4
W
hen I first stepped into a therapist’s
office 25 years ago, it was not because
I just wanted to try some therapy. Old
trauma memories began to reemerge
and I had no control over them. I needed help get-
ting the triggers to stop and end the behaviors I was
using to medicate the pain.
The first therapist seemed to scare me more
than help, so I found another one who I worked with
for several months. I made progress and gained
some good insight on what I was doing and why I
was doing it, but my triggers and behaviors were
not changing. I was also in graduate school at the
time to become a therapist (wouldn’t you know) and
decided to attend a training at a place that spe-
cializes in experiential therapy. In the past, I had a
couple of brief encounters with experiential therapy
and the methods had seemed vague and a little
weird. However, suddenly I found this training to be
different. The trainers had a mastery of this method
that made sense and I quickly found it to be more
effective than anything I had seen or experienced.
The Value of
EXPERIENTIAL
THERAPY
in Addiction
Bill Lokey, M.A.
