What we live we become!
I love being an experiential therapist! It is creative and energizing, and often tends to quickly bring about significant change. There are many schools of psychotherapy, by one estimate some 600 different ones (of course with a lot of overlap from one school to another). Which ones that are likely to serve a specific individual the best, depend on personality and learning style, as well as on the challenges that bring someone into therapy.
In an experientially oriented therapy, I invite my clients to go beyond the cognitive realm, and enter more deeply into the realm of the emotional, the expressive, and the subconscious. This is an active and collaborative form of therapy. Together we address client concerns with, for example, depression, anxiety, or PTSD. In the rich and multilayered landscape of expressive-experiential therapy, we together explore new solutions to old problems. We engage actively with trying on new voices, new behaviors and new possibilities, with the expectation that we will create and encounter ways of being in the world that can be more suited for living life with greater health and greater life fulfillment. If talking alone could accomplish this, chances are that it would have happened long ago.
In an experientially oriented therapy, we invite new, uplifting, and encouraging experiences of ourselves and of the world. Through role-play, guided imagery, physical activation, and self-expressive practices, we go beyond a cognitive understanding of life’s challenges, and invite a more deeply felt realization of what is missing, and of what is truly meaningful. Through these and other activating practices, we begin to realize inner talents and longings previously hidden or avoided. And, furthermore, we engage in safe and productive re-enactments of experiences that in the past may have been traumatic or in other ways psychologically problematic. By moving towards sensitive topics, we begin to discover a greater freedom in regards to our life history. Thus, with the philosophy of moving towards, I invite my clients to have memorable and impactful experiences in our therapy. In a collaborative fashion we approach therapy as an opportunity to practice previously underdeveloped skills. Together we seek to engage through all of our
senses. When we connect with our own inner experiences, we tend to create stronger, more lasting, and more meaningful behavioral changes in our lives. What touches us deeply, we tend to remember, and, what we remember, we bring into our lives. Activation is the precursor to real and meaningful change.
Experiential therapy has a long history, dating back to the 1950’s, going back to Milton Erickson’s Medical Hypnosis ; Jacob Moreno’s Psychodrama; the Family Therapies of Virginia Satir and Salvador Minuchin; Carl Rogers’ Client-Centered Therapy; and Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy. These therapies emphasize experiential activation in the pursuit of therapeutic growth and change. In spite of these past significant contributions, psychotherapy has traditionally come to be known as ”the talking cure”. Talking, reflecting, contemplating, and searching for insight certainly have a place in psychotherapy. To bring about real and lasting change – a transformation – experiential learning, rather than talk alone, is oftentimes needed.