The power of the corrective emotional experience. and the knee jerk reaction to apologize for everything.
Welcome back ! Thanks for joining me ❤️
For this second stack I’ve been thinking about the power of the corrective emotional experience . All inspired by my knee jerk reaction to apologize for everything.
Let me explain . The other day I apologized to my daughter for something after she got upset. I didn’t do something the right way , which led to her disappointment and voicing regret about decisions not made.
Her and I both have the tendency to play out the thousand different ways a scenario could have gone and how we could have handled it differently. For me that usually ends with me beating myself up and apologizing, to dissipate the feelings of shame and discomfort around making a mistake or upsetting others . So I said to her, “I’m sorry, I should have done X.” What she said next was so simple and yet I nearly cried. She said, “It’s ok Mom, you don’t need to say I’m sorry, it wasn’t your fault.”
Now first, I must pause and appreciate that this is a child with immense emotional intelligence and depth. While I I know she necessarily does not understand the impact of those brilliant words I do believe she is mimicking what I have modeled with her and what she has internalized, even if just a bit, for herself. She has heard me say to her in similar scenarios, “It's not your fault” or “you didn’t do anything wrong” or simply “you don’t have to apologize”. She’s sensitive like me so she tends to over accept fault and while I think it's important to take responsibility for our mistakes it's equally important to learn when and what to not take responsibility for , like someone else's mood or feelings or mess ups. And so i’ve made a concerted effort to help her understand that. Even though, I know very well she will continue to absorb other people's BS , including my own, because of her sensitivities.
Back to the apologizing and why I’m calling this a corrective emotional experience …
Well first off , what is a corrective emotional experience ?
“In 1946, Franz Alexander wrote of the ‘corrective emotional experience’ as the essential helping factor in psychotherapy. The corrective emotional experience (CEE) refers to the ‘re-exposure of the patient, under more favorable circumstances, to the emotional situations which he could not handle in the past.’The reexposure is undertaken in psychotherapy via a reparative relationship with the therapist.” (Deborah Fried, in Encyclopedia of Psychotherapy, 2002)
In plain terms I like to think of it as an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past . And these experiences are occurring all the time in our lives outside of a therapy room, whether we are aware or not.
See as a kid I was not so different than my daughter . I was sensitive, absorbed the moods and feelings of others . And was quick to apologize . In fact I have a distinct memory of my father praising me for always apologizing so quickly . It was a coping skill. What we call a maladaptive coping skill . A not so healthy skill we develop to cope and survive . I apologized to keep the peace. I took the responsibility where my emotionally immature father could not .
And as an adult we have the opportunity to develop adaptive and healthy coping skills . I kind of thought me apologizing was one of them . I was trying to correct for that feeling I had as a kid that it was always my fault and didn’t want her to feel that way. In reality though I was taking on the feelings that weren’t mine . My real work is tolerating the discomfort of those around me, but that’s a whole other conversation. Anyhow, I realized for me that this over apologizing thing is not so healthy all the time .
And my seven year old daughter reminded me of that . In that brief moment she gave me the corrective emotional experience I needed . Like my inner child talking to me, she gave me permission to not take responsibility for her disappointment. She communicated that she would be ok and that I in turn would be ok.
That we can all handle our own feelings and the world won’t fall apart .