Thread by @JonathanShedler

Training in psychotherapy begins in earnest when it finally sinks in that giving advice doesn't help

And it sinks in that common-sense solutions haven’t helped and won’t help now

Meaningful psychotherapy is not an extension of common sense. It is something else entirely.

2/ It’s fair to ask WHY advice and commonsense solutions don't help

There’s a lot to say about his, but ONE crucial reason (among many others) is that the problem you see on the surface is rarely the problem that therapy needs to address

There is the *surface* problem or the

3/ “manifest” problem—and then there are the underlying psychological problems that give rise to it, and that have gotten in the way of all previous efforts to address it

In other words, there is WAY more going on than meets the eye. What you see is almost never what you get

4/ Advice and common sense solutions take the surface or manifest problem to be “the” problem, but it almost never is

We can say say that advice and commonsense solutions are focus on “first-order” causes. Meaningful psychotherapy addresses 2nd and 3rd (and Nth) order causes

5/ And the skill of the expert therapist is in understanding and knowing how to work with those 2nd and Nth order psychological causes

This is why meaningful psychotherapy requires real expertise & many years of training. *We are not addressing the same problems*

6/ This is why psychotherapy is so often misunderstood by others

This is why therapists who are still trying to give advice or provide "commonsense” solutions are not expert therapists. Their psychotherapy training never began in earnest. No matter what degrees they have, or how

7/ how many years of experience they have, they are operating with a beginner-level understanding of human psychology, and they are providing beginner-level psychotherapy

“Training in psychotherapy begins in earnest when it finally sinks in that giving advice doesn't help”

/8 Another way of saying this: therapists who offer advice & commonsense solutions have a “theory of mind” that’s really no different from a layperson—and not a foundation for the work of psychotherapy

They’re relying on the same commonsense “folk psychology” as their patients