Being-for-another, or “Why you shouldn’t spend £1,000 on that CPD”

As I write this blog post I am half-looking at my email window, open behind this document.  Another email has come in from a psychotherapy training provider trying to sell me the latest greatest treatment for trauma to implement with clients.  The provider wants me to pay £999.98 for a one-day workshop to become “certified” in an intervention based on a theory “backed by neuroscience” that has been resolutely debunked and shunned by neuroscientists.  They may not be aware of the bit about the theory being debunked, yet I wonder if they would still run the course if they were.  Lunch, the email informs me, is not included in the course fee.  I have had three emails of this nature today alone.  I am asking myself where we’ve gone wrong.  I am thinking about what good therapy looks like for me as a practitioner, and as a client. 

We therapists can be a profoundly insecure bunch, and this is, perhaps, the source of our undoing.  We are desperate to prove ourselves, to demonstrate unequivocally the value of our profession to society.  We are Pinocchios, aching to become real.  This professional insecurity leaves us vulnerable to Honest Johns and Gideons[1] luring us down the path towards (at best) misguided and (at worst) harmful interventions and theories that ultimately take us away from that which should be the primary focus of our work, the client sat before us.  We risk distancing ourselves from the person seeking our support when we follow the protocols, and we risk distorting our understanding of them when we view them through the lens of whichever book/workshop/podcast we’re clinging onto for safety.  I will acknowledge here that, of course, our view of a client is always distorted on some level by our own experiences and prejudices.  This is why much of our training as therapists is about learning to look beyond our own attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices, all in order to notice when our image of the client is being distorted.  I am simply asking why some of us then seek to add a different layer of distortion into the mix, as though a belief that we have developed through getting yet another certificate is any different from a belief we’ve organically developed by virtue of being adaptive animals existing in a context.  What are we afraid of?

I can think of many sources of our fear.  Like I said, we each have our insecurities both personal and professional.  Most of all, I think we are eager to help and afraid of being incapable of doing so.  So many of us seem to have an insatiable need to be useful to other people.  Every training I’ve done in this field seems to start with the ice breaker question “So, why do you want to do this work?”.  99% of people in the group will inevitably say something along the lines of “I want to help people”.  We want to help; we want to feel like we are doing something that will be useful to our clients.  I know that the moments I feel most ill at ease with clients are when they are looking to me for answers.  It would be so deliciously easy to reach for some kind of theory, tool or analysis, a shiny, spinning thing I could use to distract my client from what I believe in that moment to be my woeful inadequacy as a person and a therapist, rather than making the vulnerable and considerably more skillful move of reaching towards my client and addressing the sense I have of their desire for me to provide answers and solutions.  When clients look to us as though we are the experts with all the answers, it is easy to feel that we should be the expert, to position ourselves as the expert, however fraudulent it may feel[2], and give them something vaguely tangible to hold onto so that we feel like we’re doing something to help them.  So that we can hide from our insecurities about the work that we do and about ourselves.  Ironically, this might be one of the least helpful moves we can make as therapists because it creates a dynamic that is almost anti-relational, and is, at its core, objectifying of the client.  We dismiss out of hand the notion that our relational skills could ever be enough.  I wonder what would happen if we surrendered to the truth of our work; that we are just talking with people. 

A colleague and I were discussing this; we were considering what therapy is, what it is exactly we’re doing when we’re with a client.  We agreed, with a strange excitement, that we’re just talking.  It’s dialogue.  Skilled, absolutely, because not all people are deft at having open and explorative dialogue about potentially difficult topics, and not everyone wants to get into the experience of another person and feel what it might be like to be them, but at its core, we’re just having a conversation.  The fundamental difference between a conversation between therapist and client, versus a conversation between friends, is that a therapist sacrifices something of themselves, existentially, in that conversation to an extent that isn’t required in a conversation between friends.  Friends are, hopefully, reciprocally being for each other throughout the conversation.  A therapist, on the other hand, is unilaterally being-for-another[3] for the entire length of the session.  For those 50 minutes, I am so focused on my client, so dedicated to being-for-another that, on some level, I cease to exist.  It’s a strange sensation, I can only liken it to what Eleven experiences when she goes into the sensory deprivation tank in Stranger Things.  I become something for my clients to use.  There is no guarantee that I will come out of the experience unchanged. 

This can feel, for want of a better word, icky.  In Being and Nothingness, Sartre talks about interpersonal relationships and the risk of objectification that exists when two people interact.  Genuine human relationships, for Sartre and for me, require that we acknowledge and respect the existential freedom of each other, so as not to objectify.  In everyday life it is not a pleasant experience to be made an object by someone else[4]; it feels like exactly what it is, dehumanising[5].  The therapeutic relationship is a strange relationship, then.  As a therapist I am willingly submitting to a client’s objectification of me.  I am dialling down my own subjectivity to immerse myself in this state of being-for-another.  I am letting them change me, for that hour, into whatever they need me to be; I am a means to their end.  I wonder if we cannot help but feel the strangeness of it, and whether this is one of the reasons we grip tight to things that give us back some of the power we’ve ceded in the relationship; ways of conceptualising a client’s distress, of turning them into an object, a puzzle to be solved.  Analysis in its many forms has, since the dawn of our field, been a therapist’s close comfort.  Rarely is it our client’s friend.  When we analyse a client through a theoretical lens, we inherently lose the I-thou[6] dynamic of the therapeutic relationship.  If we lose that, we lose everything that matters.  We lose our way as therapists.

When we then layer onto this icky feeling of submission, the insatiable need many of us seem to have to feel useful and valuable, we create the perfect conditions for peddlers of nonsense to supersede our better judgement with their questionable theories and methods.  We want to feel useful, and if we’re “just” talking with a client we might not feel like we’re doing anything to meaningfully move them forwards in their life-project.  It’s especially hard when a client looks to us for the answers to their problems.  It feels painful somehow to have nothing concrete to offer them to alleviate their distress.  Our discomfort in this is big business, as exemplified by the myriad expensive trainings available to us on theoretical approaches and interventions that have little to no evidence in favour of their efficacy or validity.  We are gulping down snake oil like water in the desert, as though it’s going to slake our existential and emotional thirst and give us all the answers our clients are looking for.  Worse still, we become unwitting quacks and charlatans ourselves with our ongoing endorsement and use of these tools and theories.  The (upsettingly limited) research in psychotherapy has shown us time and time again that the theoretical approach we take matters very little.  CBT, ACT, psychodynamics, somatic experiencing; whatever the theoretical grounding or system of tools, they’re all as effective and ineffective as each other[7].  We can have all the expensive tools available; we can have the whole proverbial Makita toolbox at our disposal, and none of it will make us better, more effective therapists.  It might even make us worse by leading us down the path of pathologizing our clients and undermining their natural resilience.  In the process we are also distancing ourselves further and further from the thing that has been shown to make a difference to the people who come to us: the relationship.  If you’re a therapist reading this; the next time you feel compelled to reach for something you learned from a colourful Instagram post or an expensive seminar, I urge you to resist the impulse, be brave, and submit even further to the relationship. 

[1] Honest John and Gideon the Cat are the main antagonists of Disney’s 1940 version of Pinocchio.  They lead our young puppet friend into temptation precipitating a series of events culminating in Pinocchio, quite fittingly in the context of potentially bogus therapeutic interventions, being turned into an ass.

[2] There are some therapists who arrogantly believe they are experts with all the answers.  They are a subject for a different discussion at another time.

[3] Co-created in conversation with Niklas Serning.¯

[4] This does not include, of course, relationships between consenting adults for whom this exact existential transgression is utterly thrilling.

[5] Anyone who has worked in the service industry or retail can surely attest to this.

[6] Martin Buber's concepts of I-Thou and I-It encapsulate two fundamental modes of human interaction and relationship. In the I-Thou mode, individuals engage in direct, authentic encounters with others, acknowledging their full humanity and fostering profound connections beyond mere utility or objectification. Conversely, the I-It mode involves viewing others as objects to be analyzed, or utilized for personal gain, resulting in detached, instrumental relationships devoid of genuine connection or mutual recognition. Buber highlights the significance of embracing the I-Thou mode, which prioritizes empathy, dialogue, and reverence for the inherent worth and subjectivity of each individual, as essential for fostering meaningful human relationships and experiencing authentic existence.

[7] For a more detailed appraisal of the research, please read Mick Cooper’s book “Essential Research Findings in Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Facts Are Friendly”