This may be a tangent, but I found this statement by Jaybird57 especially important:
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I just wanted to comment on how our mental view of therapists as being perfect and untouched by the trauma of life possibly makes us close doors on important connections . . . doors that we might possibly close or cut off in other relationships we attempt to foster.
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I would extend that beyond therapists. In many of the forums on this site and other mental health sites, as well in real life experience, many people express the feeling that they are particularly odd, weird, messed up or generally awful, and that other people are leading wonderful, easy or perfect lives.
In my experience, nobody has a perfect life. Some people have it easier, but even lives that look so smooth and seamless on the surface can be marred by trauma, loss, fears, agony, shame and struggle.
You can't tell by looking at someone if they were abused as a child or assaulted in an alley or had their heart broken, money stolen or have sick kids at home. The shiniest, most-together-looking professional I know lived on the streets as a homeless teenager before he managed to pull himself out of it and into school. And yet I've heard people shout at him, "You could never know what it's like ...." He knows. He knows all too well and he's dedicated his adult life to helping street people.
As Jaybird said so well, our mental views of Ts (and other people around us) as being untouched by the trauma of life (and therefore different from us and unable to comprehend us) may cause us to close doors on important connections that could foster important relationships.
IMO, that's an important idea to extend not only to Ts but to many of the people we meet. We can't tell what struggles they've faced in life just by looking at them. They may look damn good on the surface. It doesn't help us any if we automatically judge them as having it easy and then turn around and judge ourselves as somehow ruined or awful in comparison because we
know what we've suffered.
Maybe when we judge others without adequate information about their lives the person we may actually be harming the most by that judgment is ourselves, especially if we go around feeling either less-than or superior-to in comparison. More often than not, we'll be equal to them in ways we could never imagine.