It's an interesting question. I've had one T whose life experience I knew nothing about, one T who shared a single traumatic incident with me as a way to normalize my feelings about something that I was really struggling with, and one T who has talked about childhood traumas that resemble some of the traumas that I experienced, in very boundaried and non detailed ways. With my last T, who has shared the most, I find that his life experience is not so similar to mine, because the gender issues make our experiences differences in a lot of ways, in combination with the dynamics of the traumas being quite different. Nonetheless, I think that its somehow helps me to experience the way he talks about them, in ways that show me that he is both emotionally connected to his experience and yet not still scarred by it. I can both tell that he is "over" it and still able to relate to both his own and my experience. He shows me that you don't have to be obsessed with your past, nor do you need to shy away from it. That is what I appreciate about the personal things he shared with me-- not the information per se, which is in fact very little in detail-- but he *shows* me healing and hope and makes it believable.