Your childhood and past experiences shaped who you are today, and you’re aware that negative experiences have a different impact on you than positive ones. But have you ever considered how those negative experiences influence your behavior today?
Emotional pain from unhealed trauma can show up in unexpected ways. From lashing out to feeling anxious to bursting into tears, that negativity can cause us to react in ways we don’t want to. Even if you understand what’s happening and can identify why you react the way you do, the negative emotional feelings can provoke responses you can’t always control.
Corrective emotional experience is a treatment modality that helps you heal from past trauma and reframe your emotional responses. In time, when you encounter situations that are similar to your trauma, you’ll be able to regulate your emotional response and have better control over your behavior and reactions.
What is Corrective Emotional Experience?
Corrective emotional experience (CEE) is a therapeutic process that can help you change how you view yourself, how you relate to others, and understand how your emotional responses were shaped by emotional or traumatic events. By exploring how your past shaped your present actions and behaviors, you can change how you think and act to form a new, more positive sense of self.
During a corrective emotional experience, you relive a past emotional trauma in a safe and supportive environment with your therapist. As you recall the experience, your therapist is there to help you process what happened and reshape how you feel by responding to your reactions in a supportive and affirming manner.
For example, someone might relive the moment they made the honor roll and told their parents. During a CEE, the therapist might praise the client for all of their hard work and effort. This is different from when the client’s parents shrugged and didn’t seem to care. Experiencing this positive reaction can change how the client feels about themself and their achievements.
How Corrective Emotional Experiences Works
Corrective experiences are designed to help you change the negative beliefs about yourself that were created when you experienced childhood trauma or emotional pain. This is accomplished by helping you change the negative emotions and associated behavior you experience in response to certain events by creating new emotional responses and behaviors. By processing what happened to you and changing your responses, you’ll heal your past traumas and change your behaviors.
Corrective experiences treat the underlying reason for your behavior, getting past the defensive behaviors that helped you cope with trauma to create lasting change and improve your mental health. As you revisit your past and experience your emotions, your therapist replaces negative messaging with positive ones. Repeating this action can help you create a new neurological pathway to associate a new emotional experience with the event. That, in turn, allows you to modify your behaviors.
For example, when talking about money, a client may become defensive and lash out to avoid talking about it. As the therapist works with the client, they may identify that money is a sensitive topic because their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t provide financial support during their childhood, and that’s the source of the anxiety and associated response.
During a corrective experience, the therapist may ask the client to relieve a time they asked their parents for money, and they said no. The therapist responds in a positive and supportive manner that validates the client’s wants and needs. Over time, the client learns to feel differently about money and, in turn, can discuss it without lashing out.
While talk or narrative therapy is one way to have a corrective experience, some therapists use these therapies to achieve the desired results:
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)
- Exposure therapy
- Internal family systems
- Other forms of cognitive behavioral therapy
Equally crucial to the success of CEE is how the therapist responds to the client’s emotional response. Supportive responses can help the client feel heard, seen, and validated, which can facilitate behavioral change.
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Benefits of Corrective Emotional Experience
Corrective emotional experiences can help you understand why you behave the way you do and change those responses. By healing from past trauma and its associated behaviors, you can improve your self-awareness and emotional regulation, which will improve your overall mental health and well-being.
This changes how you respond to a situation. Instead of becoming defensive, reactive, or withdrawing, you’ll learn how to explain yourself calmly or speak positively about your accomplishments. Likewise, you’ll learn to recognize when you’re becoming overwhelmed or feeling your old behaviors creep in and can decide to change your response or even leave the situation.
While you may have to make a conscious effort to react differently, with time, these changes become a part of who you are and eventually, it’s second nature.
Criticism and Challenges of Corrective Emotional Experience
While corrective emotional experience can help you process past traumas and change your behavior, there are challenges and concerns about this therapeutic process.
A supportive and trusting relationship with your therapist is crucial no matter what kind of mental health treatment you receive. However, some clinicians feel that the best relationship between therapist and patient is neutral. When a therapist acts as a parental figure in CEE, there’s the possibility they aren’t acting as neutral and objective as they should to maintain a professional distance, and that could impact treatment.
Another challenge is that while exploring past trauma and healing from it is crucial, the negative feelings and emotional processing can be overwhelming. This can block progress and stop someone from achieving their mental health goals.
Likewise, change is hard. A large part of CEE is that to create lasting change, you have to change how you think about your past, the associated traumas, and how you view and handle close relationships. This can be a difficult thing to do, and for some corrective emotional experience won’t help them heal.
Corrective Emotional Experience Can Create Lasting Change
Corrective emotional experience can help you realize that your emotions aren’t the problem; your past traumas are. By exploring your past experiences, you can change how you respond to similar situations, allowing you to grow and reframe your relationship with yourself and the world around you.
No matter what your mental health goals are, we can help. The skilled clinicians at Anchor Light Therapy will help build a therapeutic alliance with you to help you heal from past trauma and grow in a new direction. Schedule your free consultation today.
