“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly”
– Mahatma Gandhi
Client: “But I’m doing all these things and I still feel so lost. Like I don’t feel like I’m any closer to knowing who I really am!”
Me: “Have you tried to perhaps instead of “doing” more, “being” more?”
Client: “Well, how do I do that?”
It was after this interaction with a client that I was reminded – again – of a topic that I’ve been struggling with, both personally and professionally, and that has been eating away at me for a while now. I’ve been reluctant to give voice to this struggle just because it is quite controversial, and will likely ruffle some professional feathers. In fact, it goes against what seems to have become the mainstream approach in addressing psychological wellbeing and mental health in the field today. So, here goes … *puts on protective headgear just in case*
I am a big proponent and advocate for providing practical, science-based, solution-focused, psychological tools and techniques to help people live happier, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. I mean heck, I share these tools frequently in therapy, on my website, and even in this newsletter! For example, psychoeducation on how to use journaling for self-discovery, how to form new habits and ditch bad ones, how to set healthier boundaries, how to cultivate a growth mindset, or how to deal with stress and burnout. However, I feel that the application of these psychological techniques (i.e., the “doing” of things) has gone horribly amiss. As a result, psychotherapy has now become almost ubiquitous to these solution-focused approaches. Clients enter therapy with this perceived idea of what it should be – a process by which the therapist tells you exactly what you need to do to “fix” your problem. This conceptualisation of therapy stands in complete contradiction to what it actually is. True psychotherapy is not about “how to do”, it is about “how to be”.
I am truly horrified when I see advertisements on Instagram promoting a five-step programme to heal your inner child, or a trauma-informed journaling course, or my worst one yet – a CBT programme to heal your Borderline Personality Disorder! Say what? Really? Ask any well-trained psychotherapist and they will without hesitation be able to tell you the true complexity inherit in treating something like a personality disorder. I mean, if qualified, trained, supervised, board-registered professionals struggle to “treat” these disorders, what on earth makes people think an app will achieve it?
Psychological disorders have long fascinated psychologists, researchers, and scholars largely because they are so difficult to understand. There are just too many nuances to what it means to be human that it is virtually impossible to distill these complex psychological concepts into simplistic terminology and application. Each human comes with a rich history of childhood experiences, their own personality makeup, their own set of values, beliefs, and way of relating to others and the world around them. What may work for one person is not going to work for the next. Also, how can you rely on something external (e.g., course/programme/therapist) to determine something that is so deeply internal (e.g., discovery of the self)?
Don’t get me wrong, practical psychological tools and strategies have their place and can be valuable in certain contexts. For example, knowing the science behind how a bad diet can manifest as symptoms of depression. Or having insight into how the gut microbiome affects your emotional state – I mean who knew eating certain foods can increase obsessive compulsive behaviours?! Similarly, we now know that sleep is implicated in all psychological disorders, and therefore, an essential aspect to address in all therapeutic settings. So there is absolute value in providing psychoeducation to others so they can use science to improve their lives. However, these scientific strategies are no replacement for doing the deep work. What is even more concerning is that these science-based practices often get misconstrued and reported back to the public by untrained professionals, either through short TikTok videos or some casual short course. In such cases, the unsolicited advice and short-cut programmes can cause even more psychological harm.
How? Well, imagine someone signs up for some childhood trauma healing course, they start to engage with the course material and the process starts to unlock suppressed unconscious material. However, now, this surfaced material sitting in the person’s conscious awareness needs reorganising into the self. A process that can be very difficult and requires time, patience, and containment. However, these quick-fix, self-help approaches cannot provide that, leaving the person feeling even more depressed, anxious, dysregulated, ungrounded, and lost. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the application and use of these strategies by untrained lay-person “professionals” – i.e., someone who did a two-day online training session on trauma, and now is a “qualified trauma-informed specialist”. That’s like someone watching a couple of cooking shows and then declaring themselves a Michelin-star chef! Just because you can flip a pancake doesn’t mean you’re ready to run a five-star restaurant.
If we keep trying to reduce complex psychological phenomena into simple solution-focused action plans, it will keep fuelling this misconception that psychoeducation alone will be enough to get people from mentally unhealthy to flourishing. Thereby, stripping psychotherapy from its essence – an inquiry into the self. Something that has no set action plan and clear path. Psychotherapy is built on trust, trust in the person that they can turn inwards and take back agency over their life. The process of therapy by nature is uncertain, hence personality types that seek certainty can find it extremely difficult to stay in therapy because they are forced to sit in their own discomfort and trust themselves to navigate the uncertainty – probably the first time they’ve ever had to do this! I know how this feels, I’ve been there myself during my own therapy. I’m so grateful that my psychologist was not a CBT-focused therapist, because that would’ve been the worst methodological approach for me at the time. It would have kept me stuck in my head by focusing even more on my cognition. I needed to reconnect inwards instead of being outwardly focused. I needed to trust myself that I knew the path forward. At times I’d get so frustrated with my therapist, wanting him to give me his opinion, but he trusted me to follow my own intuitive voice. A gift no action plan and timeframe could’ve ever provided.
So, I belive that before we start applying any form of CBT, DBT, SFT, ACT, or frankly just put any “T” at the end of a new method, the question should be: Are these strategies serving as a plaster on a disinfected paper cut or a plaster on a bullet wound? In the case of the latter, these methods themselves serve as another means of avoidance or escape from what really needs addressing. For example, let’s take someone who has lost sight of who they are – their authentic self.
For a person who feels they have lost track of who you are, a step-wise approach can seem extremely appealing. Why? Well, because they don’t trust themselves. They’ve always relied on external factors to direct their way forward, guide their decisions, and provide them with some form of certainty. As such, embracing true psychotherapy would mean trusting themselves to be the captain of their own ship. However, trusting the process can be extremely overwhelming if you are someone who has always lived a life of someone else’s design. Without some external factor pointing out the way forward, they don’t really know where they should be going. In these cases, engaging in therapeutic tasks will keep them away from addressing what is actually going on. The “doing” the ”work” becomes an escape from their own existential anxiety. They end up journaling more, meditating more, out-CBT-ing themselves, and assume that the more they “do” the quicker they will arrive at their authentic self – like it is some surprise toy that will magically pop out of a cereal box.
If you are still here reading this – thank you!
I don’t know what the answer is to how we redirect this current hyperfocus on psychotherapeutic techniques, equating these to psychotherapy, or how we circumvent unregulated lay people offering courses and programmes that tap into the human psyche without any accountability for their harmful impacts. Just because some layperson or coach learned some psychological technique, it does not make them equipped to apply it. The use of CBT techniques is not psychotherapy – CBT (or any other “T” for that matter) is only a way in which to conduct psychotherapy. All in know is that psychotherapy has its place as does psychoeducation, but conflating the two is likely to have disastrous effects.
Till next week! Now go on and human a bit without overanalysing everything. Remember, sometimes a pen is just a pen and not a penis!
