In
psyche, philosopher Sabrina B. Little argues that character sometimes must be built by overshooting. She notes Aristotle's account of a virtue as a mean between excess and deficiency — adding that you cannot find your own mean simply by reading a chart. Her example is a runner acquiring humility, “owning one's limitations, neither presuming too much nor too little of one's capabilities,” who starts races too fast and then too slow until she finds where her capacities lie. She also notes Aristotle's image of the carpenter bending warped timber past straight so that it settles true.
Little also names the risk: her ethics students, aiming at open-mindedness, overshot into indiscriminateness, and she worried the overcorrection might stick.
Little’s article led me to think about how psychotherapists conceptualize and apply this concept of growth — including using overshooting in therapy. I first thought of exposure and response prevention for OCD, where the patient with fears of contamination touches the seat in a public restroom and does not wash his hands. The exaggerated act is not recklessness but a measuring instrument — ordinary behavior would tell him nothing, because his fear has already reclassified ordinary as dangerous.
I expanded my thinking to my work as a schema therapist. Little's runner has reliable skills: she overshoots, feels the cost, adjusts. A patient whose Subjugation schema formed under a domineering, emotionally distant father often does not. The schema has shifted the scale and diminished the skill. Ordinary self-assertion strikes him as aggression, shame, danger. What feels to him like the balanced middle is, measured from outside, still holding back. For him, overcorrection is what brings him closer to the middle. It will feel like “too much” while he is doing it, and that is why it takes more awareness and effort than it does for Little’s runner.
That is also why simply asking a patient to change his behavior or work on it without any guidance or preparation is unlikely to be successful. The underlying schema-mode activation is still too powerful to overcome by willpower alone. The experiential techniques provide on a visceral level what cognitive work alone cannot: imagery in which the therapist enters a remembered scene and meets the need the child did not get; mode dialogues in which the patient speaks as his coping mode and is asked what it has cost him.
Helping the patient access the Angry Child mode also has a role in overcorrection. The Angry Child mode holds anger over core emotional needs not being sufficiently met in childhood. It carries the story of what was owed and never provided. That story is not always easy to express for the patient with the Subjugation schema.
Activating the Angry Child can nonetheless be freeing, once the patient sees that this form of anger is necessary for growth. Expressing it may feel like “too much,” although it is part of the process of finding his mean. Experiential work supports emotional healing; behavioral pattern breaking supplies the real-life application.
With that motive in place, the behavioral work is more likely to succeed.
Confidence and willingness grow from understanding the schema-modes behind the unwanted behavior and from healing the unmet emotional needs that fed them. In practice that means assertion rehearsed in session, then tried out in progressively harder real-life settings, at times deliberately overdone — and reported back afterwards as far more forceful than it actually was. That gap between how it felt and how it landed is where he can adjust.
Over time in therapy, what keeps the overcorrection from becoming the norm is fortifying the patient’s Healthy Adult mode. This is the internalized healthy parent: the part that comforts the Vulnerable Child (the frightened, unmet child still carried inside) and guides adult decisions. Fortifying the Healthy Adult resonates with Little’s account of overshooting as the way to Aristotle’s mean. Both require a shift in mindset, curiosity about one’s own limits, a willingness to sit with fear, and deliberate experiments in acting differently.
Little is right that the road to virtue sometimes runs by way of vice. I would add that when a patient’s sense of the middle has been bent by his schema, the detour is not optional — and someone has to hold the measure until he can read it himself. I may keep a piece of warped timber in my office to remember it.
Sabrina B. Little, “Sometimes, the road to virtue comes by way of vice,” psyche. psyche.co/ideas/sometimes-the-road-to-virtue-comes-by-way-of-vice
