Experiential Therapy
Beyond Talk Therapy
You've probably experienced therapy as a conversation: sitting across from someone, talking about what happened, receiving insights or suggestions, and then going back to your life. Maybe it helped some, but the same patterns kept showing up.
That's because many of the patterns that bring people to therapy don't live in the thinking brain. They live in the body, in the nervous system, in emotional circuits that were wired long before you had words for any of it. Talking about them isn't always enough to change them.
Experiential therapy works differently.
What Is Experiential Therapy?
Experiential therapy goes beyond traditional talk therapy by working directly with your emotions, body sensations, and nervous system responses, not just your thoughts. Instead of only analyzing your patterns from the outside, we enter into them together in real time, so that you're not just talking about what you feel, but speaking from within the feeling itself as it comes alive in the room.
I draw from several well-researched experiential modalities, including AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), IFS (Internal Family Systems), EFT (Emotion-Focused Therapy), and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). I integrate insights from these models to tailor each session to what you uniquely need.
In a session with me, you might notice a tightness in your chest as you describe a difficult interaction, and rather than move past it, we slow down. We stay with it. We let your body tell the story that words alone can't capture. Through this process, emotions that have been suppressed, avoided, or frozen can finally be felt, processed, and transformed.
Neurobiologically, this matters: talking about an emotion engages your prefrontal cortex — the analytical mind. But the patterns that keep you stuck often live deeper, in subcortical emotional circuits and your nervous system. To actually shift them, we need to be in the experience, not just reflecting on it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In a session, you might:
- Notice what’s happening in your body, and learn to stay with it. Emotions always show up in our body before we are conscious of them.
- Step into an imagined inner scene, where something can finally be enacted and spoken： perhaps with a part of yourself, or with someone who has mattered deeply. In that safe space, the words never said, the tears never cried, the longings never met, can finally be lived through — and this time, tenderly received.
- Discover that what you thought was “just anxiety” is actually grief, or anger, or a longing you were never allowed to have
- Experience what it’s like to be truly seen and met in a vulnerable moment, which, for many people, is a corrective experience in itself
Together, we’ll gradually build your capacity to feel, to tolerate discomfort, and to stay present with yourself. All of this happens within a relationship where you don’t have to perform, fix, or manage anyone else’s feelings.
Who This Is For
This approach may be especially resonant if you:
Have tried therapy before and felt like it stayed "in your head": helpful conversations that didn't translate into real change
Tend to intellectualize, rationalize, or "figure out" your emotions rather than feel them
Grew up in an environment where emotions were dismissed, punished, or simply not modeled
Carry unprocessed grief, shame, or relational trauma
Want therapy that goes beyond symptom management, but toward genuine shifts in how you experience yourself, your emotions, and your relationships
If you're looking for therapy that does more than talk, I'd love to hear from you.