Do you feel stuck fighting anxiety, low mood, lack of energy and motivation, various physical symptoms, despite the fact that you’ve already worked on yourself and have possibly even been in therapy?

Will becoming aware of problems/difficulties in the form of conversations with a specialist guarantee that the symptoms will completely disappear and never recur?

Traditional talk therapy with a psychologist is what helps you better understand what’s happening, possibly why, and allows you to develop strategies for change. In this type of therapy, success lies in insight—understanding some painful issue (“the puzzle is pieced together” ), something is understood and brought to awareness. But unfortunately, very often an intellectual understanding alone is not enough to bring about transformative change—the symptoms, complaints remain…

Very frequently in such therapy, limitations and constraints are accepted, concluding that the problem will not be resolved, the symptoms will remain, but one can learn to live with them, manage them, guide them… It will be very rare for a symptom/problem to completely disappear or at least largely diminish.

Does that mean that this kind of therapy doesn’t work and isn’t needed?
The answer is no: for the most part, it is helpful and improves a person’s quality of life, though often not to the extent the person would like or had hoped for when seeking a specialist.

Why can’t the symptoms/problem be fully resolved?

The cause of symptoms is most often the result of unconscious emotional learning. In other words, very often there is no clear conscious memory of a certain emotional or behavioral reaction. A person simply experiences, for example, anxiety in social situations, but doesn’t really understand when and why it started. Merely talking about it, which is connected to symptom management (coping), does not change the cause.

The cause is frequently an unconscious emotional reaction called implicit memory. It is like an automatic response formed from past experiences, even if you do not clearly remember those experiences.

For example: If, in childhood, you were often criticized for showing anger, your brain might have “learned” that anger is dangerous, and now you might feel anxious without being able to explain why.

Simply talking about the fact that the cause of anxiety is unfounded, and using various self-soothing or cognitive techniques, won’t change the fact that in certain situations, anxiety will appear.
Precisely in such cases, experiential therapy can offer something that ordinary conversation cannot—a deeper, emotional and bodily experience that rewrites old unconscious beliefs.

How does it look like in practice?

For instance, in experiential therapy, working with the aforementioned example of suppressed anger, the therapist might help you, in a safe setting, feel and express this suppressed anger. This new experience—feeling and expressing anger without negative consequences—helps “rewrite” the old unconscious belief that anger is dangerous. This is an emotionally corrective experience.

What is Experiential Therapy? 🌟

Experiential therapy is not something entirely new, but it can be considered the therapeutic approach that is currently the most modern, the newest in psychology. It is a transformative approach that focuses on changing the roots and causes of the problem, rather than managing the consequences/symptoms.

Its foundation is the idea that transformative change does not come from an intellectual understanding of your problem, but from a lived, felt, bodily corrective experience. Change happens by accessing deep implicit memories, which are altered through a corrective experience.

Experiential therapy is not a specific school of therapy but has developed out of various therapies. Rather, one can speak of a merging of different ideas, techniques, and methods that share common principles and an overarching approach. Overall, it reflects psychology’s movement toward an integrated perspective, where mind, body, and emotions are all viewed as a whole in order to provide better understanding of what is happening and achieve optimal recovery/healing.

Traditional Cognitively-Oriented Therapy vs. Experiential Therapy

🔵 Traditional Cognitive Approach: top-down

• Examines the client’s life in conversation form—what happened and why.

• Analyzes thoughts: “What are my thoughts?”

• Plans behavior: “What can I do differently?”

• Uses cognitive strategies: “How can I change my beliefs?”

🟢 Experiential Therapy: bottom-up

• Focuses on emotional memories, bodily sensations, and emotions in the here and now.

• Uses mindfulness 🧘 to access the deepest subconscious beliefs.

• Offers corrective emotional experiences that rewrite old patterns.

Historical Roots of Experiential Therapy

Already in the 1950s, Carl Rogers introduced the idea that experiences taking place “here and now” are very significant in the therapeutic process. This means that stories about the past matter only insofar as they currently trigger specific emotional processes.

Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy is counted among the origins of this direction, because it uses “role-play” and attention to the body.

Wilhelm Reich’s body psychotherapy was a crucial beginning for body-oriented experiential therapy approaches, continued by Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetic Analysis, which studied how suppressed emotions could be expressed through physical body movements.
One of the most popular body-oriented methods today is Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, which works very well with trauma, as it accesses the nervous system via bodily sensations and helps it return to a more regulated state.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, developed by Richard Schwartz, offers a parts model in therapy. Its goal is to achieve an inner integration—unity in the inner world that has lost its wholeness due to trauma or negative experiences.

Coherence Therapy contributes an approach through which deep, unconscious emotional beliefs and schemas are uncovered. It also establishes the memory reconsolidation model—the rewriting of negative emotional memories—which is a key component in experiential therapy approaches.

Core Principles of Experiential Therapy

Healing at the Root Cause Level

It does not merely manage symptoms but addresses the deeper causes of the specific problem. To change these deep, unconscious reactions and beliefs, transformative new emotional experiences are necessary.

Mindfulness as a Tool for Self-Exploration (Not Just Self-Regulation)

Mindfulness in this case isn’t merely a technique for regulation/soothing (as in cognitive-behavioral therapy), but a way to explore one’s reactions. Clients are encouraged to pay nuanced attention to what is happening with them (thoughts, emotions, bodily reactions) so that the unconscious becomes conscious.

Bodily and Nervous System Safety

Safety is the foundation for the client to genuinely reach the deeper layers of the psyche, rather than becoming stuck in intellectual talking or defense responses.

In traditional therapy, too little attention is paid to this. Consequently, the client’s nervous system is often far from a sufficient level for deep therapeutic, transformative work to take place. Typically, this means that the client struggles to recall painful events, becomes confused, gets stuck, intellectualizes—remaining only at the cognitive level when discussing their problem, whereas actual change requires not just understanding but an emotionally corrective experience.

Experiential therapy uses various body, breathing, and other techniques to foster nervous system regulation and bring safety into the client’s system.

Therapeutic Focus on the Here and Now

In contrast to unstructured talk about one’s life, in experiential therapy the client is invited to focus deliberately on what they feel, think, and sense in their body right this moment (here and now). The therapist actively asks and repeatedly draws your attention to what you currently feel, think, and sense in your body. For example, they might ask: “What’s happening in your body right now, as we talk about this situation?” or “What emotions are you feeling at this moment?” This focus on the present helps access deeper, unconscious emotions and beliefs that would otherwise remain hidden. Speculating and theorizing about life is largely considered unproductive time.

Symptoms and Behavior Are Not Pathologized

In experiential therapy, the client’s symptoms, behavior, and reactions are not denied but are explored for why they occur. They may disappear when the underlying cause is uncovered and healed.

Why Is It Important to Work on the Causes of the Symptom/Difficulty?

Low self-esteem, avoidant behavior, numbness—these are just the effects, what is seen on the surface (the trunk and leaves of a tree). The goal of experiential therapy is to work on the causes—the roots🌱 of the difficulty, which are emotional learning and learned reactions and behaviors in the subconscious that trigger these symptoms.

💡The brain’s subcortical structures (for example, the limbic system) store emotional learning patterns in implicit memory, allowing for the prediction of potential threats. For example, a child who was punished for asking for help might internally conclude: “Asking for help causes pain.” As an adult, they unconsciously avoid seeking help, even when it is needed.

🌟 How does experiential therapy help?

Instead of teaching clients to manage symptoms, such as anxiety, experiential therapy:

1. Identifies the emotional root (for instance, “Asking for help is dangerous”).

2. Creates a new emotional experience that challenges this belief.

3. Reshapes the neural network, leading to profound and lasting change.

🧠 Neuroscience and Experiential Therapy

Neuroscience investigates how the nervous system, including the brain, is linked to thinking, behavior, emotions, and the ability to act and communicate.

One could say that modern psychotherapy should be based on neuroscience findings, and a therapy’s effectiveness can largely be explained from a neuroscientific perspective.

With the advancement of neuroscience and research, many experiential therapy approaches and principles are being validated:

• Memory Reconsolidation – the mechanism by which previously learned, unconscious emotional behavior and reaction patterns are “rewritten.” From a neuroscience perspective, memory reconsolidation is based on the brain’s neuroplasticity—its ability to adapt and change its structure and functions, creating new neural connections and reshaping existing ones.

• Implicit (Unconscious) Memories – unconscious memory neural networks in subcortical layers, including the limbic system, as the cause of many disruptive emotional reactions and behaviors, because they are automatic and tied to the brain’s defense responses.

• Bottom-Up Information Processing – neuroscience confirms that effective treatment must influence the deeper layers of the brain, such as the limbic system and the amygdala, and somatic and mindfulness techniques can be very effective in addressing these deeper layers. Bottom-up means that bodily and emotional reactions are regulated first, which then allows higher brain layers like the prefrontal cortex to better understand and integrate the experience.

Which Therapies Are Included Under the Experiential Therapy Umbrella?

• Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

• Somatic Experiencing Therapy

• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

• And others

The Application of Experiential Therapy

Experiential therapy is particularly effective for trauma, attachment, and emotional regulation issues.
Its main techniques involve focusing on the here and now, observing emotions and bodily reactions, working with parts of the psyche, and engaging in imaginative work (💭).

Safety and mindfulness are fundamental elements of experiential therapy, because without them, one cannot access the deeper layers of emotional memory.

Next Steps ➡️

If this therapeutic approach appeals to you, get in touch with me and sign up for a free 20-minute consultation to find out whether experiential therapy suits your situation and whether we can address it in therapy.

Ideas for this article were taken from:

• Scientific paper “Neuroscience-based psychotherapy: A position paper” by Cammisuli and Castelnuovo (2023), journal Frontiers in Psychology.

• Book Experiential Therapies for Treating Trauma: The Power of the Body, Mind, and Spirit by Dr. Eugene Senreich and others (2024).