Particular to you, not unique to you

Unique has become a hot word in the zeitgeist the last several years and has taken up its place in the therapy room. My altogether unscientific theory is that its popularity catapulted when the Food Network added a second channel, the Cooking Channel and suddenly had twice the space to fill with stories about food-celebrities you've sort-of heard of tasting pecan-crusted cinnamon rolls and food-cart pork sliders. Just about every morsel was described as mouth-watering and unique (and, to the frustration of grammarians, invariably, "so unique"). It's a delicious word, but I question its place in the therapy room even as I understand the trend.

Storytelling went through a resurgence around that same time, with shows like the Moth creating in-person and online forums forging a sort of re-democratization of story telling.

At the intersection of these two trends, catch phrases like "Tell YOUR story!" and "Everyone has a unique story!" began to proliferate. Oprah (among others) has been telling you to "Own your story". It's an extension of a 1970's "me generation" ethos that I believe is best encapsulated with one word: Unique!

Unique, of course, means one-of-a-kind and it's hard to argue that any individual isn't, in fact, unique. But I'm not so sure our experiences are all as singular as the word, in this usage, implies.

Your pain is your pain and should be honored. You have a need for and a right to a space wherein you are important, your needs are listened to, your wants are explored. Yet this implied singularity--uniqueness--seems inextricably alienating. If my pain is unique, how might others come to understand it, and by extension, understand me?

How do we reconcile these seemingly competing interests in the construction of effective therapy? How can we both honor the significance of one person's experiences without alienating those experiences from their place in a more universal framework of experiences?

Rather than attempt to resolve this, or claim that I've resolved it, I'd prefer to assert that there is good value in grappling with that question together, in the therapy room. I find it useful to make a distinction between unique and particular. With offering that experiences and suffering are particular we can choose to value the experience each person is having and the need we have to be curious about the particular ways that experience is happening or has happened for them, but without the isolation of imposing the notion of those experiences being one-of-a-kind.

It's an approach that seems a lot less lonely.