Hi I'm Dr. Tori Olds. Today I would like to talk with you about experiential ways
of working in therapy. So by experiential I mean incorporating
some element of mindfulness and I thought I would use that word because it
is one that's very familiar or common in our culture right now but here I'm using
it less to describe a discrete practice like a meditation practice and more
simply as a type of stance or awareness or focus in this case inwardly. So when
the mind can focus - instead of paying attention or focusing on the
outside world can pick as its point of focus itself so the mind coming in
contact with the mind it is really powerful because it's really hard to
shift something that we're not aware of but I will say this mind coming in
contact with the mind it's different than thinking about ourself or analyzing
ourself and a lot of people get confused about that and they think the way to
understand themselves better or to grow is to think a lot or analyze themselves
but that would be akin to trying to understand another person by thinking
about them. You may get somewhere with that but probably you won't understand
them as much through thinking about them as you would through simply listening to
them. So in this way of working we're trying to shift from thinking about
ourselves to listening to ourselves and by listening I mean really paying
attention to our unfolding process like what is happening in our mind, our
thoughts, our feelings, emotions. What is happening for instance maybe as I'm
talking about this or as you said that - Wow I noticed I just went blank or I had
this thought and I just got really anxious but instead of just trying to
regulate that anxiety, sort of listening to it in a way. In other words, tuning in
to see what we know about it or can sense about perhaps what I'm anxious about like:
"oh when I slow down with that I think that was worried you were judging me
what I just said right there" and that sort of moment by moment just noticing
what's actually coming up into our awareness and experience
sheds a light on how we process each moment and we can really
peek into how our mind works and that kind of tracking is much more productive
than simply analyzing our past or thinking about it or storytelling in
terms of the events of our week. So why does that take the help of therapy?
Well because it's hard to be mindful. Not only did most of us not have parents
that did mindfulness practice with us, helped us be really attuned to ourselves,
taught us to be self aware. Most of us didn't have parents that really trained
us in that way but additionally most of us had parents that specifically trained
us not to pay attention to ourselves not to be aware of our emotions or truth
or our pride or sexuality or needs. Why because any of those things that came
from inside us threatened or messed with our parent in some way so without really
realizing it they gave us the message just keep that inside and when we notice
that our parent seems to not like or be scared by or freaked out by or just
simply not valuing and ignoring some part of our own expression or mind we
get conditioned to ignore that or control it or suppress it as well. So let
me say that one more time. I believe that most of us have been conditioned to
ignore ourselves which makes learning mindfulness or self-awareness really
difficult. Maybe a more blunt way to say it would be our parents were freaked out
by us so we learned to be freaked out by us and that's really a problem for us to
be in some sense scared of our self, our own mind, our emotions, an impulse, a memory - anything from inside.
because there's really only two ways that fear can manifest and one is that
suddenly everything from inside seems really overwhelming. When you're scared
of something it's easy to become frozen in the face of it. So that as an
emotion comes up, let's say, if you find it frightening
or shameful or you fear that rejection around it or that it will be
overwhelming it's almost like we can become frozen and then it's like
flooding our system and seems more overwhelming than it would need to seem.
Or on the other hand, we can go to the other extreme and become hyper
regulating and controlling of the thing that we don't think is good so that
looks like getting busy, getting distracted, not knowing what we feel - a
sort of similar version of that but has its own flavor is just shutting down
entirely and becoming depressed and those
symptoms are just part and parcel of not having an empowered stance toward our
own mind where we can approach it with skill and presence and awareness because
again it's hard to shift something or work with something when you can't be
aware of it when you can't track what's going on inside of it and there
is just no way to practice that without our therapist asking us what are we
noticing feeling, or impulses, or thoughts, or our experience that's coming up in
the moment because that's where our mind is happening. That's where we can track
it and understand it it's like picking up something that you're wanting to
shift and actually taking it into your hands and looking at it rather
than just trying to work with it in a state that's blind so in case that seems
really abstract I'll just give a kind of simple short example of what this might
look like. So let's say somebody is coming in with depression and they are
noticing in session as they're talking that a particularly strong sense
of depression or depressed mood kind of came over them. So if they had that
awareness they might notice that moment one and they could slow it down and
think okay wow what were we talking about right when that shift occurred?
Okay we were talking about my brother and if I sense in and slow that down
there's this flash of anger that comes so then some curiosity might come right
there like I wonder if there's a link there between my anger and the
depression coming and when I put some mindfulness on it when I notice it yeah
I can sense there's something like my anxiety goes up there's something that
feels really dangerous about feeling angry toward my brother and now maybe
some more awareness can come if they simply notice what else
comes to mind or associations or inner reactions to begin to piece together an
understanding of where their depression is sort of manifesting from as a way of
kind of defending against damaging their relationship with their brother who
maybe can't handle their anger so every time they have a spike of anger you know
they shut it down and shut themself down by getting depressed
instead. That would be really hard to understand the workings of that without
tracking it in the moment and really listening inside to what the mind
has to say about it and what's cool about experiential ways of working is
not only is that mindful tracking of experience what allows the insight to
come up and the understanding of the mind and where it needs some help to
shift but also it's through having a new experience that that shift can happen. In
other words, the therapist might say okay so if it's the fear of the anger or
the discomfort around the anger and the habit to go to depression instead that's
the issue maybe we can work to practice allowing your system to have a bit of
anger in a way again that feels empowering, grounded and safe and yet
there's still awareness and space so that the anger can simply be felt and
not suppressed through depression and if that shift can happen then the
unconscious need for the depression lifts and the depression itself can
resolve. So hopefully I've piqued your curiosity about experiential ways of
working in therapy. There's so many different type of modalities it would be
hard to name them all I'll just throw a few acronyms at you in case you want to
do a little bit more research you can look these up. I tend to integrate AEDP
that's one of the main ones I use: AEDP. I bring in with it IFS, Coherence Therapy,
Somatic Experiencing. With couples I tend to draw on PACT, a PACT approach and I
really enjoy not only integrating these modalities in my own work but training
therapists in terms of how to integrate experiential ways of working in their
own work because for me when we can come into contact with
ourselves that's when we're actually able to most deeply develop ourselves. Thank
you. Thanks for watching, if you're a
therapist and would like to learn more while getting CEUs visit toriolds.com
or if you just like to learn more about our psychotherapy practice feel free to
visit our website deepeddypsychotherapy.com Thanks!