Latest / Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery / 122 | Corrective Experiences: the science-backed, Scripture-rooted way God is healing what shame broke

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122 | Corrective Experiences: the science-backed, Scripture-rooted way God is healing what shame broke · Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery

Hello, friend.
Welcome back.
I'm so excited you're here.
We are gonna talk about one of my favorite topics today, which is having a corrective experience.
Because what if healing wasn't about trying harder? What if it was about experiencing something different? What if the moment that changed everything for you wasn't a sermon or a decision or a prayer, but a specific moment where someone responded to you in a way that you didn't expect? A moment where your body felt safe before your mind could catch up, where something old and heavy seemed to start to loosen.
Friend, there's a name for this, and it's called a corrective experience, and I believe God has been orchestrating them into your life longer than you might realize.
So today, we're going to name these experiences, and then we're gonna start collecting them on purpose.
Before we dive in, I want to extend a personal invitation from me to you, because what we're talking about today, corrective experiences, they don't just happen in isolation.
They happen in relationship, in safe rooms with safe people who respond differently than the shame voice told you that they would.
And friend, that is exactly why I created Rooted in Joy.
That's what it's designed to be.
It is designed to be a six-month healing journey of corrective experiences for women who are rebuilding their life and their identity after infidelity.
It is one of the most intentionally safe spaces that I know how to create because I built it out of my own desperate need for it.
You see, women come to Rooted in Joy bracing for judgment, and they tell me that.
"Are, are you going to pressure me to do this? Are people going to hear my story and shudder or turn away?" But instead, when these women come, what they find is women who get it, coaching that meets them in their body and their mind and their heart and their soul, and they find a community where their story doesn't disqualify them, but it actually connects them in a deeper way Every single group call, every devotional, every honest conversation inside that community has the potential to be a corrective experience for your nervous system.
So if you are ready to stop healing in isolation because, spoiler alert, it can't happen, but if you are ready to start healing in a room that was designed with you in mind, friend, would you send me a DM on Instagram? Come find me in the Facebook community, send me an email, and let's talk about your next step.
Okay, are you ready for this? There is a name for what has happened to you, and I want to start by giving you this name because it took me years to find this.
So many of the women that I coach have had moments, quiet, unexpected, sometimes unremarkable moments, something ordinary, but they notice that something shifted, where the weight that they were carrying got a little bit lighter or where an old belief lost some of its grip.
And these women didn't know what to call it, how to describe it.
Maybe you've had one.
Maybe you told someone your secret and they didn't recoil or they didn't condemn.
Maybe a safe person looked at you with kindness when you expected to receive disgust.
Maybe you made a right choice in a moment where you used to make a wrong one, and you felt it in your body, the excitement and the celebration and the pride before your mind could understand what just happened.
Friend, this is called a corrective experience, and it is one of the most powerful healing mechanisms God built into your human body.
Okay, here's the clinical definition, and then I'm gonna make it real, what it actually means for you.
So in 1946, two psychoanalysts named Franz Alexander and Thomas French introduced this concept of a corrective emotional experience.
And the idea is this: when you have been wounded in a relationship, when someone has responded to you with shame or rejection or anger or abandonment, your brain files that response as what to expect.
And so next time it becomes a prediction, which is why you find yourself bracing in relationships.
It's a posture that your nervous system carries into every similar situation afterward.
I mean, think about young kids.
If they accidentally burn themselves on the stove, y-you would think, you would hope that they would learn that lesson.
And so every time they're tempted to touch a hot stove again, their brain, their body is reminding them, "Remember last time? That hurt.
Don't do it again.
Stay away.
Listen to mom."
Well, even in a grown-up situation, this happens to you.
Your brain and your body are reminding you of how it felt, what went wrong, how did that situation play out last time, and then let's predict that it might happen again the next time.
However, when a safe person, a therapist, a good friend, a coach, a safe community, or even Jesus himself, when these safe people respond differently than your wound predicted, your brain experiences what neuroscientists call a prediction error, and that prediction error triggers something called memory reconsolidation.
I know.
There's a lot of big words.
Hang with me here.
But this memory reconsolidation is where the old painful memory is literally updated with a new healthier response.
So think, you know, back in the day when we had to actually save files to our computer.
It's like a new file is getting saved in place of that old one.
So in other words, now you don't just know something new in your brain, but your body has felt something new at a cellular level.
Insight alone never changes longstanding patterns.
I'm gonna say that again.
Insight and knowledge alone never changes longstanding patterns.
But you know what does? Experience.
Your life experiences.
So here's what I want you to understand about that.
God obviously knew this long before Alexander and French wrote it down in 1946 because scripture is full of corrective experiences.
It's how God handles us.
These are intentionally designed moments where someone expected one thing from God and received something so much better that it rewrote their identity entirely.
Can we talk about two examples? Again, scripture's full of them, but here's two that I wanna call out.
One of them I know you're familiar with and might be the most common example of this.
John 21, there's the story of Simon Peter, and in John 21 it's after the resurrection.
Jesus is alive, but Peter is still carrying something that the resurrection hasn't touched yet.
Because if you remember a few chapters earlier, Peter was the one who stood by a fire in a courtyard and denied that he knew Jesus three times.
Three times, and the rooster crowed like Jesus predicted, and Peter wept bitterly.
He knew what he had done.
And friends, you know what shame feels like.
Put that on Peter now, the ultimate level of shame because he denied knowing his friend and his teacher and his Lord.
So Jesus died.
Peter is now living with the shame of the last words that he spoke about Jesus.
And so Peter went back to fishing, back to what he knew before Jesus had called him.
And you know what? That's kind of interesting because maybe Peter didn't know how to be a disciple anymore.
Maybe he thought that that chapter in his life was closed.
But then Jesus appears on that shore, and Jesus built a fire, and he has bread and fish waiting for his friends, and he feeds them first before any conversation, before any reckoning.
Grace came before direction.
We talked about that in the last episode as well.
Nourishment came before correction.
And then, then Jesus asks Peter a question, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" And I want you to sit in Peter's body for a moment.
His heart is probably pounding out of his chest.
There's likely a knot in his stomach, the weight in his chest and his heart.
He's probably been rehearsing this moment, consciously or not, since that courtyard, just replaying, stuck in that loop.
He knows what he deserves, and he's expecting that disappointed look, a reminder of the failure, a reprimand, a verdict.
And Jesus asks him, "Do you love me?" And he asks him three times, one to replace each of his denials.
Jesus is not reopening a wound, but he's replacing every memory of Peter's betrayal, now with a declaration of love.
To Peter's body and nervous system, it's a new experience at the exact site of the old one.
And then Jesus doesn't say, "You're forgiven.
Sit down.
Give me a hug."
But Jesus says, "Feed my sheep."
Peter's reinstated.
He's commissioned.
He's trusted again, publicly and specifically, and with a purpose.
If I had been there, I know I would've been expecting condemnation, and a disgusted look, and a conversation like, "You really hurt me.
Did you know that?" But instead, he received reinstatement, a new identity.
His identity had been the one who denied Jesus, but his identity here was rewritten, and it wasn't rewritten by Peter trying harder, or thinking more deeply about it, or by Peter trying to prove himself, or you know, even by trying to punish himself.
But everything changed in this conversation on the beach where Jesus responded in a way that Peter's shame never predicted.
That is a corrective experience, and it changed the trajectory of his life and also the early church.
Okay, I have another example here.
John chapter 8, earlier in the same book, because this one is deeply personal for me and so many of you.
So if you know John chapter 8, it's the famous story of the woman caught in adultery.
This woman was dragged into the temple courts, exposed, surrounded by men who are loud and holding these stones.
Her body is in full threat response.
Her nervous system is screaming.
Every cell in her is braced for the worst possible outcome, and the worst possible outcome is entirely reasonable given her circumstances and what the law required at the time.
And Jesus, who sees all of it, got quiet.
He kneels down.
He writes in the dirt.
He brings the energy of the entire crowd down before he says a single word, and one by one, her accusers leave, and then it's just her and Jesus.
And Jesus says, "Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?" And she says, "No one, Lord."
And he replies, "Neither do I condemn you.
Go and sin no more."
And that is grace first, safety first, before direction- Before the identity change, before the reinstatement, her system needed to experience safety and the absence of threat before she could receive that command to go and sin no more.
And Jesus knew that.
He designed her that way, and he designed you that way, too.
Because here's the neuroscience under the theology.
Your brain cannot receive direction or make good choices or dream about the future when it is in a state of threat.
If you have ever studied the brain, there's a part that's called the p-prefrontal cortex, and this part is responsible for planning, for decision-making, for identity, and all of that goes offline when you are overcome with shame and fear.
Safety has to come first.
Grace has to land in your body before direction can be understood in the mind.
That's not a weak theology.
That's how God created our nervous system and our brains and our bodies to work together, and it's exactly what Jesus modeled every single time he encountered a woman in shame.
So God has likely been orchestrating similar corrective experiences in your life already.
You may just not have had a name for them, or you may not have noticed them.
So let me tell you about one of mine.
For a long time, longer than I want to admit I didn't trust myself around men.
I had this belief that had been reinforced many times that I'm just always the flirt.
I always find a way to make a conversation with a guy mean something more than it should.
I can't just be around men without crossing some kind of line.
And these were the, the lies and the stories I kept telling myself.
And you know what? Those beliefs had evidence.
I mean, look at my years in the affair.
I had given myself enough evidence to say, "Yep, she can't be trusted.
She can't be trusted."
And so my nervous system carried that like a warning label.
"Warning, warning, guys are not safe around Christina."
But slowly, intentionally, without me realizing what was happening, God started placing men in my life who were safe.
My pastor friend, my boss, board members at my school, other men who knew my story and still respected my work and treated me with complete integrity and dignity And every single interaction, every meeting, every conversation, every moment where I showed up and nothing inappropriate happened, that was a grain of rice that I was moving onto the healing side of my balancing scale.
One at a time, one at a time, I kept stacking these grains of rice to say, oh, I did it.
I had a conversation with a guy and nothing bad happened.
And then last year, I went on a business retreat.
It was a mixed group, and I found myself in a conversation with a male friend, a brother really, and I remember on the inside tearing up because I looked around the room that we were in and I thought, "I'm surrounded by men who respect me and who I trust, and men who I can be around without making it mean anything.
I can trust myself here."
And so this old belief, I always find a way to cross the line, had been rewritten, not by one single dramatic moment, but by dozens of quiet, accumulated experiences where my nervous system was learning something new.
It is safe to be here.
I am not who I used to be.
And so I told my friend in that moment, "I am so grateful for this corrective experience."
I had a chance to feel what it was like to make a right choice, to enjoy exactly where I was, to just be.
And this is what healing looks like from the inside.
Now, I want to get practical because this is where your healing will accelerate.
Most women experience corrective experiences passively.
They happen, they're beautiful, and life moves on, and the shame voice comes back, and the old belief reasserts itself, and honestly, the experience just gets lost and buried.
And so I want to teach you how to catch them, how to anchor them, how to let your brain file these experiences as evidence of who you are and who you're becoming.
So here's what that looks like.
Number one, notice it in your body first.
When something happen that contradicts an old wound or an old belief, like when someone responds with kindness instead of judgment, when you make a right choice in a moment that used to trip you up, or when you feel safe when you used to feel afraid, pause.
Pause right there.
Before you move on, before you minimize it, before you overthink it, before shame comes in, pause and notice what is happening in your body in that moment.
Where do you feel it? Does your chest open a little bit? Do your shoulders drop a little bit? Does anything loosen in your throat? So that physical sensation, wherever it is, is your nervous system receiving new information.
Don't rush past it.
Then number two, name it out loud.
To yourself, to God, to a safe person, but say the words, "That was a corrective experience," or even something more simple like, "Ugh, something just shifted."
Naming it activates that prefrontal cortex I mentioned, and it helps your brain begin the process of this memory reconsolidation.
The experience moves from something that just happened to you to something that you are intentionally integrating into your life and your future.
You're calling out to your system, "Pay attention to this.
This was a corrective experience.
This is important," and your system will respond to that.
So pause when you notice it, notice it in your body, and then name it out loud.
Then number three, ask yourself, what old belief did this just contradict? This is a coaching question that I ask my girls all the time.
Not just how did it feel, but what did you used to believe that at this moment just got challenged? When you can name the old belief and the new experience at the same time, you are doing the work of rewiring at the deepest level.
Don't mind the motorcycle if you just heard that.
Okay, step number four, um, add this experience to your scale.
Remember I just mentioned moving grain of rice from one side of the balance scale to the other? Well, every single corrective experience is another grain of rice moving from the shame side to the healing side.
The goal here is not perfection.
It's just accumulation, adding one more and adding one more.
Stack enough of them and the scale eventually tips.
I promise it happens every time.
Stack enough of these grains of rice and one day you will realize that the old belief has lost its authority over you.
So keep at it.
Don't give up.
All right, and step number five, let safe community witness you and this experience.
There is something neurologically powerful about speaking out about a corrective experience to another person who responds with, "Yes, I see that in you."
That response itself becomes another corrective experience.
Isn't that amazing? This is why healing in community accelerates what healing alone can't do.
This is why I ask women after a really brave and courageous moment, "How did that feel in your body? What does it mean about who you are?" Because the experience itself without the integration, it's a missed opportunity.
You, you won't be aware of it.
You won't have the opportunity of being witnessed and bringing it into your life, that being integrated.
But when someone else can see you in that, that's, that's the magic sauce right there.
Sister, you have had too many hard days to miss the healing that's trying to happen to you.
And sometimes we just need community to point it out and to encourage us along the way.
So I want to close with this.
While Jesus is 100% your Savior, that's not it.
He's not just your Savior.
He is your most intentional corrective experience.
Every moment that Jesus met a woman in shame and responded with mercy, He was doing something in her body that no amount of religious instruction could ever do.
Jesus was giving her body evidence that she was safe, that she was loved, and that her story was not over.
And guess what? He is still doing that today in the safe people that He places on your path, in the moments that you choose differently, in the communities where your story is held without flinching.
You are not just being forgiven.
You are being rewired quite literally in your brain.
And every single day that you show up and you make right choices and you choose healing, you are adding to the most important evidence file you will ever build.
The one that says, "I am loved.
I am not my worst day, and I can trust who I'm becoming in Jesus' name."
So friend, I want you to think of one corrective experience that has already happened in your life.
One moment where someone responded differently or where you chose differently than you would have.
Just think of one, and I dare you to send it to me in a message.
Again, whether it's on Instagram or find me on Facebook, uh, specifically in the community or send me an email.
All of the links are in the show notes.
But I dare you to send me a message and tell me what was that corrective experience for you.
I would be so honored to witness you in that because naming it to someone safe, again, that's another corrective experience right there.
So if you want community that is designed to create these moments where there's safe women, honest coaching, and the presence of God, and all of these things work together to rewrite your story from the inside out, friend, Rooted in Joy is that place.
I love you, dear friend.
Your story is not over.
It is still being written.
And so God, I pray that you would meet my sister in these places where the old beliefs still feel loud.
God, bring people into her life who respond with kindness when she expects judgment.
And would you let every safe moment, every right choice, every whisper of your grace become evidence that she is healing.
Father, give her eyes to see what you are already doing and let her body learn what her heart is beginning to believe, that she is safe, she is so loved, and she is not who she was.
In Jesus' name, amen.