Knowing yourself by knowing others

Because I trained at a practice that primarily treated anxiety disorders and OCD, as I became a psychologist, I was hearing everyone I worked with describe similar problems with their thoughts, their sensations, and their feelings. It gave me a deep sense of common humanity. I created Community Time to give other people the experience that I had in training. I wanted other people to hear the same thoughts, sensations, feelings, and behaviors coming from other people of other backgrounds and life experiences and to feel understanding and hope.

In individual psychotherapy, you can only go as far as what your conscious experience will allow. You can’t see what’s happening in your unconscious, because it is by its nature unavailable to you. A good psychotherapist will see patterns in you that you can’t see in yourself and help you understand them skillfully. Oftentimes a psychotherapist doesn’t know what to ask. You might not know what to report on.

Being in a group, especially with people with the same patterns as you have, can be like having the scales fall off your eyes. You hear others describe your experience and you realize that you don’t just have harm intrusions, but you also have difficulty making decisions and setting boundaries, and that those behaviors are connected. You don’t just worry about worry, but you also believe that worry helps you problem solve and that not worrying would mean that you don’t care.

Groups that have focused on panic attacks or harm intrusions are helpful. They help people understand the processes that maintain their suffering. You can see the patterns more clearly when they are happening in others than when they are happening within yourself. That said, talking about the panic cycle doesn’t necessarily make the panic cycle less likely.

Hearing similar patterns in other people doesn’t necessarily change your suffering. If you are using Community Time well, I hope that hearing similar patterns happening in other people helps you get distance from your suffering. I hope you see it as a disorder, an illness, that is not you and does not define you. Having a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, just like there’s no reason to be ashamed of having the flu. The utility of seeing your illness as an illness is so that you don’t see it as you. If it isn’t you, then it’s something you can change, or at least respond to differently. When you see it in other people you might also have more compassion about the symptoms than when you experience them yourself.

You see patterns of suffering of other people and you understand yourself a little better. You can see the pattern as a disorder. You feel compassion for the disorder, rather than shame about it. You start to get curious about the details of the disorder that start as very subtle thoughts or behaviors that can gradually take over your experience. My hope is that as you hear suffering in others, you both understand what’s happening for you and you reframe your attitude towards it with curiosity and compassion.