“The patient needs an experience, not an explanation.”
-Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
This profound statement reflects the essence of relational psychotherapy: growth and healing emerge not from intellectual understanding alone, but through corrective emotional and relational experiences. True healing happens when we engage with our inner world in the presence of a caring and supportive other, who can hold space for our vulnerabilities, struggles, strengths, and challenge us.
At Think Recovery, we honour this core principle of change by creating a space where you can co-create new experiences firsthand—one moment, one interaction, one feeling at a time. This blog explores how new experiences facilitate healing and lasting transformation.
Prediction Error: Navigating the Unexpected
Our brains try to help us by acting as “prediction-making machines” with the goal of anticipating future outcomes and responses based on past experiences. Prediction error refers to the difference between what we expect to happen and what actually happens when we encounter something different in the present. For many, life experiences have taught us to anticipate rejection, disappointment, or neglect at key points in relationships. These often unconscious expectations shape how we approach others and navigate the reactions we anticipate from them. For example, if past experiences of expressing your needs were met with criticism or neglect, you might naturally expect to be met with rejection, even though the person on the other end in this current situation would meet you very differently.
This is where highlighting instances of prediction error can be a catalyst for growth. When reality doesn’t align with our typical expectations—the opportunity arises to rewire your brain’s understanding of what’s possible. These new experiences rewrite your implicit expectations, creating room for a more expansive and adaptive blueprint for future interactions with people you are in connection with.
In therapy, when these expectations are met with previously unexpected understanding, acceptance, or caring (including limit setting and confrontation) a prediction error occurs. The familiar outcome your brain was convinced would happen didn’t actually happen! In this disruption of old patterns by a new experience (which generates feelings of surprise and novelty), the capacity for learning to expect and to let in new relational experiences develops. In turn, allowing you to gradually explore what it feels like to be seen, heard, and supported in ways you may not have encountered before.
The Nourishment Barrier: Tolerating Newness and Goodness
While we may long for connection and care from others—we may also experience receiving this as unfamiliar or even uncomfortable at first. This paradox is known as a nourishment barrier. It reflects the difficulty of tolerating new, affirming experiences when they challenge and strongly contrast with deeply ingrained negative beliefs and assumptions we may hold about our worth or lovability.
Therapy provides a stable environment to sit with these feelings, gently expanding our capacity to receive and trust goodness over time. Gradually, clients learn to let their guard down, expect to be met with more understanding and to embrace receiving expressions of care as valid and deserved. This can also help us to develop greater self-acceptance of those aspects of ourselves that are difficult or painful to acknowledge.
The Bittersweet Nature of Receiving
When we finally receive what we’ve been missing—whether it’s warmth, validation, understanding, acceptance of the messy or difficult parts of our inner world, or a sense of belonging—it can evoke a sense of bittersweetness. On one hand, it’s deeply touching; on the other, it may highlight all the times in our past when this support wasn’t provided.
In therapy, there is space to acknowledge and honour this bittersweetness which is a vital part of healing. It helps us honour the contributions of the resilient parts of ourselves that survived without these experiences for so long, while opening the door to questioning their utility in the present. Grieving what wasn’t and what was missed, as well as reflecting on the ways in which we were shaped by these experiences is a necessary component of a successful therapy.
From Longing to Expectation: Integrating Positive and Negative Experiences in Relationship
Over time, the repeated experience of being met with comfort and challenge allows for a broadening of what one can accept within themselves and tolerate within a relationship. Holding the tension of differing or contrasting perspectives and experiences of each other becomes normalized. Relatedly, showing others the messy or difficult parts of ourselves enables us to show up more authentically, by no longer feeling a compulsive need to shun or deny those parts of us carrying feelings of shame, anger, guilt, worthlessness, etc.
Growth Through Experience
Healing is a dynamic process, rooted in the courage to engage with new experiences and the willingness to sit with discomfort as old patterns are challenged. At Think Recovery, we guide clients through this journey, helping them to expand their capacity to receive, connect, and thrive.
If you’re ready to step into your potential and to develop a greater sense of agency in relationship, we invite you to request a referral to our clinic today.
