How to Get the Most Out of Therapy: 7 Key Steps for Deeper Healing
Are you trying therapy for the first time and wondering what it might be like? Or, maybe you’ve tried some talk therapy and you’re curious about shifting deeper patterns through experiential work like somatic therapy or Internal Family Systems. Experiential therapy is more than just talking through your problems—it’s about uncovering patterns, shifting beliefs, and creating new emotional and felt experiences that support lasting change. If you’ve ever wondered how to make therapy more effective, these steps can help you go deeper in your sessions and maximize your growth. If you prefer listening/watching videos, you can check out Dr. Tori Olds fantastic video exploring these ideas.
1. Start with a Clear Point of Focus
Walking into therapy with only “I’m unhappy” can feel vague and overwhelming. Instead, see if you can narrow your focus. Some examples might include
A specific symptom you experience (e.g., anxiety in social settings).
A pattern in relationships.
A way you treat yourself (self-criticism, avoidance, perfectionism).
A recurring body or nervous system response, e.g feeling stuck in freeze.
If you’re unsure, use your first few sessions to explore when your unhappiness shows up most strongly. Identifying a concrete entry point gives therapy a clear direction.
2. Revisit a Concrete Moment
Once you’ve identified a clear focus and overarching goals for therapy, we want to start exploring the nuances of how that pattern or issue shows up for you. We get to the unconscious beliefs or nervous system responses that underlie it.
What does this look like? We’ll often start by thinking of a concrete moment where that pattern or symptom played out – either a memory or a typical scene. Before you come to session, if can be helpful if you already have a memory or moment in mind - often an event or interaction that happened that week where you noticed the pattern. Then together in the session we revisit that moment, re-inhabit it, so it feels alive and fresh to your brain. We feel the moment that happened right before the reaction or trigger. We slow down, notice sensations, and allow the scene to become alive in your imagination.
3. Explore, Don’t Just Explain
Experiential therapy is not about simply explaining the problem and expecting a solution—it’s about exploring what’s happening beneath the surface.
Once we’ve brought up the memory or moment, we use mindful listening to flesh it out and explore the different channels through which we experience it (Sensation, Image, Behavior, Affect, Meaning).
· What do you notice in your body? Are there any impulses towards movement?
· What images arise?
· What emotions show up?
· What meaning does your brain attach?
This step helps uncover the deeper prediction your brain makes in those situations (e.g., “If someone is upset, they’ll punish me”).
Exploring instead of explaining helps bring unconscious patterns into conscious awareness. It helps us to access implicit memory: not just our cognitive awareness, but all the ways our brains and bodies store information below the surface of our immediate awareness.
4. Update Old Beliefs with New Experiences
Once we’ve uncovered the underlying pattern or prediction, I’ll often ask “is this familiar?” or “when was the first time, or an earlier time, that you remember feeling or thinking this?” This may bring up a childhood memory, or a sense of earlier experiences in your life where you felt similarly. It could be a clear scenario, or just fragments of memory. Once we’ve accessed that older memory or felt sense, we work with memory reconsolidation – where we bring up an implicit memory or experience, and move through it differently this time, in order to create a new neural pathway and felt sense experience of it. Once you identify an old belief or pattern, therapy can help you hold it alongside new truths. For example:
· Old belief: “If I show anger, I’ll be punished.” – this belief is held in your implicit memory, by a ‘part’ of you, or in your felt sense.
· New truth: “I can express frustration and still be accepted.” – this belief can be held by your adult Self, and reinforced through safety in your nervous system.
Somatic therapy and IFS are both ways of accessing and transforming these implicit memories. If you DON’T have specific memories, that’s totally ok! We can use these same tools to work with the felt sense: your emotional/bodily sensation experiences. Remember, even if you don’t have a cognitive memory of something, your nervous system still might, and we can still help it to feel a new sense of safety or release.
An important note here: if we’ve experienced pre-verbal or developmental trauma, we may have no memories at all of what happened, or why our pattern exists. We didn’t have the cognitive abilities to remember or make meaning of experiences at the time. But our bodies and our nervous systems remember - we can experience the emotion and sensation. In therapy we can work with these channels of information to restore the safety we didn’t have at that time, but the work will look different - we won’t necessarily ‘walk through’ a memory in the same way.
5. Write It Down and Revisit It
It’s easier to shift a pattern when you consciously hold both—the past belief and the updated experience—at the same time. This creates flexibility in how your brain and body predict and responds to situations. We can use IFS and somatic experiencing to create a felt sense of the new belief - so we’re not just ‘thinking a new thought’ but genuinely feeling something new in the way our bodies respond.
Write down the old belief alongside the new one you’re working on. Keep it somewhere accessible and revisit it daily—or whenever a trigger arises. Repetition helps your nervous system integrate the new perspective, and helps the ‘part’ of you holding the belief to feel your presence, care, and connection. It takes about 3 weeks of repetition for a new belief/neural pathway to fully form.
6. Work Gently with Protective Parts
Sometimes it feels difficult—or even unsafe—to touch painful memories. This is often because protective parts of the mind step in. Instead of forcing past them, we get curious:
· What does the protective part believe?
· What sensations or images come up?
· What’s the fear if I stop holding onto this defense?
By slowing down and befriending these protectors, you can access deeper layers of healing at a safe pace. We may not get to the core wound, and we may not have to - instead, we create a new sense of safety for your ‘protectors’.
7. Understand the Role of Emotions in Therapy
Many people carry implicit beliefs that emotions are “bad” or dangerous:
· If I feel sad, I’ll sink into despair.
· If I get angry, I’ll hurt someone or be punished.
· If I show emotions, I’ll be rejected.
These beliefs—not the emotions themselves—often create suffering. The brain interprets emotions as “danger,” and protective defenses kick in.
Therapy can create a safe environment to experience emotions differently. When you bring these beliefs to light and share your feelings with your therapist, you open space for new emotional experiences—being cared for, accepted, or understood instead of rejected.
Why This Matters
The brain processes negative experiences almost instantly (0.25 seconds), but it takes about 20 seconds for positive experiences to fully register. By slowing down in therapy and lingering in supportive, corrective experiences, you strengthen new neural pathways that make healing stick.
Final Thoughts
Getting the most out of experiential therapy isn’t about showing up and talking, or expecting clear ‘solutions’ or instructions—it’s about focusing, exploring, updating beliefs, and allowing new experiences to land. With these steps, therapy becomes not just a place of insight, but of true transformation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Getting the Most Out of Therapy
How long does it take to see results in therapy?
It depends on your goals and where you’re starting from. Some of the more transformational experiential therapies (e.g. somatics, IFS) can feel like learning a new skill or language, so it can take some time to feel comfortable using them before bigger shifts start to happen. Some people notice small shifts within a few sessions, especially if they come in with a clear focus. Deeper patterns or trauma may take longer to work through – your system needs to feel safe enough to slow down and explore. Think of therapy as a process, not a tick-list—progress is often gradual but cumulative.
What if I don’t know what to focus on in therapy?
That’s completely normal. You don’t need to have everything figured out before starting. Together we can explore where your struggles show up most strongly and narrow it down together. Sometimes just noticing when unhappiness arises is the best place to begin. Once we’ve got a better sense of it, we can collaborate session to session on where you might want to focus to get the most out of the work.
Is it normal to feel worse before feeling better in therapy?
It can be. AND we don’t want to be triggering trauma responses every session. While dipping into old patterns can feel tiring and emotional, ideally we want your system to be able to find center again relatively soon during or after a session. The key is to process feelings in and out of session in a safe and supportive way, and make sure you have the tools to navigate this. If you’re feeling really triggered every time, it’s a clear indicator we need to ‘fine tune’ the work and make it feel safer for your system.
If you’ve been in a freeze response for a long time, or dissociated in order to navigate really difficult situations, coming back into your ‘felt sense’ and the emotions underneath might feel tricky. There could be grief, fear and anger that have felt too big to process, and when your system starts to ‘thaw’ you’ll feel of more those feelings. Again, we only want to do as much at a time as your system can handle.
How can I make therapy more effective between sessions?
Writing down insights, reviewing belief shifts, and practicing new behaviors or emotional responses in daily life can reinforce what you explore in sessions. Spending even 20 seconds really lingering in positive experiences can help your brain integrate them more deeply. It takes 3 weeks for a new neural pathway to form, and then it can take up to 2-3 years for your system to really integrate a state change.
What if I feel too guarded to open up in therapy?
It’s common to have protective parts that hold back, or are nervous about coming to therapy. Instead of fighting them we can get curious about them together. What is this part afraid might happen if I share? Naming the fear out loud often softens its grip and allows the therapeutic process to move forward at your pace.