What is experiential therapy?
Therapy terms can be confusing if you’re not a therapist. If you’re looking to start therapy, you may have a clear idea of what you do and don’t want out of the experience. What you may not know is how the criteria of what you’re looking for translates to the descriptions you encounter. For example, you may notice that I describe my therapy style as “experiential” on my website. But then you may be left asking, what is experiential therapy?
As is the case in many fields, these terms are used as shorthand to describe something that is important, but complex. The terms are useful, but only if you know what they mean. Here, I’m going to do my best to define and describe what experiential therapy looks like. As therapist who believes in this way of working, I will also tell you why I think it’s particularly useful when it comes to treating anxiety and trauma.
What even is therapy?
Looking at psychotherapy in general is a good place to start with this. When you think of a therapy session, you likely think of it being a type of conversation. You bring in the problems and conflicts in your life and you and your therapist discuss them. Perhaps you come out of the session with some new insights or solutions. Or perhaps you just feel relieved to have had a chance to talk it out. And this is an accurate picture of therapy for the most part. At its most fundamental level, a therapy session is a conversation.
The question, then, is: what makes this different from a conversation with a friend? The first and most obvious answer is that the dynamic is different. With a friend, the exchange is often mutual. Or, in many cases, you and your friend have assumed set roles that may be hard to break. If you have a friend who calls you expecting support, but who you rarely turn to when you need support, then you two have established certain roles. In many relationships, we do this without acknowledging it. With a therapist, the roles are clear and explicit. The focus is on you, and no one needs to feel guilty or resentful about it. And with that comes a certain freedom, especially when you also know that your therapist will respect your privacy.
The other way therapy can differ from other conversations is determined by your therapist’s approach. And this is where your therapist’s style and specific skills come into play. If your therapist takes a solution-focused approach, then they are likely focused on helping you find practical next steps. If they take a CBT approach, then they will help you examine and challenge your thinking. If your therapist takes a experiential approach, then they will help you to examine what you are experiencing as you are experiencing it. The style your therapist brings to the conversation can greatly impact what you walk away with.
What is experiential therapy?
Experiential therapy requires a certain focus on the part of your therapist. That focus is on the present moment. If your therapist is taking an experiential approach, they are helping to add a layer of awareness to the conversation that looks at what is happening while you are talking about whatever you’re bringing into your session. You may experience anxiety, emotions like anger or sadness or joy and along the way you may experience sensations in your body. For many people all of these experiences slip by without much awareness of them. Experiential therapy helps you to develop that awareness.
Let’s consider an example. Say you are talking about a conversation you had with your parent that you found unsettling. As you relay this story to your therapist, perhaps you mostly feel anxiety, but you also feel a whisper of anger and a bit of sadness here and there. If your therapist is working with you experientially, then they will be trying to help you to notice and track these internal shifts.
In doing so, they may also help you to make space for feelings that you may otherwise skip over. For example, if you stay with the anger that you would otherwise ignore, you may learn something new. This could be about yourself, like that you habitually put others’ needs before your own. Or it may be something about the relationship, like that your parent has shut down your feelings for most of your life. Of course, these two things could certainly be related. Our emotions contain wisdom and messages that teach us to better understand ourselves and our needs. This anger may show you that you have a different option that would help to liberate you from a long-standing pattern.
Experiential is also experimental
Oftentimes, a therapist with an experiential focus helps the client to try something new. In the above example, the therapist helps the client to stay with an emotion (anger) that they would normally skip over or turn away from.
Trying a new way of relating with yourself and others can be difficult. Often these patterns are so habitual that we don’t even know that there’s another option. It can also be scary. A lot of times, these patterns have worked for us in some important way in the past. In the above example, the client may ignore their own anger at their parent because they learned early in life that expressing it would lead to severe punishment. Although as an adult that may no longer be the case, the fear remains. And this same fear probably shows up in all of that client’s relationships. It may also prevent them from recognizing when a relationship is unhealthy, or from developing deeper connections with the people who would support them the most.
Considering that trying something new can be difficult and scary, it helps to first try it in a relationship and environment where you know you are safe from judgment and other negative repercussions. Your therapist can provide the support and security you need to experiment in a way that feels emotionally safe.
Why is experiential therapy useful?
The main reason experiential therapy is useful, is that it helps us to develop mindful awareness of our internal and emotional experiences. Much research supports the many benefits of mindfulness to mental and emotional health, as well as in physical health and relationships. Many of us associate mindfulness with meditation, but mindfulness is actually an umbrella term that includes any way that we practice awareness of the present moment. Experiential therapy is a type of mindfulness practice.
Additionally, and related to this, the present-focused awareness that we can tune into with experiential therapy can help us to recognize and shift longstanding patterns that get in our way. For example, if we tend to feel anxious in social settings, we probably will associate socializing with discomfort and we may habitually turn down opportunities to socialize. Through experiential therapy, we can begin to notice anxiety as it arises in the moment. When we learn to recognize the somatic signs of anxiety or emotions, we gain more control. Rather than skipping the social event without much thought, we may notice the anxiety arising. This gives us an opportunity to investigate how much of a role we want this anxiety to play in our decision making. We can also do some internal exploration to better understand the cause of the anxiety and how to regulate it.
Overall, experiential therapy helps us to recognize the limitations we regularly experience and to recognize we have choices we did not know that we had. By getting in touch with ourselves in this way, we also open doors to connect with the world around us in ways we didn’t know were possible.
Who is experiential therapy for?
I believe experiential therapy could benefit anyone. We all experience anxiety and we all hold self-limiting beliefs. That said, if you have experienced trauma of any kind, experiential therapy will probably help you more than most forms of talk therapy.
The reason experiential therapy is particularly useful for treating trauma, is because traumatic experiences overwhelm our nervous systems. As a result, we become stuck in a highly anxious state. Trauma’s overwhelming nature, also tends to lead to feelings of shame and strongly held negative beliefs about oneself. If you strongly believe that you are bad, disgusting, lazy, or a horrible person, chances are trauma is at the root of this. Trauma, then, creates both a somatic and a cognitive state that restricts people from feeling present.
In experiential therapy, a person who carries trauma can begin to notice the role it plays in the current moment. Rather than feeling a vague sense that something is wrong, they will begin to notice the body sensations associated with a hyperactive nervous system and the moments that shame influences their thinking and choices. Then they have an opportunity to regulate their anxiety, investigate their core beliefs, or apply some self-compassion as an antidote to the shame. In the context of a safe therapy relationship, they can also begin to discover new ways to relate to themselves and others that are not driven by shame and anxiety.
In many ways experiential therapy departs from the more classical forms of therapy. In doing so, it brings in neuroscience-backed ideas that can help to alleviate and shift the problems that many other therapy modalities have struggled to address. This is particularly true when it comes to treating trauma and the chronic anxiety and shame that often come with it. By bringing mindfulness into the mix, experiential therapy creates opportunities to notice what is happening as it is happening. From there, we often find an abundance of new possibilities for how we can feel and relate.
Read a blog about relational therapy.
