Today I came across a rather curious Instagram post. It was by a psychologist, one of the hundreds of millions of psychologists selling their services on Instagram, and, like the rest of them, he uses persuasive techniques that grab your attention by hitting a pain point to convince you of whatever they want to offer you.
Nothing against that. Quite the opposite. I’m all for honest professionals selling their services.
If you’ve tried hundreds of ideas and hacks that promise to solve an important problem in your life and, after many false starts and the odd thing that did help, you still never manage to resolve a problem that’s become chronic, this might interest you.
This particular psychologist isn’t exactly doing pop psychology. In fact, some of the things he shares are valuable and useful, but it’s true that he’s developed his own methodology, one that promises the sun, moon and stars to anyone who wants his services.
And this goes straight to a pain point we all have: solving something, a problem, a difficulty, something that causes us real distress. And at the same time, we want the solution to be easy, simple. Above all, we want a professional who seems to have authority in the field to tell us exactly what we have to do.
So we become the perfect target for someone to promise us that, with a very specific system, with a secret nobody else knows but they can reveal to us, they can help us solve it and finally reach the kind of life or solution we’ve been dreaming of.
So this psychologist said he’d bought a large whiteboard where, in the first session, he promised to create a mind map with the patient and explain exactly what their situation was and what the solution was.
He was going to give them a roadmap, showing exactly how they’d go from A to B.
For an ordinary person who’s never studied psychology, this sounds perfectly normal. The psychologist is going to tell me exactly what’s wrong with me and exactly what the solution will be, or what path will lead me to solve my problem.
However, there’s nothing more complex than the human mind.
And promising a potential patient that, in the first session, I, as a professional, have the ability to know everything about them and therefore give them the perfect solution, is very far from reality.
The psychologist knows nothing about the patient. Much less in a single first session. The psychologist knows about psychology and how to do their work, but only the patient knows everything about themselves.
And it’s through working together that solutions can gradually be reached.
As I was saying, the human mind is very complex. And we psychologists know perfectly well that someone can come to a first session thinking that what’s happening to them is one thing, and later it turns out to be something else.
For example, a patient may honestly express that the problem in their current life is their job, and then, through deeper therapy, not with a whiteboard where we decode the root of the problem in 20 minutes, discover that it was actually something to do with their romantic relationship.
This is only one example. It could be a thousand different things.
Sometimes, yes, a patient does come to a consultation with a very specific problem that they already have very clear in their mind, and they simply need a little guidance or support to solve it.
That’s not the majority of cases.
Nor is it true that you need years of therapy to solve a mental health problem, improve how you feel about yourself and your life, or make progress in your personal development.
Neither one thing nor the other.
Rather, it depends on what each person needs. In other words, real therapy adapts its approach to each person in particular.
So, if you need a mental health professional who adapts the work to what you actually need, whether that means a single session or as many as you require, you can fill in the following form.
I don’t use whiteboards. I work together with the patient:
Love,
Noemi
PS: to see whether we can work together, go to the link above.
