What is Experiential Therapy and How is it Different?

Traditional therapy

Traditional therapy means people talk through their problems with a licensed therapist. Most therapists are trained to use present-focused, logic-based models and teach skills using versions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or apply brief problem-solving models like Solution-Focused Therapy.

Traditional talk therapy can be helpful for people who have never had therapy before, to talk and think through their problems and experiences. In fact, it is an important step to learn to put words around your experiences and emotions.

A male psychiatrist named Aaron Beck invented CBT in the 1960’s

The premise of CBT is that people have distorted thoughts, and therefore engage in ineffective behaviors. Emotions are not directly addressed in CBT. I believe people’s thoughts are “distorted” because they are not “thinking” at all… they are feeling.

The beliefs or “thoughts” that go along with feelings are not always based in adult logic. In fact, it can be pretty hard to access logical thoughts when your emotions are activated.

And those strong feelings can be based in past experiences, not present situations. Trauma therapists commonly state that when you are feeling strong emotions, it’s 80% about past experiences, and only 20% about present experiences.

CBT involves over-riding your emotional responses and trying to stay in your logical mind. That’s really hard to do when you’re triggered into old, familiar feelings. Often, suppressing our emotions leads to them coming out sideways, despite our best efforts.

If you can easily use a different or opposite behavior in those triggering circumstances once a therapist tells you to, CBT or talk therapy might be enough. It’s effective for 40-50% of people, at least in the short term.

Here’s why I think CBT is not a cure-all

The logical info you learn from CBT gets stored in your pre-frontal cortex, the problem-solving, organizing and decision-making part of your brain. To access your pre-frontal cortex, your body and brain must be calm.

But when our emotions get activated, especially with anxiety or fear, our brain activity is focused in our amygdala and brain stem. The pre-frontal cortex goes dark, making it hard to access all that nice, logical, reasonable information and those different behaviors you’re supposed to do.

Anyone who’s ever been in a fight with a partner, friend or family member has experienced the lights being out in the logical part of their brain. In that moment, we are dominated by our emotions. It’s like you never learned any of those skills at all.

This disconnect is what sometimes makes people think, “therapy doesn’t work.”

The long term data on CBT is not great. It helps about half the people in the short term, but less in the long term, because it may not get to the root of the problem…those old, familiar emotions.

Therapists don’t know what they don’t know

Short-term approaches like CBT or Solution-Focused Therapy are reliably taught in graduate programs. It’s what insurance companies will reimburse for, and want therapists to do, because it can be done relatively quickly. You can think of it like the “fast food” of therapy.

Learning to do more requires significant investment of time and money by the therapist. And when therapists accept insurance, they typically don’t have the ability to invest $10,000 to learn a specific form of specialty therapy.

Experiential therapy gives you an experience that works with your emotions and with your body, rather than a logical explanation

I have had about 12 cumulative years of therapy over my lifetime, with different therapists. This gave me some personal experience with different forms of therapy for my own problems.

Thanks to some amazing therapists older and wiser than I am, I had the opportunity to experience deep insight and transformations from experiential forms of therapy.

Each time I have felt transformative power from a type of experiential therapy, I have excitedly invested in learning to practice it myself.

Most people are smart enough to know what they should do. What people often need, is help for how they get hijacked by their emotions.

Experiential therapy encourages you to access your emotions and sensations in your body, and then the therapist gently guides you through an EXPERIENCE in that emotional state. This allows emotions to be processed, so they naturally quiet down. It allows new perspectives that arise spontaneously from YOU. It allows new neural connections to be formed. You are finally listening to the wisdom within yourself.

If you’ve never talked about your problems, or you are very invested in trying to avoid your emotions, you are probably not ready for experiential therapy. Experiential therapy, when used skillfully, is like a precision surgery tool. It gets right down into the heart of the problem. And with the therapist’s guidance, you are given an opportunity to heal whatever is stuck.

Experiential therapy is a creative process grounded in extensive training and experience.

Experiential therapy works well with clients who are able to trust and step into the process and allow the therapist to guide them.

EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy

EMDR is the most extensively researched therapy for trauma processing. Over 30 controlled studies have demonstrated it’s effectiveness for many types of psychological problems. A Kaiser Permanente study demonstrated that 100% of single-incident trauma victims and 77% of multiple trauma victims no longer met criteria for PTSD after 6 sessions. The work you do with EMDR is permanent, the same problem does not re-occur.

I have over 200 hours of training and can use EMDR for many different types of problems.

The EMDR International Association FAQ page

Internal Family Systems or Ego-State Therapy

Internal Family Systems is a psychodynamic therapy that is based on Ego-State Therapy. Ego-State Therapy believes every person is made up of “parts” that can be identified and understood. Parts of the self are sometimes in conflict with each other. Child parts can be frozen in the time of the trauma and not be aware of current reality. Defensive or protective parts can get in the way of your relationships and healthy functioning. Ego-State Therapy aims to integrate these parts of the self into the whole of the present self.