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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
In Experiential Psychotherapy, Dr. Alvin R. Mahrer demonstrates his use of this form of therapy, which centers on the experience of strong emotion. In this therapy, clients are directed to relive experiences in which they felt strong emotion and to truly be present with those emotions, so as to develop greater emotional openness and resilience in the face of future challenges. In this session, Dr. Mahrer works with a client to help him overcome a feeling of emotional numbness and feel and display his emotions. This video features a client portrayed by an actor on the basis of actual case material. Precipitating Event In this therapy, each session starts with an invitation for the person to put all his attention on recent times, incidents, and scenes in which there were strong feelings. This is the alternative to "precipitating events." In the first session, Ted began with two scenes in which he drove to a part of town where there were prostitutes, he sat in his car, and thought about taking out his penis and showing it to a prostitute, but did not. Both instances occurred within the last week or so before the first session. Preceding Sessions There were two preceding sessions. Both went through the four steps of each experiential session. In the first session, beginning with the previously described event, the session opened up and accessed something deeper in Ted. This was a deeper quality or potential for experiencing a sense of showing feelings, of opening himself and of opening up more with anyone. At the end of the first session, Ted was being this new person who was ready and eager to remain open and show and display his feelings. He was committed to being this way with his wife, to being much more open with her about his hopes and fears and also about the recent incidents involving the car, the prostitutes, and the penis. At the beginning of the second session, he opened with recent scenes of being this new way with his wife, that is, showing his feelings and telling her about the incidents he had had with the prostitutes and how he had thought about taking out his penis. He has had no further urges or incidents like this. The scenes of strong feeling involved one in which Ted's father cut himself while doing some work, and Ted did nothing. The accessed inner experiencing was that of being openly critical, wholesomely kidding, and playfully ridiculing. By the end of the second session, Ted was able to be this new person who was openly critical and wholesomely kidding. He was no longer the old person who, in incidents such as the one with his father, was frozen, numb, unable to show particular kinds of feelings, and was tight, locked up, and held in. By the end of the second session, Ted was ready and eager to be this new person with his father; he wanted to be able to cajole and kid his father about something his father had done for years and no one in the family ever mentioned openly, namely, stealing cheap little items from stores. As this whole new person, Ted tried this out, rehearsed and refined it, and was ready to be this way with his father and with lots of other people too. |
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