Common Types of Experiential Therapy
There are many different types of engaging activities that people can take part in our experiential healing center serving Memphis residents. Some of these engaging activities may require people to engage with animals. Other types of experiential healing may require people to tap into their creative sides.
Regardless of the type of therapy, the purpose is the same. To help shift the perspectives of patients, help patients gain a better sense of self, and open patients up emotionally.
Some common activities that therapists make people take part in at the experiential healing center include:
- Art therapy
- Music therapy
- Equine-assisted therapy
- Canine therapy
- Rock climbing
- Hiking and other outdoor activities and games
- Dance
- Creating poetry
- Role-playing, otherwise known as Gestalt therapy
When individuals take part in different types of therapy, they may have to call on different experiential healing techniques. However, some standard methods at our experiential healing center directly align with certain types of therapy.
Effective Techniques in Experiential Therapy
Experiential therapy techniques are the psychological methods that therapists often use on patients during therapy. Like with all things, some techniques are more common than others.
Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy for Emotional Growth
Equine-assisted psychotherapy is an experiential healing technique that directly aligns with the equine-assisted type of therapy. For those that don’t know what equine-assisted therapy is, it’s using horses to help create engaging and therapeutic activities.
What may surprise many people is that more often than not, people who take part in equine-assisted psychotherapy don’t ride horses. Instead, they feed, groom, and walk the horses around
Forcing individuals to take care of horses causes them to tap into their emotional and mental states. This can then give therapists an insight into the emotional and mental states of patients.
Understanding EMDR Therapy for Trauma Recovery
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, otherwise known as EMDR, is a therapeutic practice that makes individuals think about past traumas while being guided visually with a pen or finger. EMDR therapy helps people manage the negative thoughts and emotions that arise within them when dealing with trauma. Due to EMDR therapy, many people can be triggered into thinking about past trauma without it consuming them or causing them to start abusing substances.
Adventure Therapy: Embrace the Outdoors for Healing
Adventure therapy uses outdoor activities to make patients live in the present and open themselves up emotionally. Common types of experiential healing that are also considered forms of adventure therapy include rock climbing, hiking, and other outdoor games. Adventure forms of therapy force patients to be responsible, communicate, make their own decisions, and problem solve. Oftentimes, adventure forms of therapy occur in group therapy formats.
Art Therapy: Unlocking Emotions Through Creativity
Creating art is one of the most popular experiential therapy techniques. This is because creating art can help individuals express the thoughts and emotions that are laying dormant in the minds. Creating art can also help individuals work through their negative thoughts and emotions in a productive manner.
Who Can Benefit from Experiential Therapy in Memphis?
Many individuals would benefit from receiving experiential therapy at the healing center. Individuals that struggle to step outside of themselves and connect with their emotions while in addiction treatment could benefit from experiential healing. Individuals at the healing center that also struggle to connect with their therapists and fellow addiction treatment patients could also benefit from receiving experiential therapy.
Who May Not Benefit from Experiential Therapy
Individuals that are not of an age or level of maturity to properly engage in certain forms of experiential healing would not benefit from them. For example, a young child may not be mature enough to handle practicing animal-assisted forms of therapy on their own yet. Therefore, such individuals would not benefit from this form of experiential therapy at the healing center.
Individuals that are genuinely psychotic also should not engage in experiential forms of therapy. This is because they would not be able to get the emotional and mental benefits from it. Also, being psychotic while engaging in experiential therapy activities that require problem-solving and trust is dangerous.
Individuals with severe cognitive or physical limitations should also not engage in experiential therapy activities. This is because doing so could be very dangerous. This is especially true when it comes to experiential therapy activities that are very physical or require higher levels of problem-solving.
Individuals that genuinely have no desire to engage in certain forms of experiential therapy due to fear, extreme shyness, sensitivity to criticism, or something else should never be forced to do so. For example, a person that contains an intense fear of animals should not receive animal-assisted forms of experiential therapy. Instead, therapists could introduce such people to more creative forms of experiential healing such as art or music therapy.
Contact Grace Land Recovery for Experiential Therapy Today!
Here at Grace Land Recovery, we offer numerous different treatment modalities, one of which is experiential healing. Therefore, individuals that struggle to connect with others or their own emotions can take advantage of the different forms of experiential therapy that we offer.
Because Grace Land Recovery is a dual diagnosis treatment center, individuals that want extra assistance in the treatment of their co-occurring disorders can also take advantage of our experiential therapies. Individuals can even pair our experiential therapies with their other forms of addiction therapy to maximize the results of both.
To learn more about Grace Land Recovery and the other unique forms of addiction treatment and therapy programs as well as services that we offer, contact us today! Our phone lines are open 24/7. For those that would rather visit our facility in person, our treatment center is open Monday – Friday, 9 am – 5 pm
