If you receive the very thing you’ve always needed, the very thing you didn’t get that is inextricably linked to a traumatic experience, and this corrective experience brings you to your knees, you are not alone.

If you witness someone being treated the way you’ve always needed to be treated on a television show or in a book or a passing conversation with a friend, and this opens the griefy floodgates, you are not alone.

If you have experienced sexual assault, and someone lovingly and respectfully checks in with you for consent, this can be a corrective experience.

If you have lived through abuse and manipulation, and someone is kind to you, this can be a corrective experience. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you if these experiences bring up big emotions and overwhelming grief.

If you were not protected, and someone offers you protection - this can be a corrective experience and it can bring up so much grief, resentment, anger, and sadness. Because the protection might be hard to receive. For the times you needed it and didn't have it.

Sometimes waves of grief and sadness emerge when we experience hurts similar to our past experiences. Sometimes pain and sorrow visit when we directly experience or witness a corrective experience. Corrective experiences can include receiving kindness, love, validation, attentiveness, and consent when we haven’t previously.

If you are treated with kindness and it moves you to tears, you are not alone.

If what “should” be a healing experience brings you grief, you are not alone.

Healing can be complex and layered, just like we are.

Jess

Even if we can’t get the apology or acknowledgement or accountability from the person who harmed us, we might get those things from other folks in different situations. And while it’s not like the math works out where that makes it all okay that we didn’t get it from the person who we really needed it from, it might still feel really healing to receive it. Corrective experiences can be really tender, they can bring up a lot of grief and resentment - and they can touch into the parts of us that have been desiring and deserving a certain response or way of showing up. It can be healing to know that this sometimes can happen. It can be tender to be with the grief of the times we really needed it to happen and it didn’t.