This month, I want to explore a question I have thought about for years: Do you have to live something in order to understand it? I have worked in mental health for the past eighteen years. When I started out as a young therapist, I was unmarried and had no children, yet a big part of my day-to-day work was talking to clients about their marital and relationship problems or teaching parenting skills.

I remember dreading being asked, “Do you have children?” or “Are you married?” These questions often seemed to assume: if you're not married and have no children, how could you possibly understand? At the time, I often experienced these questions as an implicit challenge to my credibility.

I could show my degree and license, talk about continuing education, and mention my years of work in mental health, but the implication still felt clear: without lived experience, I couldn’t truly understand or help. I found myself wondering whether this standard was applied equally. My father, for example, is a retired OBGYN. To my knowledge, no patient has ever said to him, “You’ve never been pregnant, so how could you possibly help me through labor and delivery?”

His expertise was accepted because of his education, training, and years of experience caring for patients. Yet my own education and professional experience often seemed secondary to questions about my personal life. Why?

These experiences left me wondering: do we believe people must personally experience something in order to understand it, and do we apply that expectation selectively? There is no question that lived experience has value. Someone who has walked through infertility, grief, addiction, divorce, parenthood, or chronic illness often brings a depth of insight that cannot be learned from a textbook. Common experience can create trust and connection, helping people feel less alone, which is one reason peer support groups can be so powerful. But lived experience is not the same thing as understanding.

If personal experience were the only path to understanding, many professions would cease to function. Just as we don’t expect our OBGYN to have personally given birth, we also don’t require oncologists to be cancer survivors, or cardiologists to have heart disease. We don’t insist that criminal defense attorneys have been incarcerated or that aerospace engineers have been to space. So why does lived experience matter sometimes, but not all the time?

Questions about lived experience are not distributed equally. Young professionals are often asked to prove themselves in ways older professionals are not. A female therapist without children may be viewed differently from a male therapist without children. A younger clinician may be questioned more than an older one, even with equal experience.

Truthfully, none of us can fully understand another person’s experience—not even when we’ve lived through something similar. Common experiences are rarely identical. Two people can experience the same event and walk away with different emotional realities.

I may be a parent now, but is being a parent enough to fully understand every parent's experience? Is being married enough to understand every relationship challenge? Of course not.

Whether intentional or not, these assumptions influence who is granted immediate credibility and who must earn it. The real question is why some people are allowed to draw authority from their expertise while others are expected to draw authority from their personal lives.

There seems to be a genuine inconsistency. Curiously, clients rarely ask whether their therapist has personally struggled with depression, anxiety, OCD, or suicidal thoughts. Yet many therapists are asked whether they are married or have children. Why do some experiences seem essential for credibility while others do not?

People tend to grant authority in two different ways: through professional expertise and through lived experience. In medicine, expertise is generally considered sufficient. Yet when it comes to therapy, especially issues involving marriage and parenting, people often place greater value on shared life experiences.

These assumptions appear to be formed by a desire for sympathy and validation, and by a tendency to equate similarity with understanding. Unlike surgeons or attorneys, therapists become part of the treatment. Clients are revealing intimate parts of their lives, so curiosity about the therapist is understandable. Questions about marriage or children may therefore reflect a search for safety and understanding rather than a true assessment of professional competence.

Marriage and parenting are often viewed as expected milestones of adulthood rather than exceptional experiences. Because they are seen as normal everyday roles, people may assume firsthand participation is necessary to understand. Conditions such as cancer, heart disease, depression, anxiety, addiction, or trauma, however, are viewed as adversities rather than developmental milestones. Since they are neither universal nor desirable, society tends to accept professional expertise as sufficient authority.

Ultimately, lived experience and professional expertise represent different forms of knowledge, and modern society applies them inconsistently. Some professionals are allowed to borrow authority from expertise. Others—therapists, clergy, parents, spouses, and sometimes women and younger professionals—are expected to borrow authority from their personal lives.

While personal experience may enrich a clinician's perspective, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for effective treatment. In fact, much of human civilization depends on our ability to understand experiences we have never personally lived. So if sharing an experience isn't the only way to understand, how do we understand someone when we haven’t walked in their shoes? The answer is empathy.

Research and clinical experience suggest that empathy is less about having identical experiences and more about qualities such as curiosity, humility, emotional awareness, attentive listening, and imagination. Empathetic people do not assume they already know what someone else is feeling. Rather than saying, “I know exactly how you feel,” they are comfortable saying, “Help me understand what this has been like for you.”

Perhaps the greatest misconception about empathy is the belief that we must fully understand someone before we can help them. In truth, we can help by listening, asking, and responding with humility.

Human connection depends not on having lived every story, but on our willingness to enter someone else’s story with humility and compassion. Shared background can help, but no individual represents an entire group, and similarity alone does not guarantee understanding. The takeaway is that empathy begins with being willing to listen, not with assuming we already know.

None of us, no matter how similar our circumstances, can completely know another person’s experience. A shared experience may strengthen connection, but empathy, not autobiography, is what allows us to enter another person’s world.

References

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