Staring at the Sun: On Death and Being Human

 “Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.”
- Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun

In this conversation, I sit down with Chris Place, therapist, supervisor, podcast host, and humanist celebrant, to explore the world of existential therapy through the work of Irvin Yalom. We discuss how existential therapy doesn’t try to “fix” what is ultimately unfixable about life. Instead, it asks: how can we live meaningfully, in full awareness of the limits and inevitabilities of our shared human condition?

Chris and I explore what it means to speak about the unspeakable, to name death, to ask questions that many of us might seek to avoid, such as how we sit with the knowledge that we, and everyone we love, will die. This is a deeply human conversation about what it means to show up, fully present, flawed, and alive, with another person in the therapy space - and what becomes possible when we do.

Jen: Ok Chris, tell me what we're here to talk about today?

Chris: Well, we're looking at existential therapy, focusing on the work of Irvin Yalom. There are two books I’d like to reference. The first is the very first book of Yalom’s I ever read, ‘Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy’. The other book, ‘Staring at the Sun’, is the most recent book I’ve read of his. I read ‘Love's Executioner’ when I was beginning my training as a therapist, and ‘Staring at the Sun’ has been more recent, and much more personal in terms of my recent experiences.

Jen: So, these books have fallen at different points on the timeline for you, and your reasons for being drawn to Yalom are more personal now?

Chris: Yeah, certainly. You know, when I read ‘Love's Executioner’, I was immersed in my training, reading case studies of therapy. I found the honest exploration that he offered of the work, and his own part in it, very profound. I think the key thing, though, is summed up in ‘Staring at the Sun’. There’s a lovely line where Yalom says that people come to therapy, not just because of struggling with instinctual drives, as in Freudian ideas, not just because of internalized figures, you know, like object relations or attachment type theory, not just because of distorted thinking, or cognitive ideas, but also because of existence. Pain.

I thought that was lovely, because it was saying it’s not “just” about existence, either. People might be struggling with a current relationship issue, or a trauma, but if we ignore existence, or ignore death anxiety, which, for Yalom, is the ultimate concern, we miss something. It’s always there, for all of us, even if we don't want to look at it.

Jen: That's something that I really like about existential therapy. It’s about recognising the human condition.

Chris: Right, and I mean, it's quite inclusive then. I'd be quite influenced by Carl Rogers, attachment theory and lots of different models. Existential therapy, or certainly Yalom’s approach, can sit with that. Rather than saying you have to focus on a certain topic, it's just asking you to pay attention to things around death, which I think a lot of us will avoid if at all possible. 

Jen: Absolutely. One of the things I really value about that is how much it democratizes the therapeutic process. It really erodes that separation between the therapist as this clinical expert figure, with the client in opposition to that, as the one who is struggling. It makes it explicit that we are all navigating the same human conditions.

Chris: Absolutely. Carl Rogers would talk about the core conditions, which includes congruence - being real with somebody, being authentic, but what that looks like is often hugely problematic for therapists because they're going, what does that mean? I just come in as I am? That's what Yalom does, you know. It's not like he'll just come in and talk about himself for an hour, but he uses it in a certain way. He'll bring his own existential issues and concerns into the room, and those are the moments, often, that clients will value the most. It’s those moments of connection that are so fundamental to the therapy work. Empathy, for Rogers and for Yalom, is the great healer in therapy. When you can meet somebody, really meet them, that's where the transformation can happen. It mightn't be straight away, but it starts something really important. 

Jen: Absolutely. I found it very striking, In ‘Staring at the Sun’, when Yalom speaks about how the idea of congruence changes when you consider it the context of existential givens, and of death in particular. It’s a shared concern, a mutual experience.

Chris: Right, we’re all in it. Nobody’s getting out of here alive.

Jen: Right, yet we so rarely acknowledge it.

Chris: I remember thinking about this a lot when I was working in the psychology department of a university, teaching empathy and different things. I’d talk about Yalom, and one of my issues at the time was around what Yalom says, at the beginning of ‘Love's Executioner’, about the two great delusions: a belief in personal specialness and the belief in a supernatural power. I don't have a faith, but to me, an agnostic position is far more steady ground, in many ways, than calling faith a delusion, because we don't know, that's the point. We can say there's no available evidence, but we might be wrong. He does say, in ‘Staring at the Sun’, that he will never take away somebody's religion. He'll never try to undermine somebody’s faith. If a priest comes to see him, he’ll try to meet him where he's at, so it's not about saying you're bad because you believe in God. I was glad to read that, because that was one of my issues before. I could be deluded and I could be wrong. The person with faith could be right, or it might be a mature defence for them - that might be really important to help them bear the world, and who am I to take that away?

Jen: You know, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about how he describes these two primary delusions we invoke to protect ourselves from confronting death: either that I am special personally, and so the same fate that will befall everyone else will somehow not befall me, or, as you said, some kind of a belief in a higher power will save me from death. When I first read ‘Love’s Executioner’, it struck me that even though I don't have any religious belief myself, I was still holding on to some kind of belief that someone was going to save me. I’m not sure the delusion, as he describes it, depends on religion. I had a belief that someone would come; that someone out there had the understanding or tools that I need to fix everything, or to know what to do in my life. It wasn't coming from a religious perspective, but the same belief was there as a coping mechanism. The realisation that actually, no one is coming, it's just me and my own choices - that’s core to existential therapy. I have to take responsibility for my own life. That was a huge revelation for me personally. 

Chris: Yeah, you’re right, it’s not always about religious saviours. I mean, as therapists, sometimes we have mentors. We might say, if I can be like Rogers, or Yalom, you know, whoever's my guiding light, then I'll be better. I'll be free. I'll be a better therapist, a better human.

Jen: Right, and sometimes clients can do this with therapists, too. It’s something to be mindful of, to notice when that delusion might be creeping into therapy. If you as the therapist are seen as the person who's going to come and save the client, it gives you a power that you don’t have, and it can inhibit clients from taking ownership over their own life.

Chris: Yes, we have to be very careful with that. It can be lovely and ego boosting sometimes when somebody says to you, you've changed my life! In my training, we called that positive transference. It’s not real. It's when negative transference comes in, when the client starts to hate you, that you're doing the work, because then they're able to bring the earliest woundings into the room, and it can be alive. We can work with it then. Whereas, when we're sort of deluded by love and positivity, which can be the danger with some trainings that focus on that side of things too much, we stay in the realm of positive transference. Clients will do what you’ve described at times, put us into the positions of saviours. I think if you're aware of that, you can sort of sit with that and hold that and be curious about it, but if you get your ego stroked too much, you might just think, oh, well of course they see me that way - I'm great!

Jen: That’s an interesting take about negative transference. What comes up for me here, from an existential lens, is that it's precisely in those moments when the client realizes that you can't save them that they’re called to confront the reality that no one is able to give them the answers. As much as they might be furious about this, or feel lost, it's also an invitation to step into their own responsibility, their own freedom, for their lives and choices.

Chris: Right. You're just another human who is flawed like. There's a real connection that becomes possible in that. One of the big things for Yalom in terms of coping, even with death anxiety, is connection. It's that real meeting, that heartfelt connection when you have another human being with you. It might be like: I hate you right now! - but it's real. It’s absolutely alive. It’s moments like that when time disappears in a therapy room. 

Jen : Right - because you’re so present in the here and now.

Chris: It doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes you’re lost in the story, but when it happens, it’s kind of magical.

Jen: Absolutely. Can I invite you to say a little bit more about the personal impact of these books, or these ideas?

Chris: So personally, I suppose, I've lost both my parents. My dad died four years ago, and my mom died four months ago, five months now, so it's very recent for me. I'm really in the midst of that transition to not having parents and everything that that means. The idea of parents is a bit like God, in a way. When you're a child, your parents are everything. I mean, if they're not so lost to their own demons, if they can be somewhat there for you on a consistent level, they become your everything. You can only imagine a world with them in it. When they're gone, it's like this feeling of being in nothingness, that existential floating in the universe without anything to hold you down. Yalom’s work, Staring at the Sun in particular, has been really helpful for me in grappling with these things and with my own fears of my own ending. I know that I will die sometime, and I have a three-year-old who sees me as this everything, and my parents are gone and I'm like, how do I manage all of these things? Yalom’s work really helps with that. I think it sort of grounds me a little bit.

Jen: Absolutely. It sounds like your parents were a constant, and yet, there’s this loss. It's so confronting to go through something like that. It’s about the loss, the very real loss, and it also brings us into contact with our own mortality. 

Chris: Yalom calls it awakenings, you know? You're awakened to yourself, to your situation. I can remember a time, maybe even ten years ago, where I could never imagine a world without my parents. It wasn't that we had perfect relationships, we didn't, we had problems and difficulties, but I could never imagine them not being in my world. It wasn't comprehensible to me. I couldn't get there, and then suddenly, you are there.

Jen: It's inescapable.

Chris: It's going to happen to us all. I know that the best way is to be fifty, or something like that, when you lose your parents. That's brilliant, you know what I mean? As opposed to when you're three, or four, or five? In my head, that's the kind of natural way, but then it happens, and suddenly you’re transported back to being a five year old, or a three-year-old, and you've got a three-year-old holding your hand, and you're going, oh no, I'm only three! I don't know what I'm doing! Yalom’s words are really helpful with that because he grapples with these themes as well. When he was writing Staring at the Sun, you know, his wife was alive and well. She has since died and they've written that book together about going through that. 

Jen: ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. It’s here on my coffee table. I bought it in the run-up to this conversation, but I haven't gotten into it.

Chris: You know, it's funny, it's kind of  like I’m almost avoiding it, you know?

Jen: I think I’ve been sort of avoiding it too.

Chris: Yeah? So that's interesting. I think, from a personal point of view, his ideas always help in the sense that they give us something to hold on to. The big one for me, personally rather than professionally, though I can see its value in terms of professional work, is the idea of rippling. In my work as a humanist celebrant, there's a line that I'd often use, whether it's for a wedding or funeral, that the person will always live, as long as the ripples of their life remain. Until the last person that exists in the world, who may not even remember you, but who felt some impact from your actions, something that you said to somebody, maybe. That impact could go on for generations and generations, so that you're alive in some way, in some aspect. I love that. That's very comforting, and it also almost says, you know, I want to be able to give more.

Jen: Yes, absolutely.

Chris: I want to allow those ripples to grow. He talks about people who live to be very old, how they have a multitude of people that they leave behind that can continue out. I think that’s really cool.

Jen: Yeah, I really like the idea of rippling. I think it's like the existentialist's version of life after death, you know? 

Chris: It’s exactly the existentialist's version of life after death! That's exactly what I was thinking about it. I will live forever, but not be alive. I think there's something in that that can provide comfort in an existential realm. 

Jen: Something I find compelling in what you've just shared is the recognition that death is also a call to action in the present. If we recognize that death is inevitable, that we're not going to live forever, because it comes for all of us - if we can allow ourselves to really recognize that, and to think about the rippling impact we can have in our temporary life span, there is a call to action there. It’s a reckoning. I’m going to die, so what do I want to actually do with the time that I have? Perhaps even right now, in this present moment.

Chris: Yeah, it taps into Maslow’s actualization in a way. He talks about actualizers, people whose life and work aren’t separate, you know? Their existence is based on a cause, be it something that's more than themselves, something about the betterment of humanity, or the world, or something like that. Or maybe it's not even that extreme, but there’s something about asking, how can my life have meaning? How can my life be meaningful and have an impact?

Jen: This connects me with two questions that I had in mind to ask during this conversation. I realise now that they're quite connected. One is about the idea that the physicality of death destroys us, but the idea of death can save us. I wanted to ask if you agree with that, or what you might say about it?

Chris: I think if you're in the grip of death anxiety, it's probably a hard concept to swallow. Do you know what I mean? If you're in the midst of your own terror at dying and somebody says that facing the idea of death will give you life, that isn’t easy to hear, but I think that it's true. For most of us, we might avoid living fully because of the fear of death. There can be a restriction of life, you know, like I'm just going to operate in my own little space in the universe, because I'm terrified.

Jen: Right, but then on the other hand, if we don't have any fear of death, we may also avoid living life fully, because that urgency that comes with recognising death is not there. 

Chris: Yeah, so then we’re kind of looking at those extremes, you know? There are people who are taking big risks with their life, because there’s almost a nihilistic existentialism, like, what does it matter? There's something that's missing then for me, in the sense of connection - connection to your deeper self, connection to others, that actually makes your life really important. Your life actually matters.

Jen: I wonder then, whether this is connected in some way to the other question I was going to ask, about this distinction Yalom makes between terror and fear of death. He says that we need to overcome the terror of death, but not the fear. What's your take on that? Why focus on the terror of death, without removing the fear?

Chris: Well, because terror is something that disables. Having fear in its own right is a normal human response to something that we don't know. Fear, like, every emotion has real value. Terror, on the other hand, is that extreme that restricts us and shuts us down. If I'm in the grip of terror about my death, I can't live at all. I can live even when I'm fearful, or anxious. I'm aware that, yeah, I'm frightened of dying, but I'm not stopping living. Whereas terror will keep me locked in my room. Do you know what I mean? I think facing our fears is really important. We are all frightened. We have fundamental fears within us, but when those fears take over and become the terrors that restrict us, then we lose sight of possibility. I think that's what it says to me. 

I’ve worked with people in the therapy room who would be gripped by horrific anxiety. I remember one person in particular who couldn't get on a bus, or be in a car, unless they were going somewhere that was close to a hospital. Their life was so restricted, so we worked on that, bit by bit, through a mixture of deep emotional, existential exploration and behavioural actions, until they were able to suddenly go on boat journeys and planes and do all these things. They still had fear. They were still frightened, but it didn’t have that same hold over them. They didn’t have that same terror that was keeping them stranded in their tiny part of the world. There were so many things they couldn't do, and then you know, over the two or three years that we worked together, they started to do things. They started to dare to go out into the world. It didn't mean that they stopped being frightened of dying. They still had those moments, but it didn't have the same power over them. It didn’t restrict them from action.

Jen: That really resonates with my experience, both personally and as a therapist. When we experience emotions that are very uncomfortable, be that anxiety, or fear, the impulse can be, well, I need to get rid of this, you know? I need to make it so that I’m not anxious, so that I'm not afraid. When actually, when you're working within an existential framework, that's really not something that you want to do. Now terror, as you said, absolutely needs to be softened, because it's paralyzing, it restricts.

Chris: Well, Yalom would keep saying, what are you so terrified of? For somebody it could be nothingness, or it could be that I cease to exist, or, whatever it might be, and then you have something more tangible to work with. 

Jen: Right, it’s important to be specific about death anxiety. It’s something we all share, but Yalom calls us to get really curious about what is specifically going on for the person in front of us.

Chris: Yeah, what is it exactly? Am I frightened I won't see people, or I won't see people grow up, or I won't experience certain things? I can relate to that. I won't get to see my son, you know? If I die, I won’t see him grow up. I'm an older dad, so I'm not going to see certain aspects of his life. All going well, he will outlive me. For someone else, it might be something else. For some people it's the idea of nothingness that can be really terrifying. I remember having a recurring dream as a child, a nightmare that was just a sense of floating through the universe with nothing. It was strange. It was a terrifying dream, but when I talk about it, it doesn’t seem frightening.

Jen: It sounds pretty frightening to me.

Chris: Yeah, and I did find recently, when my mum died, that's what it was about. It was the fear of not having my parents. It was the fear of being alone in the universe.

Jen: Right, which is another one of the existential givens: the experience of isolation. Isolation, not in the sense of lacking people in my life, but that ultimate aloneness in our experience.

Chris: Yes, because we will all die alone. Nobody can die with us. I mean, people do die together, but they're still alone.

Jen: Nobody shares in our experience completely. You’re alone in your experience. Nobody can fully inhabit that other than you.

Chris: Even as we're talking, I have butterflies in my stomach. I'm aware that there's part of me that would like to go, let's not talk about this. These are very uncomfortable places for people to go, but as therapists, we have this responsibility to go there. 

Jen: Yes. This touches on one of the things that I think is absolutely vital about existential therapy. If we are not, as therapists, willing to confront our own death, our own isolation, our own meaninglessness, our own freedom, we can end up avoiding going there with clients.

Chris: It can be unconscious.

Jen: Totally, but then we end up replicating the wider culture and leave people even more alone with these experiences.

Chris: Oh yeah, and we can say, you know, let's focus on your life! Let's focus on all the amazing stuff, but let's not talk about your death.

Jen: Right, because talking about your death brings me into contact with my own death, and I don’t want to go there. Another real danger here is we can end up pathologizing the client because we don't want to admit that this is a shared human experience that's fundamental to the human condition. So we end up framing it like: this client suffers from anxiety. When, in reality, this client is terrified, as we all are. Again, it's that human to human connection: can I go there with them? Can I be there with them, instead of creating this false separation, as if I'm fine, but they're freaking out. We're all freaking out, if we actually allow ourselves to acknowledge these realities. 

Chris: It’s the problem with diagnosis, in a sense. That’s a whole other debate, but there’s something about putting somebody into a box over there, with some medical problem we can fix, or do something with, as opposed to these feelings being human. 

Jen: Yes, an inevitability of our shared situation.

Chris: Right. We are humans and we are all going to die. We're going to be frightened. We're going to feel lonely. We're going to feel sad and scared. We're going to feel all of the feelings that all of us humans have. Therapy, in many ways, has gone towards these sort of brief, diagnostically driven models to “fix you”, rather than open-ended, human work. Yalom talks about this in terms of insurance companies in America, but it's probably not too different here. There’s this sense that we have to fix you in ten sessions, you know, insurance will cover that, or your medical card will give you six sessions or eight sessions, so we need to fix you now, get you sorted, then off you go into the world again. It's not meeting that deeper existential need.

Jen: Absolutely. I mean, you can’t cure the human condition. 

Chris: Yeah, so you know, we've got a broken society and a broken world, and people are reacting as a result of that, but we just want to kind of patch you up so you can continue on. That's what Yalom would write about. He says none of us want to face the terrors that lie within those things, and as therapists, like you’ve said, we can kind of collude with the system, collude with ideology and collude with reductive models that might be fine for a little while, but they don't answer, or even ask, the bigger questions. 

Jen: Right! Nor do they give us the tools to live within those questions, which is something that I'm very concerned with. If we think about what we’ve said about overcoming the terror of death, but not the fear - the fear of death is a question that has no answer. It has no solution. There's no escaping death, or the fear of it, but there is huge value in figuring out, how can I live within that question? I agree with you about not turning towards life in an avoidant, happy, clappy kind of way, and yet, really confronting these existential givens does, or can, turn us back towards life in a meaningful way. 

Chris: Yeah, I think you can absolutely get to a point of reckoning with how to truly live in the world and really grapple with those things. The idea that bothers me is when everything is about love and life and beautiful happiness - all that kind of “the universe is going to give us love and experience bliss” stuff. It leaves me saying, where's all the anger there? I hear that and I just want to pull pieces of my face off, because this isn't being human. This is shutting down some fundamental aspect of my humanity to pretend that I'm not going to die or to pretend that I'm not frightened. That's the danger. That's the danger of our profession.

Jen: Absolutely. It reminds me of that paraphrase of Nietzsche that Yalom uses, which says that to become wise, you have to learn to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar. The wild dogs are precisely these things that we're talking about: our terror, our anger, our anxiety around death.

Chris: It’s so prevailing. You know, it’s interesting with Coru at the moment, and this notion that personal therapy isn't prioritized within the proposed regulations.

Jen: That’s wild to me.

Chris: When you think of what we're talking about here today, the need in our work to sit with another human being in the dark night of their soul, and we're proposing that we’re not going there? We're not prioritizing that as fundamental to what we do? Well, there you go. 

Jen: I think this kind of existential work really highlights that because, you, necessarily, will be navigating the same struggles as the clients.

Chris: Absolutely, and you need to be supported in that. Apart from being protective of the profession, protecting the legitimacy of counselling and psychotherapy, I don't know how you can do it without having support along the way. It doesn't mean you have to be in therapy all the time, but you need to have experienced a good chunk of it.

Jen: You need the support, and you also need to be willing and able to go to those places yourself, to hold yourself steady in that, in order to be able to do this kind of work with other people. You can't sit with somebody else's fear of death, or with their pain, if you have never confronted your own. I would hope that as therapists, we believe that therapy has a role to play in supporting people, us included, to be able to sit with our own stuff, so it makes sense to me to have that integrated in our training. I certainly couldn't have done my training without personal therapy. I can't even imagine.

Chris: Absolutely. I came into the work because of therapy, not because I wanted to be a therapist. I wouldn't have had a clue, you know? I was in long-term therapy and then through that I decided that maybe I could do this, and then, you know, went on a journey with training - but it was because of my own healing process rather than deciding in the abstract, oh, I want to be a therapist, so I'll do ten hours of therapy or twenty hours of therapy, whatever's prescribed for the training. So it's had a different influence. I think that you can see that, when people have dedicated their lives to their own healing and process. It has a different flavour in the therapy room, I think.

Jen: Totally. It makes me think again about that sense of equality that we were talking about earlier between clients and therapists. I also came to this work after long-term therapy. Therapy has totally changed my life, which was what drew me to eventually go there myself and become a therapist. When people have this belief that they can help people, having never been in that position, going to therapy, needing support themselves – I’m not saying this is necessarily the case, but speaking from my own perspective, that lands with me as quite imbalanced, quite unequal footing. Almost like, I'm fine, I'm well, so I can help these other people who are not fine and not well.

Chris: Yeah, I’m going to help you get to where I am, right?

Jen: Right. Whereas I think for me, being really in the muck with clients brings huge value to the work.

Chris: Well, in my mind, that’s where the real value is, but it's also really hard,

Jen: Right? Yes.

Chris: This is where we need to mind ourselves, because that's the heart of the work. I remember, I was talking to a colleague of mine about, you know, not making any money out of this, and she said it depends on how you work. If you work in a very process driven way, very much in the mix of that emotional, unconscious, kind of messy arena, you can't do thirty or  forty clients a week like that. 

Jen: No, not a chance.

Chris: You wouldn't survive. Whereas if your work is maybe more focused on content and strategies and things, I think you can see a lot more people. Now, people might take huge issue with that, but I just think there's two different ways of working. It's not that other approaches aren’t valuable, they're really valuable. I mean, I remember Les Greenberg, an originator of Emotion-Focused Therapy, would often talk about how cognitive work can be really important before you start going into the emotion world.

Jen:  Oh totally, it can give people tools and a sense of safety.

Chris: Right, it gives you sort of resourcing or grounding to work from before you get into the mess of feelings. It’s really important, and that could be the bulk of your work with some people. It has real value, so it's not to dismiss that work. I'm just saying, I think that if you're not working with that messy emotional underworld you have capacity to see more people.

Jen: I suppose I can only speak to one side of that because I work in one of those ways more than the other.

Chris: Me too. Well, I mean, I've worked in short-term models.

Jen: Oh, same. I do short-term therapy in universities too, but I think there’s a way to do that that still holds space for the mess.

Chris: Yes, you’re limited, but I still bring all of that, exactly.

Jen: Me too. You know, if I were to be very honest about what draws me to this work, I think a huge part of it is that it enables me to be, day to day, in acknowledgment of the difficulties of reality and the challenges of the human condition. I find it grounding to work in a way that is in contact with that, because it keeps me out of my own avoidance of these realities that are so core to actually living a meaningful life. There's something about being in contact with other people in that way on a regular basis as part of my work that is hugely anchoring for me. 

Chris: Yeah, I think there's something about that deep connection you have with somebody in the work of those moments. I remember a trainer of mine once said that one of the big things about therapy is that you get your own therapy along the way. It's not the reason to do it, we do it for the clients, but when you work in this way, when you really go somewhere with somebody, it has an impact on you. It's a nice bi-product.

Jen: Absolutely. So, I'm conscious that we’re running out of time. I wonder if there is anything that you had hoped to speak about in this conversation that we haven't had the opportunity to touch on?

Chris: No, not really. I think that what’s sitting with me, after everything we’ve spoken about, is that fundamentally, therapy is an encounter between two humans, or a group of humans, to meet. That's really what it is for me. It's about a place of real meeting. There's a deeper connection we can make in that meeting place and that, to me, is what therapy has always been about. When we were at a conference, and when I met you at the conference, there was a conversation that happened afterwards that felt much more of a meeting. To me, those are the things that matter more.

Jen: I absolutely agree. I appreciate that conversation, then, and this one now.

Chris: Well you know, this conversation has brought me into lots of different places. It's got me thinking about lots of different things, to do with clients, to do with my own life, things I hadn't considered, or have to revisit. I think the conversations that you're having with people are really invaluable. It's very stimulating. It’s been the same when I did the Therapy Talks podcast, because there's so much out there. So let’s open it up, have conversations and see where it brings us.

Jen: Absolutely. I agree. Thank you so much for being part of this today.

Chris: Not at all. It was brilliant. I really enjoyed it. 

Jen: Me too. I’d be happy to continue the conversation. I think that there’s much more we could say.

Chris: Absolutely. Maybe I can get you on the podcast soon? 

Jen: Sounds great.

Chris Place is a counsellor and psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, trainer, and humanist celebrant based in Galway, Ireland. He is Leas-Chathaoirleach (Vice Chair) of the Irish

Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP) and runs Galway City Counselling, a

busy private practice that includes a low-cost clinic supporting trainee therapists.

Chris is also the host of TherapyTalks, a podcast exploring psychotherapy, mental health, and

the human condition through open, grounded conversations with therapists, thinkers, and

lived-experience voices.

Deeply influenced by existential and humanistic traditions — especially the work of Carl

Rogers and Irvin Yalom — his approach is rooted in authenticity, relational depth, and a

belief in our capacity to face life’s givens with courage, meaning, and connection. With a

background in theatre and a passion for story and ritual, he also creates and delivers humanist

ceremonies that mark life’s milestones with warmth, presence, and care.