What's the value?

"Understanding" - Silvia Dutchevici


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Silvia is an author and a psychotherapist who believes in the transformative power of psychotherapy to change individuals who can change the world.  

She created the Critical Therapy Institute to expand psychoanalytic praxis to reflect how race, class, gender, and religion intersect with psychological conflicts. Critical Therapy works from the premise that the personal is political. To be more effective, psychotherapy must therefore interrogate the patient’s as well as the therapist’s worldview. As you might imagine I find this approach fascinating.


Silvia values "understanding" as the best tool we have to bring more compassion and open dialogue into the world. We need to do the work to understand ourselves, understand others, and understand why we experience the world the way we do. If we do that, then we should have less hidden fears, insecurities, and biases. The ripple effect of that is massive and is why Silvia is so passionate about her work.


I agree with Silvia that we should look at the whole picture and we should do the hard work to better understand ourselves and the world around us. So we spent a good bit of the discussion debating why it is so hard to actually do this. We discussed different factors like power dynamics, parenting approaches, and historical trends. We also discussed current societal issues like race and the patriarchy to see how the value of "understanding" could help.


Maybe my favorite part of the discussion was towards the end when we turned it onto ourselves. Do we actually practice what we preach? Do we prioritize understanding when engaging with someone we disagree? Many of these topics are so easy to buy into conceptually, but when real life emotions and consequences are involved it can all go out the window. So we explored a few social/political topics that ran counter to Silvia's beliefs and saw how understanding worked in those situations as well. 

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