Let’s talk about experiential family therapy. When it comes to treating mental conditions, the only thing that comes to mind is the more common type of therapy called “talk” therapy. Talk therapy, also called psychotherapy, is extremely beneficial in treating different types of mental issues but sometimes more has to be done as a simple talk session will not cut it when it comes to fault lines originating from the family. Then what can work, we ask? Well, let’s talk about experiential therapy indeed.
What is Experiential Family Therapy?
As the name suggests, experimental therapy is a type of therapy or counseling technique that incorporates user activities to help individuals affected by mental issues look inward into their problematic behavior stemming from those issues and find a resolution for that problematic behavior.
The user activities and tools that are incorporated into this kind of therapy are used to help affected individuals reassess and “re-experience emotional situations from their past or from past/present relationships, ” as Greenberg et al would say (Greenberg et al, 1998)! It’s basically all about immersing yourself in an experience that helps you heal from issues in the past and present and issues stemming from your relationships in the past and present.
Read More: The Benefits of Family Therapy: Strengthening Bonds and Improving Well-being
The essential part of this type of therapy is recreating experiences that are authentic in every way possible to uncover the hidden ideas, beliefs, and problems from the subconscious mind. It’s not just one type of intervention but more of a combination of different interventional techniques (Greenberg et al, 1989).
But all of this was all about experiential therapy, so, how does it relate to family? Well, it could be the case that experiential counseling helps treat the fault lines in an affected individual’s psyche that stem from their past and present relationships. Much of its structure belongs to the Symbolic Experiential Family Therapy that was created by Carl Whitaker for the Handbook of Family Therapy in 1981 and was a popular medium for a while that focused on the subconscious mind for treating problems in the family with multidisciplinary techniques such as creative expression and role-play (Martin, 2011). To understand this, we need to understand what are the different types of experiential therapy techniques (Gupta, 2024) that are there:
Music Therapy
It uses music and musical instruments to fend off the negative thought processes associated with problematic behavior.
Art Therapy
This includes activities such as painting and sculpting as these types of experiential therapy techniques use creative art processes and tools to help a patient work through their mental issues via becoming aware of their problems through their art.
Animal-Assisted Therapy
This form of experiential counseling uses animals, specifically domesticated ones such as dogs and horses for therapeutic outcomes as animals have been known to provide therapeutic benefits for affected individuals, making it a good option for experiential family therapy but there is something much better.
Outdoor Therapy
Outdoor counseling tends to include adventure therapy and wilderness. In fact, outdoor therapy combines them by incorporating wilderness excursions, adventure activities, and therapy sessions in one complete package.
Drama Therapy
Also known as Psychodrama, this is the most common form of experiential therapy and essentially most suitable as an experiential family therapy. Why do you ask? Psychodrama has the capability of helping patients reenact or recreate the conflict-inducing situations that led to negative or suppressed emotions associated with that situation previously.
More About Psychodrama
Psychodrama is an approach that is one of the most suitable experiential family therapy techniques. An experiential family therapy provides its participants with the ability to show what happened in the situation that led to distress for them in a play-like scenario, even if it happened years ago to actively pinpoint the fault line then and there. It also gives the participants, usually part of a family, the opportunity to reenact their roles in a safe space.
Read More: Exploring Dysfunctional Family Therapy: Comprehending, Recovering, and Fortifying Resilience
The main benefit of an experiential family therapy using psychodrama is that it allows to create a safe space between fantasy and reality where the participants are encouraged to apply different ways of responding to the re-enacted situation rather than what they actually did in the real one. The more it is done, the more the participants become capable of scouring through different types of responses to find the most helpful and adaptive one.
The safe space for this kind of experiential family therapy can be marked with something like a “rug” and in that safe space, participants can ensure where boundaries will be made between their reenactment and the actual situation, helping resolve issues in a more productive way while providing them with in-depth emotional processing and decrease avoidance behavior in the process, especially the fault lines are with different members of the family. This can also help lead to acceptance, forgiveness, and love over the course of time.
What Can Experiential Family Therapy Help With?
Different mental clogs that stem from family and relationships (Gupta, 2024) can be pushed into oblivion with the help of experiential family therapy:
- Relationship and family conflicts
- Anger management and irritability treatment
- Anxiety and stress
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Behavior disorders such as Antisocial Personality Disorder
- Compulsive behaviors stemming from something like OCD
- Clinical depression
- Grief and bereavement
- Mood disorders such as bipolar disorder
- Certain Phobias
- Eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa
- Substance abuse and alcohol dependence
- Traumatic Events
What Sets It Apart?
As we have mentioned before, therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy have their benefits but there are some features (Elliot et al., 2013) that make them more suitable for many mental conditions than others:
The Bottom-Up Approach
An experiential family therapy tries to focus on overall behavior rather than just focusing on the “facts” based around the symptoms of a mental issue. It focuses on the mind (cognition), body (somatic), and emotions of the participants involved. This is how it makes it a bottom-up approach as responses in the shape of physical sensations, raw data of the body and the emotional response themselves are thoroughly assessed.
Closing the Gap
Therapists of the Experiential Family Therapy rely on it to close the gap between what is thought rationally and what is deep inside the mind. An example would be how someone would think it is necessary to mark boundaries when thinking rationally but they are unable to do so due to the fact they are not aware of how their emotional responses to, for example, to a particular person is not letting them do that.
Read More: Narrative Therapy for Family Counseling and Trauma
Understanding of the Neurobiology
Experiential family therapists also use neurobiology to understand and bring about the biological changes that help find resolutions related to fault lines in relationships. What they do is that they try to understand how automatic emotional and physical responses work and then they tinker to find out and rewire these automatic responses.
Summing Up!
This was all from our side about experiential family therapy but you can try it if it works well and is suitable to find resolutions for the problems in your family. If that doesn’t work out, you can always go to family therapy, couple therapy, or marriage therapy with Solid Foundation Psychiatry. You can also come to use it for treating problems such as insomnia with other treatments such as psychiatric medication management and telehealth psychiatry. We are looking forward to meeting you and your loved ones in person.