What is Experiential Therapy?

Is looking good on the outside but feeling bad on the inside keeping you from achieving your best life? Do you wish that the experience from your family of origin would stop haunting you? Experiential therapy is a way to wade into the water and discover what is at the root of these behaviors and discrepancies.

Experiential therapy is an overarching term or umbrella of action oriented therapies that draw from psychodrama, EMDR, Play Therapy, EFT, Safe and Sound Protocol, and Somatic Experiencing to name a few. These modalities assist clients in moving out of their intellectual frame of reference to a more felt sense of reference. The intention is to help clients move from their head into their body & feelings. Another way of saying this, these are bottom-up regulation modalities rather than top-down modalities. This is profoundly helpful in a client’s therapeutic process when healing from trauma, medicating, numbing and grief. It's also beneficial when clients are learning the art of effective communication.

When talking about experiential therapy with clients and or teaching other clinicians how to facilitate experiential therapy, a necessary foundation for working this way is obtaining the client’s permission. I tell my clients that if we begin doing something that they don’t want to do, all they have to do is say stop, and we will stop. Giving clients the power and autonomy in how we work together is often healing in and of itself. So often at the core of somebody’s wounding is the lack of power or choice. Empowering the client and giving them autonomy and the ability to choose is an opportunity for a healing correction.

Here is an example of a session using experiential therapy and how it would be different from talk therapy. In talk therapy, the clinician would ask a client to tell me about their recovery and explain it in detail. In an experiential session, the clinician would ask the client to show them their recovery. The client would be asked to choose an object in the room to represent their recovery. The enactment would continue by the therapist asking the client to place their recovery in the room, and in proximity to how close or far they are from their recovery. Next, the therapist would ask the client to identify the obstacles that get in between them and their recovery. An obstacle might be their job, their fear or shame, or possibly all the family obligations of childcare, household chores and or caring for an aging parent that takes priority for this client. The client would be showing rather than telling, and the client often walks away with more insight into their own presenting issue. When they see it and feel it, there’s more clarity for solutions.

It was Maya Angelo who said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This is so parallel to Experiential therapy in that the process slows things down so clients are able to feel their feelings and walk out their choice rather than react.

We work with very intelligent people who believe that if they could just “figure it out” that they would be able to stop doing what they’ve always been doing. If it were easy, people would not struggle. Instead, there’s some sort of emotional driver that makes us do what we know we shouldn’t do, or behave in ways that bring about relational consequences with ourselves and loved ones. Getting underneath or accessing the feelings that drive the impulse to do something is where there is a profound opportunity for healing change. Experiential therapy is so effective because people begin to learn how to take care of themselves, or the part of them that is wounded and ill equipped to make grown up choices. When we get the adult on board to step in and care for the wounded part, healing begins.

All of the therapists at Relationship Enrichment Center are training to work experientially, or in action. We are here to assist you in unpacking what it not serving you, and grab hold of what fulfills the you of you. When we heal the relationship within ourselves, we have the capacity to heal the relationships with others. We hope you’ll start your journey today!

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