Experiential Therapy is a development of Humanistic Therapy. Here are some of things you might expect from this kind of work:

The Relationship

As befits a humanistic approach, the first principles of Experiential Therapy have to do with honoring the relationship between the person seeking help and the helper:

1) The therapist is clear and transparent, honest and genuine. The person will generally know a lot about the therapists’ responses and feelings, and needn’t worry that anything is being hidden. What you see is what you’re getting.

2) The therapist makes an ongoing attempt to understand the person from that person’s point of view, rather than from some outside, supposedly “expert” vantage. Even when complete understanding is elusive, the effort to understand is continual, sincere, and gladly undertaken.

3) In addition to understanding, the therapist is accepting of the person as a whole, even of those things the person does not accept in themselves. This combination of understanding and acceptance, all by itself, can go a long way toward healing.

Process Diagnosis (rather than Person Diagnosis)

Experiential therapists attempt to view situations in terms of process. Instead of categorizing and labeling what you are, and/or what is wrong with you, the question is what is happening here? As the person and the environment mutually interact and respond to one another, what are the most helpful views of what is actually going on?

In this way, problems are not seen as originating or manifesting exclusively within the individual, but rather as processes that emerge naturally (and traceably) out of person-environment encounters.

The responsibility for improving your life remains with you. It’s just that you don’t have to take all the blame for you how you got here.

The Growth Tendency

In attempting to get a whole and helpful view of what is happening, there are two things that will have to be seen well. While it’s important to feel one’s way into “the problem,” it’s equally important to grasp the healthy needs, wants and desires of the person.

If pain, hurt and suffering are one side of the coin, the other side is all of the various yearnings and wantings that are crucial in moving towards solutions.

In the humanistic view of the world, desires, properly understood, are not evidence of some kind of moral corruption, but rather healthy and helpful signposts of useful directionality. They are the body signaling — often vaguely at first— what is needed. While these impulses may require some careful decoding, they are ultimately essential to healing.

A Focus on the Here & Now

From an experiential point of view, the best way to get a clear view of a process is to see it in action, while it’s happening, now, in this moment. We set aside abstract and purely cognitive thoughts and ideas for the immediate, emotionally and physically felt experience of this moment.

Some have taken “Here & Now” to mean that the person is only to talk about this very moment, and is somehow not supposed to refer the past or the future. This is a misunderstanding. It’s just that when you are remembering the past, you are remembering now. When you are anticipating or planning for the future, you’re doing that now.

It’s always now.

“As”

At some point, as you’re telling your story, as you’re recalling the details, etc., the question becomes, “As you see your partner’s face, the tears in their eyes, what’s happening inside for you now?” Or, “What’s it like for you, now, as you remember the sound of the car pulling out of the driveway?”

What we’re doing here is explicitly connecting the person’s perception (say, a memory), with their here-and-now reaction to their perception.

Often, people will talk pretty exclusively about what is out there, without reference to their own experiencing. At other times, people refer to their own experiencing, but in the absence of the context.

To get a holistic view of the process, we’ll need to balance the perception and the reaction — to alternate the focus, bring them gradually together, and ultimately grasp them simultaneously, until it becomes one clear process.

This is like closing an electrical circuit, where suddenly things are illuminated. Or perhaps like adding a harmony to a melody, which somehow expands our awareness and appreciation of the melody and its possibilities.

Experiencing

But what is “experiencing”? It isn’t merely thinking, though thought is a part of it. It isn’t just sensory perception, though that’s included, too. It isn’t just emotions, or behavior, or memory, or story, etc, though all these things, together, make up our moment-by-moment experiencing. The sum total of all of these experiential elements, in this moment, make up our experiencing. All of these elements bear on, and influence, each other.

A Special Place for Feelings and Meanings

Though there are many discrete elements to experiencing, the various schools of therapy emphasize different ways in to reconfigure the system. Cognitive therapists tend to emphasize thoughts. Behaviorists — behavior. Etc

There is a long tradition in humanistic/experiential therapy to emphasize feelings and meanings. The idea here is not to exclude the other elements — as I said, all the elements are part of experiencing, and they all influence each other. But humanists find that, most of the time, the most potent sources of experiential shifting are to be found in feelings and meanings.

The Experiment

Often, one (or several) of the experiential elements that are needed to understand a process are absent or unclear. (They’re probably not actually absent, but the person is having difficulty establishing awareness of them.)

In this situation, the experiential therapist may propose an experiment.

An experiment is a prompt of attention and/or behavior that might help establish an awareness of one or more “absent” experiential elements.

This is a huge topic

I’ll write more about the experiment in future posts.

The Paradox of Change

Both the Person-Centered & Gestalt Therapy traditions are imbued with the sense that change comes about not through direct, teeth-gritting, nose-to-the-grindstone efforts to change but, paradoxically, through simple (though sometimes challenging) acts of paying closer to attention to what already is.

New options become visible and possible when we see better, understand better and accept ourselves better — rather than fighting ourselves.