Experiential Psychotherapy Research Paper

Although the term experiential therapy first arose to refer to Whitaker and Malone’s approaches to psychodynamically oriented family and individual therapy (Whitaker and Malone 1953), this approach has subsequently grown out of a variety of ‘third force,’ humanistic, approaches. These include client-centered (Rogers 1959), Gestalt (Perls et al. 1951), and existential therapy (May and Yalom 1995), as well as other approaches that emphasize working with the clients in-therapy experiencing process (Greenberg et al. 1998). Experiential therapy consists of those approaches that, within the context of a facilitative human relationship, focus on the creation of new meaning by the symbolization of experience in awareness. The two major foci of experiential therapy practice are the personal presence of the therapist in the provision of an emphatic and facilitatively genuine therapeutic relationship, and increasing clients’ awareness of internal experience by focusing them on their moment by moment subjective experience.

2. View Of Human Nature And Functioning

Experiential therapy adopts an existential view of human nature, one that sees existence as preceding essence. People are seen as active agents in the construction of their own realities and choice is seen as the final arbiter in human functioning. Individuals are seen as being born morally neutral with a penchant both for health and sickness, and good and bad. What is essential, however, is that people are seen as having innate worth, the ability to know the difference between good and evil, and the capacity to choose. Free will thus is the foundational principle and therapy involves facilitation of the actualization of the potential for healthy functioning. Health is seen as arising from the ability to symbolize experience in awareness and to integrate different parts of the self to create equilibrium and coherent meaning.

Experiential theory of personality proposes a process model of the self. The self is seen as a dynamic experiential system that is in a continual process of self-organization. Experiential theory is constructivist in nature, and adopts a dynamic and dialectical view of functioning. It emphasizes that meaning is created by human activity, in dialogue with others, that change is an inherent aspect of all systems and that this occurs by a synthesis of parts. Meaning construction is viewed as being constrained by a bodily felt emotional experience but as influenced by language and culture and ultimately as created by a synthesis of experience and symbol (Gendlin 1962, Greenberg et al. 1993, Greenberg and Pascual-Leone 1995). Emotional experience is seen as both creating and being created by its conscious symbolization and expression. This view casts people as creators of the self they find themselves to be. In addition, experiential therapy, by adopting a relational view of functioning, sees the self as coming into existence at the boundary between inside and outside, between organism and environment, by a synthesis of bodily experience, symbol and interpersonal validation.

Emotional experience, although seen as a basically healthy resource, is viewed as capable of either providing healthy adaptive information based on its biologically adaptive origins or, in certain instances, as having become maladaptive through learning and experience. The most basic process for the individual in therapy is thus one of developing awareness of emotion and discriminating which emotional responses are healthy and can be used as a guide, and which are maladaptive, and need to be changed.

2.1 Goals

The general goals of treatment are to promote more fluid and integrative self-organizations. Therapy focuses on the whole person, i.e. it is person centered rather than problem or symptom focused, but within this wholistic focus, the underlying determinants of different types of self-dysfunction are also an important point of focus. Thus both a change in manner of functioning of the whole self and changes in particular problems in self-organization are viewed as important. For example, a client may be seen as changing the manner of functioning both by becoming more empathic to the self and by being able to symbolize bodily felt experience, as well as changing by resolving a specific problem such resolving unfinished business with a significant other. Thus treatment in addition to promoting self-acceptance and a strengthening of the self also aims at solving particular problems of self-organization that emerge in treatment. The problems that are focused on emerge in a collaborative fashion over the course of treatment.

3. Basic Principles Of Practice

Experiential therapy recognizes both the power of the understanding relationship and the importance of different in-therapy tasks in promoting different types of therapeutic change. The quality of the bond between participants as well as collaboration on the tasks and goals of therapy are seen as essential in creating a good therapeutic alliance. The bond is warm, respectful, empathic, and validating, while the goals and tasks focus on increasing awareness, deepening experience, and resolving specific in-session emotional problems.

The relational bond is seen as involving three main healing ingredients: first, a more transcendent aspect, the human presence of the therapist, witnessing and validating the other’s humaness; second, a set of more explicit facilitative attitudes that create a safe working environment; and third, a set of specific interpersonal Behaviors that facilitate growth and provide new interpersonal experience. Buber’s (1958) ‘I–thou’ relationship, involving such elements as presence, commitment to dialogue, and nonexploitiveness, and the Rogerian triad (Rogers 1957) of empathy, positive regard, and congruence together describe the general nature of the relationship. Empathy is seen as a complex cognitive affective process of imaginative entry into the world of the other and involves understanding, in addition to being with, the other and the promotion of deeper experience. This process helps the client to feel connected, to regulate affect, and to construct new meaning.

A relational bond of this type is seen as both confirming the client as an authentic source of experience and as providing the optimal context for helping the client to attend to and become aware of prereflective experience and to communicate and explore it without fear of evaluation. The facilitative relationship, in addition to being curative in and of itself, also provides a safe environment for working on particular problems. Finally, not only does the relationship serve as a confirming environment and as a context for specific forms of intrapsychic work, but it is itself also a medium for specific corrective inter- personal experiences. Thus certain forms of work on the relationship between client and therapist are also seen as mutative.

In addition to the provision of a ‘healing’ relationship, facilitating work on particular therapeutic tasks is also seen as a core ingredient of experiential therapy (Greenberg et al. 1993). The most central task of experiential therapy is that of deepening the clients experiencing. This involves focusing clients on their internal experience, helping them to symbolize it in words, and create new meaning. The therapist promotes different internal processes at different times to aid experiential processing. The processes facilitated range from, symbolizing a bodily felt sense, to evoking memories, to letting an intense feeling form, to expressing feelings, to reflecting on experience to create new meaning. The client in addition is encouraged to engage in such activities as psychodramatic enactments, or exercises in imagination to help address particular emotional issues. Specific tasks such as resolving problematic reactions, or resolving splits between parts of the self, are worked on in therapy. Resolving problematic reactions for example involves re-evoking the situation in a vivid manner in order to re-experience what occurred in order to develop a new view of self and situation. Resolving splits involves the promotion of separation and contact between two parts of the self in a dialogue to facilitate self-acceptance. In these tasks the client is seen as an active agent engaging in an exploratory process, and the tasks are viewed as being done by clients rather than done to them.

3.1 A Process Theory

An important distinguishing characteristic of experiential therapy is that it offers a process theory of how to facilitate knowledge of acquaintance, rather than a content theory of personality or psychopathology. A process theory of this type specifies both the moment by moment steps in the client’s process of change and the therapist interventions that will facilitate these steps. The emphasis in each step always is on how to promote the direct sensing of what is concretely felt in the moment to create new meaning.

There is an explicit assumption that within each individual there is a flow of experiencing to which the person can refer in order to be informed about the personal meaning of particular experiences. The main principle of the experiential method is to have people check whatever is said or done against their own concretely felt experience. Change is seen as emerging from a growing awareness of previously unsymbolized experience and the bringing of this experience into dialectical interaction with words or symbols and other aspect of experience to create new meaning.

The key to experiential therapy is to have clients experience or become acquainted with any manner of content in a new way such that this new experience will produce a change in the way they view themselves, others, and the world. Experiential therapy thus adds to the other approaches the emphasis that symbols, schemes, and even behavior must interact with the body based, experiential, level of existence in order to produce change. It thus offers a process theory of how body and symbol interact, and a set of methods for promoting this process.

Experiential therapy theorists have specified patterned sequences of change processes and events, the explicit connections of which are spelled out by their experiential theories of change. Three such characteristic sequences are described below. One sequence offered by Gendlin (1996) includes three fundamental client change events: (a) the client focuses on a directly felt meaning; (b) the client allows feelings, words, and pictures to arise from this inward focusing, and attends to the generated feeling; (c) the client receives a new felt meaning that emerges from the ensuing shift in body experience. Another experiential sequence (Mahrer 1989) consists of four client basic change events: (a) the client attains a level of strong feeling; (b) the client welcomes and appreciates the accessed inner experiencing; (c) the client becomes the inner experiencing in the context of earlier life scenes; (d) the client becomes and behaves according to the inner experiencing in the context of imminent future life scenes.

A third sequence specified by Greenberg and Paivio (1997) involves six basic change events: (a) the client experiences the problematic bad feelings in the session; (b) the client accesses, allows, and receives deeper core emotions and needs in the session; (c) the patient and therapist together explore whether the core emotion is adaptive or maladaptive; (d) if judged to be adaptive, the core feelings are used as a guide, and if judged to be maladaptive, alternative adaptive emotions and needs are accessed; (e) the core maladaptive emotions and associated beliefs are challenged from within by the newly adaptive emotions and needs; (f ) new meaning is created based on the new experience that emerges from the dialectical interaction of adaptive and maladaptive parts of self.

In these processes, the therapist is seen as an expert on how to facilitate new steps in the client’s experience rather than an expert on the content of the client’s experience. Therapists thus avoid interpretations of the content of a client’s experiences that tell the patient why he or she does things and that are theory-driven rather than experience-near. Responses that are conceptual or explanatory, or are expressed as fact, or that give the message that truth comes from the therapists’ professional knowledge are avoided in favor of phenomenologically refined exploration of the client’s experience. Experiential therapy thus attempts to eliminate any interpretations that are based on the therapist’s theory of how people are, or should be, or that attempt to reveal hidden ‘truths.’

The experiential approach rather places great emphasis on, and respect for, what the patient experiences, and pays special attention to what the patient experiences in the relationship with the therapist. Experiential therapy involves consistent listening from within the patient’s frame of reference. Hence sustained empathic inquiry is a central part of the practice. However, although this empathic emphasis is necessary for good psychotherapy, it is not necessarily sufficient for the best psychotherapy. The most effective psychotherapy also requires therapist practices of a technical nature, such as phenomenological focusing, experimentation, and behavioral observation (Gendlin 1996, Perls et al. 1951). Diagnostic understanding of the individual, and also understanding the social, cultural, and institutional forces affecting the individual, are also required.

Notwithstanding the fact that what the patient experiences is the indispensable essence of psychotherapy, and that it is imperative that this be the subject of respectful ongoing inquiry by therapist and patient, what the patient does not experience is also an indispensable and critical component of what happens in therapy. Important factors that are kept from the patient’s conscious experience that do not become figural in awareness also need to be the subject of phenomenological exploration. In experiential therapy there is a special emphasis on bringing into awareness the processes that regulate this process of awareness unawareness (Polster and Polster 1973, Yontef 1993). This work is codirected by therapist and patient and is not based on any alleged higher truth of the therapist. It is based on a joint empathic exploration that may include observation, experimentation, and dialogue.

4. Conclusion

In the experiential approach, an empathic focus on the patient’s actual experience is seen as indispensable, but the therapist is also seen as making contributions in addition to sustained empathic inquiry. Therapists complement the empathic inquiry with a variety of therapeutic interventions that can help the patient learn how efficiently to focus awareness and distinguish actual phenomenological experience, that can highlight the processes essential to the patient’s characterological organization by sophisticated and competent understanding that includes understanding theories of healthy functioning and psychopathology. Experiential therapy has been demonstrated to be effective in treating depression, anxiety, childhood maltreatment, and marital distress in addition to some personality disorders and a variety of other problems in living (Greenberg et al. 1994, 1998).

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