Promoting Client Experiencing in Therapy

A free lecture and group deliberate practice training from Sentio University, presented by Alexandre Vaz.

Client experiencing is a transtheoretical construct that has held up across decades of psychotherapy outcome research. Clients who are able to engage their inner experience in session, rather than describing it from a distance, tend to benefit more, regardless of the model their therapist is practicing. The skill of helping a client move from external description to felt experiencing is therefore one of the highest-leverage skills in psychotherapy. It is also a skill that gets surprisingly little structured rehearsal in most training programs. In this lecture and group deliberate practice webinar, Sentio Chief Academic Officer Alexandre Vaz walks through what client experiencing is, why it matters, and how to recognize and promote it in real time, then leads a structured group rehearsal of the relevant therapist moves.

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What you will learn

The webinar combines a focused lecture with structured group deliberate practice:

  • What client experiencing is and how to recognize different levels of it
  • Why depth of experiencing predicts outcome across therapy modalities
  • The specific therapist responses that tend to deepen versus flatten experiencing
  • How to slow a session down at the moment experiencing is rising
  • A group deliberate practice exercise rehearsing experiencing-promoting responses

Watch the webinar

Promoting Client Experiencing, with Alexandre Vaz. Free to share.

This webinar is a Sentio crash-course built around a cross-cutting clinical skill rather than a specific therapy model. It pairs a focused lecture with a group deliberate practice exercise, so it is most useful when watched with a supervision group, study cohort, or peer pair who can run the exercise alongside the recording.

How to use this with peers or supervisors

The webinar is most useful when followed by structured practice. We recommend watching the recording with a peer or supervision group and pausing at the group deliberate practice section to run the exercise live. One person plays the therapist, one plays the client, and a third observes and offers structured feedback against a specific behavioral target, such as "deliver a response that names the client's present-moment experience without interpreting it" or "produce a slowing-down response within ten seconds of a rising-affect cue." Five to ten minutes of focused rehearsal followed by feedback tends to produce more growth than longer unstructured roleplay. Licensed clinicians who want to take this further can join Sentio's ongoing deliberate practice consultation group, which meets regularly and is open to clinicians worldwide.

Going deeper: Deliberate Practice Supervision

This webinar demonstrates what deliberate practice looks like inside a cross-cutting clinical skill rather than inside a specific therapy model. Doing deliberate practice supervision well is a separate skill, and one that is hard to acquire from didactic content alone. The method has to be practiced under feedback, the same way the clinical skill itself does. A single weekend workshop tends not to give supervisors enough repetitions to develop the experiential muscle they need. Sentio runs an intensive year-long clinical supervisor training built around this principle. For the longer rationale for that format, see Why One Weekend Supervisor Trainings Fall Short.

About the author

Alexandre Vaz, PhD is the Chief Academic Officer of Sentio University and co-founder of the Deliberate Practice Institute. He is co-editor of The Essentials of Deliberate Practice book series (APA Books) and host of Psychotherapy Expert Talks. He is a licensed clinical psychologist in Portugal and has authored or co-edited over a dozen books on deliberate practice and psychotherapy training.

Related Sentio resources

Frequently asked questions

What does this webinar cover? The webinar combines a focused lecture on client experiencing with a structured group deliberate practice exercise. The lecture covers what client experiencing is, how depth of experiencing predicts therapy outcome across modalities, and the specific therapist responses that tend to deepen rather than flatten experiencing. The deliberate practice section gives clinicians a chance to rehearse experiencing-promoting responses with feedback.

Who is this training for? Licensed clinicians, supervisors, postdocs, predoctoral interns, and advanced trainees in any therapy modality. Promoting client experiencing is a cross-cutting skill that applies whether the therapist is practicing emotion-focused therapy, AEDP, CBT, psychodynamic work, or any model in between. Supervisors and faculty will find the framework useful for teaching trainees who are stuck delivering interpretation when experiencing is what the moment calls for.

Do I need to be trained in a specific model to use these exercises? No. The exercises are designed to be useful across modalities. The skill of recognizing and promoting client experiencing is foundational to most experiential and integrative approaches, and is increasingly cited as a common factor in psychotherapy outcome research. Clinicians from any orientation can rehearse and benefit from the responses demonstrated in the webinar.

Is the webinar really free? Yes. The webinar is free to watch, free to share with peers and trainees, and free to use inside a supervision group. Sentio University is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and releases its training resources openly.

Where can I go deeper after this? Clinicians who want to extend this work can join Sentio's DP Consultation Group, which meets regularly and is open to licensed clinicians worldwide. For longer, modality-specific deliberate practice webinars, see the full set of Sentio Innovation Lab spoke pages, including Deliberate Practice in Emotion-Focused Therapy, Schema Therapy, and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy.