DOES THIS SENTENCE MEAN YOU ARE NOT THINKING INDEPENDENTLY?

"You trust your own experience: you don’t need numbers or generalisations to back you up".

According to a paper by a Counselling Group, and I quote... this sentence may seem like you are thinking independently, but in fact, it’s very likely that you’ve interpreted your experience in line with unexamined conventions.

I personally think this is a very misleading piece of text, and not remotely helpful in any way to anyone, because there are just too many ways of viewing the context.

1)
If you are confident on your subject matter then surely you would already know the ‘numbers and generalisations’. So by trusting your own experience does this not mean you must be confident in your understanding of the subject matter to begin with?

… you’ve interpreted your experience in line with unexamined conventions.

2)
Interpret means to understand, or make sense of something doesn’t it? So why would you attempt to trust you own experience with something you did not understand, or that did make sense to you in the first place?

3)
Unexamined means you’ve not examined your subject, so how would you be confident enough to even try and pretend otherwise, and my understanding of conventions within this particularly text is I can only assume relates to a set of generally accepted standards.

In my experience I often find that those in the business of trying to help others with their problems etc, always try to impose the opposite meaning to anything: in other words they turn everything around. I don’t really see how this ever really simplifies a problem, but I can definitely see how it nearly always manges to complicate one!

Or maybe it‘s just me being wickedly narcissistic!


I'd be really interested to see what anyone else thinks ; - )