An operator sits across from a counselor and describes a decision made under pressure. There was limited information, little time, and a consequence that cannot be undone. The decision has caused cognitive dissonence and some cognitive distortion.
The counselor may hear anxiety, guilt, or a pattern of distorted thinking and start to develop a judgment based on what he or she has learned. However, those possibilities deserve attention. But what if the decision itself was sound? What if the distress comes from having to live with a necessary choice that still cost someone dearly? They are living with the outcome of the decisions.
This is where counsel can fail, because they only have the experience they learned from the books. A person brings an experience shaped by responsibility, danger, loyalty, secrecy, or loss. The professional listens through a framework built for a different kind of life they never experienced or came close. The encounter may be courteous and well intentioned. The person leaves feeling less understood than when they arrived. That is a weakness born of lack of discernment between what the counselor has been taught to see or perceive based on a linear line of evidence and what the pattern and signal of experience highlights to them.
I have seen versions of this beyond operational work. People facing spiritual crisis, grief, or an experience they cannot easily explain are sometimes offered an interpretation before anyone has taken the time to understand what happened. A label can be useful. It can also end the inquiry too soon. There’s an arc of experience and perception that can change or transform the individual. This arc comes from my own research and something I will lecture on later. But know that experience is fundamental to true awareness and understanding.
Lived experience changes the questions we think to ask based on the patterns we perceive within our mind. Someone who has carried responsibility under pressure may recognize the difference between regret and wrongdoing. They may have acted based on the perceptions they were expected to see or they may have not based on the failed perceptions they ignored. Someone who has known profound loss may understand why a person resists the neat stages they are expected to move through. That recognition can build trust quickly.
Still, shared experience is no guarantee of good counsel. Two people can live through similar events and make entirely different meanings from them. A counselor can also do excellent work without having lived a client’s life, provided they are willing to listen beyond their training and test their assumptions. However, that is rarely the case, because as I mentioned before, the counselor follows a pattern of linear evidence that fall in neatly to a given conclusion.
The question is whether the counselor can hold more than one way of knowing at once: what the evidence suggests, what their training offers, what the person reports, and what remains uncertain. Rules and clinical models have their place. They become restrictive when they are used to settle a person’s experience before it has been properly heard. To hear someones experience and to sit in the well with them, the counselor needs to have lived that similar experience.
For operators especially, trust may depend on whether the counselor understands the conditions surrounding the story. What could be said? What had to remain private? What was known at the time of the decision? What did the person believe they owed others? Without those questions, counsel can mistake the weight of responsibility for a symptom.
Good counsel begins with the humility to ask, “What am I missing?” Then it stays with the answer long enough to learn something.