Experiential Therapy in Practice: the Process-Oriented Approach

Experiential therapy in Practice: The Process-Oriented Approach

General Principles of ET (Experiential Therapy).

-The clients are experts on their own experiences.

-They have privileged access to their experiences.

-They are encouraged to identify and symbolize their inner experiences rather than therapists offer them interpretations, advice, instructions, or statements of truth.

-Therapy is a process of facilitating choice and action by confronting their own experience.

-Focus on current, moment-by-moment process of attending to and symbolizing bodily felt referents.

-The person is viewed as future-oriented and goal-directed, and behavior is influenced by a vision of the future than being directed primarily by the past.

-The relationship between therapist and client is not reduced to an unconscious repetition of past attachments but rather a new, present relationship.

-The relationship between therapist and client is important. Therapist presents herself in a non-imposing, non-authoritative manner.

Treatment Principles

Relationship Principles: Facilitate a therapeutic relationship.

1. Empathic attunement: Contact and be empathically attuned to the client’s internal frame of references.

(a) Continuously try to contact with and to maintain a genuine understanding of the client’s internal experience or frame of reference.

(b) Try to track what is most important to the client.

(c) Involves numerous internal actions by therapists (i.e., letting go of previously formed ideas about the client, actively entering the client’s world, understanding what is most poignant/crucial to the client).

2. Therapeutic bond:

(a) Empathically attune to the client

(b) Communicate this empathic understanding of what the client is experiencing to the client by showing genuineness (open, transparent, authentic) and unconditional prizing (i.e., non-critical, non-judgmental)

(c) It will foster a therapeutic alliance/bond/relationship in which the client is felt worthwhile, accepted and understood.

3. Task collaboration: Facilitate mutual involvement in the goals and tasks of therapy.

(a) Try to understand the client’s view of his or her goals and objectives and accept them.

(b) Help the client to engage in the general task of experiencing and exploring feelings related to the presented goals and objectives.

(c) The therapist negotiates therapeutic tasks/activities using non-expert/collaborative tone.

Task Facilitation Principles: Facilitate therapeutic work on specific therapeutic tasks.

4. Experiential processing: Facilitate optimal, different client processes (mode of engagement)

(a) Attending/awareness:

Help the client attend directly to particular elements of sensation rather than symbolic/complex/relational feelings and meanings. So, the client can make contact with visual/auditory, so esthetic/kinesthetic sensation/stimuli (i.e., clenching fists)

(b) Experiential search:

Encourage a deliberate turning inward of attentional energy so that the client will have an access to one’s complex and idiosyncratic inter experience and begin to symbolize it in words (i.e., revisit a distressing event and let the client re-experience the event)Can put into words the unexamined personal needs or values.

(c) Active expression:

Help the client to discover and own what is that they do feelAnd they actively and spontaneously express them (i.e., an empty chair technique).

(d) Interpersonal contact:

Through the relationship principles, the client can feel worthwhile/accepted and exist in relation to othersAnd then, the client feel safe to own hidden aspects of the self as part of oneself (i.e., self-acceptance task) in various moments of each session.

5. Growth/choice: Foster client growth and self-determination.

Emphasize/value the client’s potential for development and self-ownership. And encourage freedom, choice, and mature independenceGrow!!

6. Task completion: Facilitate completion of specific therapeutic tasks.

Help finish therapy tasks by framing therapeutic work in the first place, following through natural therapeutic tasks, and/or gentle persistence.

Specific Interventions

1.Emphathic understanding: Simply communicate understanding of the client’s message (i.e., Uh-huh”)

2.Emphathic exploration: In addition to the empathic understanding, help the client move toward the unclear or emerging edges of his or her experience

(ex)

-Evocative reflection: I see! Re-paraphrase….

-Open-edge reflection: I see! Re-paraphrase…Was it something like that?

-Exploratory question: I see! What was it like to be in that situation?

-Empathic conjecture: I am not sure. But was it like you were feeling rejected? How does that fit?).

3. Attention suggestion (i.e., Not content but Process directives).

See if you can stay the heavy feeling a bit longer.

Take a moment and ask yourself “what this feeling is about?”

4. Experiential presence: Be there with the client (i.e., tone of voice, eye-contact, nonverbal behaviors).

5. Process observation (i.e., “when you say that, you seem to be confused”).

6. Revealing self (i.e., “I am aware of being touched by you when I heard what you said to me.”)

7. Experiential teaching (i.e., “It is very helpful that these two sides of self talk to each other”)

8. An empty chair work (i.e., Imagine that your mother is sitting in this chair here. Can you tell her what this was like for you?)

-Emotional arousal (i.e., re-experience unresolved emotional reactions in a safe environment.

-Expression of what was previously restricted until the expression is completed (i.e., Let the emotional expression to run its course. Unfinished business)

-Relief/recovery

-Restructuring.

*Good for forgiving others, holding others accountable, unfinished business)

9. Two chair dialogues for Conflict Splits or Self-Evaluative.

-When two aspects of the self are in opposition, let the critic part harshly criticize the self and let the experiential part react to the critic part.

-The critic part becomes more concrete and specific.

-The experiential part becomes to react in a more differential way.

-The client becomes to soften the critic part, re-experience the experiential part, negotiate/integrate the two parts, and positively accept the self.

10. Two chair enactment for self-interruption.

-When one aspect of the self is blocking or interrupting emotional experience or expression by another aspect of the self.

-The previously interrupted emotion can be allowed into awareness and expressed in appropriate/adaptive manner.

-The client can feel control over or empowerment of one’s emotions (i.e., depressedI need to toughen myself up!)