Experiential Therapy

Thinking, recognizing patterns, and organizing our stories can bring great relief and perspective. Insight and greater awareness can be powerful and important parts of therapy.

Sometimes though, deep pain can still persist even after we have done all of this work. We may understand why we feel a certain way intellectually, but still feel stuck being able to shift things emotionally.

The deeper pain we struggle with is often connected to emotional learnings carried forward from past experiences and can sound something like:

I’m not safe.
I’m alone.
I’m unlovable.

Meaningful emotional change on this deeper level is possible through a process called memory reconsolidation.

Memory reconsolidation isn’t a specific therapy technique or modality. It’s a process the brain can engage in under certain circumstances, allowing emotional learnings to be updated with new information. When I talk about brain-based therapy, I mean that I pay attention to creating the kinds of experiences that support this deeper emotional change.

One way we do this is by working in a more experiential way rather than staying only in thought and analysis. This doesn’t mean we stop thinking. It means we invite more of ourselves into the therapy process and have better access to the parts of the brain where the emotional knowings are located.

Experiential therapy creates space to notice, be with and relate to ourselves rather than immediately trying to figure things out.

This means slowing down enough to notice experiences that often stay outside of awareness.

• body sensations
• emotions
• images
• memories
• metaphor
• imagination
• symbolic meaning