Life Experience and Listening Well

When I started seeing clients as a provisional psychologist, I worried that I didn't have enough life experience.?

I was 23 and routinely saw clients who were in their 30s, 40s and 50s. The age gap felt massive to me.

Many of my clients had spent years being homeless, addicted, and dealing with problems that I had only read about. I’d never had to navigate experiences like theirs and I definitely hadn’t crafted an intervention for them.?

I had this fear that I wouldn’t be able to tell them anything that would fit with their unique experiences.

At that point in my career, I often felt that my ability to listen was all I had to give my clients. And so I doubled down on this and listened well. But if I'm being honest, I wanted to draw from the wisdom of life experience instead.

I was of course assuming that psychologists needed to be proficient in giving all kinds of advice. That we were meant to be experts in life, rather than the narrower field of mental health. An assumption that many of the community seem to hold too.

So I figured if I couldn't have life experience for a few years, surely I could compensate with clinical experience. I attended workshops and supervision frequently as part of my internship. I thought more training in CBT, ACT or DBT would give me something special to present to clients. Evidence-based therapies would be the golden ticket to helping clients, while my life experience caught up.

In retrospect, I realize I was simply putting both clinical skills and life experience on a pedestal. Since they were lacking early in my career, I figured they must be the things that would give me a perfect level of confidence and credibility with clients. This would be the combination that moved me away from the boring basics of ‘just listening’.

But an interesting thing happened when I was in my late 20s. I met a client who was a lot like me. He was a Sri Lankan immigrant like me. He’d experienced the complexities of being a brown kid trying to fit into a largely white community. He’d experienced racism. And he even enjoyed the same nerdy hobbies as me.

I had been practicing for a few years at this point and felt comfortable with my clinical skills. I was also nearly 30 and felt I'd gained a credible amount of life experience. But best of all, I shared many of the same experiences as my client. Surely now I had the perfect combination of clinical skills and life experience to get right to the point in every session.

But when I sat down to start the first session, I realized something deeply important about our work. No amount of life experience or clinical skills would ever erase the need to listen well. I might know what it was like to be Sri Lankan, immigrate, and assimilate. But I didn't know what it was really like to be him. Regardless of our shared heritage and experiences, we weren’t carbon copies of each other. We were individuals in our own right and so I started from scratch.?I began by listening just as deeply to him, as I would anyone else. And guess what? It worked.

I had been putting pressure on myself at 23 to get life experience and clinical skills, as if they would provide me with fast solutions in therapy. But when I finally met a client I should have been able to do this with, I discovered that there are no shortcuts in therapy. You have to use the fundamentals, whether you're 23 or 60. Whether you've been using evidence-based therapies for 1 week or 10 years.

The basics never stop being important.

So if you’re new to the industry, don't buy into the illusion that you need more life experience. You already have a skill that will allow you to do good work. It will always be important to bridge the gap between people, and listening well is the foundation of that.