What is Experiential Therapy and How is it Different?

Traditional therapy

Traditional therapy has 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 verbalize and think through their problems and experiences.

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

The premise of CBT is if you think different thoughts, and use different behaviors, you’ll feel different, and therefore better. Emotions are not directly addressed in CBT, except to say, you’re upset because your thinking is flawed. I believe your “thinking is flawed” because you’re not “thinking” at all… you are feeling.

And there are valid reasons you’re feeling what you are feeling.

All the versions of CBT, in my opinion, involve over-riding emotional responses and trying to stay in your logical mind. That’s really hard to do. Our culture already prioritizes suppressing our emotions, and how’s that working out for us?

If you just need to hear is that whatever happened wasn’t your fault, and you can easily do a different or opposite behavior in similar triggering circumstances once a therapist tells you to, CBT or talk therapy might work for you. It’s effective for 40-50% of people, at least in the short term.

Here’s why I think CBT is not that helpful

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 things 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.”

There is so much hype about CBT being “evidence-based” because it’s easily measured, study participants are often cherry-picked to have mild problems, and because it requires a LOT of homework for it to be successful (homework, yuck!). But the long term data on it is not great. It helps half the people in the short term, but not many in the long term, because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem.

And I think following our emotions DOES.

Therapists don’t know what they don’t know

It’s not the fault of therapists, because short-term approaches like CBT or Solution-Focused Therapy are what is taught in graduate school. It’s what insurance companies will reimburse for, and want therapists to do, cause it’s quick.

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

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

I have had about 12 years of therapy over my lifetime, with many 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 me, I have experienced deep transformations from experiential forms of therapy. I was already a licensed therapist, but had never learned about or experienced these types of therapy before.

Each time I have felt transformative power from a type of experiential therapy, I have excitedly invested years, and thousands of dollars, in learning it myself. I’m up to 4 different kinds now!

Most people are smart enough to know what they should do. They don’t necessarily need an explanation. What people need, is help for how they get hijacked by their emotions.

Experiential therapy encourages you to access your emotions, or access 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, and have spent a lot of time trying to avoid your emotions, you are probably not ready for experiential therapy. Experiential therapy, when it is used skillfully, is like a precision surgery tool. It gets right down into the heart of what’s going on. And with the therapist’s guidance, now you get to heal it.

With experiential therapy, you and I create a unique processing experience just for you, based on your needs. I bring extensive knowledge and skills, you bring the emotional experiences that are stored in your body and mind.

This is a creative process grounded in my extensive training and experience, on both sides of the couch. I work well with clients who are able to trust and step into the process and allow me to guide them.

EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy

EMDR is the most extensively researched form of 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 250 hours of training to use it for just about any type of problem.

The EMDR International Association FAQ page

What do other clients say about EMDR?

“I had no idea how life changing EMDR would be for me. I am in awe as to how I am positively impacted daily in how I feel, respond and experience life’s moments and life’s challenges.” Female, 59 

“I received about three months of EMDR therapy from Taana. The best way to describe the therapy is guided meditation in which Taana allows you to build a safe personal mental space in which to process difficult experiences and feelings within your own life. I had such a positive experience with Taana! I never felt disconnected from the therapy process and I always felt safe and comfortable to share moments and milestones in my own life with Taana.”  Female, 28

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 your current reality. Defensive or protective parts can get in the way of your relationships. Ego-State Therapy aims to integrate these parts of the self into the whole of the present self.