Gestalt, Psychodrama, EMDR
Experiential Therapies in Colorado.
Some things you cannot talk your way into understanding. Experiential therapy works through activity, movement, and role, so that insight turns into something you have actually practiced.
What experiential therapy is.
The clinicians at The Redpoint Center use experiential therapies to help you process thoughts, feelings, and past experiences in a different way. Instead of only describing what happened, you do something with it: an exercise, a role, a movement, a conversation with a chair nobody is sitting in. A lot of people have trouble connecting what they feel with how they act and with what they have actually lived through, and experiential therapy bridges that gap by giving you a way to explore abstract things through physical activity.
In session you use these tools to revisit and work through past or recent events in a safe, controlled setting, which brings unconscious thoughts, experiences, and emotions into focus. The work asks you to reflect on a past event while staying aware of your current thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, and that kind of self-reflection tends to surface the biases and motivations that have been shaping your behavior without your knowing it. Cleveland Clinic describes the closely related gestalt approach as one that helps you increase your awareness of the present moment, which is the thread running through all of this work.
Knowing a skill and being able to use it are two different things. That is why our clients take part in experiential groups: they move you out of education and into application. Common examples in our setting include equine therapy, adventure based therapy, and role-play exercises drawn from psychodrama. It is one part of how we work, running alongside talk therapies like CBT and DBT rather than replacing them.
- Insight practiced, not only discussed
- Mind and body treated as one system
- Run in both group and individual sessions
- Used inside our outpatient programs
The experiential work we use.
These four come up most often at The Redpoint Center. They are tools inside a treatment plan, chosen with your therapist, not a menu you pick from on arrival.
Gestalt therapy
Working in the present on something unfinished from the past. You describe what your body and mind are doing in response to a memory as it comes up, rather than reporting on it afterward.
Psychodrama
Structured group work in which past events and scenarios are acted out rather than recounted, so that the unconscious processes behind a behavior become something you can look at.
Somatic experiencing
Body-first trauma work that locates where a traumatic event is being held physically and reprocesses it there, on the premise that the body kept a record the narrative did not.
In Session
Gestalt therapy, and the chair nobody is sitting in.
Gestalt therapy helps you resolve old business using experiential methods. You are encouraged to describe the bodily sensations and thoughts that arrive in response to a specific activity or memory, in the moment they arrive rather than from a safe analytical distance. Cleveland Clinic places gestalt inside humanistic therapy and describes it as focused on helping you increase your awareness of the present moment. Three methods come up most often.
The empty chair. You imagine someone is sitting in the chair opposite you, and you talk through the ideas, feelings, or scenarios you have with them. Cleveland Clinic describes it as imagining someone you want to talk to, maybe a family member, a boss, someone you are in a conflict with or even someone who has passed away.
Exaggeration. At your therapist's direction you make a facial expression or a movement larger than it would naturally be. Overstating it is what makes the mind-body connection visible, because you feel the emotion move when the gesture does.
The here and now. This one builds interpersonal mindfulness. You focus on the sensations, thoughts, and feelings you are having while you interact with your therapist or with the people in your group, as they happen.
The goal underneath all three is the same. Gestalt work is meant to make you more aware of what is happening inside you and in the environment around you, so that you can value yourself and accept your own experiences rather than spend the day arguing with them.
What psychodrama looks like in session.
Psychodrama uses exercises and activities to examine the unconscious processes behind a behavior or a thought pattern, and it is done as group work. Acting a past event out rather than recounting it lets you look at it from a position you have never had, and understanding why you react the way you do is what makes a pattern rewritable. These are the techniques you are most likely to meet.
Role reversal
You play someone else, which lets you see a specific situation from a point of view that is not yours. Many variations of this exist, and it is used most often to work through an interpersonal conflict.
Roleplay
Playing another person, or a different version of yourself, can make it markedly easier to say a thing out loud, and what you say when the pressure is off is usually worth knowing.
The double
You speak while another person stands or sits beside you and voices the thoughts underneath what you are saying. Doubling sharpens communication and self-awareness at the same time.
The mirror
A therapist or a peer mimics your behavior back to you, so that you can see how the people around you are actually perceiving it.
Surplus reality
You use physical objects to represent subjective ideas. Creative symbolism brings an emotion, a memory, or a thought into the real world, where you can interact with it directly.
Scene setting and enactment
Props like chairs, tables, and books are arranged to set a scene, and a specific scenario is played out in it to reach personal insight or closure.
Trauma and Memory
Where the body keeps what the mind could not file.
Traumatic experiences are often stored in the brain and the body differently from ordinary memories. Writing in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, J. Douglas Bremner concluded that traumatic stress has a broad range of effects on brain function and structure, as well as on neuropsychological components of memory. That is the clinical reason a careful verbal account of a trauma can change so little about how it actually feels to carry.
Somatic experiencing starts from that premise. It works to identify where the trauma is being held in the body and to reprocess those events, so that over time they stop firing in day-to-day life and in close relationships. Clinicians on our team are trained in it, and others bring somatic counseling, somatic psychology, and dance and movement therapy into their practice.
EMDR belongs to the same family. It is a psychotherapy for reprocessing memories that were stored improperly at the time they were made, and the American Psychological Association's PTSD guideline covers eye movement desensitization and reprocessing as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Our therapists use it to help clients reduce anxiety and the symptoms that follow trauma. There is a great deal more on how EMDR actually works on its own page.
This work runs through our treatment for alcohol, stimulant, meth, and marijuana use, and for the co-occurring mental health conditions that so often sit underneath them.
When this work fits, and when something else fits first.
Experiential therapy suits a lot of people and it is not the right first move for everyone. Here is how we think about the fit.
Talking about it has stopped moving anything
If you can narrate what happened with complete accuracy and nothing shifts, doing something with it tends to get further than describing it one more time.
You notice it in your body before you notice it
A tight chest, a locked jaw, a stomach that drops before you have worked out why. Experiential work treats that as the material rather than as background noise.
You are willing to feel briefly ridiculous
Standing up, taking a role, or speaking to an empty chair is strange at the start. The strangeness usually fades faster than people expect, and nothing here is compulsory.
You are in crisis right now
Safety comes before any course of therapy. Call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, then let us help you find the right level of care.
Levels of Care
Where this work happens.
Experiential therapy is part of the clinical curriculum inside our programs rather than something you enroll in on its own. These are the levels of care it runs in, most structured first.
Questions about experiential therapy.
What is experiential therapy?
What experiential therapies does The Redpoint Center use?
What does experiential therapy treat?
What is the empty chair technique?
Is psychodrama backed by research?
Do I have to act something out in front of a group?
How is this different from CBT, DBT, and ACT?
Tell us what you have already tried.
If talking it through has taken you as far as it goes, that is useful information, not a failure. Tell us where you are and we will help you work out what comes next.