One Day One Room

 is the title of an episode of the TV show House M.D. The main character is an intellectually brilliant yet emotionally damaged doctor who in this particular episode has a patient who has been raped and for some reason wants House to be her physician while House is acutely aware that he's ill equipped to help her deal with her trauma and tries to get her to see the hospital psychiatrist. The patient responds by taking an entire bottle of sedatives and House relents, but beyond the goal of getting her to talk about what happened to her, he's mainly curious about why the patient/victim insists on him. The patient/victim can't explain why she wants House and insists that they just talk, though eventually she tells House that she'll talk about what happened to her if he first shares about a bad event in his life. House can't understand why and continues to try and figure out why but he eventually reaches a place where he actually wants to know what she's feeling, at which point the patient lets House know that the reason she chose him was because it was apparent to her that he'd been hurt as well. After House then shares a truthful account of how he was treated by his father, the patient then tells House the details of what happened.

Ultimately, I found it remarkable that the episode essentially communicated the same premise as Henri Nouwen's book The Wounded Healer though Nouwen's book is geared towards those in spiritual counseling, it applies to all counseling; we all share a fundamental woundedness - and that commonality can make those who seek to heal others more effective by using their own woundedness as a source of strength & healing. It's Nouwen's contention that all who seek to heal/help should first recognize their own woundedness. 

I myself had thoughts about getting a PhD in marriage & family therapy about 20 years ago. A lot of therapists who also do a lot of social dancing were pretty excited when I proposed that my thesis which would involve the concepts of partner dancing to be used for diagnostic as well as therapeutic/educational purposes. Looking back, I can now see how ill equipped I would have been; the concepts will work, but I had not yet begun to come to a fuller and deeper understanding of my own woundedness. I find it ironic that my coming to grips with a lot of it only began after I lost my financial independence where I could have funded my education completely from my own resources.