Anxiety
Core Life Questions
Core Life Questions
This directive is designed for clients who present with a diffuse sense of unease or a lack of direction, particularly when their stated goals feel disconnected from a solid personal foundation. It is most effective when therapeutic progress has stalled and you suspect the client’s difficulties are rooted in fundamental anxieties about their existence and choices, rather than specific, symptomatic complaints.
The worksheet provides a structure for examining the implicit assumptions that shape a person’s life. By prompting reflection on several universal conditions of human experience, it helps the client articulate their personal philosophy. This process clarifies core values and identifies discrepancies between their current life and a more deliberate one, creating a stable platform for subsequent clinical work.
Core Life Questions
| Concern | Questions to Consider |
|---|---|
| Finite Life | How does the fact that your life will end shape your daily choices and long-term goals? |
| Freedom & Choice | Given your freedom to choose, what are you responsible for creating in your life? Are your choices yours, or are they for others? |
| Aloneness & Connection | You are the only one who lives inside your experience. How do you manage this separateness? What connections to others are essential? |
| Meaning & Purpose | Where do you find meaning? Is it something you find, or something you create through action? |
| Authenticity | Are your actions aligned with your stated values? What would it look like to live in a way that is more true to yourself? |
| Uncertainty | When you feel a fundamental unease about life, what specific uncertainty is at its root? The future? Your place in the world? |
| Unfulfilled Potential | What specific potentials do you feel you have failed to live up to? What prevents you from pursuing them now? |
| Transcendence | Do you have a need to connect with something larger than your individual self? If so, what is that, and how do you connect with it? |
Generated with Rapport7 — rapport7.com