Why doesn’t counseling work?
What do you mean counseling doesn’t work?
There’s a dirty little secret in the counseling world, that they don’t want anyone to know. Counseling doesn’t actually work. Most counselors don’t actually heal anybody. They keep the same clients for years and years with very little progress. Some clients become what I like to call “profession clients” because they’re basically earned an advanced degree in understanding and recognizing dysfunction and the clinical terminology, but their lives are still more or less a mess. They’ve experienced little in the way of healing. The other dirty little secret is counselors aren’t taught how to heal, not in grad school, not in CEU courses. A few other experts out there have figured it out, but by and large the bulk of mental health professionals just do what they were taught in grad school and in post-graduate supervision.
How do I know this? Because not a small percentage of my clients report they’ve been in counseling off and on for years, “and it helped some, but I’ve still got this problem.” I also know because I train counselors how to actually help heal their clients. We know that healing takes place because a) we looked for the root of the problem and address the root, b) the symptoms disappear without learning any coping skills or establishing new mental tricks or habits.
Counseling today largely consists of teaching coping skills, correcting cognitive distortions, and gaining understanding about the cycles and immediate contributors to their problems, but understanding your problem doesn’t work any more than understanding how a virus replicates in your body cures the virus.
The healing process is relatively simple. We’ll take compulsive behaviors (overeating) because these are clearer examples. A person who compulsively overeats is not chemically addicted to food. That person has an emotional addiction to food. Gastric bypass doesn’t work for a great many people because it doesn’t address the root of the problem that keeps them eating. It’s literally a bandaid that addresses a symptom but not a problem.
At some point in life, the compulsive overeater had a time in life where his emotional needs were not being fulfilled. There are about 25 different emotional needs (safe, secure, connected, winning, reward, etc.) that we have. Somewhere in childhood, that man’s emotional needs were not being met. He went to a birthday party, or his mom would show she loved him through cooking for him, whatever. Throughout his life, whenever that man felt unsafe, disconnected, felt like a loser, his mind says, “that’s ok, we know how to make ourselves feel safe, connected, like a winner,” and he would eat. So there’s an emotional pain or fear of not having his emotional needs met, then there’s the “hidden payoff” of getting his needs met (feeling safe, connected, like a winner, etc.)
Just know that’s how it works is not enough to get him to quit compulsively overeating.
So we do some exercises in session that work to remove those emotional charges. See, his mind is still periodically remembering and ruminating on that lack of emotional need fulfillment in childhood, and it comes up from time to time, and he feels it or echoes of those pains or fear. So we use some exercises to tell the mind, “I don’t need this or want this anymore. I’m getting rid of this and letting it stay in the past,” and truly let the memory and the associated feelings go. Then we do another exercise to identify the most intense emotional moment of eating, “it’s that first bite of cake, I just feel safe, connected, taken care of.” We do a similar exercise to remove that emotional charge of “safe, connected, taken care of” from the image of the first bite of cake, and again the person is telling his mind, “I don’t want this, I don’t need this, I’m done with this,” and washes it out of his mind and body through simple visualization exercise. Once it’s gone, it’s gone! This is not a coping skill. It’s not something that has to be repeated whenever he feels the urge. The urge is GONE! A client just reported that he lost 20bs in one month and doesn’t even have any urges to eat compulsively. It’s required zero willpower, not mental talking himself through it, no pills or injections. The reason this works is we found the underlying pains/fears and hidden payoff memories and addressed those, washed them out. He’d been in counseling and with a trainer for years, but neither one understood how to address the emotional component of eating.
The same works with people who have anxiety, panic attacks, etc, but we have a lot less of the “hidden payoffs” to work on, and a lot more focus on the underlying traumas (pain, fear, shame, shock, frozen, disgust, horror, etc.). Client report a significant increase in quality of life and decrease if not complete elimination of symptoms because we identify the root and heal it.
