Not sure I'm on board with all of that. In speaking to other vets and those who have experienced trauma in and outside of battle one thing seems to be mentioned a lot. How can someone provide therapy, guidance or counseling on something they haven't experienced? How would someone know what you're speaking about if they haven't experienced it or had any real dealings with it outside of faraway sessions? I can imagine it's quite difficult to get someone to buy in. I'm just talking generalities here because I don't know your background just what I've heard from others with like experiences. It's tough to relate until you walk that mile in someone's shoes as they say.
I remember listening to my dad and grandad's stories when I was young and couldn't relate to what they were saying. I understood it but couldn't relate. It wasn't until years later after I had some of the same experiences that I somewhat understood what was going on. Admittedly my experiences likely pale to what they went through.
I understand the skepticism. Whenever I meet with a new patient, there is either this skepticism or a belief that I am like a medical doctor and will just assign a diagnosis and treatment plan. These perspectives are not limited to just the veterans that I have worked with over the years; they are experienced by almost everybody who chooses to go to therapy.
Accordingly, in training to be a psychotherapist, the core abilities of empathy, theory of mind, and interpersonal communication are constantly assessed, trained, practiced, and tested until they become reliable professional skills. Part of that professional skillset is accommodating and adapting to the understanding that it is impossible for empathy to be perfect.
In training, we spend a lot of time early on working on phenomenology and grinding through our understanding of sensation, perception, and consciousness; and I personally have devoted a large part of my life to the on-going study of perception and consciousness. There is no scientific consensus, though we have been converging on a type of physicalism over the last few decades as functional neuroimaging and machine learning have really taken center stage in psychological research.
My perspective has always learned toward the hard materialism of the William James' lineage of psychology, and I find the teleofunctionalism of philosophers like Daniel Dennett, Lycan, and others to be especially compelling, despite their perspectives often clashing with those of psychologists and neuroscientists like Damasio and Ledoux. I have enthusiastically read and reread every book written by those two, in particular, as a type of grounding practice when I find myself drifting back into a more hard-edged philosophical stance.
This training is relevant to practice because it inculcates an understanding and comfort with the fact that we will never truly understand or perceive exactly what another person sees, feels, thinks, or believes; and it is the process of attempting to understand that is the predominant mechanism of connection and collaboration in the therapeutic setting. The genuine, on-going attempt to understand that is grounded in the humility of never truly knowing is what invites buy-in and builds a strong working alliance in therapy.
We talk together in a supportive, collaborative manner with a pragmatic focus on improving the person's life. We build hypotheses and models together that the person can test and employ to develop a greater sense of understanding and agency. I provide tools and theories and frameworks, and my patient tries them out to see how they work for them, individually, then we continuously refine and tailor those tools until my patient starts getting the outcomes that they want.
www.latimes.com
