TRANSCRIPT
The first thing is to look the part. I think it helps to look older because older people naturally have that look of wisdom. White hair helps. I think if you’re a guy, having a bit of a white beard helps. Dressing kind of well helps. But I think some therapists actually do the opposite with dressing, that they can dress a little bit sloppy and look very casual. And that can create an image in the mind of clients. Oh my god, this person is so knowledgeable and wise about life that they don’t even have to look fancy.
So I think a lot of it, regardless, is image. Whatever image the therapist puts forward, do it with confidence. Do it with a lot of confidence.
I think another thing that really helps, I remember hearing this once from a fellow therapist. He said he learned it from his supervisor: two things. Rent the most expensive office you can possibly rent and also charge the highest fee that you think you can get away with charging. And the reason for that is when people come to therapy, they’re vulnerable and they have no clue often how to assess the quality of a therapist. So when they see someone with a fancy office and they see someone who’s often dressed well and who’s charging a lot of money, something psychological happens where they say, “Oh my god, this person must know what they’re talking about.”
And there’s even a word for that in the psychology field, in the psychotherapeutic world. It’s called positive transference. And that’s when the client transfers a lot of these ideas of success, of maturity, of healing, of the ability to help onto the therapist. And they just—it’s almost like the ultimate placebo where they think this person must know how to help them.
So what else can a therapist do? A person who may have actually very little in the way of real therapeutic or healing skill? What can they do to be successful, to get clients to come back again and again and again and give them lots and lots of money? Well, one thing that’s pretty easy for a therapist to do is to give a lot of positive feedback to the client. In the world of psychology, it would be called narcissistically gratifying them. So having an intuitive sense of the insecurities of the client, some of their desires for being a big shot, perhaps some of their biggest weaknesses. And what you do is you tell them how good they are, how special they are, how great they are. And a lot of therapists do this, and it’s a great way to get people to come back because it makes people feel good.
What you do is just tell them, “My god, you must be going through so much pain. The world is so unfair to you. You are so smart. You are so gifted. Wow, you’ve been through a lot. All those people in your life, they’re rotten. They all treat you badly. You know, you are right. You’re healthy. You’re right. You’re the right one in this situation.” And what happens when therapists do this—and they do this all the time—is the clients become addicted to them. They become addicted to this positive feedback because, in many ways, the therapist is treating the client like a little child. And they’re telling the client things that the client has secretly wanted to hear their whole life and that probably they should have been told really when they were a beautiful, perfect little child at two years old.
But when you grow up, most of the time, it’s not true anymore. When people come to therapy, it’s not because all the people in their lives are jerks and because everybody treats them badly and the world is so unfair to them. When people come to therapy, ninety-nine percent of the time, yeah, they don’t have the nicest people around them a lot of the time, but they’re contributing to this. It’s something in their behavior that’s contributing to this because, as adults, they’ve participated in making their reality. So in a lot of ways, it’s very, very hard as a therapist to hold a mirror up to a client so they can see what their own behavior really is.
And many people who come to therapy, many people just in life in general, have a very hard time receiving really realistic feedback about their own behavior. And yet, if they don’t get this feedback, if they don’t have someone who’s willing to tell them stuff that’s very difficult to hear, how do they grow? How do they look at themselves? And a lot of therapists neglect that duty. They just blame the other people in the person’s life. And this can make a person feel really good. “See, see, finally somebody’s taking my side. This is what I’m paying money for. I’m paying money to someone to tell me finally that I’m right.” And a lot of people will pay good money for that.
Now, a final thing that therapists can do to build a really good business is to reject difficult clients. And I think a lot of therapists do that. I think there’s a lot of supervisors, a lot of schools of thought, a lot of training institutes that actually teach therapists to do this. And it’s not that hard in a way. All you do is when someone comes to you or calls you on the phone, the therapist can pick up who this person is. They’ve got more problems. They’ve got more anger issues. They maybe have problems that are sort of venturing into psychosis, or they have problems with more severe depression, or they have problems with feeling a lot of suicidal stuff. Just say, “I can’t work with you.” And it’s very easy to do that in the therapeutic field. All you say is, “Ooh, this is beyond the scope of my practice. You need a higher level of care. Maybe you should see a psychiatrist, or maybe you should go to a hospital-based program, or maybe you should go to a day treatment program.” But just basically reject any potential client who is going to cause you, as a therapist, stress.
So many, many therapists do that. They only take on people who are called high-functioning, who are not very emotional, maybe don’t have anger issues. Work with people who have easier problems. Don’t go digging into childhood stuff, or if you dig into it, just look at it a little bit.
Another thing that therapists can do also—and this is more in the psychoanalyst realm—I thought, “God, sometimes it’d be so easy to be a psychoanalyst. Just sit back and tell me more. Tell me how you’re feeling. Just talk. Let me listen. Tell me more. How are you feeling about this? How are you feeling?” Just listen. Or maybe even not listen very much because I think a lot of therapists actually tune out what their clients are saying and just get the person to talk. And I think a lot of therapists of this variety, they train their clients to just talk, talk, talk, and they really don’t give them much feedback. And a lot of the reason is they don’t have much feedback to give. And guess what? Not much change happens. The client doesn’t really learn that much. A lot of times, problems that maybe have been able to be worked out in a matter of weeks or months can just go on for years and years, and nothing changes. The relationships don’t change.
I remember talking to a few psychoanalysts who said they could see sixty clients a week. The clients lay on the couch. All they did was talk. The therapists just sat there, sometimes took notes, maybe very occasionally asked a question, maybe occasionally gave a sentence or two of feedback, but it wasn’t much interaction. And I think there are a lot of these therapists out there.