How experiential therapies help you go beyond understanding.

Ever felt so overwhelmed by your emotions it becomes hard to describe your experiences? Many of us start therapy like this, desiring change when our inner landscapes contain more chaos than we can ever hope to handle. Getting words out can be a struggle when you’re chronically dysregulated, and feeling like you have to talk about upsetting experiences in therapy can come with a lot of pressure. Managing your symptoms gets harder when you are constantly overwhelmed. Logical reasoning doesn’t work when you already know what you should do. For most of us, it simply adds to our mental load.

Connecting with your emotions, making sense of them, giving yourself the comfort and space to react, is what allows for the creation of new experiences.

Experiential therapy helps you bridge the gap between your goals and reality, and this means going to the root of your problems and providing transformational change. Instead of looking for solutions or providing symptom management, experiential therapies target the emotional learning associated with the problem in the non-verbal or subcortical part of the brain. Attending to our most deeply held and vulnerable emotions helps to re-wire the neural networks in the brain responsible for our everyday behaviours and emotions, including many of our problems, and creating change at the emotional level paves the way for providing transformational change.

Transformational change is the change we feel in our bodies. It’s a deeper level of change that comes from rewriting the implicit memories in our emotional or limbic brain. Transformational change allows us to change the feelings we associate with memories and creates the space for us to make new choices.

Experiential therapy starts with a sense of emotional safety. Many of our root problems represent significant pain from a young and vulnerable state of our being. Coming into contact with those experiences requires courage, and clients need to feel safe in order to stay mindful and regulated through the therapeutic process. A sense of relational safety, or distance from painful experiences helps us direct mindful attention towards our experiences without becoming dysregulated, and allows us to trace the emotional patterns that lead to our actions.

Experiential therapy creates change through guided attention. Our innermost self holds answers to our problems, but connecting to vulnerable emotions can be painful. Our thinking brain protects us against the pain of our experiences through deflecting attempts at self-understanding by intellectualization. Experiential therapy helps to expand on your experiences by directing attention to our deepest emotions and wisdom.

Experiential work is deep, efficient, and focused, and therapists typically use a directive style to make sure clients stay on task. As a result of the efficient and focused style, experiential work can also be short-term and very effective.

Should you consider experiential therapy?

Experiential therapies include Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Experiential therapies are all deeply trauma-informed, and are proven to be effective with early relational injuries (like attachment wounds) or chronic traumatic experiences.

If you find it hard to start talking at the start of a session, or you feel chronically overwhelmed when you start to talk about your feelings, then experiential methods might be a good fit for you. Connecting and listening to your innermost experiences take place in silence, so there isn’t any need to struggle to get your words out, and an intentional silence is no less transformative than talking out loud. No pressure to talk through past events means experiential therapies can be less triggering. If you’re neurodivergent or find the conscious effort to change behaviour, thoughts, or emotions through the route of traditional therapy challenging, then experiential therapy may be a better fit for you.