ABSTRACT
When we learn to become therapists, we learn particular ways of thinking as much as specific content. These ways of thinking become perceptual lenses. Lenses have advantages in that they focus us on important aspects of the patient. They have disadvantages because they also limit perspectives. Additionally, lenses act as filters to the degree that our perceptions circumscribe subsequent actions. In our early training, perhaps in graduate school, lenses are “surgically implanted” by our teachers. They then become our heirlooms, to be carefully transmitted to patients and subsequent generations of students.
