Being OK is Fine
It has been a little while since I have taken to this blog, but I find myself being rather frustrated with the number of therapists out in the world trademarking various “types” of therapy claiming that it is the next big thing in the evolution of therapy. For those of you who do this, I ask one thing….please stop it.
When we look at the great models of therapy, these were created by people who had a genuinely new way of looking at the world. Often this view of the world was biased to their experience and that the creation of the model was merely a byproduct of them trying to understand themselves. Re-hashing hypnosis and calling it something else or rebranding humanistic psychotherapy are simply that, rehashes and rebrands.
The plethora of “new” approaches are merely the old approaches with a wizzy new name and a ® next to it. After all, if you have genuinely created something that would shift the paradigm of the human condition and the therapeutic world, you would want your peers to critique it and utilise it if useful. Oh wait, sorry, a ® means you want to charge people to train in order to learn your approach. More often than not these experiences have the word no, Emperor, clothes somewhere in the description.
It is my hope that people become therapists because they want to help people and not simply to enrich themselves with the psychological equivalent to snake oil. There is nothing wrong with simply being a good or even an ok therapist, it is far better than calling yourself the founder of Transactional Uber Hypnology®, a new approach to mental health. In case you were wondering, I just made that name up. See how easy it is.
Therapists, get to work and help people to reach their potential stop with the nonsense which brings us all down to the lowest common denominator.
