How Experiential Therapy Helps You Do More Than “Understand” Your Problems
How Experiential Approaches Like Internal Family Systems and Emotionally-Focused Therapies Go Beyond “Just Talking” to help you actually PRocess Your pain and let it go.
Steven Hayes once said, “the problem is that we are not trained to discriminate when the mind is useful and when it is not”. I think about his words often when it comes to giving and receiving effective therapy. This quote also helps articulate why I have chosen to practice Experiential forms of therapy (in particular, Emotionally-Focused, Narrative, Somatic, and Mindfulness therapies).
Have you ever said, “I know why I am the way I am, but I still can’t change my patterns or feel any better”? If so, you understand that intellectual comprehension alone cannot heal you. But when Experiential therapy goes well, you connect with something deeper than your rational mind, and that makes all the difference.
Here’s a quick rundown on what Experiential therapy means, and how it meets specific needs for healing.
Embodying versus “just talking”
Traditionally, therapy has been “talk-based”. You share about your life, thoughts, emotions, and, with a therapist’s assistance, you work to gain insight into all of the above. This certainly also happens in most Experiential therapy approaches, but normally, insight is just the starting point for an embodied process of healing.
Embodiment is when we use our self-awareness to notice our whole experience, including our sensory, physical, sensational, and emotional states of being. When you are “embodied”, you are not just talking, thinking, understanding, and being “in your head”. Instead, something that can feel almost magical happens in real-time during the session.
The work of trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk (2000) is helping us to understand what that “magic” might be. van der Kolk’s work indicates that consciously inhabiting your body and feeling your difficult emotions while processing difficult memories can significantly rewire your nervous system. In this way, a system that has been “tuned” to chronic high stress by painful experiences can relearn rest and relaxation. Your body/mind essentially let go of the past, and the reasons it gave you to be on high alert. You can return to the present and enjoy what is positive and possible in your life.
The role of the imagination
How can you create an experience that unites body, mind, emotion, and memory? Very often, Experiential therapy asks us to use our imaginations to get into this sweet spot for processing pain and letting it go.
For example, many approaches—including Emotionally-Focused Therapy and Internal Family Systems—use “imaginary dialogues” to get us into this zone. With the support of your therapist, you might revisit a traumatic memory and dialogue with the part of you that suffered then. You might ask this younger self what they needed the most, and then speak the words or send the energy they ask for. You maintain a sense of being safe in your body as you feel your emotions deeply, making new meaning out of your painful recollection.
In fact, because you are engaging with this memory as if it is occurring in the present moment, your brain/body appear to experience it as a “real” situation playing out in the moment (Giacomucci, 2021). It is almost like you are time traveling to intervene in the events that gave you the problems that brought you to therapy in the first place.
