<p>I was on another forum (about mental health), and the posters bemoaned that therapists often do not give advice to their clients nor even make suggestions.</p>
<p>Rather, they try to get the client to talk through their feelings, so that the client will supposedly solve them. The forum posters complained that (especially for young people) such an approach is often ineffective because someone might not know what to do nor understand how the world works/how other people think.</p>
<p>After reading that thread, I did some research and discovered that many therapists, especially for individuals, indeed do not give advice. See here:</p>
<p>Why is that? And what do you think of such a practice?</p>
<p>Instead of outright giving advice, do you think that they should, at the very least, state a list a possible suggestions and the pros and cons of each; and then leave the client to make a decision? The thread left the impression that therapists take too much of a hands-off approach and are not really helping clients.</p>
<p>Well, I think part of it is liability. They don’t want to be held responsible if things don’t turn out well. Having said that, I have been going to the same therapist for years and if I ask him for advice, he gives it to me. Maybe because he knows me well and knows that I am level headed.
He most often will give different scenarios with the pros and cons but once and a while will just come right out with his opinion. I appreciate his candor. Life is busy, let’s get on with it! Lol.</p>
<p>Therapists job is not to give advice but to help you deal with the issues you needed them for. You need to be able to solve your problems, not just do what someone tells you. Any advice can’t cover all of the possibilities and would do you a disservice. After getting to know you then they could offer advice, as above.</p>
<p>I think you may also be confusing a therapist vs a life coach. I think of a therapist in cases of marriage counseling, depression, anxiety, etc., where the focus is more on communication skills and coping techniques. The therapist is not going to give advice per se, but help you to reach decisions on your own and teach you how to work through things.</p>
<p>A life coach might fit better with young adults needing suggestions/advice on “how the world works”.</p>
<p>They don’t tell people what to do. They help people to work through their thoughts and emotions and figure out what they might want to do. It’s not the therapist’s place to give advice especially when issues are loaded and might have very long-term implications. If you are debating whether you should leave your spouse for example, that’s really a decision you should make. If you decide (and I do think therapists can help people to see things more clearly) that that is what you want to do, your therapist can help you to come up with a plan for what happens next. </p>
<p>The goal of most therapy is to have a better sense of being able to comfortably solve one’s own problems by the end of it, not to be in therapy for life so your therapist can keep giving advice. A lot of it is about developing coping techniques, as rockvillemom said.</p>
<p>Studies have shown time and again that only when a person “buys in” to a solution is it successfully incorporated. That is what is taught these days to tobacco treatment specialists and many others working on lifestyle changes. Advising or directing the behavior of another is one of the least effective methods. Having the person decide s/he has a problem and how s/he wants to address it has been shown much more effective.</p>
<p>My personal experience (from being in therapy for years) is the best therapists teach you the skills needed to evaluate and respond to your problems. I’ve been to therapists who do this and to a few who did not. I will never again go to a therapist who doesn’t have a clearly defined method for helping me work through my problems. One of the best tools I’ve learned is cognitive behavioral therapy (but there are several good ones out there). With this, you learn to identify the distortions in your thinking and then restate your thoughts in a more realistic manner. Once your thinking becomes more clear, it becomes easier to see your own path to resolution. You can take a skill like this and work through most any problem you will encounter in life.</p>
<p>I would be very leery of a therapist who gives too much advice. They can help you explore different options for handling a problem but they shouldn’t tell you what to do.</p>
<p>That’s too bad. Because that basically closes the circle between the advice industry and the therapist industry and shuts out anyone actually looking for useful advice. </p>
<p>For many decades professional advice-givers (Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and their current successors and imitators) have handed the facile cop-out response of “get counseling” to anyone and everyone with a problem that is the least bit difficult. Now it turns out that the therapists they have been sending everybody to do not give any advice either. </p>
<p>I guess if you really want concrete advice the only place you can get it is on CC.</p>
<p>Guess it depends on what type of advice someone needs–an answer to a concrete problem or more of an abstract emotional issue. I think some people do just need straightforward advice or at least a good way to figure out and then sort through options. Dr. Phil gives very concrete advice all the time which is why he’s popular. Here’s your problem, here’s the options to solve it, here are the steps to get out of your mess. Unfortunately not all therapists are capable of giving good advice.
Emotional issues are very different. Simple advice to do something (depressed? Get over it.) doesn’t work. Those issues have to be worked through and recognized by the individual. Although some basic “to do” advice works here also I think.</p>
<p>If you are looking for therapy that is results oriented, you may be more interested in cognitive behavior therapy rather than analysis of the freudian/ jungian model.</p>
<p>Often therapy falls into the “if you give a man a fish, he eats for an evening, if you teach him how to fish, he eats for a lifetime” category. If someone is seriously ill, a therapist may, of necessity, need to offer more direct information and guidance (such as when hospitalization is indicated). As others have mentioned, there are a variety of approaches available. If one is coping with a specific dilemma (health problems, child rearing, certain diagnosis, elder care, substance abuse, etc.), sometimes there are educationally based supportive groups that may be a chance to directly hear others’ points of view and address pragmatic solutions.</p>
<p>If I was with a terrible mate and my therapist told me I should leave him, I’d be really p!$$ed and would run in the other direction.</p>
<p>If I was with a terrible mate and my therapist asked me how he treated me, I might begin to recognize how he treated me. And then I might leave him.</p>
<p>The therapist should do the latter, not the former.</p>
<p>I had a wonderful therapist years ago, and she helped me by asking the right questions. These questions made me think about how I really felt about things. Not how I thought I felt, but getting beyond the layers of justifications and self delusions I had built over the years to cope with an untenable childhood and dysfunctional marriage. </p>
<p>Telling me these things would have done no good, 30 years of making believe everything was fine would have deflected that without a thought.
Picking away at my defenses and helping me to figure things out was so much more profound. Getting advice does not fix things, working though your issues and fixing the way you think about things does.</p>
<p>Though my therapist came perilously close to giving advice once - after over 6 months of weekly therapy, one of her questions was - have you ever thought of a legal separation? Of course, what she was really saying was ‘why don’t you leave that idiot??’</p>
<p>Your scenario reminds me of when my D was two years old, and I’d list the possible dinner veggie suggestions (broccoli or carrots), the pros and cons (“The broccoli looks like little trees, the carrots are your favorite color”), and then left her to make the decision. In other words, I framed the options, I assessed the options. Her decision, such as it was, was entirely on my terms. </p>
<p>Therapy is supposed to lead to maturity, not infantilization.</p>
<p>If we were all purely rational creatures, choices would be easy. The emotion, the patterning surrounding those choices, or the lack of them, is what therapy is about. </p>
<p>Emotionally, a good therapist feels like someone you can trust to help you do the best possible for yourself, when perhaps you’re unable to see the forest for the trees on your own.</p>