Probably not.

I’m in the middle, emoting.
    At a coffeeshop table to my left is a young woman I’ve never met before. On my right, one of the regulars. Both are listening. Both have a zoned out expression on their faces. Oh, perhaps I should say I’m emoting through my music, a newly composed song played on the digital keyboard. Each of my songs distills some aspect of my subjective sense of self, emotions and all.
    After I’d finished the song, the young woman on the left and the regular on the right each tell me where their minds had gone with the music. Their accounts didn’t match, nor did they fit with where my mind had been when I composed the piece nor how it impacts me as I practice it.
    The question is this: If I’m trying to communicate something in particular with my music, something from inside myself, like somewhere I’d been or someone I knew, is it getting through into the minds of my listeners? Probably not. Apparently, they have their own thoughts and imaginings in listening to it.
    So, am I doing it wrong then?
    Probably not.

So I’m reading one of my stories to a small group of people.
    The characters erupted from the deeper recesses of my mind allowing me to craft them into words. The plot oozed out the same way. The dialogue had been transcribed as if I was taking dictation. All of this came from somewhere within me.
    As I read aloud I watch the flow of emotions on listener faces (a residual side effect of being a psychotherapist all those years). The muscles around the eyes and mouths of my listeners spasm to reflect amusement, sorrow or apprehension. I anticipate that at certain places in the story, certain emotional experiences are likely to infect the minds of the listener … the same emotions I had experienced as I wrote those passages. They usually do.
    So after the story is finished we talk about it. I hear about someone’s Aunt Edith, or about a kitchen ritual from someone’s childhood, or a time when a particular something had happened to them (something sort of related to the plot of the story but not actually in the plot). 
    Do I hear my social commentary on the human condition distilled into my characters and story line? Probably not. Did I do something wrong in my efforts to convey that social commentary?
    Probably not.

When I was working as a mental health professional there were two different approaches to treatment. One can be described as “the professional knows best”. Therapists were supposed to believe researchers and esteemed psychiatrists had definitively figured out all the diagnoses with their lists of symptoms. When it came to helping, we were to apply to our diligently diagnosed condition the “best practice” therapies that were statistically better than other therapies in comparison studies. This presupposed what was best for the client was what had been written up in the professional books and journals. We knew we were doing the right thing when the client voiced acceptance of our technical terms and complied with our approaches. 
    Was I good at that as a psychologist?
    (You know the refrain by now…). Probably not.
    The other approach was to start with the client, the person rather than the diagnostic manual and therapy theories. It involved understanding how they experienced the world, what connected to what to create distress and the inability to function. It was so much more than labelling a particular struggle as a symptom to be aggregated into a disorder. It was understanding the complexity within the client that gave rise to their difficulties and distress. 
    The knowledge I gained from years of university and professional development activities helped me to know what to be curious about. My training as a family therapist was a great supplement to my knowledge of psychiatric disorder. But the most effective help for the client came from understanding the client’s uniqueness, that rather than how they could be reduced to a diagnostic term and targeted with a proven intervention.
    What my clients needed was respect and companionship secure enough to explore what they felt and how they were trying to think through what they were experiencing. That companionship wasn’t a set of therapeutic maneuvers but was a hook-up of our minds. This hook-up came with my own subjective experience of their emotions (a phenomenon a way up and beyond that of empathy) and an appreciation of the schemas organizing their lives. Once we had that starting point we were able to find a way out of the distress they felt. 
    For the most part all I had to offer were questions and observations. Thanks to the science of psychology I came equipped with knowing how the human mind processes information and engages with the world around. Bringing this knowledge I could come up with alternate ways the client might think about a situation or things they could try. But what I suggested was never more than just possibilities and options. The authorship of change for the client always needed to be what resonated within them.

And so, getting back to those different subjective experiences of the listeners in the coffee shop. It’s not important that they replicate within themselves what was in my mind as a composer. What is important is that they experience something of themselves when they listen.
    Each week at the coffee shop I see patron or two with the distant stare as they look toward the piano, or perhaps it’s a pre-schooler moving in time with my music. There’s a passage in the Christian Gospels about Jesus feeling his power flowing out of him to a person who'd touched the hem of his clothing. That’s the feeling I get when I sense my listener is experiencing something within their own subjectivity, doing so in harmony with the subjectivity I poured into composing and playing the piece. 
    It’s what music is all about. Probably.
    No. Actually. 
    Well, for me anyway.