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Conscious reasoning isn't always enough to change ingrained emotional beliefs and patterns.

Experiential therapies provide opportunities that challenge what your mind and body have come to expect.

Disconfirming emotional experiences update the nervous system, allowing for new feelings to take root.

If you're an over thinker or have previously been to therapy, you may understand your patterns and even know why you feel the way you do. However, this insight alone may not be enough to fully change how you feel about your situation.

This can be such a frustrating experience. So why does this happen?

You can intellectually understand your fears, beliefs, or lived experiences come from the past or are irrational, yet your nervous system continues to respond as if the threat is happening in the present. These reactions are due to implicit emotional memories, or emotional learnings that your body stores when the experience is overwhelming or unable to be processed fully.

How Bottom-Up Therapies Work With Implicit Memories

Experiential approaches, such as Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), Coherence Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Somatic Experiencing (SE), all have one thing in common: They move beyond intellectual insight to work directly with emotional experience.

Instead of staying in perpetual analysis, therapists trained in these modalities help clients notice and explore the physical........

© Psychology Today