Another term pulverized beyond recognition is “self-empowerment,” yet you claim Philosophical Counseling can be empowering. How so?
To an extent not commonly recognized, what we think determines much of how we feel and what we do. Quite often the client is unaware of deeply settled habits of thought that, over time, have become unexamined life-directing assumptions. Hence the philosophical counselor, while slighting neither feeling nor behavior, is especially attentive to the client’s thinking, from which flows a vast portion of his or her feelings and actions. A common discovery route is to trace current feelings and behaviors back to their sources in thinking, understood broadly to include perceptions, concepts, beliefs, opinions, imagination, memory, and reasoning. Here the philosophical counselor’s special training in Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge) and Logic is helpful in sorting out the various cognitional elements involved. For example, just about every philosophical counselor, I think it safe to say, has worked with a client who entered the counseling encounter feeling worthless and u
