Melbourne trauma psychotherapy

While talking therapy provides an important base for exploring an individual’s difficulties, change rarely comes from cognitive insight alone. Fundamental change requires individuals to connect with emotional experiences, both in the present moment, and those emotional experiences stored in formative memories. To support this connection, interventions known as experiential techniques can be useful. Experiential techniques provide an opportunity to immerse one’s self in an emotional experience, to explore and express the associated components of this experience, which often leads to new insights and emotional shifts.

Experiential techniques that I have been trained in include imagery rescripting, and chairwork.

Imagery rescripting

Imagery rescripting involves returning to difficult past (often childhood) memories and, with the support of the therapist, rescripting the outcome of the memory such that the original feeling associated with the memory is changed to a more self-accepting, empowered or safe feeling. In early imagery rescripting sessions, therapists will bring themselves into the memory and protect the client from the threat, which is often a scary or shaming person from the past. Once the client is safe from the threat in the memory, the therapist will speak with the client as their child self, giving the child the missed emotional and psychological support that would have helped them understand or process the experience differently at the time. In later rescripting sessions, the therapist will encourage the client to enter the memory as their adult self, such that the client’s adult self can support the client’s child self, and give them this corrective experience.

Research has demonstrated that imagery rescripting has similar efficacy to EMDR, both of which have higher efficacy than standard trauma-focused treatments. The mechanism of change has been hypothesised as a change to the representation of self that was previously encoded in the trauma memory. This then leads to changes in an individual’s core beliefs and self-assessment/ sense of self. Individuals undertaking imagery rescripting report decreased experiences of shame, guilt, anxiety and traditional trauma symptoms, and an increase in self-compassion and self-acceptance.

Chairwork

Chairwork is an experiential technique that arose out of psychodrama, but has also historically been utilised by Gestalt therapists and more recently, schema therapists. My own training was with Scott Kellogg and Amanda Garcia Torres’s Chairwork Psychotherapy Initiative. Chairwork involves a client moving between different chairs to express different parts of self, or to talk to imagined others from the past or present. The purpose of chairwork is to explore and give voice to emotional experiences, such that an individual can develop awareness of and integrate disavowed and sometimes conflicting aspects of self.

Chairwork utilises a model of self that understands individuals have different internal parts, modes or voices. To read more about how I use this model of self, please read my page on parts work.