IJSP Number 7, 2025

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 7, 2025 Page | 51 We have to admit, at least to ourselves, that we do not know everything; what is more ‘dangerous’ (for our equilibrium) is that we should recognize that those limits are inherent and, as such, they are the only ‘tool’ we have to work with. Every accommodation is a challenge to our mental apparatus and its work-patterns. Wherever questions appear, which implicitly are questioning our limits and the possibility to interrogate habitual values, benchmarks, or usual patterns, they can and will be problematic, unpleasant and consequently stressful for our mental system and its equilibrium. What we implicitly have to recognize here is that our own mental system works based on certain patterns and that we have to change some of those patterns when there is an accommodation process involved. Furthermore, changing patterns is not difficult because you have to replace one pattern with another, but because you have to change your own patterns with new and unusual ones. It is this alienating process that creates the discomfort or the uneasiness; moreover, the discomfort is not as much a mental or intellectual one but instead it is about the deeper level of emotions, feelings and attachments. It is the feeling of our mental inadequacy or incompleteness that is at the core of the difficulties encountered in the accommodation process. We may think and remember here the core idea of the individual psychology of Alfred Adler [4], namely the inferiority feeling inherent to all humans from childhood onwards. It is probably the sensible point where every need for accommodation hits the mark. Consequently, we have not only to dismiss our own ideas or beliefs just because they are our own. What we have to consider is that they have become our own because we have cherished and developed them as being the only ones we had after all. It is not easy to recognize that we, as adults, have limits, intellectually and emotionally as well, and that we still have to learn and develop although the school years are since long forgotten. Most adults are not prone to learning, and I mean here the real learning as understood in Piaget’s accommodation , second part of the adaptation process. What can be observed is that most people are rather inclined to assimilate new information which should fit in their habitual ‘folders’ or ‘files’ (there should not be any effort involved besides swallowing pre-digested news or information). We don’t even realise the existence of inherent mental patterns, because they are so familiar, prone to dominate and arrest our minds in their intricacies and idiosyncrasies. From a strictly cognitive perspective, as expressed by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach in The Knowledge Illusion , we are living in complete hypocrisy and consequently: “The answer is that we do so by living a lie. We ignore complexity by overestimating how much we know about how things work, by living life in the belief that we know how things work even when we don’t. We tell ourselves that we understand what’s going on, that our opinions are justified by our knowledge, and that our actions are grounded in justified beliefs even though they are not. We tolerate complexity by failing to recognize it. That’s the illusion of understanding.” [5] There’s no wonder, in such a context, that the accommodation process is even harder for people who already know some theories and have an intellectual and cultural background to start with. In such cases, we always will see how the new information, ideas, or theories collide with the already assimilated ones. The difficulty in such cases is the bracketing of the old (information, ideas, theories, or beliefs) in order to free some ‘mental space’, to create a new work-place. It is remarkable how far and deep we are addicted and emotionally bound to our own ideas, inscribed in our own mind in order for us to work with them as our own modes and procedures based on our own beliefs imbedded in our own