by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext – 20.Oct. 2022 Updated: 5.1.2024
What the mainstream media is hiding
There is no question: many psychotherapists are excellent at helping those suffering from mental illness. Thanks to her scientific background? Instead, their successes are based on distinctive skills they have in common with laypeople – and already possessed them before they set foot in a university building for the first time.
It almost sounds too bland to be worth mentioning: by no means is every amateur equally suitable as a support in emotional distress. No psychiatry critic in their right mind insists on the blatant nonsense that all laypeople can do just as much as professionals. Of course, the majority of them have deficits, and these limit their therapeutic options.
But the key point is: do these deficits inevitably exist due to a lack of specialist study? Are they based on the fact that the amateur is ignorant of scientific studies, methodology, and theories? Will they be remedied at the university and only there?
Like professional psychotherapists, amateurs also differ enormously in terms of characteristics and abilities on which whether their help is good depends: for example, in terms of patience, attentiveness, empathy, impartiality, non-judgment, openness, friendliness, warm-heartedness, authenticity, skillful conversation – i.e., in everything that is crucial when assisting. For many laypeople, handling such general impact factors is hardly easier than a piano solo, star-worthy five-course menu, triple throwing axel, or novel. On the other hand, others bring these factors into play virtuously without first needing a few hundred lectures, seminars, and supervision. The abilities to do this develop as part of socialization in the first two decades of life. They do not wait to be enrolled before they emerge and fully develop.
What mistakes the layperson is prone to make
Many laypeople fail to realize that no two cases are the same. Advice, recommendations, and measures that are good for one person are useless or harmful for another person or the same person under different circumstances. How do you learn to do the right thing at a time? In sensitive interaction, a unique subject emerges in the other person. This happens constantly and everywhere in social space, not just on campus.
Laypeople know from painful personal experiences that widespread stresses such as anxiety, depression, sadness, tension, bitterness, lack of motivation, mood swings, self-doubt, restlessness, and exhaustion, and they encounter them time and time again in social contact. This can lead to a deep understanding of such problems – and experience with what could be suitable for those affected. But what do we do with extremely deviant experiences and behavior that we have never encountered before?
Someone stops eating, mutates into a walking skeleton – and wants to lose more weight to find themselves even more beautiful. Another washes his hands several dozen times a day, hears threatening voices out of nowhere, finds animals or corpses sexually arousing, feels like he is constantly being followed, and enjoys cutting himself with scissors, kitchen knives, or razor blades. Another wants to have his leg amputated because he feels it is foreign and does not belong to his body (1). Someone gives their child poison to induce convulsions and vomiting or squeezes their aorta to cause an epileptic seizure. (2) The unknown unsettles and frightens; this is where the psychoamateur usually reaches his limits. By the way, this is often what happens to professionals too. What he has ahead of the layman in such strange cases is simply experience. He and his colleagues have already had to deal with something extremely unusual, and this fact alone gives them advantages: they remain more composed, are more likely to keep a cool head, and react more carefully. And you know what sometimes helped. She and her clients occasionally benefit from this – and not from universal laws, a theory that explains everything, or a consistently effective technique.
“Common sense” has limits.
The everyday psychological knowledge of the layperson, disdainfully dismissed by professionals as “kitchen” or “everyday psychology,” corresponds in many respects with what scientific studies reveal. This is why, to laypeople, much psychological research appears meaningless and redundant. On the other hand, it is complete of common prejudices that supposedly common sense often stubbornly clings to, even though they have been empirically refuted (3). For example, theses such as: “Women talk more than men,” “Puberty is always a phase of rebellion, conflicts with adults and increased willingness to take risks,” “Intellectually gifted people have more problems when dealing with others,” “It is reflected in their handwriting personality,” “Stress causes stomach ulcers,” “If small children are regularly played Mozart, their intelligence increases,” “More violent acts are committed during a full moon,” “If children are raised equally, they will later develop the same personality.” (4 )
Professional psychologists learn during their studies that nothing like this is true. This gives them an information advantage. In a recent study, however, experts – people who are studying psychology or have already completed such studies – turned out to be hardly less susceptible to the common sense views mentioned above, which have now been clearly refuted compared to laypeople. On the other hand, more than half of the laypeople surveyed recognized ten of thirteen errors. As such, 80 percent identified five or more, and over 90 percent identified at least three. (5)
The layperson needs to be more flexible in helping.
When confronted with the psychological needs of their fellow human beings, laypeople predominantly adopt a particular style of counseling and treatment. It reflects your own beliefs, attitudes, experiences, and habits, but also your nature. One presents himself more as a highly empathetic all-rounder (the “mental trash can” type), the other more as a clever whisperer, a hands-on behavior changer, and a sparking motivator. However, a soul helper achieves more diverse strategies and tools he has at his disposal, which he uses flexibly depending on the problem and situation.
This is where professionals have the edge. During the course of their training, they are given such instruments and practice them under supervision.
With increasing practical experience, not only does the range of possible approaches expand. At the same time, the courage and self-confidence to use them grow. Do I let someone seeking help talk and refrain from commenting as much as possible? Do I pepper him with questions, or am I more silent? Do I confront him with what, how extensively? Do I let him scream his anger on a mountaintop? Or hug trees in the forest? Do I let him paint? Depict in “constellations” what relationship he has with influential people? Do I use his first name or insist on a distant “you”? Do I offer or avoid physical contact? Do I let him lie or sit? Am I digging into his past, or am I focusing on the current and future? Do I provoke him every now and then? Do I use humor? How much attention do I pay to his dreams, his slips of the tongue? Do I give him guidelines? Do I let him keep a diary? Write a letter to your future self. Do I remain objective and sober, or do I get emotionally involved? How much sympathy and compassion do I show? When do I stop? Do I only rely on the tried and tested, or do I try out completely new approaches – like the South Korean who lets suicidal people prepare their own funeral, write farewell letters to their loved ones, and test them in the coffin? There are no patent recipes. How much a measure brings always becomes clear individually and usually only in retrospect, based on the result. Sometimes, the seemingly most absurd turns out to be the most helpful. Coffin therapy gives participants “such a shocking experience” that they are ready to start again, assures its inventor, Jeong Yong-mun, from the Hyowon Healing Center in Seoul. (6)
A good therapist intuitively decides which strategy makes sense; no specialist literature can do this for him. The fact that he is aware of various possible approaches gives him a considerable advantage over amateurs – although not one that necessarily results from higher academic positions. Organizing an encounter flexibly and reacting creatively to changing situations is something students at university are more likely to be taught rather than taught. Fewer weekend courses would be needed to make committed laypeople fit for this if they still need it at all.
The advantage of the professional: a complete toolbox
When professionals shake their heads and shake their heads, they fail to understand what their advantage in competence ultimately consists of. During their training, they have been handed an impressive toolbox filled to the brim with dozens, if not hundreds, of different instruments. The layperson, on the other hand, like herself before starting her studies, generally only knows and uses a few.
Any general operating instructions that scientific training purports to provide turn out to be essentially useless in everyday use when it comes to helping and healing. Because the instruments have to be used in a world in which, confusingly, no two materials or items to be repaired are alike.
Over time, some professionals realize how pointless it is to ask which instrument is the best. Is a screwdriver better than a hammer fi, le, saw, or soldering iron? In craftsmanship as well as in psychotherapy, the answer is: it depends. Real experts gradually move on to using their tools pragmatically, depending on the individual case and circumstances – how it is not the professor, the textbook, and the specialist magazine that teaches them, but the real life. If one instrument proves to be unsuitable, they undogmatically use another one or combine several. The more you use it, the more confident, inventive, and spontaneous you become. Intuition increasingly replaces deduction. This is how psychotherapy works, and never according to scheme F methodology or scheme G theory, and it helps – regardless of whether it is carried out by a professional or an amateur.
Many laypeople find it more challenging to be objective.
The closer laypeople are to the person seeking help, the more likely they are to be biased and biased when they try to assess what is wrong with them and for what reasons. Your judgment could be clouded by sympathies, perhaps even by a genuine interest in declaring a healthy person to be sick or a sick person to be healthy. You turn to a therapist with similar expectations that you have of a judge: you see him as a neutral authority, free of preconceived opinions (which you are sometimes wrong about). Therapists usually lack a motive for not striving for objectivity. Any finding can be equally acceptable to them unless they have too little to do and, therefore, want to retain customers. But some laypeople are also quite capable of viewing an internal emergency objectively and temporarily ignoring attachments.
Professionals benefit from a greater wealth of experience.
Professionals spend more time with mentally distressed people. As true as it is banal: the more often and longer you deal with something, the better you generally know about it. Anyone who watches television for hours every day, sits in front of a chimpanzee cage at the zoo, or tends to their stamp collection knows far more about football, monkeys, and postage stamps than someone who only does this occasionally or never – even without a DFB-licensed football teacher, diploma or diploma. To be a zoologist or philatelist. The professional has an advantage over the psychological layperson in that he has to deal with mentally distressed people from morning to evening, not just every hour from time to time. No wonder he can draw on a much greater wealth of experience. And because he is more familiar with psychological limitations, he deals with them more calmly from the start. He is more prepared for surprises, unpredictable conversations, and sudden outbursts of emotion that upset him less, so he appears more confident.
Professionals benefit from the trust of experts.
Those seeking help are more likely to open up to a helper whom they see as an expert, whether rightly or hastily. You know this from parties; you experience it in travel groups: As soon as someone has come out as a psycho professional, those present perform an uninhibited soul striptease: they reveal intimate problems, prick up their ears, and listen, spellbound. The inhibition threshold for exposing oneself in front of experts is considerably lower. When you’re sick, you show your genitals to a gynecologist rather unabashedly – who would do that in front of an acquaintance, a colleague, or a neighbor? A psycho-professional is generally granted deeper insights into one’s own inner self, including events, tendencies, and fantasies that one is usually ashamed of. This gives him an information advantage – one that is, of course, not based on actual science but on a status gap and ingrained role expectations.
The layperson lacks the information network.
Loners predominate among lay psychologists. When they encounter someone else’s suffering, many people give advice and treatment straight away, on their own initiative, based on personal experiences. When it comes to helping, they draw primarily from themselves. Professional psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, on the other hand, are introduced to a well-connected large group during the course of their training, in which information is actively exchanged and feedback is given: the scientific community. Experiences are reported, compared, and put up for discussion in specialist magazines and newsletters, at congresses, conferences, and further training events: How do others do it? What helped with a particular disorder, what was of little or no use, and what caused more damage? Science is a collective way of life. Practicing mental health practitioners continue to draw on their connection to them after they have left university life behind them. We bet: If a large number of laypeople interested in psychology decided to create common platforms for exchanging experiences, even without academic training, they would achieve much more than they already do.
An organized community focused on constant exchange has another advantage: it can systematically accumulate acquired knowledge – and grow from it. Science develops cumulatively: each new generation builds on what previous ones left behind. It adopts their findings, modifies or expands them, and uses proven solutions that have already been found. Anyone who takes part in this is like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants: he sees further. If the multimillion-strong group of capable lay psychologists outside of academia were able to preserve and build on the experience they have accumulated, they would do much better in competition with academic psychologists.
Most professionals were more talented, to begin with
Psychological professionals are consistently ahead even before their academic training begins. Seeing a vocation in caring for people with psychological problems and striving for a corresponding profession instead of becoming a craftsman, engineer, banker, chemist, interpreter, or programmer is what distinguishes young people who are passionately interested in what is going on in others long before They entered a university building. They have always stood out for their special ability to carefully observe and assess their fellow human beings, respond sensitively to them, empathize with them, and lift them up. They have always been able to listen and observe particularly carefully, empathize, and communicate. They are more likely to succeed in withdrawing themselves and avoiding mistakes that make understanding difficult: for example, devaluing being different, wanting to be right, manipulating, refusing respect, short-circuiting themselves by their own case, allowing themselves to be dominated by their own prejudices, dislikes, and habits of mind. They already had the ability to do this, which supposedly only a course of study gives them, with them into the first semester. No wonder that excellent people understanders are more common among them than in the average population. In performance tests for social understanding and support, the majority of qualified psychologists, psychiatric specialists, and state-recognized psychotherapists would probably perform higher than other professional groups – but they would also do that if such comparisons were made before the start of their academic careers. Should we praise a fish diving school if its graduates can handle underwater?
More options
What do university studies and additional psychotherapeutic and psychiatric training give young people? No reliable operating instructions, but ideally, further options for action beyond those with which you were already familiar. There are no conclusive explanations but various possible interpretations – templates, text modules, and images for stories with which they convey meaning to those who do not understand. Many years of professional experience also give them plenty of experience with the effects that specific approaches can have: Opportunities to further develop their own social skills, practical lessons in not letting compassion slide into pity, closeness not into crude familiarity, mutual sympathy not into a bond that becomes dependent. They also benefit from the considerable advantage in prestige and authority that the knowledge of their academic background gives them to those seeking help.
This is what puts them ahead of the lay helpers in our camps. If they allow patients to benefit from it, it is less because of their university training, but rather bypassing it, over them, even against them. What helps psychologists to understand are, first and foremost, basic psychosocial skills that are not only not supported in academia but are found in the thicket of “analyses of variance” and “significance tests,” “cross-validations” and “Cronbach’s alpha,” “interval scalings” and “cumulative distribution functions.” “rather wither away. College psychology is an organized attempt to make aspiring psychologists forget what they were about when they wanted to be psychologists and to drive out of them what they desperately need to help.
This is how a supposed contradiction is resolved: not psychology, but some psychologists can be of great help to those who have mental illness. No matter how scientific his self-image, a psychologist is not science incarnate. He is a subject like us. He had a life before his encounter with academic psychology. He had one when he was in college. He has it outside of his practice, but also during his consultation hours, in every moment in which he acts and reacts intuitively and spontaneously, without deriving his actions from learned study data, methods, and theories in a textbook-compliant manner – that is, almost always. He also has all the social skills that lay helpers have to bring into relationships – although often to a significantly greater extent than representatives of other professional groups. In short, he shapes his practice using skills that have always distinguished him.
Now, a consistent finding from several effectiveness studies becomes more understandable: at least some professional therapists achieve significantly better results than usual. As in every professional group, there are a few outstanding experts among them – super shrinks, as American therapy researchers have casually dubbed them. The most capable achieve improvement rates with their clients that are ten times higher than the therapist average (7), and the dropout rates in their practices are less than half as high. (8) What is the secret of your success? They can cleverly consider those general factors that make even psychological amateurs excellent helpers of the soul.
According to Aristotle, virtues are ideally developed when they lie in the middle between extremes: generosity, for example, between avarice and extravagance, and bravery between cowardice and foolhardiness. With this guideline in hand, underestimated lay psychologists should be able to balance themselves whenever they have to deal with psychoprofessionals: between ridiculous, disrespectful megalomania and premature self-dwarfism.
To save the honor of the cleaner
“Are you serious?” said my old friend, a psychology lecturer, after he had done me the favor of proofreading the manuscript of this book chapter for my benefit. “So you would rather go to the cleaning lady than to the psychotherapist,” he scoffed, shaking his head, “and you would rather go to the regulars’ table than to the psychiatric clinic if you couldn’t get out of a mental low on your own?”
With that, he got me on my nerves in no time: “Doesn’t it show more of a kitchen-psychological bias and the arrogance of the academic than the spirit of science if you generally devalue cleaning staff and social gatherings? If the cleaning lady knew how to treat me the way I would want someone like you to. Why not? After all, you don’t learn what you need first and foremost at university.”
Because I received a dumbfounded look, I continued: “Let me be empirical. From my own experience, I can swear under oath: Although I have met a three-digit number of professional mental health practitioners over the past forty years, I owe some of the most psychologically profound, moving, and helpful encounters to a physics teacher, an educator, a social worker, an accountant, one mathematician, a radiologist, a dental assistant and an advertising specialist with a secondary school diploma. They reached out, touched me, and moved me – more than you, to be honest.”
Since then, our contact has been lost.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
This text is a revised excerpt from H. Wiesendanger: Psycholügen, Volume 3:Seelentief: ein Fall für Profis?, Schönbrunn 1st edition 2017.
The consequences of this series:
1 Extensively researched: Many laypeople can do more
3 Dodo bird in the Psychotechnics race
4 How much does psychotherapy really help?
5 Why is psychotherapy beneficial?
6 Why some Laypeople are better Therapists
7 Embarrassing, telling: successful imposters
8 Psychotherapy as a source of danger
9 What many professionals can do better – and why
10. Pragmatism instead of lobbying – For wise psycho-politics
Remarks
1. A characteristic of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).
2 Parents with so-called “Münchausen syndrome by proxy” resort to such cruel methods to get the attention of doctors and other people; Around 15 percent of the children affected do not survive such ordeals.
3 S. O. Lilienfeld u.a.: 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behaviour, Chichester 2010.
4 Thirteen incorrect statements of this type, in addition to three correct ones, were evaluated in a study published in 2013 by 1,688 laypeople between the ages of 16 and 82 as well as 142 psychological experts, see U. P. Kanning/F. Rist/M. T. Thielsch: “Myths of everyday psychology – What do laypeople know about (supposed) research results?”, Skeptics 26 (1) 2013, pp. 10-15.
5 Kanning u.a., a.a.O., Anm. 108.
6 Südwest Presse, 15.12.2015: „Sarg-Schock soll vor Selbstmord schützen.“-
“Coffin shock is said to protect against suicide.”
7 J. Okiishi u.a.: „Waiting for Supershrink: An Empirical Analysis of Therapist Effects“, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 10/2003, S. 361-373.
8 Barry Duncan/Scott Miller: “Supershrinks: What is the secret of their success? “, Psychotherapy Networker, Nov/Dez 2007, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284394201_Supershrinks_What_is_the_secret_ of_their_success
Das Titelbild ließ ich von Microsofts KI „Bing Image Creator“ generieren.