A Psychologist's Thought Book: Observations #10

                                                # 10

Therapy begins when the "you" becomes "me".

One of the things that psychotherapy can help to produce is the transition between understanding one’s self as the “false universal” and becoming more firmly an individual.  It is amazing to listen to all people speak and hear how often we all use the word “you” in a way that seems to mean everyone.  So a client, when speaking about him self might say “So sometimes you do things that you’re not proud of.” In this context, the “you” distances one self from the responsibility for one’s own actions. Part of the self-building that can happen in therapy is to replace those “yous” with “I”s and “me”s.  Some critics have suggested the therapy that does this makes people selfish and over emphasizes “individual” needs to the detriment of society because to ‘produces’ a narcissistic ME. Nothing could be further from the truth. By putting people in charge of their own lives, it removes narcissism of the Universal You.  The you says whatever I think--everyone else thinks as well.    The you is far more dangerous than the I because the You allows the projection of unanimous values onto people who probably do not hold those values.  When the client says I, she is only speaking for herself and now others are free to disagree with her, be aligned with her or have an number of differing opinions. The I is far from selfish, it pulls me out of a false sense of unity so that I can firmly can say what I stand for and it inherently respects others because I now don’t initially assume that there is universal agreement with me.