TRANSCRIPT
Not infrequently, people reach out to me asking me to critique this particular school of psychotherapy or that particular school of psychotherapy. Daniel, what do you think of CBT? Is it the right type of therapy for me to go to? Or I am going to become a psychotherapist. Do you think I should become an existential psychotherapist, or do you think I should do internal family systems therapy? What do you think of these particular schools of therapy?
And my answer is pretty much the same across the board. I am not interested in individual schools of psychotherapy. Well, that’s not exactly true. I’m actually interested in all of them, but I don’t have a preference for any of them. And I think the basic reason is I’m not into this idea of going to school to become a psychotherapist or the idea that school is what helps someone become a good psychotherapist or that training should even really be a part of psychotherapy.
Like, you can train a dog to sit. You can train a dog to bark at a certain time to guard a house. But do you train a psychotherapist? Is that the right way to help a psychotherapist become a good psychotherapist? And then a certain school would be better than others for people. Psychoanalysis is better.
Well, I was a psychotherapist for a long time. I still have a psychotherapy license. In fact, I just haven’t used it now for more than 15 years. And what I learned by having been a psychotherapist, having brushed shoulders with lots and lots of psychotherapists, especially when I was younger, having lots of older psychotherapists telling me, “You can never be a good psychotherapist unless you do this type of training. You have to do psychoanalytic training. You have to do CBT training. You’ll never be successful. You’ll never be able to help your clients.” And I didn’t agree.
This especially got drummed into my head through my own painful experience by having been a psychotherapy client with psychotherapists who followed particular schools of psychotherapy. And what I found as their client was that when my problems, my issues, my presentation of my problems, perhaps my confrontations of my psychotherapists didn’t fit into the way that they were trained, didn’t fit into the school of psychotherapy that they believed in, held to be true, almost like a religion, suddenly, they didn’t like me anymore.
You don’t fit into my school. You don’t fit into my training. You are not behaving like how a client is supposed to behave. So therefore, there is something wrong with you. There’s something pathological with you. Maybe you’re even unhelpable. And I’ve seen this across the boards with I think all the different schools of psychotherapy when the people who train in their particular school no longer can help a client because the therapist is often too limited, is too rigid, has too rigid of a framework because of their own psychology, their own psychological limitations, their own lack of creativity, or heaven forbid, the limits of their training, the limits of their whole psychotherapy school in general.
Well, then they don’t like the client anymore, and they alienate the client. They alienate the person who is coming to them for help. They alienate an already alienated person. They send them away. They said, “You need a higher level of care.” But what they really mean is, “I can’t help you. No one can help you. You probably just need to go to a hospital. You need to be medicated.” And sometimes they even say this, “You now need medications. Your problems are no longer psychological. Your problems are now biological.” They have no proof for this. In fact, there is no proof for this. In fact, it’s just silly because for starters, all of psychology is just a subset of biology because we are biological creatures. Everything about us is biology. Everything about us is biological. Our psychology is biological.
And so when they start saying, “Oh, your problems are biological,” what they really mean is this unproven farce that your problems are chemical. You need some pill to stabilize you. But really what they’re saying in psychological terms, and by the way, this can happen with totally different and opposing schools of psychotherapy, what they’re really saying is, “You make me uncomfortable. I want pills to shut you down. I want to shut down your brain. I want to shut down your feelings. You make me and others in your life uncomfortable. Perhaps you make the nation in which you live, the culture in which you live, the society in which you live uncomfortable. And perhaps I will act as an agent of the state. Maybe even if you don’t want to take these medications, I can legally force you to take these medications.”
This happens all the time. I guarantee there are people listening to this right now who have been forced to take medication by people in the psychology field who trained in a certain school of psychotherapy, a school of psychiatry, acting from a nonfactual theoretical basis that really underneath it was just trying to take people who are alienated, people who are traumatized, people whose traumas are upwelling, and they’re trying to make the traumas get pushed back down.
Now, which particular schools of psychotherapy am I talking about here? I’m talking about all of them because all of them have the potential to allow their adherence to follow this model. You are now beyond anything I can help.
Yet what’s interesting often is the people who created these schools of psychotherapy, not all of them, but a lot of them I think were actually therapeutic geniuses. I think a lot of times the people who created these schools of therapy, and unfortunately I’m not talking about Freud here, even though maybe he was a genius in some ways, and I talk about him in another video. He had some very gifted ideas, but a lot of them were really crazy.
But I think a lot of times the people who create these new ideas that the schools are based on, they had some sort of psychological gift, often a therapeutic gift really to be able to help people. But I think where they didn’t have a gift and often they started leaking into an exploitative way of being was when they thought they could create a model, a model school, a model way to train other therapists that could pass on their gift to other people, other psychotherapists to be other training psychotherapists who weren’t so gifted, weren’t so psychologically insightful, didn’t have such a natural special something interactively with people.
And these people who created these schools thought that they could pass on what they have to others through books and training programs. And often, mostly probably 99% of the time, it didn’t work. It doesn’t work. Yet what it does and what it has done is that it allows people who aren’t very gifted at psychotherapy, people who don’t have much psychological insight, people who might be coming into the psychology field to begin with with strange motives, motives about having power over others, liking to dominate others. It gave them a credential they could hide behind.
I am now a highly trained, licensed, diplomated psychotherapist in CBT training, cognitive behavioral training, or DBT training, or IFS training, or psychoanalytic training, or this training or that training. And I’ve met so many of these therapists where they get their training, they go through years of training, they’ve read the books, they’ve gone to the expensive supervision, they’ve paid all the money, they get the little thing which they hang up in their office, the little diplomat with the date on it and their name on it and the credentials.
Sometimes they get special licenses and other sorts of certificates for it. They can bill at higher levels sometimes because of their new credentials. And now they sit higher in their chair and they double their fees and they look down on those who have not done their particular training because now they are the experts and now they can train others to do their particular school of psychotherapy.
And often I think their training, I think because I’ve seen it, their training makes them worse psychotherapists. They become more rigid. They become less flexible. They become less open to people who are not amenable to being healed and cured according to their method. They become less creative at stepping outside of their method.
One thing I think about gifted psychotherapists, I’ve met some along the way, is that they have many different engines in their brain going on at the same time. When a client doesn’t meet their model, meet their experience, meet their historical ways of having been able to help other people, they try new ways. They think outside the box.
They can use different analogies and different metaphors. They can meet people in very, very different ways of interacting. That’s a real gift. It’s not easy. I think a lot of people get very stuck in ways of thinking and ways of being. Psychotherapists, perhaps worst of all.
One thing I’ve seen with a lot of psychotherapists, which seems really counterintuitive, and I think probably is counterintuitive, it probably goes against the grain, goes against the norms of how other professionals are, is that many psychotherapists, most perhaps, when they get more experience, more years in the field, they become worse at their jobs. They become more rigid.
I think a lot of therapists just burn out. I know what happened to me after 10 years of being a psychotherapist. I was exhausted, or I shouldn’t say I was exhausted. I was becoming exhausted. I started looking down the line, seeing that the way I was working with people, by being very open, very flexible, nurturing my gift, was starting to kill me.
I was working with 30, 40 patients a week, clients a week, 30, 40 hours a week of sitting with people and exercising the basic healing quality of psychotherapy, which is just listening, taking people in, taking in the whole range of their humanity in a nonjudgmental way, nurturing them, being open to them, listening to them, respecting them, asking questions that mirrored people, encouraged them to go deeper inside of themselves.
And all the while simultaneously running the other program in my head where I was looking at myself and thereby being able to relate to them, listening to my feelings, seeing what feelings came up in me when they were speaking, when they were expressing themselves, sometimes when they were challenging me, even being very angry at me sometimes. Because sometimes being angry at the therapist is a very important, even necessary part of psychotherapy.
Sometimes folks that came to me, people who go to psychotherapy, myself included, when I went to psychotherapy, have never in their whole lives had a chance in a safe place to be angry at another person. And most people, certainly most people who have been traumatized, which to one degree or other is everyone, is angry and was forced to push down their anger because their traumatizers, often their own parents, the people who were the most powerful in their lives, did things that were infuriating and didn’t accept the child’s anger.
And so it got pushed down, and this gets displaced in therapy, and it’s an appropriate place to get angry. Very, very few schools of psychotherapy even talk about this subject at all. Most schools of psychotherapy try to nurture the client never to be angry at the therapist.
Yet so often being angry at the therapist is a great opportunity for the client to learn about his or her own historical traumas, his or her own buried anger in a loving environment, a nurturing, respectful environment where the therapist can accept these feelings and help the client make sense of them. But it’s stressful for a therapist.
So what I was getting at was that I was getting burned out. I saw the future for myself, and I saw I need to get away from this field for a while. Now that for a while has been 15 years, and I’ve used these past 15 years to reflect on that time a lot. I’m still reflecting on it right here as I speak about it and sharing about these reflections.
Would I ever go back to being a psychotherapist? I’ve thought about it a lot over the past decade and a half. I’ve never really felt the motivation to go back. I have found that there are many other ways to be useful to people without doing it in a formal psychotherapy setting.
I’m not against psychotherapy. Theoretically speaking, in specific mostly, yeah, I think psychotherapy is pretty awful because I think most psychotherapists are not very good. They’re not very talented. No amount of training, no amount of training in any particular school is going to help them be great.
Probably the thing that would best help someone become a great psychotherapist would be deeply, deeply exploring all sides of themselves, especially their most ugly sides, their most traumatized sides, healing those traumatized sides, learning about what happened to them, working through all their feelings around their traumas, learning about how they acted out their traumas while they were still unhealed.
And through learning about how they acted out their traumas on others, on their own selves, on the world in general, they can have compassion for others who are still traumatized and are still acting out. But most importantly, they can learn about the healing process. They can learn about how to heal from trauma and in so doing, help others do it.
Be a healing force. Be a voice of calmness and compassion and reason while someone else is going through this long, sometimes seemingly interminable, often awful and painful process of healing. Not telling people, “Oh, you need to take medications to shut yourself down,” which is often the exact, often, always perhaps the exact opposite that they need to do to heal.
But helping people heal in a slow way so they don’t burst open and explode out. Oh, take ketamine, take Iawaska, take this drug which is going to help you bring your feelings up. No, no. The long gentle process, that’s the path that I’ve seen most useful.
And so to get back to the subject as I close this video about people asking me about specific schools of psychotherapy, no, I think often those schools of therapy are kind of an anti-anxiety drug for the therapists. They don’t exist really for the benefit of the client. They exist to help the therapist feel more confident, less anxious when they are dealing with the inevitably stressful feelings, stressful relationship that comes with helping another very wounded person struggle to heal from their historical traumas.