Connecting individuals to their stories, couples to each other, and all to God.
“Good psychotherapy isn’t simply recounting what’s happened to you since your last visit, or how you’ve felt in the past week or month. Although that can be a small component of each weekly visit, it should never be the focus. The focus is in helping you better understand your thoughts, relationships and behaviors, and how all of that impacts your emotions and can lead you into whatever condition you’re grappling with.”
via PsychCentral
Skimming the surface in life is more emotionally expensive than actually digging in and being honest of life. The lack of depth in our world feels to be expanding at an unstoppable rate. From information to nutrition, we can satisfy our most basic longings in an instant rarely stopping for long to consider the implications of the hunger that we are feeling.
Symington, in Narcissism: A New Theory , suggests that in “people dominated by narcissistic currents there is a failure of separateness between themselves and others, and they will asume that you think in the same way that they think.” These ‘narcissistic currents’ are significant in corporate settings but it’s because personal pathologies creation organizational pathologies.
In personal relationships, this current can be seen in the movement towards the abolishing of difference in striving for agreement. If agreement is the goal of relationships, it is impossible to care for the other. Listening will only be done as a way to weed our discontentment where disagreements occur, essentially looking to murder the separateness that I feel with you. So I either become like you, or you like me … neither option allowing for either person to be present with the other.
Too often insight, knowledge, and assumptions act as intermediaries for the lack of experience.