Philosophical Counseling
guided dialogues to spark insight & empower wiser living
Do you feel…
Stuck?
You feel uneasy, knotted up, confused, blocked. You’ve experienced challenges, but haven’t found a way to integrate them, and you feel it hindering your personal growth and relationships.
Stagnant?
Maybe life’s going okay, but feels shallow. You sense there’s more to be explored, felt, seen. You’re ready to push toward the edges of your thinking and abilities, but aren’t sure how to start.
Curious?
You’re hungry for conversation. Questions like – What’s ultimately real? Is there meaning in life beyond pleasure? Is God real? Are we free or determined by forces beyond our control?
There’s a path forward, and we can walk together
Join me in dialogue. With empathetic listening, mindful presence, and Socratic engagement, I’ll support your journey toward insight, self-understanding, and wiser living.
Your companion
I’ve studied philosophy for over twenty years and taught it for almost ten. I’ve also spent hundreds of hours under the skilled coaching of experts practicing the facilitation of transformative dialogues.
My work begins in empathetic listening and mindful presence. I want to understand your world–what it’s like to be you. This is the heart of my practice. I then bring in Socratic engagement, informed by the wisdom of the ancient philosophical traditions, to help you explore the shape and structure of whatever challenge or question you’re facing. Courageous engagement in this process sparks insight, self-understanding, and your own sense of the way forward.
My Ph.D. (2017) and M.A. (2011) in philosophy are from the University of Oklahoma. I received my philosophical counseling certification from the American Philosophical Practitioner’s Association (APPA) in 2023.
Max Parish, Ph.D.
Philosophical Counselor, Philosophy Professor, Strength Coach
How it works
Discovery call
In a 30-minute conversation, we’ll discover your needs and goals and explore if my approach to philosophical counseling is a good fit for you.
The Path
We engage together in dialogues that illuminate the background patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that shape your interpretation of yourself and the world. Together we explore how they interconnect and how they might be serving or hindering you.
Wiser living
New insight and deeper self-awareness equips you to navigate into the future with a clearer vision of what matters most to you. You are then empowered to bring yourself and your relationships into closer alignment with your deepest values.
Going Deeper
If you deliberated every day whether to brush your teeth, that would take time and energy that’s better used for other things. So, you build the habit and do it automatically.
It’s similar with our self-talk, our beliefs, desires, values, and reactions. Much of the time they run on long worn grooves, and that’s useful, because it saves energy. But problems arise when those defaults no longer serve us well. As defaults, they feel normal, and the normal is hard to see. It’s like wearing glasses with dirty lenses that you’ve forgotten you’re wearing. You can’t see the dirty lenses, because you’re looking through them rather than at them.
In philosophical counseling, we take a step back, look at those lenses, your defaults, and get curious about how well they’re helping you navigate the world and how they might be improved.
The way we become aware of our background defaults is through dialogue–with a partner who knows how to listen deeply and reflect back what they’re hearing, seeing, and feeling, like a mirror. There’s a power in this process that cannot be found in solitary reflection. Philosophical counseling provides this kind of conversation.
What’s philosophical about this process? ‘Philosophy’ means the love of wisdom. Part of wisdom is developing a deep awareness of how your own mind is interpreting the world through its thoughts, feelings, emotions, gut reactions, etc, and how those are forming your own choices and behaviors. Being aware of your own default interpretations enables you to notice unhelpful patterns, and then work on changing those patterns and shaping new ones.
This special sort of dialogue is informed by the ancient philosophical traditions that take transformative self-awareness as a central focus. Insights from these ancient traditions and ways of life are brought into the conversation for perspective, inspiration, and guidance.
Philosophical counseling can be useful in a wide range of situations, including:
Pricing
1
Discovery Call
$45 (30 min)
2
Single Session
$125 (60 min)
3
Packages
8, 12, or 16 sessions