What is Mahrer's Experiential Session

The sequence of steps in an experiential session: each session follows the same steps, whether there is a therapist and a person or the person alone

Each session follows the same four steps, even the first session. There is no such thing as an intake interview, a diagnostic assessment or evaluation.

The session goes through the same four steps whether the person is having a session alone or whether the person is with an experiential therapist whose main job is to teach, guide, show the person how to proceed through the session. Picture an experiential session as the person alone or with the teacher-guide, which is what the experiential psychotherapist is.

In either case, picture the person's eyes closed throughout the session. If your picture includes a therapist-teacher-guide, picture the two as sitting very close together, both chairs facing the same direction, both with their eyes closed throughout the session.

Step 1 - Discover the Deeper Potential for Experiencing

The aim of the first step is to access, to bring forth, to find, to discover, a deeper potential for experiencing.

The person is to be in a state of readiness for relatively strong feelings. When you are ready to begin, put your body in a state of readiness for relatively strong feeling by doing things like:

heavy, exceedingly hard and deep breathing make loud noises

whimpers

screams

sighs

hissings

moanings

shriekings

clacking

yelling

yelpings

shrill outbursts

move your arms, legs and torso with powerful energy and gusto.

Do all this for perhaps a minute or so to get into a state of strong feeling. You radically depart from your ordinary state of feeling, of control, and you have entered into an extraordinary state in which you are to remain throughout the entire session.

Finding a scene of strong feeling. Either the therapist or the person or both select some of the following questions - say them out loud, with feeling, over and over again until some scene of strong feeling comes to mind. Sometimes a scene of strong feeling is already front and center. Sometimes you have to use a number of these questions:

What is it that bothers me so much, tears me apart, makes me feel so awful, is almost always on my mind? When did I have this awful feeling?

In my life today, what kind of feeling do I have that is so awful, so painful, tears me apart, the terrible feeling? When did I have this awful feeling, some time when it was really bad?

Example - Anna, the client, begins crying.

"I feel so terrible... sometimes about me that is cold, hurts people. My sister told me I... she's having trouble getting pregnant, and she got so mad at me. She said I don't ever really listen to her. She said she wished she had a real sister." (Anna cries harder)

The are other ways of finding a scene of strong feeling:

When was it recently, when did I have maybe the worst feeling, the most horrible, a feeling I never ever want to have again? What was going on?

In my whole life, now and when I was little, when was it that I had one of the worst feelings, so powerful, so awful? What was happening?

In my whole life, now and years ago, when, even for a brief moment or longer, did I feel like I was losing my mind, crazy, something was really wrong with me? When did this happen?

In the last few days or so, when did I have a dream? What kind of bad feeling have I had just about my whole life, from when I was just a kid, that same awful feeling, like it's just a part of me, the kind of person I am? when have I had that feeling?

Lately, what kind of nice change seems to be happening in me, in the way I seem to be , in a way I am with people, the way people seem to be with me, some nice change in the way I feel or act or just seem to be? when and where does this seem to happen?

Lately, recently, when did I have some wonderful feeling, really happy, excited, so wonderful, a great feeling? What was going on? When did this seem to happen?

When I go back in my life, my whole life, when was it that I had maybe the best feeling, wonderful, really happy, felt fantastic? When was this? What was happening?

Each time you get a scene ask: "Earlier in my life, maybe even long ago when I was very little, when did I have that feeling even more powerfully, much more fully, deeply? When was it? What was happening?"

You will likely come up with several scenes of strong feeling. Choose which one you want to work with in this session. Which one seems most compelling, pulls you more?

"When Anna went back, she found a more powerful early time in her parent's home. Her mother is hurt, pulled in, crying, and her father is shaking, his voice quivering as he accuses Anna of not caring about the family, or being cold and selfish, of slapping the family in the face with the things she does. Anna is numbly transfixed, her body filled with pounding pressure as his quivering voice booms: 'We never want to see you again! Stay away! You are not our daughter!'"

Anna decides that here is the scene of strong feeling for her to work on in this session.

Fully live and be in the scene of strong feeling. You are to use the methods that enable you to enter into this scene, to live and be in this scene. It is exceedingly real. You are actually and wholly in this scene. You are filled with this same strong feeling.

Discover the peak moment of strong feeling in this scene of strong feeling. Freeze this scene of strong feeling. Keep it right here. As you are living and being in this frozen scene of strong feeling, actively search for precisely when the feeling is at its peak. This almost always means looking around, exploring until you actually discover this precise instant.

It is truly a discovery. Anna discovers that the precise instant is when he is saying, "We never want to see you again!" His voice is very loud and, in the very instant, he averts his gaze from her. There is a numb look on his face. This is the precise instant of peak feeling.

In the moment of peak feeling, the deeper potential for experiencing is discovered when there is a qualitative shift in experiencing. Freeze this discovered moment of peaked feeling. As you are now living and being in this frozen, dilated moment, you and the deeper potential for experiencing are within breathing distance of one another. You actually touch, or are touched by, the deeper potential when there is a discernible, qualitative shift in experiencing. What you had been experiencing is now gone. The state qualitatively shifts. Here is a momentous change, yet it happens almost instantly, in a flash. If the feeling had been painful, it is gone. Suddenly, there is a qualitatively new experiencing. This shift may happen subtly but dramatically.

There are several ways of living and being in this frozen moment of strong feeling to help you discover the deeper potential for experiencing:

Fill in the missing critical detail. Use this method first. As you are living and being in this frozen precise instant, fill in even more details.

Anna fills in the details of her agonizing feeling, what the awful heart pounding is like, the specific inner sense of pressure. She details everything she can about her mother, about Anna's own physical posture, the clarified racing thoughts in her head, that averted gaze of her father, about his physical posture, the specific words he is saying, how he says these words.

As you fill-in more and more of the critical details, as you find and fill in the missing critical detail, what is actually happening in this precise moment can become vivid, can come to the foreground, can emerge out of the general scene. When this happens, a shift can occur. A new experiencing happens.

However, when Anna fills in the critical details of her father saying those awful words, and looking away from her, no qualitative shift happens. Try another method:

Intensify the strong feeling. In the moment of strong feeling, raise the sheer level of feeling to a far higher level.

Anna's voice is drenched in powerful feeling as she belts out: "You never want to see me again! You hate me! My heart is pounding so hard it is going to burst! This pressure! My God! I feel like I'm going to die! OH! OH! MY GOD! OH! OH! OH! THE PRESSURE! THE PRESSURE!" Suddenly there is a qualitative shift. Something new happens. She is almost hissing, and her voice takes on an icy, other worldly hardness. Here is the shift, as she says: "YOU CAN'T LOOK AT ME... NOOOO... AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH, YYYEEESSSSSSSS!!"

Right here, Anna is touched by, or she touches, the deeper potential for experiencing. But suppose that this method did not work. Use one of the remaining methods, especially one that seems to fit what is happening in the frozen moment of strong feeling.

Penetrate down into the awful feeling. Start with the feeling that is bad; painful, awful. Penetrate down further and further into the most horrible heart, the most catastrophic core, of awful feeling. What is the most painful possibility, the worst consequence, the most terrifying implication of that awful feeling? It might be: "He hates me! He doesn't even want to look at me! I feel disgusting, hated!" Suppose it gets much worse. How bad could it get? How could this feeling be even more agonizing? As you penetrate deeper and deeper into the innermost pit of the awful feeling, a point will be reached when the qualitative shift occurs. This is when you are close enough to sense the breath of the deeper potential for experiencing.

Be the special other presenting. In some of these frozen moments, your attention is compelled by, is magnetically drawn toward, is locked onto that special other person-thing. Furthermore, you seem to know something of what is going on in the head of that special other person-thing. You know something of what it is thinking, knowing, intending. It is as if you are almost a little bit sensing, knowing, what it is like to be this special person-thing.

Go ahead and be the other person-thing. Put yourself inside the other person-thing. Live in it. Take its place. Keep going until the qualitative shift occurs. Replace the bad feeling with good feelings. In the moment of peak feeling, Anna is having awful feelings. Suppose that everything about the moment is preserved: the words the father says, the way he says these words, his averted gaze, the numb look on his face, Anna's posture and stance, Anna's mother in the back-ground. Anna replaces her awful feelings with pumped up joyful feelings:

"I love this! This is wonderful! Oh how great this feels!"

Stay in the moment of peak feeling until a qualitative shift occurs, not the surface shift from bad to good feeling, but an inner qualitative shift to some new inner deeper experiencing. Anna exclaims:

"I feel great! this is wonderful! Oh this is just marvelous!... Keep trying, old man! Knock yourself out! I am staring at you, Pop! Hey, you are looking away! LOOK AT THAT! He can't even face me! YOU GOT THAT VACANT LOOK ON YOUR FACE. YOU  CAN"T FACE ME. HA HA HA HA HA! YOU LITTLE WIMP!"

Anna is now touching or is touched by the deeper potential for experiencing. Replace the bad feeling with exuberant good feelings, and wallow in the moment of peak feeling until the qualitative shift happens and there is a touch of, a glow of, a new inner deeper experiencing. Step 1 is achieved when Anna is touching or is touched by, when she and the deeper potential for experiencing are in contact with one another; that is, when Anna has discovered the deeper potential for experiencing.

Step 2. Welcome, Accept, Cherish the Deeper Potential for Experiencing.

What had been, sealed off, kept deeper inside, is now right here. You are within breathing range. The purpose of the second step is to enable the person to move from a disintegrative relationship of fearing, hating, distancing, sealing off, holding down the deeper potential, to an integrative relationship of loving, welcoming, accepting, cherishing what had been deeper.

Anna has just hissed, "YOU CAN'T LOOK AT ME... NOOOOO.... AAAAAHHHHH... YYYYEEEESSSSSS!!!!" and the feeling is so good. But what is this deeper experiencing? One way of letting herself love and embrace the deeper potential for experiencing is; (1) to name it, to describe what it is.

Anna and the therapist try, and arrive at these words: "It is a sense of superiority... toughness, a one-on-one encounter... winning." The more she can name it, describe it, the more she is welcoming and cherishing it.

There are other ways of welcoming and cherishing the deeper potential. (2) She savors the wonderful and bodily sensations accompanying its discovery, "when I said, you can't look at me", I felt strong, hard ... my whole body felt so good." (3) She can check her feelings toward this deeper experiencing: " Yes, I love it... I never felt that, but I'd like to... I like being that." Anna laughs. There are other methods, yet they are all aimed at enabling her to move from a bad relationship to where she is genuinely loving, cherishing this deeper potential for experiencing.

The change is a magnificent one. There is a new felt sense of greater inner peacefulness, of being reunited with so much that is you. And there are new felt bodily sensations that help make even more wonderful this second step of loving closeness with one's own deeper potential for experiencing.

Step 3. Undergo a Qualitative Shift into Being the Deeper Potential for Experiencing in the Context of Recent, Earlier, and Remote Life Scenes

The third step is achieved when the person wholly disengages from, no longer is, the ordinary person she has been, and enters wholly and completely into being the utterly new person who is the deeper potential for experiencing. It is a radical leap, a qualitative shift into being a whole new and utterly different person who literally is the living experiencing of sheer superiority, wholesome toughness, exuberant one-on-one encountering, wonderful winning. Here is a qualitatively new person in everything from the way she acts to the way she talks, from what she feels to the person who is present right here.

Find recent, earlier, and remote life scenes. Being this whole new person is helped by occurring in scenes and times from the past. She may use scenes from her recent life, or from further back, from many years ago, from later or earlier childhood, or from when she was a baby. She may even use scenes in the lives of her mother or father during the year or so before conception to some years after birth.

She gets herself ready by letting herself be in the general vicinity of recent times, or from earlier periods in her life, or when she was a child or a baby. She sets herself to see the first scene that comes to mind, whatever it happens to be, whether it is familiar or not, dramatic or not, whether it seems fitting and appropriate or not.

One way of finding these scenes is by describing the deeper potential for experiencing, even letting herself have a glow of this experiencing, until some scene appears: " I am little, five, eight, ten, and I feel superior, tough, winning, one-on-one encountering...." In the first scene, she is about 10 years old. She locked her-self in the bathroom and, with her angry mother just outside the door, she is glowering with reverberating self-pity because her mother accused her of stealing socks from the laundry of a neighbor in the next apartment.

Another way of finding these scenes is to use the general structure of the initial scene of strong feeling: I am in my teen years. We live on Crandall Street. Someone is saying awful things at me, accusing me...." Keep repeating these words until a scene appears.

We found four or six scene by using these methods.

Undergo the qualitative shift into being the whole new person in these life scenes. In each of these scenes, she is to hurl herself into being the qualitatively new person who is the live experiencing of sheer, undiluted superiority, toughness, winning, one-on-one encountering.

Picture her as this radically new person in the bathroom scene, and in each of the earlier life scenes. Picture her being this radically new person (1) fully and completely; (2) genuinely and authentically; (3) with powerful feeling, full of energy and saturation; (4) with wonderful, joyful, exciting, exhilarating feelings; and (5) all wrapped up in safety-providing craziness, zaniness, silliness, burlesque, and wholly free of all realistic constraints.

Step 4. Be the Qualitatively Whole New Person in Scenes from the Forthcoming New Post-Session World.

The final step is achieved when the qualitatively whole new person has an ample sample and taste, readiness and commitment, to live and be the whole new person in this new person's new world of today, tomorrow, and beyond. The person who leaves the session is qualitatively different from the old person who was there in the beginning of the session.

The qualitatively new person finds outrageously unrealistic imminent scenes and situations in which to playfully and fully wallow in being the qualitatively new person. Look for imminent scenes and situations that are likely to happen soon, or might perhaps happen soon, or that Anna can make sure will happen soon. These imminent scenes become outrageously unrealistic when you picture them as the contexts in which you are to live and be as this qualitatively new person.

Elicit these scenes by asking this question: What imminent scenes (1) would optimally and ideally suit and be appropriate for the whole new person that you are; (2) would come from the qualitatively new person's fantasies and daydreams; (3) would involve being the qualitatively new person in ordinary mundane daily living; for instance, while brushing your teeth, walking along the street, conversing with others; (4) would seem outrageously impossible and dangerously inappropriate; (5) are times when the qualitatively new person could-would-should be the qualitatively new person; (6) are times when the qualitatively new person would just love to be the qualitatively new person; or (7) are imminent reoccurrences of the initial scene of strong bad feeling, that is, when someone, perhaps her sister, criticizes her, berates her, hates her, accuses her of being cold, not listening, hurting people, being selfish?

By using these questions, Anna found a number of creatively useful scenes and situations within the context of the next few days or so. These scenes involved her sister and her father, situations at work in the hospital, spending and evening with a few friends at her place, ordinary little scenes with the butcher in the market and the fellow who was supposed to fix her refrigerator, and scenes with Jerry and his kids in her apartment.

Playfully and fully wallow in being the qualitatively new person in the wildly unrealistic scenes and situations. Anna throws herself into being the qualitatively new person in each of these scenes, and does so (1) with absolutely full, saturated experiencing of pure superiority, toughness, winning, one-to-one encountering; (2) with sheer joy, ecstasy, exuberance, delirious hilarity and fun; and (3) in context of wildly unrealistic zaniness and playfulness. She is indeed the qualitatively new person in these imminent scenes and situations.

The qualitatively new person frames scenes that are realistically fitting and appropriate. Now is the time to add reality constraints. When and where would the qualitatively new Anna be ready and eager to live and be this new way realistically, for real, in the real post-session world of the whole new Anna? It is reality time.

The new Anna selects two scenes. She is ready and willing to be this whole new person in having a real talk with her sister. She has never really talked with her sister. And, more excitingly, the new Anna sees a whole new world with men, new men, and even with the man she is with, Jerry, who is much older than she is, and who, with his two children, often stays at her place while she tries to be so graciously good to the three of them. Rehearse and modify-refine being the qualitatively whole new person in these scenes until it is just right. Try it out. The whole new Anna, including the new felt sense of superiority, toughness, winning, one-to-one encountering, rehearses what it is like to be with her sister. She checks her body. How does it feel? Are the bodily sensations wonderful, awful , dead and numb? Anna keeps rehearsing, modifying, refining what she does and how she does it until it feels just right, until the bodily sensations joyfully approve.

Anna invites other parts of her to raise all sorts of serious objections. When there are no teeth-clenching objections, when overall bodily sensations are wonderful, when the final dress rehearsal is successful, Anna has experienced what it can be like to be this whole new person in undergoing this special talk with her sister.

Anna does the same thing in a forthcoming scene with Jerry and his children. They will be at her place tonight, again. How is the new Anna ready to be? Rehearsal and modification and refinement culminate in a newfound, solid, exciting rightness in facing their unspoken commitment, no longer suffocating this buried issue under her grudging graciousness. She is ready and eager to be this whole new Anna with Jerry and the children, perhaps tonight.

This whole new Anna sees what it can be like to be faced with an imminent reoccurrence of the initial painful scene of such painful feeling. "The little sister isn't pregnant. She's mad at you! You don't really listen to her! You're bad! She wishes she had a real sister! Go ahead, Anna, cry! Feel rotten! She's right!" Anna is giggling. "Nice try, Kim. Come on. You can do better than that! Go ahead! Give it your best shot... Then I have a few things to settle with you..." The scene has lost its painful zing. Anna is a whole new Anna.

Commit yourself to being the qualitatively new person, with whole new ways of being and behaving, in the rehearsed scenes and situations. The session is over when Anna fully commits herself to being this whole new person in these whole new ways, in these whole new imminent scenes and situations with her sister, and with Jerry and his children. "Yes! I want to! I'm going to do it!" The person who leaves the office is a qualitatively new person, with the formerly deeper potential for experiencing as one integral part of who and what this new person is: pleasant, exciting, harmonious, well-fitting, experiencing a delightful sense of superiority, toughness, winning, one-on-one encountering.

After the session, actually be the qualitatively whole new person in the new ways, in the new scene and situations of the new extratherapy world. The session is truly over when the new Anna does her homework. Becoming a whole new Anna in the session is an impressively prideful achievement. But actually being the whole new person in the new scenes and situations of the new extratherapy world is far more helpful in enabling the whole new Anna to come to life. So what happened?

Mahrer, A. R. 2001). Experiential Psychotherapy.

In R. Corsini (Ed.), Handbook of innovative therapy (pp. 218-229). New York: Wiley.