How to "Get Out of Your Head" to Heal With Experiential Therapy

In an earlier article, Healing From the Inside Out: Why Insight Isn't Enough, I discussed how traditional psychotherapy has focused on helping clients to understand and develop intellectual insight into their problems.

How to Get Our of Your Head to Heal With Experiential Therapy

While intellectual insight is an important first step, it's usually not enough to heal and create change (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy For Trauma).

As I discussed in the prior article, traditional psychotherapy without the mind-body connection creates intellectual insight into clients' problems, but it often doesn't help with the necessary emotional shift necessary for healing and change.

This is why Experiential Therapy is more effective for healing and change.

What Are the Various Types Experiential Therapy?

Experiential Therapy includes many body-oriented therapies including:

• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
  

• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)

• Somatic Experiencing

• Parts Work Therapy (IFS and Ego States Therapy)

How Does Experiential Therapy Work?

Although each modality is set up in a different way, all Experiential Therapy has certain aspects in common:

• Creating Experiences: Compared to traditional psychotherapy, all Experiential Therapy involves creating experiences to bring about a deeper connection between thoughts and emotions. 

• Emotional Processing: After preparing a client by helping them through the Preparation and Resource Phase, Experiential Therapy allows thoughts, memories and emotions to come to the surface in a deeper way than traditional therapy. Most Experiential Therapists track clients' moment-to-moment experiences so that what comes up is within clients' window of tolerance within the safe environment of the therapist's office. This is important in terms of the work being neither overwhelming nor causing emotional numbing.

Getting Out of Your Head to Heal with Experiential Therapy

• Connecting the Mind and the Body: Experiential Therapy creates a bridge by connecting rational thoughts with deeper emotions, including unresolved trauma. This approach helps to identify and shift unconscious core beliefs (e.g., "I'm unlovable" or "I'm powerless") and patterns that often don't respond to therapy that is more cognitive talk therapy approaches (see my article: Experiential Psychotherapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

• Memory Reconsolidation: By creating new experiences, Experiential Therapy can activate memory reconsolidation, rewiring neural pathways related to traumatic experiences from the past. Memory reconsolidation is essential for transformation (see my article: Riding the Waves From Trauma to Transformation With Experiential Therapy).

What Are the Benefits of Experiential Therapy?

The benefits include:

• Increased Self Awareness: Clients become more attuned to their thoughts and emotions and how these thoughts and emotions interact with their body and behavior (see my article: What is Self Reflective Awareness and Why Is It Important to You?).

• Developing New Skills: With Experiential Therapy clients learn and practice new and healthier ways of coping with stress, managing difficult emotions, resolving conflict and overcoming unresolved trauma.

Getting Out of Your Head to Heal With Experiential Therapy

• Reframing Negative Patterns: Clients learn how to experience situations in new ways by reframing negative thoughts and beliefs. This helps clients to stop harmful patterns from repeating. 

• Enhancing Empathy and Communication Skills: As enhanced empathy and communication skills emerge, clients can improve their relationship with themselves and others (see my article: What is Compassionate Empathy?).

• Providing Stress Relief: The process of engaging with and releasing suppressed emotions and processing unresolved trauma provides stress relief.

Getting Help in Experiential Therapy

If traditional therapy was only partially helpful, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional who uses Experiential Therapy to help you to work through trauma and heal (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

Getting Out of Your Head to Heal With Experiential Therapy

A skilled Experiential Therapist can help you to complete trauma processing so you can lead a more meaningful life.

Rather than struggling on your own, seek help in Experiential Therapy so you can heal and move on with your life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT (for couples), Somatic Experiencing, Trauma Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Embracing Your Shadow Self

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, popularized the concept of the "shadow self." He believed that everyone has a shadow self that conflicts with an ideal version of how they want to see themselves. 

In this article I'm focusing on identifying the shadow self and the benefits of understanding and integrating those parts instead of trying to suppress them (see my article: What You Resist Persists: The More You Resist What You Don't Like About Yourself the More It Persists).

What is the Shadow Self?

The shadow self consists of the parts of yourself, including thoughts, feelings and behavior, that you find difficult to accept because these parts don't fit with how you think you "should" be.

Embracing Your Shadow Self

The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an example of how someone, who doesn't embrace his shadow self, experiences a strong internal conflict. 

Dr. Jekyll attempts to split off the parts of himself that he feels are evil. These parts turn into Mr. Hyde. The more he tries to suppress his shadow self, the more powerful it becomes until it becomes all encompassing.

Here is a modern day example:  A woman believes she should always be a loving daughter towards her mean and critical mother. Whenever resentment towards her mother comes into her awareness, she tries to suppress it because it doesn't fit in with how she believes an ideal daughter should feel towards her mother. 

The more she tries to suppress her resentment, the more unhappy and anxious she becomes because it takes increasing effort to suppress these feelings. And, since she can't completely suppress her resentment towards her mother, her anger comes out unexpectedly in ways that make her feel ashamed and guilty afterwards.

Sometimes when her anger towards her mother is strong, she displaces it onto her husband and children. Other times she snaps at coworkers. And, when her mother is especially critical of her, she is shocked by how she eventually loses her temper with her mother.  Then, she feels remorse, shame and guilt, and she redoubles her efforts to suppress her anger, and the cycle continues.

How to Embrace Your Shadow Self

Since everyone has a shadow self and suppressing it only makes you feel worse, learning to embrace your shadow self is important for your mental health and sense of well-being.

Shadow work involves gently bringing these split off and disowned parts of yourself into your awareness (see my article: Making the Unconscious Conscious and Discovering and Giving Voice to Disowned Parts of Yourself).

Embracing Your Shadow Self: Making the Unconscious Conscious

The following suggestions can be helpful to embrace your shadow self:

• Get Curious: Instead of having a negative and judgmental attitude towards disowned parts of yourself, get curious about them. An open curious attitude can help these parts to emerge into your consciousness.

• Meditate: Mindfulness Meditation is a good way to observe your thoughts and feelings in a nonjudgmental way.

• Write in a Journal: Journaling allows you to transfer your thoughts and feelings from your mind onto paper. It helps to concretize the many different parts of yourself so that you can reflect on them. As part of journaling, you can ask yourself:

• What were you taught as a child about the parts of yourself you find difficult to accept now?

• As a child, were you allowed to express these aspects of yourself or were you punished for it?

• If you weren't allowed to express these thoughts and feelings, what did you do with them? 

• Are your current negative thoughts and feelings about yourself and/or a significant relationship in your life?

• What type of people or situations trigger negative feelings in you? Are these feelings related to aspects of yourself that you consider to be unacceptable?

• Get Help From a Therapist Who Does Parts Work: Parts work, like Ego States Therapy, is designed to help you to identify and integrate all the parts of yourself including the ones you find challenging to accept. Ego States Therapy allows you to develop an accepting attitude towards all parts of yourself so that these parts can coexist together. In Ego States Therapy, you learn that the parts of you that you want to disown often have a protective intention but, because they remain split off and unintegrated, they can come up in unhealthy ways. You also learn that by having an internal dialog with those parts, they can serve you in healthy ways (see my article: How Parts Work Helps to Empower You).

Get Help in Therapy

If you're struggling with parts of yourself you find difficult to accept, seek help from a licensed mental health professional.

Parts Work, like Ego States Therapy, can help you to identify and, eventually, accept the parts of yourself with compassion.  

By maintaining an internal dialog with these parts, you learn to develop these parts into healthy aspects of yourself.

Rather than struggling on your own, seek help from a psychotherapist who does Parts Work so you can live a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, Somatic Experiencing, Ego States and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Reparenting Yourself: How to Become a Good Enough Parent to Yourself

Unfortunately, everyone didn't get good enough parenting when they were children.  

Good enough parenting usually leads to secure attachment, but it's estimated that only 50% of people have secure attachment and the other 50% experience insecure attachment (see my article: What Are Attachment Styles?).

Becoming a Good Enough Parent to Yourself

If you didn't get good enough parenting, chances are that one or both of your parents probably didn't get it either.  

How to Become a Good Enough Parent to Yourself

Childhood emotional neglect and abuse are much more common than most people realize.  

Childhood emotional neglect and abuse often lead to attachment-related problems later in life with adult romantic relationships (see my article:  How Unresolved Trauma Affects Your Ability to Be Emotionally Vulnerable in a Romantic Relationship).

So, if you didn't get the parenting you needed as a child, reparenting yourself as an adult with love and self compassion is essential to emotional healing.  It will help you to build a strong sense of self esteem and self worth.

The Role of Self Compassion

Children who grew up without good enough parenting are often hard on themselves as children and adults.  If they had critical and shaming parents, these children internalize those characteristics in an unconscious way.

How to Become a Good Enough Parent to Yourself

This is why self compassion is so important.  For these people to heal, they need to learn to give themselves the compassion they didn't get as children.  This can be difficult to learn, especially if there's a part of them that feels they don't deserve it (see my article: Overcoming the Emotional Pain of Feeling Unlovable).

Accessing a Self Compassionate Part of Yourself

Parts Work, also known as Ego States Therapy, was originally developed by psychotherapists John and Helen Watkins in the 1970s. They specialized in hypnotherapy.

Part of the work for individuals who were traumatized is learning to access a compassionate part of themselves (see my article: How Parts Work Therapy Can Empower You).

This is often difficult for people who were traumatized to do on their own, so participating in experiential therapy is one way to learn to access and develop the self compassionate part (see my article: Understanding the Different Parts of Yourself).

One way to do Parts Work in experiential therapy is for the therapist to help the client, as an adult, to imagine looking at their younger self who was traumatized so the two parts can have a dialog with each other.

This dialog often involves the adult self asking the younger self what they need emotionally.  In other words, the adult self is in the role of a parent soothing the traumatized younger self.

Then, the adult self gives the child what they need, which is usually a hug or hearing that they're lovable and so on.  All of this is done in the client's imagination in experiential therapy.

Parts Work helps the younger part, who holds the trauma, to receive the loving and compassionate parenting they didn't receive earlier.  

This back and forth dialog also helps to weave together a more integrated experience as the traumatized younger self and the adult self heal together emotionally.

Imagining a Compassionate Other

If it's too difficult to access a self compassionate part, clients in experiential therapy can start by imagining how a compassionate or nurturing person might feel and behave towards their younger self. 

How to Become a Good Enough Parent to Yourself

They can imagine what that person might have said to them when they were children that would have felt loving and kind. Or, they can imagine the loving gestures that this compassionate person might have made to them that would have communicated how much they cared for them.

If someone can't think of anyone in their real life either from the past or from the present, they can imagine someone from a book, a story, a movie or some other imaginary person.

Whether this person is someone they know in real life or someone imaginary, this would be considered an internal resource in the form of an imaginal interweave in experiential therapy (see my article: Experiential Psychotherapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

Talk Therapy Isn't Enough to Resolve Trauma

Regular talk therapy can be effective for many psychological problems, but it's usually not as effective as experiential therapy for trauma because it tends to be intellectual (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Resolve Trauma).

Clients who attend talk therapy can develop intellectual insight into their problems, but their problems often remain unresolved.

Experiential therapy, like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, AEDP, hypnotherapy and Parts Work, use the mind-body connection to work through trauma.  

Experiential therapy helps clients to resolve trauma on an emotional level using the mind-body connection.  This is important because the resolution of trauma happens on an emotional level--not on an intellectual level.

Getting Help in Experiential Therapy

If you didn't get good enough parenting as a child, you can learn to reparent yourself in a nurturing way with the help of an experiential therapist.

A skilled experiential therapist can help you to access the internal resources you possess so that you can heal from your childhood trauma.

Rather than struggling on your own, seek help in experiential therapy so you can overcome trauma and live a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

 

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

I have been focusing on managing emotions and emotional intelligence in my last three articles (see my articles: How to Develop Emotional Intelligence, How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them and Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions).  Those previous articles include self help techniques.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

The current article focuses on how experiential therapy can help if self help techniques don't work for you (see my article: Experiential Therapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

What is Experiential Therapy?

Experiential therapy is a broad range of mind-body oriented therapies, which include:

• Somatic Experiencing (SE): Mind-Body Oriented Therapy: Somatic Experiencing

• EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Can Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs

• Parts Work (also known as Internal Family Systems, Ego States Therapy): How Parts Work Can Empower You

• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy): What is AEDP?

• Hypnotherapy (also known as clinical hypnosis, hypnosis): What is Clinical Hypnosis?

Each of these modalities work in a different way, but what they all have in common is that they use the mind-body connection.

Rather than just talking about your problems in an intellectual way (as is usually the case in regular talk therapy), experiential therapy helps you to make the connection between your mind with your body to get to emotions that are often unconscious (out of your awareness).  

In that way, experiential therapy tends to be more effective than regular talk therapy (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy).

Experiential therapy is also used to help clients to overcome emotional trauma, including shock trauma and developmental trauma.

How Does Experiential Therapy Help to Manage Emotions

Since all experiential therapy works with the mind-body connection, clients learn to identify and manage their emotions.

For instance, many people come to therapy with emotional blocks.  These blocks are often unconscious.  

Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions With Experiential Therapy

Emotional blocks often occur due to past negative experiences and unresolved emotions, including emotional trauma.

Once they are uncovered, these blocks usually involve negative feelings about the self.  Common examples are "I'm not good enough" or "I'm not lovable" or other similar feelings.

But since the blocks are often unconscious at the start of experiential therapy, clients are unaware of them at the start of them at first.  When they come to therapy, these clients might only have a vague sense that something is wrong, but they don't know what it is.

An experiential therapist attunes to clients and listens for the underlying unconscious roots to the problem.  She will also help clients to develop a felt sense of the problem by asking clients to feel the sensations related to the problem in their body (see my article: What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?).

Many clients can sense into their bodies to identify emotions, but many others can't.  When clients can't sense emotions in their body, an experiential therapist knows that this is part of the block and works in an empathetic way to help clients to develop this skill.

Clients who are unable to identify emotions often sense a difficult or uncomfortable sensation.  From there, the experiential therapist starts where the clients are at that point and helps clients to differentiate sensations into specific emotions like anger, sadness, frustration, contempt, shame, and so on.

Being able to detect emotions on an experiential level is different from having intellectual insight into these emotions.  It means actually feeling it as opposed to just knowing it in a logical way. 

This is an important distinction between regular talk therapy and experiential therapy because change occurs with the combination of intellectual insight and emotional awareness.

Clinical Vignette: Developing Skills to Manage Emotions With Experiential Therapy

The following clinical vignette which, as always, is a composite of many cases to protect confidentiality is an example of how experiential therapy can help a client learn to identify and manage emotions as well as work through unresolved trauma:

Ed

After Ed's wife gave him an ultimatum to either get help in therapy or she would leave him and take their children with her, Ed began therapy with some ambivalence (see my article: Starting Therapy: It's Not Unusual to Feel Anxious or Ambivalent).

Ed told his therapist that he often yelled at their young children when he got upset and then regretted it later because it frightened them.  He said he tried various self help techniques, like trying to pause by taking a few breaths, but his emotions often overrode any attempts he made to keep from losing his temper.

Initially, Ed was unable to identify the emotions involved when he got upset. He just knew that he felt overwhelmed, but he couldn't identify the emotions involved.

His experiential therapist provided Ed with psychoeducation about experiential therapy and the mind-body connection.

Over time, she helped Ed to go back into a recent memory where he became upset with his children. She helped him to slow down so he could feel in his body what he was experiencing at the time.  

At first, Ed had difficulty detecting physical sensations or emotions in his body, so his therapist helped him to develop a felt sense of his experiences by using a technique known in hypnotherapy as the Affect Bridge (also known in EMDR therapy as the Float Back technique).

One of the emotional blocks they encountered occurred when Ed had a memory of himself at five years old when his father told him, "Big boys don't cry."  There were other times when his father scolded him when Ed got angry or when he made a mistake.  

As she listened to Ed's history with his father, his therapist realized that these experiences resulted in Ed numbing his emotions from an early age which was why he was having problems identifying his emotions.

Using Parts Work, his therapist helped Ed to develop compassion for his younger self.  He could look at his own five year old son and realize just how young he was when his father shamed him (see my article: Developing Curiosity and Self Compassion in Therapy).

Developing self compassion was an important part of Ed's therapy and, over time, feeling compassionate towards his younger self enabled Ed to get to the underlying emotions that had been numbed for many years.

Gradually, Ed was able to detect sadness when his throat felt constricted, anger when his hands were clenched and fear when his stomach was in knots (these are examples of how one particular person experiences these emotions and not universally true for every person).

As he continued to work in therapy on identifying and managing his emotions, Ed realized that when he got upset with his children, he was not only experiencing anger, he was also experiencing fear.  Fear was the underlying emotion at the root of his upset.

By then, Ed was curious enough to question why he felt fear when he was upset with his children. By sensing into his experience using the mind-body connection, Ed realized that fear was related to his childhood experiences with his father.  

He realized that he felt the same fear and sense of helplessness in the present that he experienced when he was a child (see my article: How Traumatic Childhood Fears of Being Helpless Can Get Triggered in Adults).

He realized that, although his father never said it directly, his father communicated to Ed that whenever Ed was sad or angry or made a mistake, Ed was allowing himself to be vulnerable to being ridiculed or worse.  

In other words, what was communicated to Ed was that so-called "negative emotions" or making a mistake was dangerous.  

This was a pivotal moment in Ed's therapy.  He realized that when his children made mistakes, which could mean making a mistake in their homework or getting an answer wrong, this sense of fear and vulnerability to danger were triggers that rose up in him without his awareness (see my article: Becoming Aware of Emotional Triggers).

Underneath his anger and fear, he sensed his intention to protect them, but instead of coming across as protective, he came across as harsh and critical, which was scaring them.

Once Ed learned to detect these emotions, he was able to stop himself from yelling at his children.  Having those physical cues he learned in experiential therapy allowed him to calm himself first so he could respond to his children more empathetically.

After he learned to manage his emotions, Ed worked on his unresolved childhood trauma with EMDR therapy so he was no longer triggered in this way.  

The work was neither quick nor easy, but once Ed worked through these issues, he no longer felt triggered.

Conclusion

Experiential therapy can help you to develop skills to manage your emotions.

Regular talk therapy can help you to develop intellectual insight into your problems, but problems often don't change with insight alone.  Change occurs on an emotional level.

This is an important distinction between talk therapy and and experiential therapy: With experiential therapy you can develop both insight as well as an emotional shift which enables you to make changes.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples, and I have helped many clients to manage their emotions and work through unresolved trauma (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.