Corrective Emotional Experiences

The corrective emotional experience, a concept introduced by Franz Alexander over 60 years ago, has become ubiquitous in many different forms of psychotherapy. Alexander pointed out that in psychotherapy the patient is often re-exposed to emotionally painful incidents that could not be handled earlier in life. This re-exposure under conditions of safety that therapy provides constitutes a corrective experience that can begin to repair the pathogenic influence of previous adverse life events. There can be little doubt that corrective experiences are an important effective ingredient in psychotherapy. What is less clear is how a therapist can know what will be a corrective experience for a particular patient. In this video, with George Silberschatz, PhD, we will highlight how a therapist’s attitude or intervention that is corrective for one patient may be detrimental for another. Control-mastery theory and the patient plan formulation in particular is a useful guide for providing patients the corrective experiences they seek. Get your free e-book on how Control-Mastery Theory works: http://personalizedpsychotherapy.com/ebook Learn about the Personalized Psychotherapy Institute: https://sfprg.org/