How can a therapist understand an experience they haven’t been through?
It’s not at all about experiencing the same situations as their clients. It’s about accurate empathy. Like any human with a heartbeat, my empathy helps me connect with the sad movie playing in the background as I type this. With a little girl’s pain when her doll was accidentally run over in the driveway. With my friend sharing the story of her pregnancy and childbirth so beautifully and frankly that I felt I was there beside her, with her young husband and the doula. With almost overdosing on Handel during Christmas break. With volunteering with Cancer Connect.
I’m an old man, and I’ve had tons of experiences in lots of places, but I’ll never match all the experiences my precious clients have had… until they share them with me, along with all the feelings they had then and still feel.
Fact is, having had exactly the same experience can be a disadvantage in psychotherapy. You could keep mentally comparing your bad car accident and your feelings with their bad car accident and their feelings, or work extra hard not to.
Now, we do know that people with similar experiences can support each other. I belonged to a priests’ support group for years, and it was great. We did share many of the same experiences, and that was comforting, of course. But we were also never operating at the level of intensive psychotherapy, which requires love and understanding, of course, but also a certain amount of distance and the ability to disengage at times. It also requires being able to shape and improve approaches and interventions, and to fully appreciate the entirety of your experience as new and yours alone.
There are plenty more stories and insights on how therapy works in Get the Most From Your Therapy, a friendly, practical guide to the experience.
