Article posted on Monday, April, 29th, 2013 at 1:43 pm

To remain current and to continually advance my professional knowledge and abilities within the field of coaching, I enroll in various training programs as they come up in the calendar. One such specialist training was a recent four-day programme run at a treatment centre called Onsite Workshops near Nashville in Tennessee, USA. I attended a workshop on Experiential Therapy. This powerful tool first developed by Alvin Mahrer is a process by which therapists are able to help the unconscious to become conscious. A simplified description is a process of listening to a client and then using simple physical cues or the active replaying of former family interactions to give clarity, depth and meaning to buried and repressed feelings and emotions. This process of visualisation helps people accept and move beyond deep inner pain and emotional blockage, issues that may have been nagging in the unconscious for years or even decades.

Over the last nine years, I have benefitted from many experiential therapy sessions and having derived huge rewards from these experiences, I felt I wanted to go further and learn about the provision of such therapy. My goal was to enhance my understanding of this practice to deepen my own empathy, both with myself and therefore with others. Listening to another human being can take many forms: you will listen to a friend during a chat about a game of rugby; you will listen to a colleague during a conversation about accounting in your office; you will listen to your builder as he shows you samples of different colours of paint. While all of these interactions involve talking and listening, none of them are life threatening and none require you to have listened in a manner that would allow you to ‘play back’ to the other your version of what you have just heard.

During the coaching and mentoring of clients who are very likely to be sharing life-changing issues with me, it is very important that I am able to listen in a manner that allows me to feed back what I have heard in a manner that will lend additional perspective and prompt reaction and change.

Experiential therapy techniques allow precisely this level of interaction. Learning how this level of listening can be achieved is therefore a very useful tool that will only help me better interpret the needs of my clients.

Do contact me if you are interested to find out more about this fascinating process and workshops at Onsite.