The Therapeutic Experiences That Have Helped Me the Most as the Client
And the Biggest Takeaway for the Future of Mental Health in a World of AI
Quick note: I’m travelling so for now my posts are a little sparser. I’ll be back in July and look forward to posting more often.
I love therapy. I love growing and healing and developing my psyche and unlocking my spirit and parts of myself that make me more in tune with my being, capable of connecting with and uplifting others, and harmonious with the universe.
I call this lifelong pursuit of psychological and spiritual growth the hero’s journey. This journey involves going to the deepest places within ourselves and courageously facing what we discover there, healing from the most painful experiences, and emerging as a kinder, happier, and freer person. I feel akin to and seek out others who are also on the hero’s journey. It is a tremendous privilege to be on such an odyssey.
I often joke that the thing I’m best at in life is being a therapy client. Between my professional experience as a therapist and my insatiable curiosity about therapeutic experiences, I have certainly gotten really good at it. It’s sort of like learning languages; the more you know, the easier the next one is to learn. What I know from my experience with meditation helps me get more out of AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), and what I get out of AEDP in turn helps me make sense of my experiences with Internal Family Systems (IFS), etc.
I seek out a wide variety of therapeutic experiences. If I hear it’s effective, I yearn to try it. I want to know if it works, and if it does, what its access point to the psyche is, how it effects change, and how it is similar to or different from others I’ve tried. You could call me a connoisseur of therapeutic experiences.
And so, as I consider how AI will change the field of mental health, I think it’s important to come back to these roots and record what has worked for me in therapy and mental health treatment in a world before powerful AI. What do I care to preserve, protect, or amplify as AI tools become more potent and shape the field?
I should note that I am defining therapeutic experience pretty broadly here. I like how the Oxford English Dictionary defines "psyche" as the human soul, mind, or spirit. Here, I am referring to anything that moved my soul, mind, or spirit forward and helped me operate more effectively in the present moment. I thought through my entire mental health journey (I’m middle-aged, so we’re talking more than a couple of decades of experience here), and came up with this list of everything along the way that truly made a difference.
Psychiatrist Noticing Seasonal Component to My Mood: When I was a young adult, my psychiatrist noticed a seasonal pattern to my symptoms, and to this day I know that both natural light and its absence have a big effect on my mood, making morning light an important part of my self-care routine.1
Basic Psychotherapy by an Eclectic Therapist: Taught me how to relate to my emotional processes in a different and more effective way, delighted in me (an undervalued intervention), challenged me by helping me reframe my thoughts, shifting my locus of control from outside of me to inside of me, and changing my goal from avoiding triggering other people’s emotions to learning how to regulate my own. She also helped me tolerate the intimacy of my relationship with my now-husband, which then became a further source of deep support and growth.2
Learning to Meditate: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) strengthened my mind-body connection through body scans and then taught me to witness my thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they occurred and, critically, without altering or judging them. For the first time, I could discern whether an anxious feeling triggered an anxious thought or vice versa, and I could watch my thoughts go by without them dominating the rest of my experience.
Silent Meditation Retreat: Next, I took those skills to an 8-day silent Loving Kindness meditation retreat at Spirit Rock. Several days into the silence, someone close to me, with whom I had argued about boundaries, called and interrupted my silence to ask me about something I considered frivolous. I was furious about the intrusion but because I was on the silent retreat, all of my usual coping mechanisms were unavailable. I couldn’t talk to the person who called about my anger, nor could I discuss it with anyone else. I couldn’t bury myself in work to distract from it or drink a glass of wine to calm down. All I could do was sit with my anger, watch it rise and fall, and slowly fade away. It turned out to be one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
Self-Disclosure by a Therapist: There have been a couple of times in which a therapist’s well-timed self-disclosure validated my experience and made me feel profoundly understood.
Couple’s AEDP Therapy: With the guidance of the therapist and the tender support of all three of us together, my husband and I were able to process our emotions in a way that allowed us to let go of some of the defenses blocking our intimacy.
Learning Integrative Restoration Yoga Nidra: This was one of the most forwarding experiences along the way. I learned to keep my focus on a physical experience long enough to connect it to a core memory, engage in a dialogue with the intrapsychic parts of that memory, and restructure it, creating a healing experience that fundamentally transformed my presence in the world. The profound presence of my meditation teacher was an important component of what made this experience so powerful and illustrates how years of meditation practice can lead to an awakened state, as cliché as that sounds.
Neurofeedback Therapy: Some years ago I tried neurofeedback therapy for a few months and found myself feeling less reactive and anxious. At that time it was gaining attention as a promising new treatment, but since then the evidence supporting it has not borne out. Maybe it was a placebo effect, but then again, maybe not.
Learning IFS: I love how IFS maps out my psyche in a way that is complex and yet accessible, giving me a topology and a vocabulary my therapist and I can use to trace back to core memories and restructure them. I also like its spiritual side in its focus on what it calls “the Self,” (in other traditions this might be called the soul, the spirit or even the No Self ) which founder Richard Schwartz describes as “the belief that, in addition to these parts, everyone is at their core a Self containing many crucial leadership qualities such as perspective, confidence, compassion, and acceptance…that everyone has this healthy and healing Self despite the fact that many people initially have very little access to it.”
Therapy Trainings: There is a phenomenon that occurs in certain several day therapy trainings (AEDP and IFS in my experience) when therapists come together and watch video or live demonstrations of master therapists providing a healing experience to a client. To borrow Schwartz’s language, the “self energy” in the room of the therapists in training combines with the skillfulness of the master therapists and the vulnerability and deep engagement of the client processing traumatic memories to create an incredibly moving experience, which has a profound and healing effect on those in the audience. Every time I’m at one of these trainings, I become fixated on the question of how the experience can be shared with the general public. The IFS retreat is the closest I’ve seen to it.
Practicing Therapy as a Therapist: Similarly, at times practicing therapy is in itself a healing experience. My best guess as to why is that as we watch others heal, it evokes healing within ourselves. It’s an incredible privilege to be a therapist.
My IFS Study Group: I find that much of social life occurs at the surface level, so it's refreshing to participate in a group that drops into a deeper experience every couple of weeks.
It’s interesting to note that in 9 out of the above 12 experiences, another person was necessary to the outcome of spiritual growth. That’s 75%. That seems about right to me, that about 75% of personal growth needs to be done with another person, and 25% you can do on your own.
Lastly, these are the therapeutic experiences I haven’t tried, but would love to at some point:
Group therapy (I’ve facilitated it as a therapist, seeing first hand the powerful effect it can have, but have never experienced it as a client)
Drama therapy
Biofeedback therapy
Psychedelic-assisted therapy
Therapists talk about how their phones ring off the hook during the fall and winter months, often attributing the deluge to family dynamics surfacing during the holiday season, but I think the causes are partly biological. Personally I find that my vulnerabilities and sensitivities become more pronounced during the darker, shorter days of late fall and winter, and I’m certainly not alone in experiencing this. Luckily, the treatment is straightforward and affordable: light therapy. Furthermore, emerging evidence suggests that it may also be a good treatment for nonseasonal depression
I’ll never forget when I was sorting through some interpersonal conflict and said to her, “there’s no way I could say that to her– she’ll freak out!” to which she responded, “you mean you’re worried you won’t be able to tolerate her response?” Blew my mind.