Dare to advice.
During my study of psychology I was constantly reminded that my patients should solve their own problems and we should lead them to their own solutions.
This awfully long lasting and impractical way of thinking was something I felt as a negative side of my study and it became stronger and stronger during the years.
The theory behind the method sounds very good.
We must help people to learn to solve their own problems.
But when we go to school for the first time we are taught to create problems for ourself.
Remember the time you went to school for the first time?
Probably not,
But you saw your children and maybe your grandchildren going to school,
Right?
From happily playing children you got to learn the letters of the alphabet,
The numbers we need for the calculation.
You need social behaviour to others in a way how to play and you know how to interact with each other.
You learn what is a boy,
What is a girl and all things between it.
In other words we are taught to create and think in problems.
But we are taught that we must find solutions also.
The easy solutions are offered by the teachers in the class,
The TV and the computer who seems to offer us an answer when we ask the question.
From thinking into problems and finding solutions we did learn that we get answers from others.
So we can consider the answers of the others as being appropriate for us.
Can we use them?
Can we work with them?
An answer is only a definite thing when we accept them as the truth for ourself.
All answers that we get during our life must pass a mental border which we separate the parts we accept and we do not accept.
Our mind works in specific ways and we never take an answer as something perfect and guaranteed.
Or do you?
According to psychology it is not the task of the provider,
I mean psychologist,
To answer but offer questions to let people come to their own answers.
This can take many sessions with a lasting continuity problem for the patient and an ever growing bill for the healthcare.
If you dare to do it different,
Such as with offering personal solutions,
You will fail and never get your certification because they want you to do it their way.
With other words you are trained by people who do give you a strong advice to do as they do and not another way.
Fact is you follow their advice.
If you do not follow their advice you fail to become a part of their group.
This is a remarkably interesting conflict within psychology.
People who practice are not free and have to comply with the routines of the practice.
After careful considering this part I decided to seek knowledge elsewhere and did learn that the world is full of experience and advice.
You are not alone on earth.
All you meet is met by other people before you.
Most people talk,
Write,
Communicate,
Even about their personal problems.
They write books with their experiences and in the modern world they make movies and podcasts to tell the world how they solved their personal problem.
Every part of science,
Religion,
Healthcare and education is based on sharing of knowledge by experience.
All we learn is advice from one source to the other.
That is the foundation of everyday life and all we meet during our entire life.
But suddenly when we are in really big mental problems we should learn how to solve our own problems.
When following the study it often felt like incestuous situations where students must work with students,
Doing your test and experience to reach a specific outcome.
From this so called research we had to write reports and make conclusions.
These conclusions had to be within certain borders of expectations of the teachers to end with a good grade or otherwise you had to do it again.
To me it felt awkward as the books I had to read taught me to think in a specific direction,
Gave me knowledge and told me to use it in the right way.
But if you had a different interpretation of an event,
Circumstances or experiment it was not allowed for getting and passing your degrees.
This all sounds like an attack on psychology but it is not.
I merely conclude that it is an evolving science with many weak parts that still needs to be solved and I hope this podcast may give some insights for you and others while studying this knowledge.
What I did learn was that giving advice is needed and should be used more and more.
Teaching patients how to get around with advice is an important issue that we should work on.
Teaching the patient that information is temporary,
That it is changing,
That it is confusing and nothing is entirely perfectly true.
Our advice should be given in a way that a patient can work with,
Try it,
Use it and does not care to change it.
We should first learn the patient to understand that facts are not fixed and not rock solid.
That we are humans and we are connected with each other.
Our minds are part of a group,
A society and we always interact with members in a personal way.
These interactions are not always understood in the right way and communication is always a difficult topic for each member of our groups.
Patients should allow to throw your advices away,
Ask for new advices and discuss the knowledge we have.
Most patients do not have serious illness and can be treated this way.
People with serious illness and dangerous problems must be treated the way currently the psychology teaches.
Simply because that is our current knowledge in dangerous situations and we should not play with it or even consider it to do it otherwise unless you are capable in knowledge to do it.
Keep in mind that you cannot repair a rocket engine unless you are a rocket scientist.
So do not touch what is outside your knowledge.
This leaves me saying that giving advice to a customer or patient is possible as long as you allow them and teach them to doubt.
Use and discuss it anytime.
