Maybe you’ve been in talk therapy for years and still feel stuck? Or you’ve been given tons of “coping tools” and they aren’t helping. Overall, you’re ready to go deeper and experience real change. Experiential Therapy in Ventura or online throughout California can help.
Rather than talking about your problems, Experiential Therapy guides you in talking from your problems or feeling. Importantly, Experiential Therapy uses somatic and emotion based techniques to support you in going deeper. Basic talk therapy often isn’t enough. Experiential Therapy in Ventura can help you uncover the deeper emotional truths driving anxiety, depression, relationship struggles, self-criticism, trauma triggers, and other recurring patterns. We see clients for in-person therapy in Ventura and online all over California.
Anxiety
Depression
Childhood Trauma
Relationship Difficulties
Chronic Pain & Illness
Low Self-Esteem
Emotional Overwhelm
Procrastination
Shame
Fear of speaking up
The brain changes through experience. When you tune into your body or into your emotions, you are lighting up those neural networks in your brain. Subsequently, new emotional experiences can help update old patterns that no longer serve you. The brain is now able to update beliefs, expectations, and responses that may have been formed years ago. This is one reason why insight alone is often not enough. Lasting change typically happens when it is felt and experienced, not just understood intellectually.
Insight is not enough for brain change.
Somatic Experiencing
Internal Family Systems
STAIR
AEDP
Focusing
Emotional Awareness & Expression Therapy
Many people believe that to tap into the unconscious mind, you need to do hypnosis our use psychedelics therapies. Certainly, this is untrue. The unconscious mind is readily available using Experiential Therapies.
Overall, using the body and talking from feelings, rather than about them, helps connect with the right and subcortical parts of the brain that store emotional learning, implicit memories, and deeply held beliefs. This can allow underlying patterns to come into awareness and create opportunities for meaningful and lasting change.
Our experiential therapists use many techniques such as guided imagery, role playing, movement, embodiment, and more. To begin, you and the therapist will pick an issue to focus on, what you want to shift or change. Then the therapist might invite you to close your eyes and go inside imagining a scene or person related to the issue. Importantly, imagined experiences can have a powerful impact because the brain processes them in ways that are surprisingly similar to real-life events.
You might be wondering what are the benefits of experiential therapy? Often, trying to think yourself out of something doesn’t work. If it worked, you wouldn’t be seeking therapy! Many people already understand why they struggle, yet they continue to feel stuck in the same patterns. Experiential therapy goes beyond insight by helping you access the emotional and bodily experiences that drive those patterns. When change happens at this deeper level, it can feel more lasting, natural, and transformative. Importantly, we are informed by memory reconsolidation, the science of transformational change. Experiential therapy helps to achieve this.
Maybe you are coming to therapy because you lost your job in Downtown Los Angeles and you can’t stop beating yourself up.
The therapist might say- “as you’re telling me about losing your job, what do you notice happening in your body? Oh, there’s a heaviness in your shoulders, if you place your awareness on your shoulders, what might they say? What are the words of the heaviness? How about the part of you that beats you up? Can you ask that part – would anything bad happen if you stop beating me up?”
Yes. Experiential therapy can help people process unresolved emotional experiences related to childhood trauma, attachment wounds, and difficult life events that may still be affecting them today. Often, childhood trauma is not a single memory. Childhood trauma forms certain belief systems, mental models, and schemas about how we see the world today. Unfortunity, the brain does not know time, so it’s still running on old knowings. Experiential Therapy helps to update the brain and these old childhood belief systems.
Traditional talk therapy often focuses on discussing thoughts, behaviors, and life events. Experiential therapy helps clients connect with emotions, body sensations, and implicit memories to promote deeper change.
Many experiential therapies, including emotion-focused, somatic, and experiential approaches, are supported by research for conditions such as trauma, depression, anxiety, and relationship difficulties.
Reach out to experience Experiential Therapy in Ventura. We offer therapy in-person and online all over California. Our office is close to Ojai, Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Camarillo, and Thousand Oaks. We also serve clients in Los Angeles County. Contact us to connect with a therapist and learn about becoming a new client.
