Thanks for this insightful post.
I agree with you that my understanding of what Christianity is might be different from how my former therapist look upon religion and what a Christian should be like. It was spot on what you wrote about believing that the therapist agrees with me and my values when she actually perhaps just validated my feelings.
I agree some of my perceptions and beliefs about my former therapist have been projections. Part of it comes from how she acted and what she told me about herself, that is not everything is her "therapist persona", nor everything is the "real her" when she doesn´t see clients and work as a therapist.
I also agree it´s easy to think that we have a lot in common with a therapist when we feel validated and heard but that might just be partly true or not true at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Favorite Jeans
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?
|