How Does Therapy Actually Work? How New Experiences Lead to Change

You probably look for things in your relationships you don’t get from them.

You may have love and companionship. You may have people you can talk to and people you can ask for help. You may even have people you can mostly be yourself around, who show tolerance, even affection, for your strangeness.

But there’s probably at least one part of you that your friends and family don’t understand or accept. There are probably things you keep hidden out of fear of being judged or rejected.

You are unique, and the social world is complex, full of norms and taboos that would punish and exclude you if you shared certain thoughts, dreams, and desires at the wrong time or with the wrong people. So, you keep them to yourself. Maybe you find an outlet online, but that only goes so far. You really wish there was someone you could spill it all to without risking dire social consequences.

The good news is that there is such a person. That person is a therapist.

Not only are therapists trained to listen fully and attentively to you while setting aside their biases, they can also often affirm the parts of you that you’ve kept so carefully hidden from others. Their surprising reactions to these hidden parts can lead to a corrective emotional experience—one of the universal ways any type of therapy can be healing.

Being seen and affirmed by your therapist can inspire you to question the stories you tell yourself that hold you back. It can give you the courage to take risks and put yourself out there. It can even help you recover your broken dreams and put them back together.

All of this can happen thanks to one of the most basic, universal skills that therapists have: to see, understand, and accept who you really are.

A corrective experience challenges your emotional programming: the hardwired, adaptive survival reactions that limit—often painfully—the range of responses you have to life. It does this by helping you rewire the emotional associations you have with your core memories, freeing you from the emotional burden your past used to have.

When you were a child, your parents (or other primary caregivers) shaped and limited what you could say and do. Some of the this was good, such as when they taught you positive cultural traditions or constructive social norms like “It’s good to share.”

However, some of it probably wasn’t so good. Your parents usually teach you at least a few things that are hurtful and wrong. For example, they might have taught you to hide, deny, or be ashamed of parts of who you are, or made you feel like you don’t deserve happiness or pleasure.

Corrective experiences tend to happen when you share something vulnerable and deeply personally meaningful with your therapist and they respond in a way that you don’t expect. It’s especially powerful when your therapist does or says the opposite of what your caregivers did and when it’s how you wish they would have responded to you.

The different point of view your therapist offers can trigger a shift of perspective of your own. It can help you learn that your parents’ reactions to you, which you internalized at such a young age, and which powerfully shaped your sense of self, were reflections of them, not you.

What’s important about the corrective experience is that it helps you learn this on an emotional, instinctive level and not just an intellectual one.

How is this possible?

The bad news is that your brain gets hardwired in childhood. The feelings, beliefs, and responses you learned back then tend to stick with you for the rest of your life if they go unexamined.

The good news is that examining them makes it possible to change them. You can re-wire your brain, and therapy can help you do it.

One reason therapy can have such powerful effects is that it helps you unlearn not just the rules and beliefs you were taught when you were younger, but the emotional responses you learned then, too.

In therapy, it’s possible to disconnect difficult memories from the beliefs and feelings that make them hurt so much to revisit. When you do this work, you keep the memories; you simply change what they make you believe and how they make you feel.

With empathy and understanding, your therapist may say something that makes you feel seen in a way no one else has seen you before. They may accept and validate your anger or other negative emotions instead of judging you or getting defensive. They may simply make a single statement—one that is so contrary to what you were taught to believe about yourself that it shocks you into a sudden new self-perception.

Many therapists believe that to be able to have this kind of experience, you have to first feel the painful feelings you normally avoid. This is the only way the unexpected response your therapist gives you can have the powerful emotional impact that can lead to a corrective experience.

This is when therapy can get a little tough. But if you stick with it, you’ll be amazed by how deeply you can heal. Your whole emotional landscape can shift, and you can discover a sense of inner freedom you’ve never felt before.

Somehow, even as you get older and realize you can step on a crack without breaking your mother’s back, you don’t question many other beliefs you formed with the same naïve childhood intensity. You don’t question your belief that speaking out or trying to be seen will always get you punished or your belief that no one will love you if you don’t make yourself small for their sake.

Childhood experiences also set you up with a lot of expectations about life.

You may learn to expect punishment when you’re too loud. You may expect other people to ignore you, not listen to you, or not care about how you feel or what you say. You may learn to associate love with conflict or suffering. You may learn that the only way to get a positive response is to always give others what they want without asking for anything for yourself. You may learn to expect not to get what you want in relationships.

These expectations are often based on accurate perceptions of how things worked with your parents or other caregivers when you were younger. Unfortunately, though, you probably didn’t get the chance to learn that they don’t apply to all people and circumstances. Instead, you probably internalized these expectations as rules not just for your parents and life at home, but for how you need to be with everyone everywhere.

The most surprising thing about the expectations you carry around is how powerfully they shape your day-to-day reality. What you believe affects every area of your life, especially your relationships.

For example, if you learned to associate love with conflict, you’re probably drawn to relationships that have a lot of conflict. If you learned to expect your needs to never be met by others, you’re probably drawn to other people who don’t even try to meet your needs.

This is because part of you believes if relationships don’t play out according to the childhood rules you learned, your very survival is at stake. This part usually operates outside of your conscious awareness and may be nudging, coaxing, or even “training” other people to respond to you in the way you expect.

For example, if you learned that no one wants to listen, you probably don’t even try to be heard. You probably seek out other people who aren’t good listeners and who just want to talk the whole time. You like these people; they make you feel comfortable.

When you do meet people who are interested in listening, you may keep quiet or keep turning the conversation back to them. You might even lash out or get defensive if they ask you to share more.

Deep down, you want to be listened to—and heard—but there is part of you that feels unsafe if people defy your expectations about how things work. In fact, it feels so threatening when it happens that your subconscious mind works overtime to keep it from happening.

These learned behaviors make you feel safe. They’re what helped you survive your childhood, after all. So, even if you really want to experience something different, it can be hard to push yourself past the fear and anxiety it makes you feel.

Fortunately, there’s a safe place to experience a response that upsets your expectations so you can start to uproot the limitations they put on your life. That place is therapy.

To see what a corrective emotional experience might look like, let’s check in on an imaginary therapy session (but one that is based on real things that can and do happen in therapy).

Bill is quiet and polite. He’s always trying to check in on his therapist and make sure she knows he cares about her feelings too. After all, anything less would make him selfish and a bad person.

She’s told him many times that it’s okay to just focus on himself while they’re in session. But he knows she’s just being polite. He knows what she would think if he just made everything about himself. Yes, he knows it’s therapy and he’s supposed to talk about himself, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be polite.

“Well, anyway, enough about that,” he says. “How is your dog? Did the vet checkup go okay?” (He had learned about the vet visit through an offhand remark his therapist made at the end of his last session.)

“Bill!” The shout takes him by surprise. He looks at his therapist, startled into eye contact.

Her voice softens. “We’ve talked about this before. We need to keep the focus on you.”

“Well, sometimes I just don’t know what to say,” Bill says.

“I understand. But I think there’s a lot more to talk about here. I want to know how this fight with your wife made you feel.”

“Well, I mean, it made me a little mad. But she has a point. She’s just a good person who’s trying—”

“No, no,” the therapist responds, shaking her head. Bill is surprised again. “I don’t want to hear why you think she was acting that way. I want to hear how it made you feel.”

“What do you mean? I said I felt a little mad.”

“Just a little? Go into it a little more for me.”

“I thought she was wrong. But I knew where she was coming from.” Bill crosses his arms. “I mean… I guess she didn’t have to be that hurtful. The way she put it really hurt my feelings.”

Bill feels the surge of anger coming back.

“You know what, it really upset me! She didn’t have to be such a bitch!”

Bill feels ashamed as soon as the word is out of his mouth. Will his therapist think he’s a misogynist now? Just another no-good man who calls women bitches?

“I feel like I’ve heard one of your real honest feelings for the very first time.”

“But doesn’t that make me a bad person? To call a woman a bitch? To call my wife a bitch?”

“The word ‘bitch’ is problematic in some ways, but it’s a word we all think—and call each other—sometimes. I’m betting you didn’t even call her that out loud? Which is, again, something people do tend to call each other sometimes?”

“No, gosh no, of course not. I just thought it.”

“It’s okay to think it, Bill. It’s okay to be mad at your wife. It’s okay to think she’s being a bitch.”

One night, he even insults his wife in return during a fight. He says it out loud. Bitch. He’s surprised to find that instead of causing her to reject him forever, it opens a serious, heartfelt dialogue. “I just needed to see that you felt something, anything,” his wife tells him. They grow closer as they continue to talk.

That one simple moment in therapy blew something wide open for Bill. It turned his assumptions about other people, himself, and the world completely over. As a result, he’s started feeling less guilty. He’s letting himself feel and express his feelings more than he ever has before—just because one day, his therapist told him it was okay to think his wife was being a bitch.

That’s how simple—and powerful—a corrective experience can be.

There is no way to guarantee a corrective experience in therapy. Many elements have to come together for one to happen, some of which are completely out of a therapist’s (and your) control.

That said, there are some things you can do to increase your chances of having one.

Many—though not all—therapists believe that for clients to have a corrective experience, therapy needs to reactivate difficult memories and the learned responses and painful feelings connected with them. Some believe you actually need to go through a re-enactment of the bad experience in therapy itself.

For example, if you have a painful memory of being judged or rejected, having something happen that makes you feel judged or rejected by your therapist—while upsetting at first—can set the stage for a corrective emotional experience.

Of course, this doesn’t mean your therapist will or should intentionally try to make you feel judged or rejected. That’s the opposite of good therapy.

We create self-fulfilling prophecies by subtly influencing social situations in our daily lives, and we tend to push our therapists to follow the same pattern. A good therapist is sensitive enough to see when this is happening and to push back against it. When a therapist gently (and compassionately) challenges you at the right time and with the right degree of tact, you’re much more likely to be able to receive it instead of defensively rejecting it.

The process of exploring your reaction and the painful emotions that follow can lead to a corrective emotional experience.

Corrective experiences can happen in close relationships with family and friends. On rare occasions, they can even happen during fleeting or chance encounters with strangers you’ve just met.

This can happen when someone apologizes and takes responsibility for something they always blamed you for, helps or cares for you in a way you’ve never experienced, or says something to or about you no one has ever said before—but that you’ve always wanted to hear.

However, the same things that make us need corrective emotional experiences in the first place can make it hard for them to stick. The same person who apologized may retract it later or continue to mistreat you. An act of kindness can be eclipsed by others’ casual disregard. And the words you’ve always wanted to hear can get lost in the din of everyday criticism that sweeps behind them like an incoming tide.

While different therapists have different approaches (and use different methods), they all are trained to listen without judgment, express empathy, and challenge your painful beliefs about yourself.

In fact, while there are specific corrective experiences that can happen in therapy—like your therapist remembering things your parents always forgot—the overall process of therapy can be a corrective emotional experience in itself. Day after day, session after session, you can experience being seen and understood. This is an inherent part of the therapeutic process.

As your therapist bears witness to you, affirming your life and your story, you start to realize your worth. You start to see where you shine and to feel like you deserve to be heard and seen. You then start to carry that attitude into your other relationships outside of therapy.

Carl Rogers called this quality of the therapist “unconditional positive regard,” and many clients have borne witness to how profoundly transformative the warmth of a therapist’s radiant attention can be.

They can open up new pathways in your life, free you from painful beliefs about yourself that always held you back, and help you discover parts of yourself that you might not have even known were there.

While the inner process of a corrective emotional experience is mysterious and complex, the events that lead to one are not. You can have a corrective experience simply because someone you trust sees you differently than you expect to be seen. A single statement, a surprising reaction, or simply being held in positive regard for a sustained amount of time can all trigger one.

Therapy isn’t the only place you can have corrective emotional experiences, but it makes them much more likely. This is because it’s your therapist’s job to support you in exactly the way that can lead to one (and because they’re trained to notice and follow moments in therapy that can cause one to happen).

Corrective experiences aren’t the only way therapy can heal. You don’t need to have one for therapy to be able to help you change and grow. They are just one of many healing tools therapy has to offer.

But they’re one of the most universal and powerful ways therapy can help, and we hope that learning more about them can help you go deeper and get more out of your therapy. With your therapist’s help, you can release the past and create a more amazing future than you ever believed was possible for yourself.