Seeking Professional Help
At some point, you may want to work with a trained professional to help facilitate your emotional growth and healing. A therapist can help you increase your awareness and capacity to constructively experience your feelings, work through unresolved issues from the past, and overcome barriers that may be preventing you from being more emotionally present in your relationship. In addition, a couples therapist can help you and your partner get unstuck, develop healthy patterns of relating, and connect more deeply.
When seeking assistance for these matters, it’s important to find a therapist who works experientially, which means that they practice a model of therapy that focuses on one’s here and now emotional experience. As you know change happens through experience versus simply talking about it. Do some research, get referrals from trusted others who have had a positive experience in therapy, interview therapists over the phone, ask them about their approach, what kind of training they’ve completed, and how long they’ve been practicing. When you find a therapist who seems to fit the bill, have an initial consultation and see how it feels to you. It’s essential that you work with someone with whom you feel understood, connected, safe, and confident in their ability to help you. You should be able to get a good sense of whether they’re the right person to help you and if you’re making progress fairly readily.
There are a number of different therapeutic approaches that emphasize emotional experience as a means to heal and change. AEDP, the model I practice, is particularly effective at working through attachment-related issues and helping people develop new, healthier ways of relating. Below you’ll find a list of the experiential therapies I’m most familiar with and their respective websites, where you can learn more about them and search for a therapist in your area. In addition, you can find therapists through national and local professional association directories. Many states and provinces have more localized therapist directories that might be helpful in your search.
• Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) aedpinstitute.org
• Affect Phobia Therapy (APT): affectphobiatherapy.com
• Emotion(ally) Focused Therapy (EFT): iceeft.com and iseft.org
• Experiential Dynamic Therapy: iedta.com
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): iedta.com
• Internal Family Systems (IFS): selfleadership.org
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org
• Somatic Experiencing (SE): traumahealing.org