validating your unique experience
The unfortunate consequence of a society inundated with surveys and questionnaires is the unintentional invalidation of the human experience. While the appreciation for clarity, definition, and simplicity are understandable, we lose the value and power of personal perception resulting in personal discrediting. In therapy in particular, it is a mistake to eliminate a presenting concern as a potential source of pain simply because our experienced incidents do not align with a list of event options available on a survey: your experiences are entirely unique. While it remains true that you can always find someone in a worse situation, your experiences (and your perception of those experiences) are still significant. This emphasis on the uniqueness of the human experience is called phenomenology. The phenomenological approach states that your experience and perception of an event are a phenomenon as unique as you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made by a loving Creator who lavished individualistic qualities upon His children.
The importance of the phenomenological approach is in its application – particularly in how it provides permission for you to thoroughly validate the uniqueness of your life. Within the most basic of examples, we understand the fallacy of requiring two people to have the same opinion of a shared event: one person on a roller coaster is terrified while the other sitting next to him is ecstatic. Whose experience is correct? The fault is in the question itself. However simple this example may appear, the same logic is often lost in conversations of trauma, addiction, grief, anxiety… We instead unfairly invalidate through comparison the severity of our struggles; we analyze the importance of our symptoms (determining if they are worth addressing) after judging our experiences in comparison to the experiences of others. To resolve the issue, we need to reverse the order of our analysis: if we have determined our experienced symptoms to be sufficiently disturbing and impactful, them we must conclude that our triggering events is sufficiently valid. The presenting concern, then, can be redefined as a perception of an experience resulting in significant disturbance: no judgment, no shame, no comparison necessary.
If we allow ourselves the freedom to validate our uniqueness (and the uniqueness of our struggles), we also provide the chance to effectively pursue healing and growth without shame. We need to stop comparing, stop shaming, stop measuring our lives against our assumptions of others. What unites us is Christ—we connect to Him, we follow Him, we obey Him; everything else is a phenomenological journey.