The reason why I don’t see any value in psychotherapists is that they never work with supervision. A supervisor is a therapist’s therapist who ensures that clients don’t get the therapist’s own psychological problems projected onto them. For instance, a therapist was traumatized by a controlling father and now tries to convince all his patients that their own fathers are too controlling.
At the link, you can see an example of a therapist who is projecting his own intolerable anxiety onto his patients. This is somebody who is fixated on the concept of guilt and carries around a defective worldview of “I’m good; the world is bad.” What help can he offer to people if he has such basic unresolved issues?
Of course, it would be even worse to pop pills instead of going to such a therapist but, ideally, people should have more helpful choices.
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I’m not convinced it’s much better with professional coaching, mentoring, or supervision …
In fact, such cases tend to remind me of Eric Berne’s “psychiatry” or “professional shop talk” game, and I’m never sure whether it’s a Parent-Child game or a Child-Child game, although I tend to think it’s often the latter.
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Coaching definitely is crap. Mentoring is irrelevant. But supervision will help eliminate this kind of unhealthy enmeshment.
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What works better is case review — logging all of the information about a case, including information provided through patient surveys, means that authority-based ways of ducking responsibility for outcomes won’t work. All of the relevant information is available for internal and external auditing, so the methods and outcomes can be reviewed to see whether bad patterns have emerged.
Otherwise, the practitioner really plays a game of “Psychiatry” in the Eric Berne sense: here’s my office, here’s my comfy chair, here’s my shingle, so let’s play Psychiatry together!
[… and at some point, I’ll explain a devious little management game called “Alternate”, which usually works with three or four people who play at supervision in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of children going to the “right parent” for privileges and permission …]
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My destructive psychotherapist was working with supervision. His supervisor told him I did not need therapy, which I disagreed with. But we should have both listened to her, because she was right that I could not get what I needed from this psychotherapist.
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Good point. What’s the value of a supervisor nobody listens to?
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Aren’t supervisors required for training psychotherapists?
I read that article before and like I said elsewhere, his suggestions struck me as a terrible idea.
Once I had a therapist insist to my face that I was sad when I outright said I was angry as if I couldn’t be both or just be angry about something. I don’t know what her deal was. Sometimes I think people surrounding a person much prefer a certain style of depressive listlessness because anger and assertiveness makes them very uncomfortable.
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