Experiential Family Therapy - Research Paper Example

Families should also realize that if a family member is affected by any atrocity, this does not only affect the individual, but rather the whole family institution. For this reason, family therapists need to put all members of a family into account when administering their services. Keywords: Experiential Therapy, Therapist, Family, Roles, Role Playing Introduction As the name suggests, experiential therapy involves actions, movements, and activities. This therapy is actually a category involving a couple of therapies; it does not involve one specific type of therapy.

Examples of therapies that fall under experiential therapy include recreational therapy, expressive arts therapy, and music therapy among others. The therapists who use this approach have the view that experiences form the core of this process. Experiential therapy in general has been a very important component of comprehensive treatment for persons struggling with a variety of problems. These include problems of trauma, hardships such as depression, after issues like divorce, substance abuse, addiction, eating disorders among other problems.

These therapies have been used to treat the young and old from all walks of life (Hurst, 2011) What does the experimental therapy mean? According to Keitner, Heru and Glick, “experiential therapy involves a search for meaning through mutually shared experience on the part of the therapist and family” (2009, p. 158). There are two therapists that were best known in using this model; they were Carl Whitaker and Virginia Satir (Keitner, Heru & Glick, 2009). Their main aim was to increase the capacity of family members’ to experience and understand their lives more thoroughly by sharing their present struggles with the therapist.

In his views on experiential therapy, Whitaker called his process the symbolic experiential therapy, where he had the view that the therapy was aimed at strengthening the unconscious symbolic process that will help the maturation of the process. Whitaker also argued that the growth in families usually occurred with the successive developmental tasks. Therapy now comes in to speed up this growth and not to impose an already determined structure. In other words, this therapy starts from the experience.

This shows that experience is the foundation of the therapy. Satir’s model deals much more on the here and now. The two therapies have been used as a clear indication there are many ways of solving problems (Keitner, Heru & Glick, 2009). Experiential Family Therapy This therapy is an outgrowth of the phenomenological techniques like the gestalt therapy among others. The experiential family therapists focus on current rather than uncovering the past, or what they call the here and now emotionality.

They emphasize on emotional engagement between partners in identifying the feelings that define the quality of their relationship. Rather than endorsing one technique as earlier seen, experiential therapy applies different techniques in dealing with an individual client or family, in a setup where therapists are personally involved in the process. Therefore, for the effectiveness of this therapy, a therapist should be personally involved and there should be mutual sharing of information between him or her and the client or family