Malin Gustavsson is a contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. In this article, Gustavsson draws on her personal experience as a therapist to share some tips on how to be an effective counselor. As with other guest writers on the site (such as Michael Pierce and Jesse Gerroir) we do not necessarily agree with Gustavsson on every point. In fact, we positively disagree with Gustavsson on the importance of diagnosis. Still, we consider her admonition to be a valuable counterpart to our usual perspective.
By Malin Gustavsson
In this article I am going to provide a handful of tips for the psychologist who wants to better his or her therapeutic skills. Though people have come to think of “psychologists” as being merely the members of one specific profession, my view is rather that we are really all psychologists.
Tip #1: Help the Other Person Become Himself
A fundamental mistake that people make when approaching the practice of psychotherapy is that they think of it as advice-giving: The better the advice that is given to the patient, the more of a psychologist you are (or so the thinking goes). Viewed through these spectacles, psychotherapy almost becomes a sort of guide to the stock-exchange: “Buy!”, “Sell!”, “Up!”, “Down!” Follow the therapist’s advice and all of your problems will be naught.
When practicing psychotherapy, a useful rule of thumb is that even if the person is genuinely in doubt about what to do, the psychologist should think of the therapeutic situation as if the other person already knows what to do. She carries the answer inside herself; she just hasn’t been able to clarify that answer to her conscious mind yet. The task of the psychologist in therapy is really to help the other person figure out what she is going to do of her own accord – not to give advice or to be the infallible expert that the patient will look up to.
Again, because the misleading image of the dejected patient and the all-knowing therapist has been allowed to form in people’s minds, people all too often assume that the patient is a weak and indecisive individual with no resourcefulness of her own. But the truth is that most of us are able to come to our own conclusions if we’re encouraged to, allowed to, and listened attentively to.
Think of it like this: When the patient presents a problem, the lazy psychologist will search his pre-existing and personal knowledge to come up with an answer and deliver the best possible piece of advice to the patient. “Your boyfriend doesn’t clean up after himself and expects you to do all the housework? – Of course you should move out!”
This is a mistake – a form of laziness that even many professional psychologists fall prey to. The diligent psychologist will instead remind herself that there is a wealth of emotional nuance and factual information that she is not privy to and which she has not experienced first-hand.
As wonderful a gift as the practice of psychotherapy is, there is still a whole range of things that therapy cannot do. For example, if a person is not emotionally ready to leave her relationship, there is nothing you can say from your own perspective that will impart that readiness to her. It has to come of her own volition, and it will come of her own volition, once the therapist helps her clarify her own thoughts and emotions by reflecting the elements of her own considerations back to her.
The exception to this rule is when the other person is trapped in a relationship with overtly violent elements. In such situations, it is permissible, even advisable, to use whatever authority or closeness you have with the other person to get her to leave the relationship. The reason it can be okay to advise someone to get out of a violent relationship is because a person’s base biological instincts take over when one is habitually subjected to violence. The person who lives in fear cannot rationally decide whether she wants to remain in a relationship or not – her limbic system has kicked in and is deciding for her.
Tip #2: Be Cautious About Diagnosis
While CelebrityTypes obviously places great value on diagnosis here on the site, the psychologist should nevertheless be wary of making diagnosis too central a component of the therapeutic situation. Way too often, diagnosis becomes an attempt to transplant a hard-science mindset onto the practice of psychotherapy – a setting in which such certitude is neither desirable nor possible.
Of course, the practice of proper diagnosis is critical when dealing with patients beset by conditions that have a firm biological foundation (e.g. schizophrenia, epilepsy, brain disease, etc.). But in everyday psychotherapy, diagnosis becomes less crucial. It can even be counterproductive.
The dangers of applying diagnosis should be obvious to most students of psychology: A diagnosis is an idealized prototype, but the actual patient is a concrete and specific phenotype that is shaped by her unique blend of experiences and dispositions. Once we apply a diagnosis (such as a Jungian type or DSM style) everything about the patient that conforms to the type or style immediately springs to mind. This sudden blaze of illumination can be helpful, of course, but it often comes at the cost of our neglect of those aspects of the other person’s psyche that do not fit the diagnosis.
A diagnosis may also become a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially in a clinical setting where the therapist is imbued with medical authority. From the very earliest days of psychology, the field has been rife with patients who unwittingly became more “borderline” or “narcissistic” because the therapist kept referring to them as such. It was hardly a coincidence that the sexually deprived Freud and the erotically licentious Jung kept discovering “hysterical” women who needed help sorting out their sex lives.
Even when applying a diagnosis, the psychologist should always keep the relatively poor reliability of the Jungian types and the DSM styles in mind. Even the mighty Big Five system of personality, so often hailed as the gold standard in psychometric testing, cannot relieve the therapist of his obligation to engage with the whole human being.
Tip #3: Help the Patient Develop Empathy
When people are struggling with problems that are within the normal range of psychological functioning, the gist of their problems can often be traced back to an inability to develop and deploy proper empathy in their relationships.
For the majority of relations in life, empathy is the key to developing meaningful relationships with others. Think about the most empathetic person you know: Even if you don’t like that person when thinking of him critically and from afar, chances are that you nevertheless tend to be charmed by him in the hours that follow an extended interaction between the two of you. This ambiguity illustrates the raw power of empathy to act as the plaster that binds people together and which leads them to perceive relations with one another as meaningful.
Obviously, not every patient is able to develop empathy to the level that could ideally be desired. Like a person’s capacity for mathematics, much of a person’s empathic ability is inborn and cannot be altered by the therapeutic process. Yet no matter what capacity for empathy the other person brings to counseling, the therapist must approach the conversation with an optimistic mindset. The fact that an ideal outcome is not always achievable does not discount whatever actual gains the patient is able to make.
Like I mentioned in tip #1, the psychologist should not set out to equip the patient with a textbook understanding of empathy. The patient is fully capable of acquiring such knowledge of her own accord or to pursue such knowledge in other settings. Instead, the therapist should use the here-and-now of the therapeutic situation to be empathetic towards the patient, so that she will experience empathy first-hand. If the psychologist is successful in getting the patient to feel that the two of them are sharing an empathic connection, the patient will quite naturally wish to extend that feeling to other important people in her life. And she will do so all by herself.
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Image of Hermes in the article commissioned from artist Francesca Elettra.
This article provides educational information on psychotherapy. The information is provided “as-is” and should not be construed to constitute professional services or warranties of any kind.