What Are the Rewarding Benefits of Attending Experiential Psychotherapy?

Many people seek help in therapy when they're in a crisis. 

A crisis might involve a loss in their life or a major change where they're struggling to cope (see my article: How a Crisis Can Bring Positive Change in Your Life).

The Benefits of Attending Experiential Therapy

But aside from seeking help in therapy in a crisis, there are many benefits to attending therapy even when you're not in a crisis, which I discuss in this article.

The Benefits of Attending Experiential Therapy

If you're considering beginning therapy, here are some of the rewarding benefits:

Treat Mental Health Conditions 

Putting your well-being first and getting the help you need is a sign of strength (see my article: Common Misconceptions About Psychotherapy: Going to Therapy Means You're "Weak").

Some people who need help don't come to therapy because they're afraid of the stigma, but there's a lot more psychoeducation now that there should not be a stigma involved with going to therapy and the alternative, which often means remaining unhappy is much worse (see my article: Mental Health Awareness: Reducing the Stigma of Getting Help in Therapy).

The Benefits of Attending Experiential Therapy

Anxiety and depression have increased, especially since the pandemic, so if you're feeling anxious or depressed, you're experiencing problems that millions of people are also expeirencing.  

There are safe and effective modalities of therapy to treat anxiety and depression, so you don't need to suffer alone (see my article: Self Help Tips on How to Cope With Anxiety).

One of the most common problems is unresolved trauma--whether it's a new experience of trauma or, more often, an unresolved trauma from earlier in life that continues to affect them now (see my article: How Past Unresolved Trauma Can Affect How You Feel Now).

The good news is that there are specific types of trauma therapy that have been developed specifically for unresolved trauma.

These modalities are known for being Mind-Body Oriented therapies which are also called Experiential Therapy:

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapy

AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)

Somatic Experiencing Therapy

Parts Work (also known as Ego States Therapy and Internal Family Systems)

See my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy

Develop Coping Skills and Strategies

Whether you want to improve your overall coping skills and internal resources or you want to learn to cope with a particular problem, working with a skilled psychotherapist can help you to preserve your sense of well being.

Developing Coping Skills in Experiential Therapy

Depending upon how your therapist works, here are just a few of the coping skills, strategies and internal resources you can develop in Experiential Therapy:

Meditation

Grounding Techniques

Anchoring Techniques

Somatic Awareness

Embracing Your Shadow Self

Strengthening Your Resilience

Learning to Empower Yourself With Parts Work

Develop Increased Self Awareness

Self awareness is part of emotional intelligence (see my article: How to Develop Emotional Intelligence).

Developing Self Awareness in Experiential Therapy

Learning to be self aware can help you to understand yourself as well as the impact you have on others, including your loved ones (see my article: What is Self Awareness?).

Developing increased self awareness is a skill you can learn. 

Self awareness includes:

• Being able to tap into your own thoughts and feelings

• Recognizing your personal strengths and areas where you have challenges (see my article: Discovering Your Personal Strengths in Psychotherapy)

• Recognize self limiting beliefs you have about yourself so you can work on changing them

• Recognizing how your thoughts, feelings and behavior affect others

Learn to Handle Your Emotions

Emotional regulation is an important skill you can learn in psychotherapy, especially in Experiential Therapy (see my article: Learning to Manage Your Emotions).

Emotional regulation includes understanding and managing your emotions so your emotions don't overwhelm you or cause you to engage in impulsive behavior.

Experiential therapy can help you to manage triggers that cause you to feel emotionally dysregulated.

    See my article:Responding Instead of Reacting to Stress).

Learn to Overcome Negative Thoughts About Yourself and Improve Self Esteem

Everyone has negative thoughts once in a while, but if you tend to have negative thoughts about yourself often, psychotherapy can help you to overcome these habitual thoughts and increase your self esteem (see my article: How Psychotherapy Can Help You to Change the Negative (Distorted) Stories You Tell Yourself).

Focusing on Inner World to Improve Self Esteem

Improve Communication Skills

People who attend psychotherapy often develop increased self awareness which, in turn, improves their interactions with others so they can communicate their thoughts and feelings more effectively (see my article: Improving Communication in Your Relationship: How to Stop Defensive Behavior).

Improving Communication Skills

Develop Stronger Relationships

With increased self awareness and improved communication skills, you're more likely to develop stronger relationships.

You can gain insight into how your behavior affects your relationship and, if you need to make improvements in this area, learn how to change behavior that might be contributing to a negative cycle in your relationship.

Developing a Stronger Relationship

You can also learn how to set healthy boundaries in your relationships as well as accept the healthy boundaries that people in your life are setting for themselves (see my article: How to Set Healthy Boundaries Without Guilt or Shame).

Learn to Accept Healthy Support

Psychotherapy can help you to learn how to accept positive healthy emotional support.

People who grew up in families where they had little to no emotional support or where they couldn't trust emotional support often have problems trusting anyone to give them emotional support because getting healthy support is unfamiliar to them (see my article: Can You Learn to Trust Your Therapist If You Couldn't Trust Your Family?).

Learning to Accept Healthy Support in Experiential Therapy

You and your therapist can develop a healthy therapeutic alliance over time so that you can develop trust in your therapist and the therapeutic process (see my article: 10 Tips on How to Open Up to Your Therapist).

After you have learned to accept healthy support in therapy, you can learn to choose healthy relationships where you can get and give emotional support.

Improve Your Mental and Physical Health

Due to the mind-body connection, there is a strong connection between mental health and physical health and therapy can help you to improve both. 

Improving Your Mental and Physical Health

For instance, by improving how you handle stress, it's possible for you to improve your sleep and possibly lower your blood pressure (see my article: Tips on How to Improve Your Sleep).

Getting Help in Therapy

If you have been struggling on your own to overcome problems, you could benefit from getting help from a skilled mental health professional.

Getting Help in Experiential Therapy

An experienced psychotherapist can help you to overcome your problems so you can live a more fulfilling life.

So, rather than struggling on your own, seek help from a licensed psychotherapist.

About Me

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

With over 20 years of experience, I have helped many individual adults and couples to live more fulfilled lives.

One of my specialties is helping clients to overcome trauma.

I use an integrative approach to psychotherapy so that clients can have the best possible experience (see my article: The Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy).

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.

Moving Beyond Blaming Your Parents in Therapy

Many people think that contemporary psychotherapy is all about blaming your mother or blaming both of your parents for your unresolved problems, but this is an outdated view of therapy that is part of the many myths about modern psychotherapy (see my articles debunking common myths about contemporary psychotherapy, including the myths that Going to Therapy Means You're Weak, Psychotherapy is "All Talk and No Action," and Psychotherapy Always Takes a Long Time).

Moving Beyond Blaming Your Parents in Therapy

While it's true that historically traditional psychoanalysis from a generation ago focused blame on parents, especially mothers, most contemporary psychotherapists have moved beyond that.

Most contemporary psychotherapists know that while it's important to understand how problems might have developed early on, they also know that if that's all therapy has to offer, clients will remain stuck in an angry, frustrated place and change will be difficult at best.

Developmentally, our perspective about our parents usually changes over time (see my article: How Your Perspective About Your Parents Changes Over Time).

While many young children see their parents as being wise and powerful, as these children get older they begin to see their parents in a more realistic way.  They recognize that their parents have their own problems, which might be intergenerational (see my article: Psychotherapy and Intergenerational Trauma).  

This isn't to say that some parents weren't emotionally and physically abusive to their children which created trauma. But, after recognizing the origin of their problems, which might also include genetics, temperament, and other important relationships, clients need to be assisted in therapy to move beyond blaming their parents so they can make progress in therapy.

How to Move Beyond Blaming Your Parents For Your Problems

Everyone's situation is different, and I don't know your particular situation or your personal history.  

While you might have good reason for being angry with your parents for things they did (or didn't do), at the same time, this can't be the where your development in therapy stops if you want to overcome your problems because, as previously mentioned, you'll get stuck blaming your parents and not taking steps to overcome your problems.

After you process your anger in therapy towards your parents (or someone else), you need to move beyond that stage to actually process your problems because your parents can't do it for you.

Processing the trauma is how you will heal. Depending upon your individual problems and what therapy might work best for. you, therapy could include the following forms of experiential therapy:

• Parts Work: This form of therapy, which has many different names, including Ego States work, Internal Family Systems (IFS), as well other names. It was developed by many different therapists over time, including Dr. Richard Schwartz.  It involves recognizing that we're all made up of a multiplicity of selves, which includes a child part as well as an adult part, and many other parts. So, to give just one example of how this type of therapy can be used, if you grew up in a home where you were emotionally neglected, a Parts Work therapist can help you to develop a more nurturing adult part so that you can nurture the child part of you that holds the trauma. With this type of therapy, there's a recognition that you mihjt not have gotten what you needed emotionally when you were a child, but you can always give it to yourself if you learn how to do it (see my article: Understanding the Many Aspects of Yourself).

• EMDR Therapy: EMDR therapy, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro.  It helps you to reprocess unresolved trauma, including unresolved childhood trauma, also known as developmental trauma, through a process called memory reconsolidation (see my article: Experiential Therapy, like EMDR, Helps You to Achieve Breakthroughs to Overcome Trauma).

• Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (also known as AEDP): AEDP, which was developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, to help clients overcome trauma. It's based on many different disciplines, including:

• attachment theory
• affective neuroscience
• trauma research
• developmental research 
• mind-body/somatic therapy
• emotion theory
• phenomonology 
• transformational studies

• Somatic Experiencing (also known as SE): SE, which was developed by Dr. Peter Levine, takes into account that trauma is stored in the body.  This often leads to emotional numbing also known as dissociation. SE can help clients to release the trauma and help them to feel more integrated emotionally and physically.

• Clinical Hypnosis (also known as hypnotherapy): Clinical hypnosis helps clients to achieve a relaxed state where they can have access to deeper, unconscious material and that can help clients to become more open to change.

• Integrative Psychotherapy: Many experiential therapists work in a way that integrates the different types of therapies mentioned above, which is often beneficial for clients (see my articles: The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy and Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma).

It's not unusual for experiential therapists to use the different modalities mentioned above during different stages of therapy, depending upon what the client needs.  

For instance, in my prior article, where I discussed that clients aren't defined by their psychological trauma, I gave an example in the clinical scenario where the therapist started with Parts Work and then used EMDR therapy.

Conclusion

Unlike outmoded forms of psychotherapy from a century ago, contemporary psychotherapy recognizes that if clients don't move beyond the stage of blaming their parents, they will remain stuck with their problems.  

Experiential therapy, including EMDR, Parts Work AEDP, Somatic Experiencing and clinical hypnosis provide clients with an opportunity to work through unresolved problems so they can move on with their life (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

Rather than remaining stuck in a blame trap, contact an experiential psychotherapist who can help you to overcome the obstacles that are blocking your growth.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Parts Work and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

As an experiential therapist, helping clients to overcome trauma is my specialty.

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 or email me.    

Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy Alone to Overcome Trauma: A Clinical Vignette

In my prior article, Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective to Overcome Trauma Than Talk Therapy Alone, I began a discussion about experiential therapies like EMDR therapy, Somatic Experiencing and clinical hypnosis and why experiential therapy is more effective than talk therapy (psychodynamic or cognitive behavioral therapy) alone.  As I mentioned in my last article, I'm providing a clinical vignette to illustrate these points in this article.

Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy Alone to Overcome Trauma

Fictional Clinical Vignette: Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy Alone to Overcome Trauma:

Tia
Tia began psychotherapy with an experiential psychotherapist after having been with prior psychotherapists who practiced psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Although she felt she gained valuable insights in her therapy with a psychodynamic psychotherapist and she learned some helpful tools with her CBT therapist, she felt that her core problem, which was a fear of being sexual with her current boyfriend as well as, in the past, with her previous boyfriends.

In her prior psychodynamic psychotherapy, she learned that her fears stemmed from early sexual molestation by her maternal uncle.  Prior to attending this therapy, she had always known about the sexual molestation, but she never connected it to her fear of being sexual.

Although this insight was valuable to her, Tia still got emotionally triggered in her relationship with her boyfriend, John, especially when they made love.  She loved John and she had no doubt that he loved her.  She felt close to him most of the time, but when they had sex, she felt numb and there were times when she had to ask John to stop making love to her because she felt overwhelmed with fear.

Even though she understood the origin of her fear of making love with John, it didn't help her to overcome the emotional and physical numbing that she experienced when he touched her sexually.

After being with her psychodynamic psychotherapist for several years, she went to a therapist who practiced CBT.  Her CBT therapist provided her with tools for anxiety and tried to use desensitization  techniques to help Tia overcome her fear of being sexual with John.

But when Tia was with John and they attempted to be sexual, she continued to feel fearful and then numb, even though she tried using the tools that she developed in CBT.  The CBT desensitization also didn't help her outside the therapy room.

Since Tia wanted to overcome her fear of being sexual, she decided to try experiential psychotherapy after hearing from a friend that it was helpful to her.

After several sessions of providing the history of her problem, family history, and preparation to do trauma work, Tia's experiential psychotherapist recommended that they use EMDR therapy (see my articles: EMDR Therapy - When Talk Therapy Isn't Enough, How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain, and EMDR Therapy For Big T and Smaller T Trauma).

As they worked on Tia's problem using EMDR therapy, Tia's therapist did a "float back" (similar to the affect bridge in clinical hypnosis) to see if there were any earlier memories (also called "feeder memories") that were affecting Tia.  

As Tia focused on whether there were any earlier memories where she had the same emotions and negative beliefs about herself that she had related to her memory of her uncle sexually molesting her, she remembered that when she was a few years younger, an older cousin sexually molested her and threatened to hurt her if she told anyone about the sexual abuse.

Tia's psychotherapist explained to her that, based on feedback from Tia, her earlier psychodynamic therapy provided Tia with insight and helped her to understand the unconscious emotions that were affecting her.  And CBT provided her with some tools, but that therapy remained superficial.

As a result of both therapies, Tia could talk about her problem, but her understanding remained intellectual.  Neither therapy helped her when she froze in fear physically and emotionally when she and her boyfriend tried to have sex.

In addition, and this was important--neither therapy got to the earlier memory of the sexual molestation and threats by her cousin.

After they discovered that there was an earlier memory of sexual molestation when she was younger, Tia's psychotherapist focused on that memory first and when they completed the work on that memory, they focused on the later sexual molestation involving the uncle.  This took several months.

Since EMDR therapy focuses on the past, present and future, after they worked through both memories, they focused on Tia's fear and numbing in the present with her boyfriend.

Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy Alone to Overcome Trauma 

Having worked though the earlier memories of abuse, the present and future/anticipated situations were easier.  And Tia reported to her therapist that she was no longer feeling fearful and numb when she had sex with her boyfriend, and they were enjoying an active sex life.

Conclusion
In this particular scenario, I used an example of EMDR therapy, but the same could apply to clinical hypnosis, Somatic Experiencing, Coherence therapy, and Ego States therapy (also known as Parts Work).

Some people respond better to one type of experiential therapy than another.  For the sake of brevity, I used a scenario where the client responded well to EMDR, but I could have also given a scenario where the therapist either switched to one of the other types of experiential therapies or used these experiential therapies in combination as many integrative psychotherapists do.

As I mentioned in my prior article, there are many reasons why experiential psychotherapy is more effective than talk therapy alone, including the fact that talk therapy tends to remain on a cognitive level whereas experiential therapy gets to the root of the problem on a deeper (limbic brain) level where the problem exists.

Also, both EMDR therapy and clinical hypnosis have particular methods to discover whether there are "feeder memories," which are earlier memories that are affecting the trauma.  In clinical hypnosis, the method is called the affect bridge and in EMDR the method is called the float back technique.

Unless the earlier feeder memories are worked on, the problem will only be partially solved and the client is still likely to get triggered.

In the scenario above, if the psychotherapist had not looked for feeder memories, Tia and her therapist would only have worked on memory that Tia came in with, but that earlier feeder memory would have continued to affect her when she was sexual with her boyfriend.

Although experiential psychotherapy tends to be more effective and work faster in helping clients to overcome trauma as compared to talk therapy alone, experiential therapy isn't a quick fix, and everyone processes their problems differently with experiential psychotherapy.

Getting Help in Therapy
If you have been suffering with unresolved trauma, you could benefit from getting help from a licensed mental health professional who practices experiential psychotherapy.

To overcome trauma, you need more than just insight.  You need psychotherapy that will get to the root of the trauma in the limbic brain, which is what experiential therapy does (see my articles: The Benefits of Psychotherapy and How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

After you have overcome your traumatic experiences, you can be free from the emotional burdens of your history and live a more fulfilling life.

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

I am a trauma-informed experiential psychotherapist who works with individual adults and couples.

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

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

Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma

I have discussed the use of experiential psychotherapy for overcoming psychological trauma in prior articles.  In this article, I'm focusing on comparing talk therapy alone to experiential therapy and discussing why experiential therapy tends to be more effective than talk therapy alone for overcoming psychological trauma (see my article: Experiential Psychotherapy Helps to Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs).

Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma 

My Background as a Trauma-Informed Psychotherapist

As I have stated before in prior articles and in my biographical information for this blog, my original training from almost 20 years ago was in psychoanalysis.  Back then, after completing graduate school, I was a psychoanalytic candidate in training and I used psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis with clients from the institute's center, including clients with psychological trauma.

While I loved my training and still like applying contemporary Relational psychoanalytic concepts, especially Winnicottian concepts, over the years I discovered that psychoanalysis by itself was not as effective in helping traumatized clients to overcome their problems as compared to experiential psychotherapy or the combination of contemporary psychoanalysis and experiential therapy (see my article: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and EMDR Therapy: A Powerful Combination to Overcome Trauma).

In those early years of my training to be a psychoanalyst, it was frustrating to see that clients in developed insight into their problems, which was an important step, but it often didn't change their problems.

My experience in those early days was that many clients "felt better" and that psychoanalysis was useful, especially back then when clients came multiple times per week.  But I wasn't satisfied that most clients, who experienced trauma, made significant experiential shifts.

After my psychoanalytic training, the mental health field was changing rapidly, and I decided to find out what other types of psychotherapy were being used effectively for PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) and trauma.  That's when I heard about EMDR therapy, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (see my articles: How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain and What is Adjunctive EMDR Therapy?).

Since being trained in EMDR in 2004, I have used it regularly and found it to be an effective therapy for helping clients to overcome trauma, including PTSD.  I was fascinated to see that clients were overcoming their traumatic symptoms faster than most clients in talk therapy alone, and the results lasted over time.

In subsequent years, I obtained training in other forms of experiential therapy, including clinical hypnosis, Somatic Experiencing, Ego States therapy and Coherence therapy, which has been invaluable in helping traumatized clients to overcome their problems.

Using these experiential therapies over the years has been pivotal in becoming a trauma-informed psychotherapist who has been able to help many clients who have a traumatic history.

At this point, after using these experiential therapies consistently for several years, I consider myself to be an integrationist who often combines these therapies when it is most effective to do so based on the needs of each client.

Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma

There are many reasons why experiential psychotherapy is more effective than talk therapy alone to overcome psychological trauma:

• Whereas talk therapy alone tends to help clients to develop intellectual insight into their problems, experiential therapy, by definition, uses the mind-body connection so that clients experience their emotions on a physical as well as an emotional basis which allows access to the unconscious mind (see my article: Experiential Psychotherapy Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

• With talk therapy alone, many clients remain "in their heads." If they have been in talk therapy before, they know the psychological lingo and can explain their problems well, but they might be cut off from their emotional and physical experiences.  Since experiential therapy focuses on clients' embodied experiences, there is a more integrative experience that combines intellectual insights with embodied experience.

• Whereas clients in talk therapy alone can gloss over their emotions by intellectualizing, experiential psychotherapy helps clients to slow down to get deeper into their embodied experience.  Slowing down to experience the felt sense of their emotions allows clients to make deep psychological connections that they often don't make with talk therapy alone.

• Whereas certain forms of talk therapy can pathologize clients' problems, experiential psychotherapy is nonjudgmental and compassionate.  Rather than making judgments about the clients' problems, experiential psychotherapy tends to have a strengths-based perspective.  It also helps clients to become aware of their internal experiences in more body-mind integrated way (see my article: A Strengths-Based Perspective in Psychotherapy).

• Experiential psychotherapy focuses on healing clients as opposed to talk therapy alone which, as previously mentioned, tends to focus on helping  clients to develop intellectual insight.

• Experiential psychotherapy provides clients with skills and tools that they can use on their own without the psychotherapist.  As previously mentioned, it doesn't rely solely on insight as talk therapy alone tends to do.

• Experiential psychotherapy helps clients to go beyond their "story" about themselves.  This is especially important for clients who have had a lot of therapy before and who have developed a particular narrative about themselves which they tell each therapist that they work with.  Rather than keeping clients stuck in an old "story," experiential psychotherapy helps clients to experience their shifting sense of self on a profound level.

• Experiential psychotherapy tends to facilitate transformational and breakthrough moments for clients in therapy in a more timely manner than talk therapy alone.

Conclusion

Talk therapy like psychodynamic psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are effective types of therapy for many clients.  However, for clients who want to overcome traumatic experiences, including PTSD, experiential psychotherapy used on its own or in combination with talk therapy is more effective.

In my next article, I'll give a clinical example of how experiential psychotherapy is more effective than talk therapy alone in helping clients to overcome trauma (see my article: Why Experiential Psychotherapy is More Effective to Overcome Trauma Than Talk Therapy Alone - A Clinical Vignette).

Getting Help in Therapy

If you have been struggling on your own with emotional problems, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional with the experience and skills you need to overcome your problems (see my article: The Benefits of Psychotherapy).

The first step in getting help in therapy is calling a psychotherapist for a consultation.  During the consultation, you can ask the therapist about her background, training, skills and how she works with your particular type of problem (see my article: How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

Effective psychotherapy helps to free you from your history of problems so you can lead a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who uses integrative psychotherapy in a contemporary, dynamic, interactive and collaborative way (see my article: The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy).

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 or email me.

Integrating EMDR and Somatic Psychotherapy

In prior articles, I've discussed how I use an integrative approach to psychotherapy to tailor therapy to the needs of each client. In this article, I'm focusing specifically on the integration of EMDR and somatic psychotherapy as a powerful combination to overcome psychological trauma.

See my articles: 

What is EMDR Therapy? 

What is Adjunctive EMDR Therapy? 

Using Somatic Psychotherapy

Integrative Psychotherapy

Integrating EMDR and Somatic Psychotherapy

How EMDR Therapy Developed
EMDR therapy was originally developed by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D. in the mid-1980s for PTSD (postraumatic stress disorder).  It is one of the most researched therapies that has been shown to be effective to help clients to overcome trauma.

Since that time, EMDR has been shown to be effective for other problems, including performance enhancement, substance abuse, development trauma and other problems (see my article: EMDR Therapy and Performance Enhancement).

Enhancements to EMDR Therapy
EMDR therapy has also changed since its inception to include various enhancements to make it more effective for a wide variety of clients in therapy.  

One of those enhancements is the recognition that EMDR combines well with most other therapies, including psychodynamic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy and mind-body oriented therapies, like somatic psychotherapy (see my article: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and EMDR Therapy: A Powerful Combination to Overcome Trauma).

Combining EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychotherapy
Combining EMDR therapy and somatic therapy works especially well for clients who are cut off from their emotional and physical experience of their body.  These clients often intellectualize about their problems.  They might be able to talk about their problems with significant insight, but that's where their experience ends.

Unfortunately, this usually means that their problems don't change.  So, they can remain in regular talk therapy for years and they experience no resolution to their problems (see my article: EMDR Therapy When Talk Therapy Isn't Enough).

By combining EMDR with somatic psychotherapy, the psychotherapist helps clients to connect to their experience on an emotional and physical level so that the client is no longer intellectualizing with about their problems (see my article: Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Helps to Achieve Emotional Breakthroughs.

The use of somatic psychotherapy also helps to titrate the therapeutic work in a way that makes it manageable for the client, and since every client is different in terms of his or her window of tolerance, this makes the combination of EMDR and somatic therapy ideal for tailoring the therapy to the individual client's needs (see my article: Expanding Your Window of Tolerence in Therapy to Overcome Emotional Problems).

For instance, if a client is processing a traumatic memory from childhood with EMDR therapy and she begins to feel afraid, a psychotherapist who uses somatic psychotherapy can help the client to calm down and ground by asking her to become aware of how her feet feel against the floor and how the floor and all the other floors below support the weight of her body. 

The therapist can also bring the client's attention to other parts of her body where she feels calm and safe.  Then, when the client is ready, they can return to processing the trauma with EMDR.

When the client knows in advance that the work will be titrated in a way that she controls based on what feels manageable for her, she is more likely to be open to processing traumatic experiences that she might have been reticent to do before.

Using somatic psychotherapy with EMDR also helps to integrate changes made in therapy because the therapeutic work is experienced more fully based on the mind-body connection rather than just depending on an intellectual integration.

Getting Help in Therapy
EMDR and somatic psychotherapy are a powerful combination for processing traumatic experiences as well as for performance enhancement.

If you have unresolved traumatic experiences that are holding you back and preventing you from maximizing your potential, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional (see my article: How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

Rather than struggling on your own, you owe it to yourself to get help from a skilled psychotherapist who can help you overcome your problems.

About Me
I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who uses integrative psychotherapy in.a dynamic and collaborative way to tailor each treatment to the needs of the particular client.

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. 

Meeting Clients Where They Are in Their Process

One of the first clinical lessons that beginning psychotherapists learn from their clinical supervisors when they work with psychotherapy clients is "meeting clients where they are."  This is a reminder that a psychotherapist might have good ideas about where the therapy needs to go, but if the therapist is getting ahead of the client, it's going to be detrimental to the client and to the therapeutic work.  The therapist needs to listen to the client to discover where the client is and be empathically attuned to the client (see my articles: The Therapist's Empathic Attunement Can Be Emotionally Reparative For the Client, Psychotherapy: The Importance of Therapists Listening and Learning From the Client and Why is Empathy Important in Psychotherapy?).

Meeting Clients Where They Are

Even experienced psychotherapists can sometimes forget, in their sincere concern to help clients in therapy, that getting ahead of the client isn't useful to the client or the work in therapy.

For example, clients often come in with a particular presenting problem, but the therapist might sense that the presenting problem is really something else.

In this example, the therapist is often right, but if she gets ahead of the client and tries to steer the client in another direction before the client is ready, the client will either get confused or feel unheard and leave.

As a result, even when an experienced psychotherapist senses that there is another issue that is a bigger problem than the one the client presents, the therapist needs to proceed in a tactful and gentle way.

Rather than rushing in with astute psychological insights, the psychotherapist first needs to assess the client for what s/he might be ready for, especially at the beginning stage of psychotherapy, and then decide how to proceed.

The following fictional clinical vignette will demonstrate these issues:

Fictional Clinical Vignette: Starting Where the Client Is in Psychotherapy

Ned
When Ned began attending psychotherapy, he told his new psychotherapist that he wanted to improve how he communicated in his relationship so he and his girlfriend could get along better.

Ned described a relationship dynamic where his girlfriend, Jane, liked to talk about their relationship from time to time, especially when she thought they had problems, but Ned hated these talks.

He felt that his girlfriend usually made "a big deal out of nothing" and he told her this.  At first, when she told him that this hurt her feelings, Ned didn't understand.  But after they argued about this a few times and Jane threatened to leave him, he decided he had better improve his communication skills.

As his psychotherapist listened to Ned describe how he often dismissed other loved ones' concerns, she suspected that there were deeper issues involved, but she also knew that if she brought this up with Ned too soon, she would alienate him, so she waited for the right moment when she thought he would be more receptive.

At the point when Ned and his psychotherapist formed a good working relationship in therapy, his psychotherapist explored with Ned what he thought was going on for him in this relationship.  She recognized that Ned seemed more open to this type of exploration at that point.

Ned responded by telling his therapist that, even though he no longer dismissed Jane's concerns, he still couldn't understand why she wanted to talk about the relationship.  He thought he was being much more considerate with Jane by not dismissing her concerns.

His therapist helped Ned to put himself in Jane's shoes to try to understand what was bothering her.  He thought about it and said that Jane said she would like to get closer to him, but she felt that he pushed her away emotionally.

As he thought about it more from Jane's point of view, he acknowledged that too much closeness frightened him and maybe this was why he dismissed Jane's concerns.

Over time, as Ned and his therapist continued to explore these issues, Ned realized that he could only take so much closeness with Jane and after that, he was uncomfortable.  That's when he dismissed her concerns and, in effect, created distance between himself and Jane.

He was now realizing that whenever he did this, this made Jane anxious and the more anxious she became, the more she wanted to talk about the relationship so they could get closer.  But the more she  wanted closeness, the more distant he felt.  So, this became the cycle that they were caught in.

Meeting Client Where They Are

Earlier in the therapy, his psychotherapist suspected that Ned and Jane had two very different attachment styles.  It appeared to her that Jane had an anxious attachment style and Ned had a dismissive attachment style (see my article: How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Relationship).

As his therapist talked to Ned about this and provided him with psychoeducation about attachment styles, it was as if a light went off in his head.  Suddenly, this made sense to him and he was motivated to work on the problems in his relationship (see my article: Why It's Important For Psychotherapists to Provide Clients With Psychoeducation).

Even though Ned was now ready to work on this problem, his therapist knew that if she had brought up this issue at the start of therapy, Ned wouldn't have been ready to hear it, and he acknowledged as much to her when they discussed it later on in therapy.

Gradually, Ed worked on the underlying issues that caused him to feel frightened of closeness with Jane.  He was also able to tell Jane that, ultimately, he wanted to be closer to her, but he needed to take it slowly.  Jane understood, and she said that she wanted Ned to tell her when he was getting frightened, so she wouldn't keep pushing him and alienating him.

Conclusion
Starting where the client is in therapy is important for the client and the success of the therapy.

A psychotherapist needs to use her clinical skills to assess where the client is, especially at the start of therapy, so she doesn't jump ahead of the client.  She also needs to use her clinical skills to assess when the client is ready to go deeper.  The timing will be different for each client.

It's important for the client and the psychotherapist to have a good therapeutic relationship first before going any deeper in therapy.  A good therapeutic relationship means that the client trusts the therapist and would most likely be willing to look at underlying issues.

If you're in therapy and you feel your therapist is jumping ahead of you or something else in the therapy is bothering you, it's important for you to communicate this to the therapist (see my article: How to Talk to Your Psychotherapist About Something That's Bothering You in Therapy).

Getting Help in Therapy
Asking for help can be challenging.  

If you're considering getting help in therapy, the first step is making an appointment for a consultation (see my article:  Tips on Overcoming Your Fear of Asking For Help).

When you choose a psychotherapist, it's important that you feel heard by the therapist (see my articles: The Benefits of Psychotherapy and How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

I usually advise clients to trust their instincts when they're trying to decide if a particular therapist is right for them.

Psychotherapy can free you from your problematic history so that you can maximize your potential, and a skilled psychotherapist can help you to overcome your problems at a pace that feels right for you.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who uses Integrative Psychotherapy to tailor the therapy to each client's needs (see my article: The Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy).

I work with individuals 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.