Therapy is not Telepathy

If your therapist happens to be a mentalist like Derren Brown or an X-man like Charles Xavier, you might have had the classic Hollywood experience of therapy. The one where you are in session talking about something unrelated (or maybe not even speaking at all) and your therapist suddenly hits you with a mind-reading insight that lays your whole soul bare.

Therapy Mythconceptions

We are taught to associate therapy with cold reading and mysticism and to expect that we are going to therapy for answers.

But therapy is not magic, and therapists do not train to read minds or even to gain wisdom. Therapists do not necessarily know more than their clients about what makes a ‘good life’ and how people should act in the world. 

I don’t say that out of humility or self-effacement; it's simply not the crux of what therapy is about. There could be no true individualism if therapists were just there waiting to hand out the correct answers like a Geography teacher quizzing you on state capitals.

The Argument Against Advice

A therapist’s training teaches them to listen, and this is a highly underrated skill. There is more to therapy, of course, but listening comes first, and at AIPC, where I trained, we were specifically encouraged NOT to just hand out advice.

There are some good reasons for this. Firstly, as discussed, a client needs to find answers on their own; otherwise, the answers themselves mean nothing.

Second, a client may need to stumble on the same answer multiple times from different angles before it becomes deeply integrated.

Finally, the client needs to try out some BAD answers too and say things in session that even they might not agree with. They need space to experiment and make choices between different actions and interpretations of facts.

In short, the client must be deeply involved, and it bears mentioning that, just on a human level, many people feel desperate to be heard and acknowledged by a fellow human being. There is no shame in this.

Disclaimer: This article does not mean to imply that a therapist’s observations and suggestions have no place in therapy, simply that they are not the point of the exercise, which must always begin and end with the client.

“There could be no true individualism if therapists were just there waiting to hand out the correct answers…”