8 min read:
Talk Therapy’s Limitations
Whether we’ve been in therapy for years or have merely seen a session play out on the screen,
many of us tend to think of the therapeutic process in terms of traditional talk therapy: you bring
issues that interfere with your daily life to your therapist, hoping that in talking through them, you
will leave feeling lighter, clearer, and more actualized.
Traditional forms of talk therapy, including CBT, narrative therapy, and psychodynamic therapy,
focus on verbally processing the presenting problem. For example, in a CBT session, you might
work with your therapist to understand the connection between your thoughts, emotions, and
behaviors, while in narrative therapy you talk through your story to understand and externalize
it, making it feel more coherent and manageable in the process.
These forms of therapy, whilst tremendously helpful for some, can often fall short for individuals
seeking deep and lasting change. From my experience, this is a consequence of talk therapy’s
narrow focus of targeting change within the conscious mind.
For example, clients engaging in traditional forms of therapy may spend a decent amount of
time developing insight into their problems and recognizing where their perceptions come from
(i.e., ‘I live in fear that people will leave me’ can be traced back to abandonment wounds from
childhood).
While gaining insight is a crucial component of therapy, developing conscious awareness of how
our mind is perceiving situations often isn’t enough to change those perceptions. In fact, it can
sometimes lead to judgemental thought processes (I.e.,‘I get this comes from my father
abandoning me as a child, but shouldn’t I be over this by now?’).
How Experiential Therapy Differs
Enter experiential therapy. Experiential therapy is an embodied method of therapy, meaning it
actively brings a client into the experience of their particular problems, leading to deeper
awareness over their subconscious perceptions.
Let’s return to the example of a person struggling with childhood abandonment wounds.
An experiential therapy session might start with the person naming the different feelings,
sensations, and thoughts that arose within them the moment they sensed their abandonment
wound being triggered in their present-day life. Rather than simply recounting the instance, as
would be expected with traditional talk therapy, the therapist guides the client into the
physiological, emotional, and mental experiences that arise when they think about the reality of
being abandoned.
From this space of lucid connection with one’s experience, clients are engaging a deeper part of
their brain, allowing the logical brain to take a backseat. In this state, clients are able to better
receive subconscious learnings, beliefs, and predictions related to their past experiences (I.e.,
‘Being abandoned triggers a subconscious knowing that I am not worthy of belonging’).
What does this embodied approach to therapy accomplish, you might wonder (as my clients
often do when I introduce experiential therapy into our work).
The explanation is simple: experiential therapy facilitates awareness with more precision
and speed than talk therapy by getting to the real root of the subconscious perceptions
that govern our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Once this awareness develops, we
know which perceptions need updating, and can facilitate that change in a more targeted
way.
Conscious vs. Subconscious
To better understand this, let’s imagine you are on the outside of a building, reporting about
what is happening on the inside. In order to do this, you interview people leaving the building,
walk around the building to get different vantage points, and eavesdrop on other conversations,
collecting as much information as possible. And while all these methods prove fruitful in
collecting your story, your perspective is that of an outsider; invariably distanced, often
incomplete. As a result, exercising direct control over anything that happens inside the building
presents a significant challenge.
The same logic applies to our conscious mind’s self-report. While incredibly developed, our
prefrontal cortex interprets signals from deeper parts of the brain and formulates its own ideas
and hypotheses based on historical data points.
That is to say, although the conscious mind is reacting to subconscious perceptions, we’re not
often consciously aware of what those are, as those knowings and beliefs are housed in deeper
parts of the brain that we don’t readily have access to.
For example, If I were to engage in a talk-therapy session with a client, I may offer a hypothesis
as to what subconscious emotional knowing we could be working with as I gain more insight into
the client. If the subconscious knowing doesn’t resonate with their conscious perception of
things, they will push back on the hypothesis, leading to a potentially incomplete understanding
of their experience as well as a misdirection of what we’re looking to shift in our work together.
However, after a 50-minute experiential session, we may arrive at the exact same knowing, but
this time, there is resonance, as we’ve created the space for the subconscious experience to
come up and be known. In this scenario, the insight we’re working to understand isn’t coming
from the therapist (whose hypotheses don’t always pan out), but from the client’s own
subconscious perceptions that they’ve gained access to through building relationship with
themselves.
The Benefits of Going Experiential
Once we’re equipped with the root of the emotional knowings that are leading to the problem at
hand, we get to work within those perceptions to offer updated knowledge and information. The
result is a change in a person’s perceived reality–one that is rooted more in present
circumstances than in past hurts and experiences.
The benefits of experiential therapy are innumerable, as we work on a deeper level of the brain
to understand, change, and build a more intimate relationship with ourselves. Having practiced
and experienced both talk therapy and experiential therapy, I can say that both methods work
towards the same goal. The latter just executes its job with more precision and efficiency.
