The New Way: What is Experiential Therapy?

This past July 4th, I sat around a shaded table, poolside, watching my son and his friends swim, and talking with a handful of other adults. There was another therapist there as well. When a therapist attends a social event, we tend to get asked lots of questions; with two of us there, the conversation was fairly dominated by matters of the human existence. At one point, a man in his mid 50s said "I like seeing my therapist. I see her maybe once a month now. It's good to have someone to vent to, but there's nothing else left to do. I know what my issues are. Once you know what they are, there's nothing more to really do in therapy." My heart sank.

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A huge swath of my patients come to me saying something similar. Something akin to "I'm tired of just talking about it. I want to actually do something." There is a shift taking place in the therapeutic landscape, and a movement toward models driven by experience accompanies this larger change. I certainly would call myself an "experiential therapist," but what exactly this means is often unclear to the layperson.

For much of the modern history of psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) has dominated the marketplace. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the explanation and analysis of why CBT became so paramount is beyond the scope of this article. Much of the public discourse and popular conceptualization of psychotherapy has been oriented around CBT for at least the past 30 years. In CBT, the emphasis is on thoughts driving feelings and behaviors, and patients learn practical tools to reframe negative thinking. This is known as the "top down" approach. However, not all paths toward therapeutic wellness lead through the brain in this way. Some go deeper—into the body, emotions, and even the nervous system.

Two models primarily occupy the experiential therapy space: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Internal Family Systems (IFS). The two are related in many ways, and I often consider them cousins of one another. Both methods involve engaging with one's issues directly in the present moment, often through the body, emotions, or visualizations. These methods help patients experience and process emotions that are often stuck beneath the surface of conscious awareness.

IFS is based on the idea that the mind is made up of distinct parts, each with its own feelings, beliefs, and memories. Some parts carry pain or trauma, while others try to protect us from that pain. In IFS, the client learns to connect with their core Self, a calm, compassionate inner presence that can heal these wounded parts.

This is an internal, experiential process—not a purely intellectual one. Clients often use visualization, inner dialogue, and somatic awareness to build relationships with their parts and release emotional burdens.

EMDR was originally designed specifically to help people reprocess traumatic memories. However, it is now used to address a variety of mood issues, anxiety disorders, and even chronic pain. EMDR involves bilateral stimulation, like eye movements or tapping, which activates the brain's natural capacity to integrate disturbing memories. Instead of retelling the trauma story over and over, patients process it on an emotional and sensory level, allowing the nervous system to resolve the stuck responses of fear, shame, or grief.

While a good CBT or psychodynamic therapist can help people in truly tangible and powerful ways, nothing else feels quite like IFS, EMDR or the other experiential approaches. In CBT, the change often takes place exclusively outside of the therapy office: homework is assigned, and when completed with sustained frequency, people feel better. With experiential treatment, transformative change begins during the session itself; patients reawaken to long sleeping, much younger wounded versions of themselves; people reparent their suffering inner-children, imagining holding them and whispering reassurance; patients physically quake and tremble, as tremors held back during acutely traumatic events are finally experienced and lived by the body; repressed, forbidden memories are unlocked and held; people learn to notice how they feel physically in every part of their body, and they locate where they are holding the trauma and the tension; the parts of us that work tirelessly to protect our vulnerable, sorrowful underbellies are offered a rest and given compassionate appreciation; people may experience a literal physical purging of traumatic memories long locked away; middle-age parents reach out to the inner children within them, hold their hands and welcome them back to a safe place, warm of real love and compassion. These experiences cannot be rationalized with or brought on by logical conversation. They are deeply experiential in nature, and they awaken from imagination, from emotion, and from places deep within the body.

The change and healing that experiential approaches can bring about are beyond my use of language - words do little justice to the potency and genuineness of the transformations I have been privileged to witness as part of my work. The realness, and the efficacy, of the work in the experiential side of psychotherapy drive me to focus my career on these approaches. The testimony of my patients, and the many millions who have come along with them in their own work, speak to the importance of embracing experiential models. After all, talking can only take us so far... in the world of therapy, it's time to actually do something.

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