There are moments when everything seems fine: work is going well, relationships are steady, health is not a concern — and yet something inside us remains restless, with no particular cause. We are not afraid of anything specific; there is no threat or danger to avoid. It is a more diffuse sensation, like a draught under a closed door: the anxiety of simply existing, with all the uncertainty that carries.
This form of anxiety is not a symptom to be eliminated; it is, according to the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, part of the human condition. Tillich knew at first hand what the threat of non-being means: he served as an army chaplain in the trenches of the First World War, went through two nervous breakdowns, and survived battles in which death was an everyday matter (Farris, 2024). From there came a body of thought that, half a century later, still illuminates something that touches every therapeutic encounter: how we live alongside anxiety, and in particular what we call existential anxiety.
Why am I anxious when nothing bad is happening?
Tillich distinguished two kinds of anxiety. One has an object — we fear an examination, an illness, a rejection — and we can, at least in theory, face it or avoid it. The other has no object; it is anxiety in the face of the threat of non-being itself, something no strategy can make disappear, because it is not “out there” but woven into the very structure of existence (Tillich, 1952). This existential anxiety does not mean something is wrong with us; it means that we are, like everyone, beings who know themselves to be finite.
Three forms of anxiety we all carry
Tillich described three faces of this existential anxiety. The first is the anxiety of fate and death: the knowledge that our life is not guaranteed, that nothing ultimately protects us from chance. The second is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness: the dread that what we build, what gives us meaning today, may tomorrow be emptied of content. The third is the anxiety of guilt and condemnation: the awareness that we never live fully as we would wish, that an unavoidable ambiguity between good and bad runs through every choice we make (Tillich, 1952).
Think of someone who has built, through years of work, a career that those around them admire. In the evenings, though, when the intensity of the day fades, they are flooded by a sense that none of it holds — as though they were trying to fill a container with a hole in the bottom. It is not that they do not value what they have achieved; it is that success, in itself, does not answer the question that really occupies them: why do I exist. Or think of someone who, after the anniversary of her father’s death, suddenly finds herself counting her own years differently — not out of fear of a particular illness, but out of a new, raw awareness that her time is not unlimited.
The courage to be
If this anxiety does not disappear, then what remains? Here Tillich introduces the idea that gave his most important work its title: the courage to be — not the absence of anxiety, but the affirmation of our existence in spite of the threat of non-being (Tillich, 1952). Courage, he writes, is not the opponent of anxiety but its companion: without the fear that precedes it and the anxiety that presses on us, no finite being could exist (Tillich, 1952). The question, that is, is not how we will stop being anxious, but how we will go on pursuing things in our lives within the uncertainty that always accompanies them.
A Gestalt perspective
Tillich’s thought is not foreign to psychotherapy. Laura Perls, who together with Fritz Perls shaped Gestalt therapy, studied in Frankfurt where both Tillich and Martin Buber taught, and wrote later that no psychologist or psychoanalyst influenced her as much as those two: “You listened to Buber and Tillich and you felt they were speaking to you directly, not about some ‘thing’” (Perls, 1992). It was contact itself, not the theory about it, that made them important to her.
In Gestalt therapy we say that anxiety often appears in the gap between the “now” and the “then” — at the moment when we are getting ready to do something significant (to act, to decide, to meet someone) but our mind runs ahead into an imagined future instead of staying with the energy of the present moment. Tillich’s anxiety of non-being and the Gestalt “gap” speak, in different languages, about the same thing: the difficulty of staying present in front of something we do not fully control. Courage here is not heroism; it is the small, everyday movement of contact — to speak even though we do not know how it will turn out, to love even though one day we will hurt, to create something even though it will not last for ever.
The organism, when we give it room, knows how to come to terms even with what it cannot control. We do not need to solve the existential question in order to live with it; we need to stop treating it as a problem to be solved and begin to recognise it as a condition of existence.
What helps
Existential anxiety is not “cured” the way a specific phobia is cured; it is not a fault in the system, it is part of it. Some everyday practices, however, help us live with it without being flooded by it:
- Name it for what it is. Much of the weight of existential anxiety comes from confusion — we think something is wrong with us, when in fact it is common to every person who thinks deeply about their life.
- Small, real acts of meaning. Rather than searching for an absolute meaning that will answer everything, an encounter, a piece of work, a moment of care towards someone else gives us, here and now, something real enough.
- A return to the body, to the here and now. When the mind runs off into imagined futures or inevitable endings, the breath and the sense of the body in the room — or contact with the senses, with what we see, hear, taste — bring us back to the present, manageable moment.
When this anxiety becomes so heavy that it paralyses us, however — when we stall instead of living, when we avoid every commitment for fear of a future loss — then we are speaking not only of existential dread but of clinical anxiety that deserves attention. In therapy we do not try to convince anyone that life carries no risk after all; we accompany them as they learn to bear its truth, with less fear and more courage.
When to ask for help
If a sense of emptiness or uncertainty dominates your daily life, if you avoid decisions or relationships for fear of loss, or if you feel you can no longer carry it alone, a first session is a small, safe step.
References
- Tillich, P. (1952). The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- May, R. (1950). The Meaning of Anxiety. New York: Ronald Press.
- Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
- Perls, L. (1992). Living at the Boundary: Collected Works of Laura Perls (J. Wysong, Ed.). Highland, NY: The Gestalt Journal Press.
- Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press.
- Farris, T. (2024). My grandfather, Paul Tillich, the unbelieving theologian. Aeon.
- Stevens, S. (2025). Paul Tillich and “The Courage to Be”. Gestalt Therapy Blog.
