I think we also project a lot onto our therapists. For example if you believe that being Christian is about living simply without ostentation and you know your therapist identifies as Christian, it’s easy to assume that being Christian means the same thing to her as it does to you. But maybe she sees it differently or maybe her understanding of “simply” is different from yours. (I’ll bet that there are many people in the world who would see your lifestyle as luxurious and lavish… these things are very relative.)

It’s the therapist’s job to make us feel understood and sometimes it can seem that they agree with us. They agree only that our feelings are valid, not that they share our entire moral and ethical framework. Sometimes the therapist is the first person to really impress upon us that we deserve not to be harmed and that seems like such a radical statement of solidarity that we imagine that we must have a lot in common. If we find out that we don’t or that we have some fundamental disagreements it might feel… a bit weird. But how much was inauthenticity in their persona and how much was our projection?