Psychologist's Advice

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Very different people come to consult with specialists of a psychological profile with a wide variety of questions, difficulties, requests.

Quite often I come across the fact that clients "give out" negative (I would even say - angry) reactions, if the specialist did not live up to their expectations, that is, did not rush to save and "do good", which should look like advice or a ready-made recipe about how to fix what the person came to the appointment with.

Listening to clients, clarifying their situation with the help of various questions, a specialist psychologist not only adds up from scattered facts a general picture of what exactly is happening in the clients' lives, but also tests emerging hypotheses about what could be the cause of what was happening and what was the necessary decision. This necessary solution is only within the client itself. It cannot be with another person, even a psychologist or psychotherapist.

Awareness of the possible reasons for what interferes with life, does not suit, burdens can lead to finding the right solution, ways out or changes. For this, a specialist psychologist asks the client questions such as: "What do you think..?", "What would change if …?" etc. The purpose of these questions is to encourage the person to seek their own answers. But the client's expectations of a psychologist are different: to get help in the form of a hint, a ready-made recipe or advice. And when this advice is not given to them, and instead they are asked questions, the client is indignant: “I came so that you could explain to me, give me a hint. If I knew myself, I would not have come to you!"

Why, you ask, the psychologist encourages the client to seek answers, if it is much easier to just give your answer, recipe or recommendation.

Indeed, it is much easier to give advice, to suggest to the client what, from the outside, seems so obvious or “correct” to me. Only such a tip of mine for the client will have no value. In our conversation, he can agree with me, he can treat the advice with distrust as "psychological nonsense", and he can even devalue it altogether. Only what a person has found within himself will be valuable. This is what will lead to the necessary decisions and changes.

Once upon a time my teacher at the university, Oksana Vladimirovna Kiseleva, helped me to understand this. I was a very meticulous student and always asked a lot of questions. And Oksana Vladimirovna was one of those few teachers who never gave ready-made answers, but encouraged them to think and find their own. At first, just like the clients I wrote about above, I was angry. Is it hard to just answer? Why “question to question”? And then I realized that it is precisely due to the fact that I do not receive ready-made answers that I begin to understand well the very complex science of psychology. And it is thanks to this that I am the specialist who knows and loves my profession very well.

I think now you understand why in many publications of my colleagues the phrase “the psychologist does not give advice” appears. Maybe sometimes just a recommendation. By interaction, behavior in conflict, etc.

A specialist in psychological profile is useless as a "bank of advice". A psychologist is useful to many people: he contributes to the formation in his clients of the important skill of finding their own answers, and only they are of true value!

Valuable finds within yourself!