Addiction Treatment: How Can Experiential Therapy Help You Get And Stay Abstinent?

Becoming addicted is the process of being pulled into a dark orbit that fundamentally alters the way your brain functions and dictates how you live your life. If you've been there, done that, and bought the proverbial t-shirt, you know that addiction simply demands to be the center of attention. 

All that time spent chasing the substance or behavior you're addicted to, being, in one way or another, intoxicated, and recovering from use or the experience. All that time spent trying to hide the extent of your addiction from other people, and from yourself. All that time spent telling yourself you could quit. All that time spent in the shadow of cravings, and all that time trying to fix the messes that inevitably arise when you're addicted. 

If addiction does one thing, it sure keeps us busy. 

When we do seek help to reach remission, we soon find out that abstinence leaves behind a big, gaping, black hole. Troubles that were artificially suppressed by the addiction — whether they're underlying mental health conditions, financial worries, trying to salvage relationships with people who are important to you, or anything else — once again rear their ugly heads when you're brought back to reality. But you may also find that, now that the addiction that played such a central role in your life is gone, you're simply not sure what to do. 

What is experiential therapy?

In Dutch, my native language, it's called "bezigheidstherapie". I'm sharing that here because I think this term makes a lot more sense — if I had to try to translate it, I'd choose to call it "keep-busy therapy". The English-language equivalent would obviously be "experience therapy" if you wanted to take the fancy-speak out of it, and that works, too. 

Experiential therapy is an umbrella term for any number of different therapeutic approaches that may include tackling the kind of stuff you'd work on in traditional psychotherapy, like, you know, current emotions, past experiences, and analyzing behavioral patterns. But it also, by definition, includes some kind of active process or task. 

Here are some examples of different kinds of experiential therapy:

• Equine therapy (that's with horses) and canine therapy (with dogs). People attending this kind of therapy may engage in strenuous physical labor, regain a sense of dignity as an animal depends on them for care, and unlock suppressed emotions as they interact with animals.
• Art therapy, where you learn new techniques, keep busy, and can express yourself in on a deeper level than may be possible verbally. 
• Music, dance, and exercise therapy, where you avail yourself to the proven benefits of physical movement as well as opening yourself up to emotional processing. 
• Adventure or wilderness therapy, which can involve tasks like building survival skills, learning to cooperate with peers to get things done, and generally becoming self-reliant. 
• Things that look slightly more like psychotherapy, like psychodrama workshops and role-playing in therapy, also fall into the category of experiential therapy. 

Can experiential therapy help addicts reach remission and prevent relapse?

Addiction keeps you busy, and the road towards recovery can easily create a scary vacuum that triggers existential questions. When you have no idea what life after addiction is supposed to look like — and traditional addiction treatments are emotionally painful and sometimes stigma-inducing — the risk of relapse can only go up. 

Recovering addicts who participated in intensive horse-based therapy programs for addicts, for instance, reported that the stables were the one place where nobody viewed them as "just an addict". Therapists and patients worked the same jobs right alongside each other; cleaning out stables, feeding horses, spending time with them, riding them. This placed them on equal footing. 

Addicts found that the therapy helped them build a new sense of self, and find a new purpose. Rather than having nothing to do, the therapy gave them something to look forward to — as well as some impressive new skills. Some people who participated in equine therapy as part of their addiction recovery process even went as far as to say that the therapy saved their lives. 

It is, however, important to note that, with so many different kinds of experential therapy out there, not to mention so many different programs headed by people with varying levels of experience, this is no guaranteed "magic pill". Nor is it necessarily a subsitute for other kinds of treatments. 

Individual recovering addicts who are interested in experiential therapy should enquire what's available in their locality (or beyond), and deeply consider, together with their treatment team or loved ones, what kind of experiential therapy may be the most beneficial for them personally.