ABSTRACT
The concept of the "corrective emotional experience" is to encourage a client to reexperience previously unfavorable circumstances which he or she could not effectively process in the past, and then bring those conditions into the present in order to help set free the adverse influences of those circumstances. In the present, the client will be met with positive environmental and intrapsychic factors that were not present at the time of the traumatic experience. It also demonstrates the possibility and the benefit of staying connected to others when they wished to express their own deeper feelings. Frequently, the individual presenting the shameful feelings will first experience what seems like a reenactment of a childhood experience. This is ameliorated when others in the group validate him or her by connecting to their own shameful feelings thus providing the path for a corrective emotional experience to occur.
