The best counselors know themselves well. No, I don’t mean that the best counselors are self-centered. Rather, good counselors understand their biases, foibles, strengths and challenges. The best counselors know themselves inside and out and notice when they start to project their own thoughts and feelings onto others.
Why is this capacity so important? A counselor must see and note the difference between yourself and the client in front of you. This is vitally important if you are going to be of any help to that person. When we fail to see the difference, we end up counseling the other person as if they were an extension of ourselves. As a result, we fail to challenge our own biases and assume what helped us will help them.
Enter writer Mary Karr to illustrate this problem from the vantage point of writing a memoir.
Mary, author of several memoirs, has written a new book on how to write a memoir. I heard her being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air program today (find the audio here) and was taken by her advice to writing students. In response to a question about how to know if memory of events is accurately described, Mary tells of how she stages a fight (unbeknownst to her students) and then asks them to write about what they saw. As you might expect, each student sees something different. Why? Because they project their own lives and experiences onto the event. Even those with perfect recall, those who can get the dialogue just right, never fail to project their own assumptions into the story. Mary reminds listeners that it is impossible not to project ourselves into our observations. “We don’t so much as apprehend the world as we beam it from our eyeballs.” What can we do about this problem? She implores that writers to,
Learn the shape of yourself. Learn what you tend to project onto the landscape so that you can account for that tendency in your life and question it…
Learn to know the shape of yourself. What excellent advice for counselors.
Just last week I met with a man with decades of cross-cultural missions work on several continents. We spoke about the best ways to help students and new arrivals succeed cross-cultural ministry. This man reminded me that the best cross cultural education is not reading volumes about another culture (as good and helpful as that can be) but learning to know oneself inside and out so as to see the projections we tend to place on “the other.”
Want to avoid hurting others? You will surely need to know good counseling techniques and methods. you will want plenty of experience differentiating between types of problems. But, if you fail to really understand yourself and your tendencies, your utilization of those techniques may not be what the client needs.
Best advice to know yourself?
- Don’t take yourself too seriously.
- Ask your friends who you really trust to give it to you straight about your annoying habits.
- Get into your own therapy and don’t hide who you really are from the counselor.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 
I’m so sorry, I shared this without stopping to ask first! But I really liked this. Good advice! I’ll listen to the audio interview later.
If you don’t want it shared, please tell me, and I’ll go back and undo it.
This is a great post. I think it extends to anyone in leadership particularly parents and managers in the workplace.