What is Experiential Therapy?
Experiential Therapy:
Uses experience to heal unresolved wounds, and update old unhelpful emotional learnings.
What do you mean by “experience”?
Experiencing something is different than talking about it.
Talking about something is like looking at a map of a forest. You can understand the directions of the trails, the points of elevation, the landmarks.
Experiencing something is like being in the forest. Feeling the earth under your feet, seeing the texture of the tree bark, smelling the wet leaves.
An experience is vivid, and in the present. Our full attention brings us closer to it.
In therapy we can create vivid, present moment experiences, using real life actions, imagination, memory, and the body. The specific experiences are tailored to the issue that you are trying to work on in therapy, to provide the kind of experience your mind and body need to feel things differently.
Why use experience?
We use experience instead of just talking about the issue because for many problems, intellectually understanding them doesn’t result in feeling differently.
For example:
I know nothing bad is actually happening, but I just feel anxious.
I know it couldn’t possibly be my fault I was abused, but I feel like it was.
I know it should be okay to leave work when everyone else does, but I feel guilty.
Experience is a more powerful tool to access the parts of the brain responsible for feeling.
Which therapy modalities are experiential?
Coherence Therapy
Internal Family Systems
EMDR
Somatic Therapy
Exposure and Response Prevention
(ERP)
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic
Psychotherapy
(AEDP)
What do they all have in common?
Each of these types of therapy have their own techniques for creating healing and transformative experiences. All of them tap into the parts of the brain where emotional patterns are stored, and help rewrite them. This neurological process is called memory reconsolidation.