What Are the Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions?

As a psychotherapist, I work with individual adults and couples to help them to experience and express their emotions in healthy ways.

The Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions

What Are the Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions?

The following are some of the benefits of allowing yourself to experience your emotions:

• Increased Self Awareness: Emotions offer a guide to important information about your needs, experiences and triggers. When you allow yourself to experience your emotions, you gain a deeper understanding of yourself.

• Better Mental Health: Suppressing emotions can contribute to stress, anxiety and depression. Also, when you suppress uncomfortable emotions, these emotions tend to come back in a stronger way. So, suppressing emotions makes the experience worse. Experiencing emotions can help to ease stress, anxiety and depression.

• Increased Confidence: Expressing your emotions is a vulnerable act which takes courage. By being courageous and expressing yourself, you can increase your confidence.

The Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions

• A More Balanced Perspective: People who express their emotions in a healthy way tend to have a more balanced perspective.

• Better Physical Health: Suppressing emotions can have a negative impact on your immune system and cardiovascular system. In addition, experiencing emotions can help to improve your overall physical health.

• A Deeper Connection in Your Relationship: Openly expressing emotions in a healthy way can help to increase emotional vulnerability, which can help you and your partner to deepen your connection. This can lead to a stronger, more meaningful relationship (see my article: Learning to Embrace Your Emotional Vulnerability).

• Improved Communication: Sharing your emotions in a healthy way provides clarity and context making it easier for you to express your needs and build empathy.

• Increased Trust: Emotional authenticity can help to increase trust in your relationships.

How Can Therapy Help You to Identify and Express Your Emotions?

As a psychotherapist, I work in an experiential way (see my article: Why is Experiential Therapy More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy?).

The Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions

Many of us weren't taught to identify and expression emotions. On the contrary, some of us were actively discouraged from expressing emotions which gives the message that emotions are dangerous (see my article: How Experiential Psychotherapy Can Facilitate Emotional Development in Adult Clients).

The reality is that everyone experiences emotions and, as mentioned above, there are many benefits to experiencing and expressing your emotions.

Psychotherapy with a therapist who works in an experiential way provides the following benefits:

• A Confidential and Nonjudgmental Environment: Being able to identify and express your emotions in a confidential and nonjudgmental environment is essential for emotional healing (see my article: The Holding Environment: Maintaining a Safe Environment For the Client).

• Attuned and Compassionate Listening: A therapist who works in an experiential way attunes to her clients and listens with compassion. She also validates your emotions which allows you to be more emotionally vulnerable and deepen your understanding of yourself (see my article: The Healing Potential of the Therapist's Empathic Attunement).

The Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions

• Help to Identify Suppressed Emotions: Experiential therapists can help you to understand emotions you have been suppressing, possibly for a lifetime, so you can become more self aware (see my article: How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them).

• Improved Emotional Vocabulary: If you had to suppress certain emotions in your family of origin, you might not have developed the necessary vocabulary to express yourself. Developing emotional vocabulary can increase your confidence.

• Improved Coping and Emotional Regulation Skills: An experiential therapist can help you to learn better coping skills and emotional regulation by helping you to develop tools and strategies. This tools include:

• Breathing exercises
  

• Mindfulness practices
  

• Grounding exercises

• Increased Awareness of Emotional Patterns: An experiential therapist can help you to become more aware of your recurring emotional patterns. When you have developed self awareness about these patterns, you can develop the necessary skills to make changes.

What Are Experiential Therapies?

The following are some of the experiential therapies that I use in my private practice:

• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy)

The Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions

• Somatic Experiencing

• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)

• Clinical Hypnosis (also known as Hypnotherapy)

• Parts Work Therapy (IFS and Ego States Therapy)

Getting Help in Experiential Therapy

Whether you want to work on developing emotional intelligence or overcoming unresolved trauma, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional who is an experiential psychotherapist.

The Benefits of Experiencing Your Emotions

A skilled experiential therapist can help you to develop the skills and strategies you need.

Rather than struggling alone, seek help in experiential therapy so you can lead a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT (couples therapist), Somatic Experiencing 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 (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Are You Able to Express Your Vulnerable Feelings to Your Partner?

Being able to talk about your vulnerable feelings to a loved one is an essential part of being in a healthy relationship (see my article: Improve Communication in Your Relationship By Eliminating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

Communication Problems in a Relationship

People, who struggle to communicate with their partner, often seek help in individual or couples therapy, but many more people never seek help because they're overwhelmed by shame. This often leads to anxiety and depression as well as a series of unhappy relationships.

How Does Trauma Affect a Person's Ability to Talk About Their Feelings?

An inability to communicate feelings is often linked to unresolved early trauma.

Children learn to identify and express their feelings when their parents name, frame and help the children to contain these feelings.

If you've ever watched a child having a tantrum in public, you probably observed their loving caregiver try to help them to calm down by making eye contact with a loving glaze, speaking softly and telling them that they understand the child is upset, identifying the feelings, framing it and comforting the child with a hug.

By identifying and framing the experience for the child, the caregiver helps the child to understand what they're feeling.  In effect, the caregiver becomes an emotional container for the child's emotions until the child gets older and they internalize the ability to do it on their own.

At first glance, this might not seem particularly important, but that loving caregiver is helping the child to understand what's happening to them emotionally and helping the child to manage their emotions (see my article: Developing Skills to Manage Your Emotions).

Contrast that with a caretaker who is outwardly angry and scolds the child by saying, "Stop being a baby!" or "Boys don't cry" or some other derogatory remark.

The disapproving caretaker isn't helping the child to identify, frame and contain their feelings. Instead they're communicating to the child that the child's feelings are wrong or bad, which is a form of emotional abuse. This creates guilt and shame (see my article: What is the Difference Between Guilt and Shame?).

So, what does a child do when faced with this situation over and over again?  To deal with this overwhelming experience, they suppress (or numb) their feelings to appease their caregiver at a great emotional cost to themselves.

Emotional numbing is often a survival strategy for young children who must choose between experiencing and expressing their feelings versus being overwhelmed by an angry caregiver.  

When children numb their feelings, they're trying to keep their caregiver from becoming even more angry or frustrated so, in that sense, it helps the child to survive in an unhealthy environment by keeping the caregiver from being even more emotionally abusive. 

If children experience ongoing disapproval of their feelings, this leads to developmental trauma (see my article: Overcoming Developmental Trauma: Developing the Capacity to Put Words to Feelings).

Developmental trauma doesn't just go away when a child becomes an adult. It becomes a way of life and it interferes with the individual's personal well-being as well as their relationships (see my article: How Trauma Affects Intimate Relationships).

So, what started as a childhood survival strategy to avoid further emotional pain is no longer a viable strategy in adulthood.  It creates confusion and doubt for the individual and for their loved ones.

Suppressed feelings can also cause health problems because the feelings don't go away just because the person isn't in touch with them. 

Due to the mind-body connection, suppressed feelings can create ever increasing stress and tension which can lead to headaches, backaches, autoimmune problems and other stress-related medical problems (see my article: Suppressed Emotions Can Lead to Medical and Psychological Problems).

How Can Experiential Therapy Help an Adult Who Doesn't Know How to Talk About Their Feelings?

Experiential therapy includes the following types of mind-body oriented therapy:

• Somatic Experiencing
  

• Parts Work
  

• EMDR
  

• AEDP

• Other Mind-Body Oriented Therapies

An Experiential Therapist helps clients to develop a felt sense of their feelings in their body to overcome emotional numbing and begin to identify their feelings (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma).

Instead of relying on their intellectual insight to identify feelings, these clients learn to tap into their feelings in their body (see my article: How to Manage Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them).

This is usually a gradual process because it can take a while for clients to trust the therapist enough overcome their fear, shame and guilt (see my article: Mind-Body Oriented Therapy Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

These adults, who were ridiculed for their feelings as children, also have to learn to overcome the negative feedback they received as a child that their feelings were a burden to others, including their parents or primary caregivers.

Along the way, the Experiential Therapist also helps the client to work through unresolved trauma related to childhood experiences.

Becoming More Emotionally Available to Your Partner

When the client overcomes emotional numbing, they're able to experience a wide array of feelings, including joy and pleasure and they usually become more emotionally available to their loved ones.

Getting Help in Experiential Therapy

Emotional numbing robs you of joy and pleasure.  

Emotional numbing is also an obstacle to knowing yourself and being intimately known by your loved ones.

Rather than struggling on your own, seek help in Experiential Therapy so you can 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 (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

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.

Corrective Emotional Experiences in Therapy Help to Heal Trauma

In a prior article, What is the Corrective Emotional Experience in Therapy?, I discussed how a corrective emotional experience in therapy can occur when a client has an experience with the therapist that challenges the client's negative beliefs about him or herself and provides a new emotional experience that's healing.  

Corrective Emotional Experiences Help to Heal Trauma

A Corrective Emotional Experience in Therapy and a Change in Attachment Styles

A common example of this is when an adult client, who grew up feeling emotionally neglected, invisible and unloved by his parents, has a felt sense that his therapist cares about him.  

Usually, when people grow up emotionally neglected or abused, they develop an insecure attachment style.  Although insecure attachment styles are difficult to change, corrective emotional experiences can help someone to change from an insecure to a secure attachment style, which is called earned secure attachment (see my articles: What is Your Attachment Style?, How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Relationship and Developing a Secure Attachment Style: What is Earned Secure Attachment?)

In other words, this person, who grew up with a sense that he was unlovable, can have a new transformative experience in therapy.  So, not only does he feel understood, but he also has a visceral experience of being deeply cared about by his therapist.  

What Are Corrective Emotional Experiences in Your Personal Life?

In addition to transformative emotional experiences in therapy, corrective emotional experiences occur in everyday life, but people often don't notice them or can't feel them.

You might wonder how this is possible and you might ask: Wouldn't it be easier to feel these experiences in everyday personal interactions than it would be in therapy?  The answer is: It depends.  Some people are really adept at picking up on corrective emotional experiences, especially when they occur with a loved one, and others are not.

For instance, John, who grew up in a family where he felt unloved and neglected, believes he's unlovable and these feelings carry over into adulthood.  He doesn't realize that he wasn't the problem--it was his parents who had problems expressing their love for him.

As an adult, John married a woman who is affectionate, kind and attentive to his emotional needs.  At first, he's uncomfortable with taking in her love because he's not accustomed to feeling loved.  But, over time, he learns to take in her love and affection and these new emotional experiences with his wife disconfirm the way he felt about himself since childhood.  This is a transformative experience for John--whether he's consciously aware of it or not.

Other people have a harder time with corrective emotional experiences.  For instance, Sara, who was also emotionally neglected as a child, still feels unlovable even though she knows her spouse loves her.  In this second example, Sara's traumatic childhood has had such a profound effect on her that her spouse's love makes no difference in the way she feels about herself because it's split off from how she feels about herself.  

What is Experiential Trauma Therapy and How Does It Help Clients to Experience Corrective Emotional Experiences in Their Personal Lives?

Experiential trauma therapy is a bottom up approach (as opposed to a top down approach in regular talk therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy and other forms of talk therapy).  The bottom up approach is an embodied therapy that provides an integrated mind-body connection (see my articles: What is a Trauma Therapist? and Why is Experiential Therapy More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Resolve Trauma?)

The bottom up approach used in experiential trauma therapy focuses on the limbic system of the brain where traumatic memories are stored and where they get triggered (see my article: What's the Difference Between Top Down and Bottom Up Approaches to Therapy?).   

Clinical Vignette:  

The following clinical example illustrates how experiential trauma can provide a corrective emotional experience that is transformative and helps to heal trauma:

Ed:

After attempting on his own to work through childhood trauma that continued to affect him as an adult, Ed began seeing a trauma therapist who used an experiential approach to therapy.

As Ed explained to his therapist, he had pervasive feelings of not being lovable his whole life--even now that he had a loving wife, close friends, and a successful career with colleagues who cared about him.  

In other words, there was a disconnect for Ed between what he knew logically and what he felt emotionally, and no matter how much he thought about it, he couldn't reconcile this disconnection, which was frustrating and discouraging for him.

His therapist recommended that they use EMDR therapy to work on Ed's sense of feeling unlovable.  With EMDR, Ed focused on his feelings of being unlovable and, gradually, he worked through much of his history of early trauma related to emotional neglect.  

Over time, as he continued in EMDR therapy, he developed an understanding, both mentally and emotionally, that his feelings of being unlovable developed because his parents were unable to express their love and affection for him. 

He also realized that they were unable to express their love because they grew up in home environments where they also felt unloved and so did their parents (see my article: Psychotherapy and Intergenerational Trauma).

Part of Ed's experience in EMDR therapy included grieving the loss of love he experienced as a child.  He also grieved for his parents' loss and the generations of families before them who also experienced this emotional loss.

Since his trauma therapist integrated EMDR therapy with other types of experiential therapy, like AEDP and Parts Work therapy, Ed's sense of himself changed to being a person that his wife and friends loved.  It was no longer just a thought or concept in his mind--he had a visceral sense of being lovable, which endured for him even after his therapy.

Conclusion

A corrective emotional experience comes in relationship with others--whether it's with someone in your personal life, like a significant other or a close friend or family member, or it's with a psychotherapist where you have a good therapeutic relationship and where you feel cared about.

Many people who have experienced developmental trauma, also known as unresolved childhood trauma, are unable to take in corrective emotional experiences, even when they have people close to them who love them.  

These people might know logically that their loved ones are now providing them with loving experiences that they didn't have when they were children but, due to their unresolved trauma, they're unable to feel it.

Experiential trauma therapy provides an opportunity to work through unresolved trauma and allows individuals to integrate corrective emotional experiences in an embodied way so they can have a new sense of feeling loved and cared about on an emotional level.  

Getting Help in Therapy

There are many people who spend their entire lives trying to overcome a history of trauma on their own without success.  As a result, their trauma continues to have a profound negative impact.

If you have tried on your own to overcome a traumatic history, you're not alone.  Help is available to you (see my article: Overcoming Your Fear of Asking For Help).

If you work with an experiential trauma therapist, you can free yourself from your history so you can live a more fulfilling life. 

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist (see my article:  The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Therapy).

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.

Overcoming Childhood Trauma With Experiential Therapy: What You Fear Now Has Already Happened

For adults who were traumatized as children, childhood trauma (also known as developmental trauma) remains active emotionally and physiologically throughout adulthood without help in therapy (see my article: Developmental Trauma: Living in the Present As If It Were the Past).

Overcoming Childhood Trauma With Experiential Therapy: What You Fear Has Already Happened

Adults with developmental trauma often experience the same fears they felt as children, however, they usually don't realize that they're experiencing emotions from the past rather than the present.

When old emotions get triggered in the present, they can be so powerful that they feel like they're related to the here-and-now rather than the past, but they are really old activation.

The trauma has already happened, but the emotional triggers make the emotions feel like they're current (see my article: Working Through Psychological Trauma: Separating "Then" From "Now").

The reason why they feel like they're from the present is that the trauma hasn't been processed in therapy.  In other words, the trauma remains "unmetabolized" (or unprocessed) in the brain and the nervous system hasn't been "updated" yet.

Although an adult with developmental trauma can try to tell himself that the current trigger is from an old feeling in the past, this usually isn't enough to keep him from getting triggered again.  This is because this type of self talk appeals to the logical part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and not the deeper part of the brain, the limbic system, where the trauma resides.

Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma
As a psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience helping clients to overcome traumatic experiences, I know that experiential psychotherapy is the most effective modality to overcome trauma (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma).

As I've mentioned in my other articles, regular talk therapy doesn't get to the limbic part of the brain, which is why clients often develop insight (or an intellectual understanding) of their trauma, but their traumatic symptoms don't change.  They continue to get emotionally triggered in the present (see my article:  Coping With Trauma: Becoming Aware of Your Emotional Triggers).

Experiential therapy includes EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Somatic Experiencing (also known as SE), clinical hypnosis, and AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy).  See my articles: How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain and Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR Therapy, Helps to Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs).

Fictional Clinical Vignette: Overcoming Childhood Trauma: What You Fear Has Already Happened
The following fictional vignette, which is similar to many actual psychotherapy cases, illustrates how experiential therapy helps clients to overcome developmental trauma so they're no longer triggered in the present:

Ann
Ann started experiential therapy to overcome her fear of getting romantically involved with a new man she was dating.

Two months before she started therapy, Ann met John at a party where they immediately hit it off.  When John took her out on their first date, Ann felt excited and happy to be spending time with him.  They talked for hours and it was clear that they had a lot in common and there was a strong sexual chemistry between them.

But as they continued to date and their feelings for each other deepened, Ann began to feel more fearful than happy to see John.  She knew that she still liked him a lot and that he liked her very much.  But she kept imagining scenarios where John would hurt her and stop seeing her (see my article: Wanting and Dreading Love).

The deeper her feelings became for John, the more fearful she became.  After a while, she was so fearful that there were times when she was tempted to cancel dates with John to avoid her fear. At the same time, she knew that her fear wasn't really about John.

So, she tried to reason with herself by telling herself that her fears weren't related to anything that John was doing or not doing.  But her self talk only calmed her for the moment until the fears resurrected again (see my article: Fear of Abandonment Can Occur Even in a Healthy, Stable Relationship).

She recognized her fears about John as being part of her usual pattern with men.  Whenever she met a man that she really liked, she would become infatuated with him, but as they continued to see each other, her fears of getting hurt would increase to the point where she would end the relationship (see my article: Overcoming Your Fear of Falling In Love and Getting Hurt Again).

Ann didn't want to allow her fear of getting hurt to ruin her relationship with John.  So, she talked to her close friend, Sue, about it.  Sue told Ann that she tried for years to overcome similar fears in regular talk therapy, but talk therapy didn't resolve her problem.  She told Ann that she was able to overcome these fears in experiential therapy, and she encouraged Ann to find an experiential therapist.

After the initial consultation where Ann gave the therapist an overview of the problem and the therapist explained how she worked with experiential therapy, Ann gave her family history in the next therapy session.

Ann explained that she had been close to both of her parents as a young girl, but she was especially close to her father ("I was a real daddy's girl").  Every day she waited up for her father to come home from work so he could read her a bedtime story before she went to sleep.  He would tuck her in and wait until she fell asleep before he left her side.

But shortly after her sixth birthday, her father told her that he had to go away for three months "to get better."  When she asked him if he was sick, he explained that he had a disorder that was completely curable if he got help.  He told her that he loved her and asked her not to worry while he was gone.

Ann told her therapist that she never saw her father again, and her mother refused to talk to her about what happened to her father.

She explained to her therapist that it was many years later, as an adult, that she found out from her paternal aunt that her father had a drug problem and he went to rehab.  However, he left rehab shortly after he arrived, no one ever heard from him since that time, and the family presumed that he was either still in the grips of his addiction or he was dead.  She told Ann that the family tried to find him, but there was no trace of him.

With regard to Ann's fears about her boyfriend, John, her therapist used a hypnotherapy technique called the Affect Bridge to get to the earliest memory related to Ann's fears of being left by John.  It was not surprising to the therapist when Ann's earliest memory of this fear was feeling abandoned by her father.

Over a period of time, using EMDR therapy, Ann's therapist helped Ann to process her earliest memories related to feeling abandoned by her father.  The therapeutic work was gradual, but Ann felt better each time she did an EMDR session with her therapist.

Since EMDR uses a three-pronged approach of working on the past, present and future, Ann and her therapist worked on her fears from the past, her current fears, and her fears about the future.

By attending her EMDR sessions regularly, Ann gradually overcame her fear of being abandoned, and her relationship with John continued to deepen without her usual fear.

Conclusion
The fictional vignette in this article illustrates how developmental trauma can get played out in the present.

In the vignette, Ann already had an awareness that she experienced the same fears in her prior relationships, those fears led her to end those relationships, and her fears about the current relationship weren't related to anything that John was doing.

Although she was determined not to act on her fears in her relationship with John, her attempts at positive self talk to overcome her fears weren't successful because they didn't get to the area in the brain where the developmental trauma resided, the limbic system.

The Affect Bridge from hypnotherapy helped Ann and her therapist to trace back the origin of Ann's fear.  EMDR therapy enabled Ann to process the trauma from the past and her fears about the present and future so that Ann was no longer affected by her childhood trauma.

Getting Help in Therapy
If you're struggling with developmental trauma, you owe it to yourself to work with a licensed mental health professional who practices experiential therapy.

Once you've processed the earlier trauma, you'll be free from your traumatic history so that you can live a more fulfilling life.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, and Somatic Experiencing 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.