Our field has focused on building blocks and less on building foundations.
Evolution biologist David Sloan Wilson says that going back to basics is not considered regressive.
…it’s like putting a fish back in water; it’s not a backward step; it’s putting a fish back in water.
Foundational work—like creating an emotional bond, optimising expectations, honing in our empathic communication, developing an emotionally safe climate in therapy—has been seen as “basic,” which has been underrated. It has been taken for granted, in a sense that, it’s a skill we should develop, God knows from where.
Charlie Munger, lifelong business partner of Warren Buffet points out,
“The more basic knowledge you have … the less new knowledge you have to get.”
How Do We Return to the Basics?
Listen to The Very Bad Therapy Podcast, hosted by Ben Fineman and Carrie With. In fact, have this podcast in your favorite playlist.
Here’s why:
1. Deep Learning
We can learn deeply from mistakes. Described in his book, Principles, Ray Dalio, world renowned investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates makes it mandatory in his organisation to keep an error log.
“…Observe the patterns of mistakes to see if they are products of weaknesses…
One of the worst mistakes anyone can make is not facing your mistakes.” (pp. 352-354)
Develop your file of errors as you go. Instead of consulting the stars when you are faced with a difficult situation, consult your file of mistakes /error log. (Related this related post, Blackbox Thinking for Psychotherapist, Part II)
Nassim Taleb has an edgy way of putting it:
”The characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.”
~ Nassim Taleb, Antifragile.
As you listen to this podcast, reflect on how easily these missed opportunities and mistakes might be made by you and I.
2. Not Enough Time
The second reason I highly recommend Very Bad Therapy podcast is because we don’t have enough time to learn about all the possible blunders based solely on our own experience.
~ Attributed to Otto von Bismarck.
“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns for the mistakes of others.”
The faster we can learn from mistakes, even when it is the mistakes of others, the better prepared we will be. Charlie Munger is often cited for saying, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” Munger goes on to explain, “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
An Invitation to Learn in Public
Because of my book the The First Kiss, Ben and Carrie invited me on their show for one of their episodes. (Listen to Episode 11, regarding the problem with an intake model). After the interview, I asked them in passing, “Wouldn’t it be super interesting to hear what you both learned after doing the first 20 episodes, so that we can learn too?”
I was surprised that they took up the invitation. What they are doing is so underrated. I’ve become a big fan of their work.
This is a guest post by Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita.
4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy
by Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita
“The clinical psychologist, the stock picker, and the pundit do have intuitive skills in some of their tasks, but they have not learned to identify the situations and the tasks in which intuition will betray them.” – Daniel Kahneman (2011)
Intuition is a critical tool in therapeutic progress. It is also woefully susceptible to the influences of confirmation bias and overconfidence – just ask the respondents of a study which found that every single mental health professional surveyed rated themselves as above average.[1] The therapeutic alliance is widely accepted as the most important aspect of treatment, yet therapists frequently fail to correctly understand their clients’ assumptions and assessments of the working relationship.[2] With that in mind, here are four things we have learned from our guests after twenty episodes of the Very Bad Therapy podcast.
1. Clients experience significant barriers to providing honest feedback about the therapeutic relationship.
We expected to hear a few stories that reflected the inherent power dynamic within the therapeutic relationship. It was astonishing to hear the same themes repeatedly emerge from guests who are themselves therapists (Listen to Episode 17and Episode 20). Clients often feel unable to voice feelings about elements of therapy that are experienced as bothersome. This is especially concerning in conjunction with the fact that therapists are quite poor at identifying both the subtleties of unspoken feelings and the red flags of client deterioration.[3] How do we create a culture of feedback to help our clients share their experience? Dr. Scott Miller shares his ideas in Episode #18.
2. Therapeutic ruptures can be helpful, but only if they are repaired.
No surprise, right? What has been surprising are the amount of guests who share stories about therapist defensiveness. Clinical mistakes are unavoidable, but they seem to be compounded when the gift of client transparency is unable to be received. “Perhaps you might be too racially sensitive” is not a helpful response to a valid client concern, as our guest Carol learned in Episode #4. However, client outcomes are actually betterwhen ruptures take place and the emerging alliance has room for growth.[4] Ruptures happen; it is our responsibility to remain humble and open to repair.
3. Bad therapy is often nonverbal.
Prior to starting this podcast – and speaking to guests like Bryanand Allison– we didn’t spend much time thinking about what our clients experience in session beyond the therapeutic conversation. This is decidedly harder for clients to do when dirty plates are on the desk, stacks of papers are strewn about the office, and the therapist pauses to take unimportant phone calls. Being a therapist can be difficult work, but not tending to and creating a therapeutic space can negatively impact a client’s engagement in the session..[5]
4. Clients will keep coming back even when therapy has harmful effects.
Our guests have supported the notion that clients want therapy to succeed and implicitly trust that the clinician can help achieve this goal. This makes sense; a person who receives therapy will experience greater benefit than approximately 80% of untreated individuals (that this figure hasn’t changed in forty years is a whole other story).[6] Even in the face of grooming behavioror reinforcement of disordered eating habits, clients trust in the culturally sanctioned expert role of the therapist. Accordingly, our job as practitioners is to remain aware of how this trust is manifesting within the therapeutic relationship.
After hearing twenty weeks of bad therapy stories, our learnings can be distilled down to the simple notion that we must seek to understand our clients’ experiences in session beyond what they offer in words and observed behavior. It is a fair assumption that most of the therapists described in our guests’ narratives remain unaware that their actions were anything but therapeutic. The mission of Very Bad Therapy continues to promote better outcomes through therapist accountability and client empowerment. Thank you for joining us on this journey of learning.
Do you have a very bad therapy experience you’d like to talk about on the show? Write to them here, or email Ben and Carrie at vbtpodcast@gmail.com
On behalf of our field in psychotherapy, aside from contributing to this piece, I want to give big thanks to Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita. Keep up the amazing questions.
If you have listened to Very Bad Therapy Podcast, share with us your reflections in the comments below.
Footnotes
[1]Walfish, S., McAlister, B., O’Donnell, P., & Lambert, M. J. (2012). An investigation of self assessment bias in mental health providers. Psychological Reports, 110(2), 639-644.
[2]Bachelor, A. (2013). Clients’ and therapists’ views of the therapeutic alliance: Similarities, differences and relationship to therapy outcome. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 20, 118-135; Baldwin, S. A., Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2007). Untangling the alliance-outcome correlation: Exploring the relative importance of therapist and patient variability in the alliance. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 75(6), 842-852.
[3]Hill, C. E., Thompson, B. J., Cogar, M. C., & Denman, D. W. (1993). Beneath the surface of long-term therapy: Therapist and client report of their own and each other’s covert processes. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 40(3), 278-287; Hatfield, D., McCullough, L., Frantz, S., & Krieger, K. (2009). Do we know when our clients get worse? An investigation of therapists’ ability to detect negative client change. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 17(1), 25-32.
[4]Miller, S. (2016). I Was Wrong: The Healing Power of Admitting Mistakes in Psychotherapy. Retrieved from https://www.scottdmiller.com/i-was-wrong-the-healing-power-of-admitting-mistakes-in-psychotherapy/
[5]Nissen-Lie, H., Havik, O. E., Høglend, P. A., Monsen, J. T., & Rønnestad, M. H. (2013). The contribution of the quality of therapists’ personal lives to the development of the working alliance. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(4), 483-495.
[6]Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). Counseling and psychotherapy. The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). New York, NY, US: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
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[…] were also featured as Ben and Carrie reflected on their learning experience on the Frontiers blog, 4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy) On the podcast, you get to hear the inside scoop from client’s perspectives of negative […]
[…] on Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development blog 2 years ago. They shared about “4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy” (just to be clear, it’s not 20 weeks of going through bad therapy, but of hosting the […]