by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext – 23. Okt. 2022 updated 4.1.2024
What the mainstream media is hiding
Suppose laypeople are less successful in advising and treating people with psychological problems than professionals. In that case, it is often because they are not expected to do more from the outset – due to deficits that are essentially irrelevant to the success of the therapy.
At least in Western industrialized countries, the prestige advantage of professional spiritual healers is now so enormous that it seems almost miraculous that any studies can show that laypersons can provide comparably good help. After all, test subjects trust titles and certificates, academic knowledge, and skills no less than the rest of the population.
How can amateurs even manage to make up for the increased reputation of professionals? What sets them apart? What could they even have over professional, scientifically trained psychotherapists and psychiatrists?
Nothing beats empathy
The key to this lies in a fabulous cultural technique: interpersonal understanding. (1) From early childhood, we acquire and are trained in the ability to understand the experiences, feelings, thoughts, and actions of our fellow human beings and to explain them based on their reasons. We started doing this long before we learned to speak.
However, like mastering language and any other skill, this too has different characteristics: depending on individual talent, social environment, and challenges in one’s life, it can grow or atrophy. A huge range opens up, no different than between the “What’s going on, hey, it’s going disco,” stammering of the digitally demented redneck, and the eloquence of a literary prize winner. It would, therefore, be humbug to glorify “the” layperson as serious competition for professional psychotherapists. All around us, there are people whose empathy is woefully underdeveloped. On the other hand, some of us are so good at it that they easily overshadow many psycho professionals. Based on intuition and life experience, they react more spontaneously, their sympathy appears more emotional and credible, and they pay attention to and evaluate the slightest signals of well-being more sensitively. Their emotional intelligence (2) – the ability to perceive, understand, and influence their own and others’ feelings – is often more pronounced, and this is a decisive advantage: in helping contexts, EQ beats IQ by far.
Unsupported talent
Talents for helping and healing are suppressed rather than promoted by our education system – with foreseeable results. When dealing with those seeking help, the majority of our professional psychotherapists and psychiatrists give the impression that the more successfully they have completed training, the less suitable they are for their profession.
In the German population in general, the proportion of those who have successfully completed a university degree is fifteen percent. (3) However, this was one hundred percent successful among doctors and psychologists working in psychotherapy. They initially had to overcome more or less high admission hurdles to do this. Depending on the university, you currently need a grade point average of between 1.0 and 1.9 in your Abitur certificate if you want to enroll there to study psychology. (Unless he accepts waiting times of up to eight years. (4)
For the dream job of a psychiatrist, a dream Abitur grade close to 1.0 is required. first of all, the numerus clausus for studying medicine has been this high nationwide for a long time. Where does ours come from? Religious affairs the confidence that the very best high school graduates will one day become the very best doctors and psychologists?
A high school diploma fairly reliably indicates the ability to acquire the comprehensive specialist knowledge required at universities. But perhaps because of their persistent striving, the majority of high school class leaders fail to train the social skills that patients expect from their professional helpers: compassion, changing perspectives, communicative skills, mindfulness, appreciation, compassion, and consideration.
During their cerebral, far-from-everyday studies, prospective psychoprofessionals hardly receive any tutoring, on the contrary. The coveted ticket to the mental health professional world, the university diploma, can only be obtained by those who allow their teachers to persuade them to underestimate as “merely subjective” the instrument of knowledge that sheds more light than any other on what is going on in the other person: empathy.
In this way, the university system forces prospective spiritual helpers to suppress a key social competence in an act of self-rape in order to submit to the primacy of the pure method, to become deaf to the voice of the heart, and to implement evidence-based doctrines as compliantly as possible. In this respect, our psychology and psychiatric faculties have always operated as castration centers.
Polemics are unobjective. Strong criticism of our unfortunate university system, however, has excellent reasons. They consist of empirical studies that consistently show that while new students in the field of psychology help people with psychological problems better than laypeople, their level of competence after their studies is lower – also in comparison with their own initial performance. (5)
For the therapy researcher Robert Carkhuff, this regression only allows one conclusion: “Something destructive happens to the students in the course of their training.” (6) He suspects this “something” is due to the cerebral nature of their studies: it narrows their view of thought systems and abstract methodology. It gives them stereotypical ideas about their own relationship with those seeking help. And it teaches them professional roles that make them obedient users of systematized knowledge, aligned with the ideal of a professional distance that is as word-heavy as it is low in attention.
In doing so, universities disregard the proven findings of psychotherapy research: Intellectual attitude and knowledge have little or no connection with the skills that are important for helpful assistance. (7) Since the 1950s, several studies have shown how damaging the usual psychology course is to empathy, perception, and the ability to assess others. (8) What professionals achieve, they themselves primarily attribute to learned theories and techniques – patients, on the other hand, primarily attribute it to the type and quality of the relationship that develops between the two. They consider the human side of the helper, the personal relationship with him, to be particularly important. (9) They are right.
Brainy psycho-technicians
All too many shrinks are strangers to their customers for the same reason that some clergy are strangers to their church congregation: they approach them as articulate, highly educated medical officials whose learning has trouble fitting between two book covers – heavy-thinking, brooding cerebral cortexes who have considerably less trouble with technical jargon than with the language of the heart. For them, emotional support only seems to reach its most mature, most perfect form when it emerges as a conclusion from a network of evidence-based argumentation threads that is at least a square kilometer in size.
Helping and healing no longer arise primarily from a way of life associated with certain spontaneous emotions, intuitive abilities, personal experiences, values, and true charity but rather arise from the highest intellectual achievements of an academically sharpened mind. And that alienates those seeking help.
Familiarity makes it easier to understand and help.
In addition, laypeople who are close to the person who is suffering from the problem, their problems and their antecedents, and their past and current life situation are generally familiar with them for a much longer and more in-depth time than a professional to whom the person seeking help comes as a total stranger. No expert’s eye is sharp enough to understand more about a person within a few hours, if not minutes, than someone who has been at the person’s side for years, sometimes decades. (10)
When people in emotional distress seek help, the helper’s noticeable interest is one of the most essential general factors determining how much they achieve. Can someone who only works for money be able to convince those seeking help that they are sincerely curious? The question always arises as to whether his attention and sympathy are genuine – or are they faked for the sake of the fee. Lay helpers have it easier: the mere fact that they take on a problem on a voluntary basis makes their concern more credible. This alone can trigger positive changes.
One of the most crucial advantages of many lay helpers is: warmth. They seem more compassionate and more loving. In a survey of participants in therapy camps run by my Foundation for Excursions, this plus point would definitely appear among the top five qualities patients value most in the lay helpers there. Typical voices are: “Thank you for the love you have shown us,” concluded the mother of the developmentally delayed Anja* (8). “The devotion of all of you is hard to understand. “I felt like I was among angels,” enthused the mother of a ten-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. “I got so much from you: love, care, always being there for me,” praised 60-year-old Sofia*, a victim of sexual abuse. (11)
Of course, professionals are also capable of giving so much. Most were before they made helping a profession, and they probably continue to be so outside their work. However, in her everyday practice, it would be poisonous for her to put too much heart and soul into it. Anyone who wants to listen to and support people every day who turn to them at the height of a psychological crisis is constantly staring into the abyss.
He learns about unspeakable mental baggage, learns about tragic fates, and learns about oppressive, almost hopeless living conditions. If he let all of this get to him too much, he would eventually go to the dogs, and he would soon become a psychiatric case himself. Films like “The Unsaid” (2001) and “Shut In” (2016) show what psychotherapists risk when they are too involved in the matter.
Keeping your distance internally, not letting anyone feel pity, and staying cool: For professionals, this is essential for self-protection. If you have not already learned to “act as if” during several hundred hours of practical training under supervision, you should start doing so in your first year of work at the latest. But this “as if” rarely seems real. The majority of their clients are sensitive enough to see through the game. If they miss emotional warmth, they freeze and close themselves off.
The lay helper knows the context better – he is often part of it
Unlike social support from laypeople, psychotherapy also takes place “strangely removed from the context” and removed from everyday life, in a “cocoon,” as it were, complains the German Society for Behavioral Therapy in an astonishingly disturbing manner. (12)
Many psychoprofessionals act as if there is no existence for their clients outside of therapy hours, no helpful or stressful relationships, and no significant life circumstances. Therefore, they often have no idea whether the social environment disrupts or encourages the treatment. As a result, they fail to use favorable influences from their private environment to enhance the desired therapeutic effects.
Harmful hierarchies and role patterns
Anyone who visits a psycho professional when they are anxious, listless, or desperate often encounters someone who towers over them in an aloof manner: down there is a poor sausage who is miserably unable to get his inner life in order – up there is someone who appears to be more stable and calm, a helper who cannot be shaken by anything and is at peace with himself. How could it be otherwise? Thanks to his scientific training, the professional knows exactly how to achieve something like this, right?
All too often, however, appearances are deceptive. Psychologists also go through lows, self-doubt, and questions of meaning gnaw at them; Relationship crises and conflicts, sometimes even existential fears, stress them out. Their mental health is by no means better than in other professional groups. Psychologists occupy top positions in divorce statistics alongside actors, writers, and visual artists. (13) Burnouts, alcoholism, drug addiction, and emotional lows that psychiatrists would consider serious disorders occur more frequently among them. The suicide rate among them is three times higher than in the rest of the population. (14)
It’s just that the professional hides what’s bothering him; it’s part of the social role play – what’s such private business to a client? A good friend is more truthful. It is easier for him to reveal himself and to let his counterpart see into his own inner abyss. If it becomes apparent how bad he feels occasionally, it can be a huge relief to someone looking for help. Because it connects – you’re more likely to find each other if not just one person exposes themselves. Hearing how the advisor himself managed to get through difficult times often provides decisive impetus and pointers.
Wisdom beats knowledge
Empathy complements that bundle of emotional and mental qualities we call wisdom. This exemplary character trait, which goes far beyond accumulated knowledge, is not only the key to a happy life. When brought into encounters, it proves to be incredibly healing. The wise man radiates serene serenity. He doesn’t rely on first impressions; he doesn’t go with the flow; he doesn’t act out of emotion. He doesn’t get excited. He rests within himself; nothing upsets him so quickly.
From painful experiences that he was not spared, he draws constructive lessons that he can use to benefit others. He can look at people and issues from different perspectives without making hasty judgments, let alone devaluing them. He manages to take a step back internally, distance himself from himself, and question his own beliefs. He also grasps complex problems in all their complexity, gets to the heart of them, and finds clear, balanced, plausible answers. The wise man does not take himself too seriously and resists the hard-to-control urge to appear in the best possible light. He manages to openly admit his own mistakes and weaknesses – and smile about them.
Instead of sticking to what is familiar, he is open to new and strange things. He respects fellow human beings who think, feel, look, and behave differently. Wisdom researcher Ute Kunzmann from the University of Leipzig estimates that only one in 300 adults possess this fundamental virtue to the highest degree. (15) Meeting one of them is suitable for anyone who is mentally troubled. I doubt that this virtue characterizes psychological professionals more than life-experienced, level-headed laypeople.
Educational “Auswege” camps
I owe further indications of what laypeople could have better than professionals to isolated “Auswege” camps in which professional mental health practitioners were more detrimental than beneficial to the overall result. There, as in everyday practice, professionals sometimes seem overly experienced and hardened. At our 17th therapy camp in October 2014, a highly experienced cognitive behavioral therapist was literally boycotted by our participants: While the appointment lists of the other team members, all unlicensed lay psychologists, were full from morning to evening, he remained largely unemployed from the second day of camp onwards, which is why he frustrated and wanted to leave early. Among other things, patients and relatives were bothered by his mask-like permanent grin and incessant head nodding.
From their training and professional experience, professionals derive an edge in the knowledge that can make them inclined to know-it-all, doctrinaire, and incapable of criticism. As representatives of a particular school, they often stubbornly cling to their favorite theory, ignoring the person seeking help’s well-founded suspicions about where their stress might come from.
Many professionals cling to the special methods they learned during their training no matter what: This is how they should proceed, and in no way different, they insist – even when the uselessness of their efforts becomes increasingly apparent, and the client’s resistance is getting stronger. Once a diagnosis has been made, their view narrows to symptoms, events, and processes that fit the textbook. Therefore, they tend to overlook or underestimate client characteristics and circumstances that extend beyond this. They give him the unpleasant feeling of being forced into a drawer.
Anyone who doesn’t just occasionally provide emotional support, like psycho-amateurs, but constantly tries to help runs the risk of becoming dull and burning out. Studies show that after four to six years of working (16), the emotional involvement of the majority of professional psychotherapists disappears.
Most of them feel “drained and exhausted,” have “forgotten compassion,” and “lost their spontaneity,” they say. The need to internally distance themselves from their customers is growing. They increasingly suffer from experiences of helplessness and powerlessness. They are frustrated by the fact that they hardly ever get any feedback from their clients. 14 percent say they no longer believe in their own effectiveness. What else have they lost in their job?
All of these factors contribute to the fact that in “Auswege” camps, the success rate for mentally distressed people neither increased significantly as soon as psychoprofessionals were involved nor fell significantly in their absence.
Scratched to status honor
He easily understands that an experienced psychotherapist would find such findings a slap in the face. They shake his self-image, they damage his class honor, they undermine his authority, and they gnaw at his self-esteem. How would a trained cook feel if he had to admit that Grandma Berta does the sauerbraten better than him? How would a dentist feel if he had to watch Hinz and Kunz repair a bad set of teeth at least as well as he did? How would a pilot feel if he found out in the cockpit shortly before take-off that his Boeing was being piloted by an aeronautical career changer today?
He takes off safely, flies halfway around the globe, lands smoothly, receives applause from the passengers – and only now does it become clear: the colleague is a complete amateur who has taught himself to fly. “If it were that easy,” the professional pilot would rightly ask himself, “then why did I undergo years of demanding training?”
Beate K.*, a qualified psychologist in her late thirties, showed me how hurtful such an experience can be. On the occasion of my foundation’s 22nd therapy camp in June 2016, one specifically for those affected by burnout, depression, and life crises, I included her in our 14-person team of helpers. For three days, Beate saw first-hand that the majority of those with severe psychological problems – 16 patients between the ages of 36 and 73 – made progress in an instant in a way that had not been the case for months and years.
Neither state-recognized psychotherapists nor psychiatric specialists, neither inpatient hospital stays nor prescribed psychotropic medications had previously alleviated their pain. During three evening team meetings, Beate had the opportunity to hear our helpers report very positive things from their meetings. From early in the morning until late in the evening, she constantly came across participants in and around the camphouse, and she could see in their beaming faces how much better they had felt since their arrival.
Nevertheless, Beate packed her bags on the evening of the third day of camp: “I can’t bear all this anymore.”
How come? She complained that the procedure here was “not professional”. There are “simply a basic ABC, a set of tools, certain rules and strategies for dealing with certain diagnoses that have proven themselves on a professional level for decades.” In order for “everything to become professional here,” “a lot of things would have to be changed at the structural level.” She sorely missed “a more fundamental, professional attitude.” By “unprofessional,” her favorite word, didn’t she mean “unconventional”? Isn’t it right who heals?
Our speed is “too fast,” and “fast is not the same as good.” So would no successes or those that are a long time coming be more desirable than rapid – and blanket speed limits for therapeutic progress?
“You can’t disconnect yourself from the health system,” she interjected, “because your patients have to go back there afterward.” Do we have to apologize for offering those affected by the system more helpful medicine and strive to emulate what’s outside within us?
Beate finally got to the point herself: she was “influenced by my professional socialization,” “I just learned it differently,” and “just can’t get out of my skin.” What her colleagues ultimately call “cognitive dissonance” is the unpleasant state of mind that arises when one has several cognitions – perceptions, thoughts, opinions, attitudes, wishes, values, or intentions – that are incompatible with one another.
How much more uncomfortable must Beate feel about the next chapter?
(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 Nose ahead: What many professionals can do better – and why
10. Pragmatism instead of lobbying – For wise psycho-politics
Remarks
1 Näheres in Band 4 meiner Schriftenreihe Psycholügen, Schönbrunn 2017: Stochern im Nebel – Psycho-Profis erklären nicht besser, was in uns vorgeht.
2 Daniel Goleman: Emotionale Intellgenz, München 1996; Peter Salovey/John D. Mayer: “Emotional Intelligence”, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, Band 9. S. 185–211; John D. Mayer/P. Salovey/D. R. Caruso: “Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings and Implications”, Psychological Inquiry 15/2004. S. 197–215.
3 Nach Erhebungen der OECD: Bildung auf einen Blick – OECD-Indikatoren 2006, Paris 2006.
4 Nach www.nc-werte.info/studiengang/psychologie, Stand: Februar 2015.
5 R. Carkhuff/B. G. Berenson: Beyond counseling and therapy, New York 1967; R. Carkhuff/D. Kratochvil/T. Friel: “The effects of graduate training “, Journal of Counseling Psychology 15/1968, S. 117-126.
6 Zit. R. Carkhuff: “Differential functioning … “, a.a.O., S. 120
7 R. Carkhuff, ebda., S. 121
8 F. N. Arnhoff: “Some factors influencing the unreliability of clinical judgments “, Journal of Clinical Psychology 10/1954, S. 272-275; E. Taft: “Ability to judge people “, Psychological Bulletin 52/1955, S. 1-23; J. E. Chance/W. Meaders: “Needs and interpersonal perception “, Journal of Personality 28/1960, S. 200-210; J. H. Weiss: “Effect of professional training and amount of accuracy of information on behavioral prediction “, Journal of Consulting Psychology 27/1963, S. 257-262; R. Melloh: Accurate empathy and counselor effectiveness, unveröffentlichte Dissertation 1964, zit. nach B. J. Kalisch: “Strategies for developing nurse empathy “, Nursing Outlook 11/1971, S. 714-718.
9 Irvin D. Yalom: Gruppenpsychotherapie – Ein Handbuch, München 1974, S. 80 f.
10 Ein besonders eindrückliches Fallbeispiel schildere ich in Band 10 meiner Schriftenreihe Psycholügen: Der Psychofalle entkommen – Wie psychisch Belastete einen Ausweg fanden – ohne professionelle Seelenhelfer und Chemikalien, Schönbrunn 2017, darin das Kapitel “Die Blitzheilung einer Schwerstdepressiven”, S. 92-108, https://stiftung-auswege-shop.gambiocloud.com/der-psychofalle-entkommen-auswege-schriftenreihe-psycholuegen-band-10-printausgabe.html
11 Stimmen von Campteilnehmern zitiert die Stiftung Auswege in ausführlichen Dokumentationen ihrer Therapiecamps, s. www.stiftung-auswege. de/veranstaltungen/fruehere-camps.html.
12 In einem Schwerpunktheft über „Extratherapeutische Wirkfaktoren“ ihrer Zeitschrift Verhaltenstherapie & Psychosoziale Praxis 46 (2) 2014.
13 Hans-Ulrich Ahlborn: „Psychotherapie und ihre Risiken“, Paracelsus-Magazin 6/1997.
14 James D. Guy/Gary P. Liabuc: “The impact of conducting psychotherapy on psychotherapists’ interpersonal functioning “, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 17 (2) 1986, S. 111-114.
15 Nach Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 24, 30.1.2017, S. 16: „Vernunft mit Gefühl“, U. Kunzmann: „Wisdom“, in R. Schulz (Hrsg.): The Encyclopedia of Aging, 4. Aufl. New York 2006.
16 Dieter Kleiber (Hrsg.): Die Zukunft des Helfens. Neue Wege und Aufgaben psychosozialer Praxis, Weinheim 1986; ders. mit A. Kuhr (Hrsg.): Handlungsfehler und Misserfolge in der Psychotherapie, Tübingen 1988.
Titelbild: erzeugt mittels Microsofts KI „Bing Image Creator“.