Experiential therapy: what is it and how does it work?
In our practice, we often work with clients who have tried traditional forms of talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), but still feel “stuck.” In many cases, they may come away from other forms of therapy feeling gaslit, dismissed, unhelped, or even retraumatized. Some of these clients have even heard comments from other therapists such as, “I can’t help you because you’re already so self-aware.” But that self-awareness is often not enough to create meaningful change.
You can talk about a pattern or problem forever without seeing any improvement. You can understand it fully and analyze it from every angle, and not get relief. True processing and integrating happens on a deeper level. Experiential therapy helps people access those deeper layers where true healing takes place.
What is experiential therapy?
Experiential therapy is an umbrella term for any kind of therapy that brings us into an experience instead of talking about the experience. That means we’re processing it from the inside and embodying these things as we work through them, instead of talking about them from an outside, analytic perspective. It’s often a subtle shift, but a really powerful one.
There are a range of different techniques and interventions that can bring someone to that experiential place, but experiential processing is what creates real change, especially for people who are often “stuck in their heads.” Because real healing isn’t about what you know, it’s what you feel.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Other therapists have told you, “Sounds like you already have it figured out” or “you’re doing my job for me!”
You’ve received compliments and praise for your level of self-awareness, but still feel like you’re suffering.
You’ve experienced a dissonance between what you believe or think rationally, and what you feel on a deeper level.
You tend to analyze and intellectualize your feelings, and often feel “stuck in your head.”
If you’ve tried more traditional talk therapy and cognitive (top-down) modalities, and you still feel “stuck,” experiential therapy, or bottom-up therapy, could be the thing to help you get un-stuck.
What is top-down vs bottom-up therapy?
Top-down therapy
Top-down therapy refers to therapy that targets the parts of the brain responsible for reasoning and logic. In the example of CBT, Mayo Clinic defines the basic premise this way: “CBT helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.” Top-down therapy is based on insight, awareness, and discerning what is or is not objectively true.
Bottom-up therapy
Bottom-up therapy refers to therapy that targets the lower parts of the brain, which are responsible for automatic emotional responses, subconscious core beliefs, and our defensive survival strategies. There are many different therapies that utilize a bottom-up approach – they focus on working with the body responses and emotional responses.
Experiential therapy
Experiential therapy refers to a range of therapeutic interventions in which clients are guided to connect with their inner experiences, in the present moment. So instead of asking clients to reflect on something from an analytical perspective, therapists facilitate clients to actively embody their emotional experiences.
What are key concepts of experiential and bottom-up therapy?
In therapy, we work with the mind/cognition, body/somatics, and emotions. These 3 things all interact with each other in complex ways. The basis of bottom-up therapy is that we start with focusing on the felt sense, the experience and raw data found in the body and emotional responses. Many of the issues people struggle with, which lead them to therapy, begin in the lower parts of the brain. Insight and awareness – or logical understanding of the “facts” – are often not enough to create meaningful change.
The key concepts in bottom-up therapeutic modalities are based on neurobiology, and the neurobiological process that facilitates deep change. Experiential therapists operate from an understanding of how our automatic emotional and physical responses work, and how to rewire those automatic responses.
What are the benefits of an experiential approach?
Experiential and bottom-up therapeutic modalities are based on our current understandings of the neurobiological process of meaningful change, including healing from the effects of trauma. These modalities can be deeply effective and transformational.
Experiential therapy can be a great fit for people who tend to be “stuck in their heads,” and who tend to analyze and intellectualize their feelings. It can also be a great fit if you’ve experienced a dissonance between what you believe/think rationally, and what you feel on a deeper level. For example, someone could know rationally that setting boundaries is necessary and healthy, but on an automatic emotional level, it feels somehow wrong or unsafe to do so. Experiential therapy can help bridge the gaps between the mind and the body, and shift our unconscious core beliefs.
What are examples of experiential therapy?
There are many different modalities that utilize a bottom-up approach. The three I am most drawn to are somatic experiencing, coherence therapy, and IFS (internal family systems).
Art therapy, music therapy, psychodrama, EMDR, AEDP (accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy), ART (accelerated resolution therapy), and many others can also be experiential.
Why is bottom-up therapy good for trauma?
There are a few main reasons I find experiential and bottom-up approaches to be so great for working with complex trauma.
I find these modalities to be deeply compassionate and non-pathologizing. In these frameworks, symptoms are seen as self-protective adaptations. This can help people with trauma histories reduce shame and build self-compassion for the ways they have had to adapt in order to cope and survive.
Trauma responses occur quickly and automatically, before the higher, more logical parts of our brain even know what’s going on. That’s why you normally can’t think yourself out of PTSD symptoms and trauma responses. That’s why when a core belief is deeply embedded, trying to rationalize may not help shift anything. Bottom-up therapy helps us reprocess the trauma where it’s stored – in our implicit emotional learnings and physical responses.
What are implicit emotional learnings?
These are things that we learn from experiences, instead of being taught – things we can learn without ever even putting words to it. Implicit learnings in trauma could be about how to stay safe when someone is upset, or what it means to be close to others.
For example, all our attachment adaptations are typically implicitly learned. Implicit learnings are embedded during significant or painful moments, and from those learnings spring our adaptations, self-protective mechanisms, behaviors, and even our cognitions. The body works along with the emotional brain to hold and respond to these encoded learnings. During trauma, we may implicitly learn that it's never safe to relax, so our bodies stay in perpetual fight/flight – that is hyper vigilance.
Essentially, these emotional learnings form to create our subconscious maps of reality, and those maps guide all kinds of other patterns such as anxiety, depression, codependency, and an endlessly long list of other challenges that bring people to therapy. These learnings make perfect sense considering lived experience, but they may not be “rational” according to our logic-brains. This explains why you can know the “right thing,” but not truly feel it.
For example, someone might come into therapy struggling with high anxiety in public places, and a lot of worry about being judged or perceived badly by others. They might say to the therapist, “I know I shouldn’t care what random people think about me, I know it doesn’t really matter, and I know most people probably aren’t judging me harshly. But despite that knowledge, every time I’m in public I’m so on edge and feel sick with anxiety.” This demonstrates how there can be a lot of dissonance between what we “know” in our heads, and what actually feels true on that implicit, automatic level.
An experiential therapist would help the client in this scenario get in touch with what feels true on that deeper level, and process from there. The goal is eventually to update and rewire those subconscious automatic responses, so the logical brain, emotional brain, and body can all be on the same page.
What are experiential and bottom-up techniques?
The techniques used in experiential therapy vary, but all of them are based on guiding a client into direct contact with their experiences, in the present moment, instead of analytically reflecting on their experiences from a distance. Here are some common experiential techniques:
Imagery/visualization: In experiential therapy, imagery and visualization can be a powerful tool. Clients could be guided to visualize or imagine different past experiences, or scenarios, which help a client connect with their emotions and body. Clients could be guided to visualize or imagine different “parts” of themselves, and connect with/interact with those different parts. Imagery and visualization can also be used for grounding and regulation, like visualizing being in a safe and beautiful place in nature.
Somatic tools: Somatic therapeutic tools are experiential, since they help clients connect with the automatic sensations and responses in their bodies. Body scans, learning to notice how triggers and stress show up in the body, identifying how different emotions feel somatically, releasing or expressing emotions physically, and learning to connect with a felt sense of somatic safety are all experiential practices. Some people may use dance, yoga, or other physical practices as a way to engage somatic healing.
Role playing/psychodrama: In psychodrama and role playing exercises, clients are encouraged to directly step into their strong feelings and express them directly, rather than talking about them more analytically. For example, a client might be guided to speak to an empty chair and express vulnerable emotions about a person in the client's life.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness practices are experiential since they are focused on connecting people with the present moment, and noticing how it feels to be in the present moment non-judgmentally.
Art and music therapy: Art and music can both be great tools to connect people with their inner worlds in an experiential and bottom-up way. Many of us have experienced the way that music and art can connect us with our deep inner-emotions, and can help us express our inner experiences in a way that typical verbal language often can’t. Art and music therapists guide clients into using these creative mediums therapeutically.
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