFT focuses on attachment patterns in relationships. 

EH zooms out even further: “How do you relate to existence itself?”

Therapy	Focus	Approach
CBT	Thoughts & behaviors	Structured, goal-oriented
DBT	Emotional survival	Skills-based, crisis-ready
EFT	Relational attachment	Emotionally corrective
EH	Lived experience & existential truth	Depth-oriented, exploratory, relational

✍️Common Misconceptions About Existential Humanistic Therapy (EH)

Existential Humanistic Therapy is easy to dismiss; especially in a mental health culture that prioritizes measurable outcomes, fast results, and clinical jargon. But much of that dismissal is built on misunderstandings about what EH actually is... and what it isn’t.

Let’s clear it up.

⚠️ Misconception 1: “It’s just abstract philosophy.”

From the outside, EH can sound like a therapy made of quotes and metaphors... but when you’re in it, it’s anything but abstract.

It’s grounded in the felt experience of being alive; especially in a world that often feels like it’s unraveling (Schneider & Krug, 2017). Clients bring in the emotional and existential weight of today’s realities:

• Being queer or trans in a culture actively trying to legislate your erasure

• Carrying the grief and rage of systemic racism and generational trauma

• Feeling complicit in systems of white privilege and struggling with how to hold that awareness

• Trying to make meaning in a world facing ecological collapse, political instability, and spiritual fragmentation

EH doesn’t float above these truths; it moves toward them. It doesn’t offer clean answers. But it does offer a space to hold the questions... and to be fully witnessed while asking them.

Being human doesn’t offer clean answers, and neither does an examined life (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d.). For some, that’s a pill too bitter to swallow. But if you’re willing to ask the questions, you deserve someone beside you; not someone who rushes in to rescue you.

Your therapist should believe you can weather it. You’re the one steering the boat... I’m just here to make sure you don’t capsize.

⚠️ Misconception 2: “It’s not evidence-based.”

This one comes from a rigid and often outdated view of what counts as “evidence.”

EH doesn’t lend itself to clean RCTs or brief symptom inventories; because the therapy isn’t built for short-term relief. But if you look at what actually predicts therapeutic success, EH is built around those very things.

Psychologist Bruce Wampold’s work has shown that the common factors—empathy, therapeutic alliance, client readiness, and therapist presence—account for most of what makes therapy work (Wampold & Imel, 2015; Laska et al., 2014). These aren’t secondary features of EH; they are the model.

And yes, CBT does well in early outcome studies... but those studies often stop tracking after a few months (Cuijpers et al., 2014). Long-term? Less solid. Meanwhile, the broader field of psychology is still in a replication crisis (Open Science Collaboration, 2015); so we should all be a little more cautious about declaring what "works" and what doesn’t.

⚠️ Misconception 3: “It doesn’t treat anything.”

EH doesn’t approach anxiety, depression, trauma, or grief as pathologies to correct; it sees them as truths to explore. That doesn’t mean they’re left untouched. It means they’re not amputated from your experience.

Yes, people come to EH with symptoms... but they stay because the work is real.

• It meets people navigating identity collapse, moral injury, spiritual crises, and grief that won't be rushed

• It helps people who feel like they’re performing health but not actually living it

• It gives space for questions that can’t be answered... and that, ironically, is often where healing begins

So no, it may not reduce your panic attacks in six sessions. But it might finally help you understand what that panic is trying to tell you.

💡 The Truth Beneath the Symptoms

People come to EH with depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, relational wounds, and more. What’s different is how those things are approached. Rather than being treated as pathologies to manage, they’re seen as expressions of how you're living — or not living — in alignment with your truth.

When therapy is grounded in truth, symptom relief becomes a byproduct — not the entire goal.

EH doesn’t float above these truths, it moves directly toward them. It doesn’t try to resolve or neutralize them, but instead helps clients sit in the tension, feel what’s real, and begin the work of meaning-making in the face of it.

Being human doesn’t offer clean answers, and neither does an examined life. For some, that’s a pill too bitter to swallow. But if you’re willing to ask the questions, you deserve someone beside you while you ask them – not someone who tries to rescue you from the asking.

Your therapist should believe you can weather it.

You’re the one steering the boat,  I’m just here to help make sure you don’t capsize.

Ancestors of Thought

Here’s the full list of sources that shaped this piece. From peer-reviewed studies to mentors who’ve shaped me.

🧔🏻‍♂️🪞Living Lineage

Because even though some teachers publish in journals, they sit with you, look you in the eye, and change your fucking life; even when they’ve gone before you come.

Edelstein, B. (2014–present). Mentor, therapy dad, and existential compass.

Peer reviewed by Kerrins T. Conroy III at Bear Haven Counseling