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Both my mother and step father are therapists, both had clinical experience - my mum worked predominantly with young girls with eating disorders as she was beginning her career, then she switched to adults and then into a business consultant. My step father on the other hand worked with drug addicts, now applying innovation in coaching (using Second Life as a tool, for instance). I would put it this way: apart from really impressive experience and knowing very well what goes on in people's minds (of course in a different way than the neurologists do), my mother has never paid for a speeding ticket, because she knows how to talk to a policeman to avoid the fine, discovering all his weaknesses, fears, frustrations in 5 seconds - honestly, I'm not exaggerating! She get's paid for two hours of work what many people earn by working the entire month. She usually deals with CEOs and other top-management guys who, for instance, are extremelly good and efficient in what they do, but their subordinates cannot stand the pressure the boss is creating, or to put it straight - the managers are practically monsters. And so she comes in and turns a Steve Jobs into a Wozniak, if you know what I mean. Think for a second of a police negotiator who persuades a terrorist not to blow himself up, or a suicidal person not to jump out of the window. I know I have used the examples remotely related with therapy, but I wanted to give you a broader picture of what this artful science (yes!) is coupable of. There are of course certain limits to what can be achieved and an experienced psychologist is able to define if a person needs to consult a psychiatrist to get medication, or if recovery is at all possible - the goal of the therapy can be differently defined, sometimes it is just to make the patient "stable", but healing is not possible. To give you an example, while meeting my mother at the mental institution where she worked, I once stumbled upon the head of the drug addictions department whom I asked what is their "success rate" in therapy. She asked me: "What do you mean?" - "How sure you can be that a person is not going back to the addition", I replied. "We are sure that almost all our patients sooner or later would return to drug abuse". I was shocked, but this is the realistic, frank approach. To sum it up let me just mention that when my dear mother was doing PhD she had a very distinguished supervisor, one of the best specialists in the country, for many years the chairman of the National Psychologists Association (not in US/UK obviously), and one of his most important books was titled something like "The therapeutic aspects of therapy", and his conclusion was "talking to people change them, but it is yet to be discovered how and why". |