Experiential Therapy

A non-traditional approach to therapy that is research-informed and effective (even if past therapy hasn’t been).

Experiential Therapy prioritizes giving people a different experience around topics, dynamics, and relationships which have become barriers to growth.

This form of therapy is creative and flexible, shifting to fit the needs of the person in the moment. The relationship that is formed between the client and the therapist is warm, collaborative, and dynamics.

Interventions are often unexpected and may include things like writing a short story about how you wish a tense conversation could go, using media you enjoy as a vessel to explore themes which are developmentally meaningful for you, or practicing different forms of communication in a structured scripted scene with your therapist.

Experiential therapy is about the permission to feel again. The permission to feel how you feel, as deeply as you feel, and to use that emotional information to change and grow.

Experiential Therapy Examples

  • Human Validation Process Model

    Based on the work of Virginia Satir, this experiential model focuses on deepening the understnaind of individual emotional experience, congruent communication, and physical represtantions of emotional states to help encourage transformation of the self and family system

  • Internal Family Systems (IFS)

    An integrated set of beliefs and interventions that focus on understanding our own internal, emotional processes as if they are separate but interconnected “parts” within us

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    Symbolic-Experiential Family Therapy

    Based on the clinical work and writing of Carl Whitaker that mixes the development of internal symbols and direct challenging of behavioral and relational patterns to help bring about change.

  • Humanistic/ Person-Centered Therapy

    A branch of psychotherapy that functions off of the belief that people are inherently motivated to change and grow. Therapy using this framework pulls from interventions that encourage the client to better understand their own innate capacity for understanding and transformation