Thanks for your replies! I really appreciate the "Power of Myth" example you bring up. I agree that both growth/understanding of oneself vs. feeling seen/understood are in fact separate and important phenomena. Not sure exactly how nerdy we can all get here together, but the Joseph Campbell example makes me think of "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter of Lord of the Rings, when Frodo returns to the Shire to find it ravaged by war, which to me, reads as a metaphor for the trauma he's endured, and the self that can never be truly the same after undergoing such an experience.
I guess where I was coming from with my rumination is that you can make efforts to explain yourself which will fall short of the goal of feeling understood. I suppose that's why a good therapist (or loving people in general) are important! Because it isn't just the effort you take in explaining yourself, but the quality of the listening that translates to feeling truly understood.
And to satisfy the requirement of my class #4 forum posting: I enjoyed the context given at the beginning of Chapter 14 of Boyd Webb, in terms of understanding the statistics of family and community trauma, ands the signs of PTSD and attachment disorders, but I found a beautiful, condensed nugget of practical wisdom in some of the exercises and treatment modalities. She mentions making space for how kids feel, and what they wish, and I think these 6-words might define my most simplified approach to working with children. Make space for them to express how they feel, and find out what they want. Kids specifically, or maybe it's just my current client, seems to have a lot to say about how he wishes things were, and voicing those desires seems to lead pretty quickly to the analysis of his own tendencies and fosters the sense of agency that he sometimes regrets that he lacks.
I guess where I was coming from with my rumination is that you can make efforts to explain yourself which will fall short of the goal of feeling understood. I suppose that's why a good therapist (or loving people in general) are important! Because it isn't just the effort you take in explaining yourself, but the quality of the listening that translates to feeling truly understood.
And to satisfy the requirement of my class #4 forum posting: I enjoyed the context given at the beginning of Chapter 14 of Boyd Webb, in terms of understanding the statistics of family and community trauma, ands the signs of PTSD and attachment disorders, but I found a beautiful, condensed nugget of practical wisdom in some of the exercises and treatment modalities. She mentions making space for how kids feel, and what they wish, and I think these 6-words might define my most simplified approach to working with children. Make space for them to express how they feel, and find out what they want. Kids specifically, or maybe it's just my current client, seems to have a lot to say about how he wishes things were, and voicing those desires seems to lead pretty quickly to the analysis of his own tendencies and fosters the sense of agency that he sometimes regrets that he lacks.