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By Stephen L Salter Psy. D.  There's no greater gift a therapist can give than to understand you as you understand yourself. We all have blind spots and therapists are in a position to notice things we may not notice about ourselves. But ultimately, I believe we know ourselves better than anyone else. Only we have access to the particular way we see the world--our emotional landscapes, our judgments, and our greatest concerns. Investigating the worlds outside our awareness--the unconscious, the unknown, is only one part of exploration and understanding ourselves.
Invaluable pursuits are often forgotten in therapy. Does your therapist understand you how you understand yourself? Or do you feel they may be too quick to offer a competing view or one that doesn't give your view the fullest consideration. I've noticed a common grievance among individuals in therapy. A patient may discuss a subject of interest to them while picking up a familiar sense that their therapist might be thinking, "Okay, well this is all fine and dandy, but let's get to what's really going on.” What is the deeper meaning of what you're communicating. Again, I have no doubt our communications are rich in a depth that can be uncovered. But it can be a disservice to focus on a deeper underlying meaning without appreciating the height of your intention.
I believe every patient should have a therapist who cares, listens, and perseveres with them to develop a compassionate and overarching understanding. Does your therapist know, respect, and honor what matters most to you. Your ambitions? The people you love? What you love about them. Therapists may have some good ideas about the nature of your difficulties. Do they know equally of your strengths, your virtues, your various intelligences. Diagnoses focus on pathology and they are a convenient way of simplifying and categorizing a patient's suffering. They're a sticky issue because they come with social stigmas that create misunderstanding. If a therapist is going to use a diagnosis, it is one thing to understand the nature of the diagnosis. It's a whole other thing to understand the 10,000 ways in which you are not your diagnosis.
Being understood the way you understand yourself validates what you have to offer. It affirms your unique thoughts and perspective, your vision of the world and sense of justice. As you experience yourself affirmed and valued in the fullest sense, you develop strength and conviction in yourself and your life's direction. In being understood, your self-understanding inevitably grows and changes. As you and your therapist come to notice your development, a fertile dialectical understanding evolves.
Last Update: 11/9/2012
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