Something clients say to me fairly often, usually somewhere in the first month, is a version of this: I have been to therapy before, but it was never like this.
I have spent several articles now telling you that talking about your problems will only take you so far, and that lasting change comes through experience in the body. That raises a fair question. What does that actually look like when you are sitting in the chair?
Here is how a session goes.
We Start With Right Now
I open by asking what is bringing you in at this time. Not what happened to you as a child. What is going on in your life right now that made you pick up the phone this month instead of last year or next year.
Then I ask for a specific example. If you tell me you shut down in your marriage, I want an actual instance. What was said. What day it was. Where you were standing. General descriptions keep us at arm’s length from the material, and I need to get close to it.
I Am Watching More Than I Am Listening
While you talk, I am tracking a lot of things you may not realize I am tracking.
Your tone of voice and where it shifts. Whether you hold eye contact or break it, and exactly when you break it. The color of your face, since people flush or go pale at moments that mean something. How you are moving, or how suddenly you stopped moving. Any flicker of emotion that comes up and gets pushed back down.
This is called microtracking, and it comes out of AEDP, which stands for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy. Moreover, your body tells me things well before your words get there. Very often my clients have no idea their eyes filled for half a second while they were describing something they insisted was fine.
I Interrupt You
When emotion starts to come up, I stop you.
This surprises people. You are in the middle of telling a story, building toward your point, and I cut in and ask what is happening for you right now. What are you experiencing in your body this second.
I do this because the story is not the medicine. The emotion moving through you while you tell the story is the medicine, and if I let you finish your point, that emotion will pass and we will both have missed it. My job is to catch it while it is live.
We Stay With It Until It Finishes
Once we have the feeling, we stay with it, and I work to help it deepen and expand until it runs its course.
Most people have gone their whole lives without doing this. You have felt plenty of emotion, but almost always in a partial way. It comes up, it gets uncomfortable, you distract yourself or explain it or change the subject, and it goes back underground unfinished. Then it surfaces again next month in the same fight with the same person.
Emotion that is felt all the way through actually completes. It moves, it peaks, and it resolves, and something is different afterward. That is the part almost nobody has experienced, and it is the reason clients tell me this was different from their last therapy.
Then We Talk About What Just Happened
After the wave passes, we do something AEDP calls metaprocessing, which is a technical word for a simple activity. We look together at what you just went through.
How does it feel to have done that. What is different in your body now. And we do the same thing with what happened between us, because I ask what it was like to have me there with you while you went through it.
This step gets skipped in a lot of therapy and it should not be. Processing the experience of change is part of what makes the change hold.
Connecting It To Your Life
Somewhere in this, I start linking what you came in for to how you handle emotion and closeness.
The anxiety you described, the distance in your marriage, the way you go flat at work when someone criticizes you. These are usually connected to the defenses you built to keep certain feelings and certain kinds of closeness at a safe distance. Those defenses made sense when you built them. They are also producing most of what you listed on your intake form.
When a client sees that link for themselves, after having just felt something all the way through, it means considerably more than me explaining it to them in the first session.
If You Want To Read More
Three books will give you a fuller picture. The first two were written for a general reader, and the third is a professional text that a motivated reader can still get a lot out of.
It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel came out in 2018. Hendel is a certified AEDP therapist, and she built the book around a tool she calls the Change Triangle, which shows how core emotions get blocked by anxiety, shame, and guilt, and how what looks like depression is often something else underneath. It is full of real patient stories and exercises you can do on your own.
Living Like You Mean It by Ronald Frederick, published in 2009, is about the fear of feeling and what it costs you. Frederick is senior faculty at the AEDP Institute. If you have ever caught yourself changing the subject on your own emotions, this one will be uncomfortably familiar.
Restoring Resilience by Eileen Russell, from 2015, is written for therapists, and I would still hand it to a client who wants the deeper version. Russell writes about the capacity for healing that people already carry, and how a therapist works with that strength instead of only working with what is broken.
In addition, I want to be honest about what an article can do. I can describe the steps, and you now have a reasonable idea of what a session involves. Going through it yourself is where the change happens. If any of this sounds like what you have been looking for, that level of healing is available to you, and now you have a sense of how it happens.
