Feeling Your Way to Change With Experiential Therapy

If you're an over thinker or have previously been to therapy, you may understand your patterns and even know why you feel the way you do. However, this insight alone may not be enough to fully change how you feel about your situation.

This can be such a frustrating experience. So why does this happen?

You can intellectually understand your fears, beliefs, or lived experiences come from the past or are irrational, yet your nervous system continues to respond as if the threat is happening in the present. These reactions are due to implicit emotional memories, or emotional learnings that your body stores when the experience is overwhelming or unable to be processed fully.

How Bottom-Up Therapies Work With Implicit Memories

Experiential approaches, such as Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), Coherence Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Somatic Experiencing (SE), all have one thing in common: They move beyond intellectual insight to work directly with emotional experience.

Instead of staying in perpetual analysis, therapists trained in these modalities help clients notice and explore the physical sensations, beliefs, images, and protective responses associated with their emotional learning. While they use different techniques, each provides a way of working in the moment with emotional learning that goes beyond simply talking or explaining it.

This might involve fully experiencing an emotion that was previously avoided, noticing or following sensations and impulses in the body, or having a new emotional experience that contradicts what the person has learned to expect. In experiential therapy, the body becomes part of the therapeutic process. This is key because, contrary to what most people believe, emotions aren't psychological events; they're something we experience physiologically.

How the Brain Learns Through Emotional Experience

Consider an individual who struggles with people-pleasing and caretaking, yet may be aware of the origins of this pattern. They may feel frustrated by their inability to set boundaries, assert themselves, or communicate their needs, leading to self-criticism and increasing resentment and dissatisfaction in their relationships. When this pattern emerges in therapy, the therapist may help the client to have a new, corrective emotional experience of getting their own needs met, due to not having to take care of the therapist, while also processing the underlying grief, anger, and hurt at the cost of such prior self-abandonment. This type of therapeutic experience can activate the brain's capacity to form new pathways and update old emotional learning so that change becomes felt and integrated — a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity.

This type of emotional experience can have a profound impact on the individual's former narrative of abandoning oneself in order to care for others. Oftentimes, what we see in therapy is that a maladaptive belief system (e.g., "I must put the needs of others first, even at my own expense") is never directly challenged. Instead, when a person has an experience that contradicts what their nervous system has learned to expect, the old belief may naturally lose its emotional hold. What emerges is a new, more self-empowered belief or insight that arises organically and is experienced by the individual as compelling and true. In this example, the individual may genuinely feel "My needs matter" because they had the felt experience that expressing their needs or preferences didn't lead to the anticipated rejection, shaming, conflict, or loss of connection they'd learned to anticipate.

Therapeutic Impact and Benefit

A meta-analysis found that clients who engaged more deeply in processing and making meaning from their internal experiences during therapy had better treatment outcomes, suggesting that experiential engagement may be a common factor in effective psychotherapy. Additionally, a meta-analysis of 57 randomized controlled trials involving 4,300 participants found that experiential dynamic therapies (a family of affect-focused approaches that includes AEDP and ISTDP) produced significant and sustained improvements across anxiety, mood, personality, and somatic disorders.

Over time or suddenly, new emotional learning can influence how people interact with the world outside of the therapy room. Unlike top-down approaches, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which emphasize challenging unhelpful cognitions or implementing coping skills to bring about change, the person with difficulty expressing their needs won't have to consciously remind themselves to set a boundary or reason their way out of a thought. They may simply find that asserting themselves feels more natural, or that they feel less inhibited by guilt or anxiety to act on their needs.

Ultimately, sustained therapeutic change for more ingrained patterns isn't just about learning a more adaptive way to think. Experiential therapies can help people embody new emotional experiences that allow the nervous system to respond differently when familiar situations arise.