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Monika Malewska Tattoo - Tychy Poland

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And yet, as the influence of the [DSM-III] manual spread, the truth about its construction remained obscure. Most professionals using the manual simply didn’t know (and still don’t know today) the extent to which biological evidence or solid research failed to guide the choices the Taskforce made. They didn’t know that the definitions of the disorders contrived, the validity of the disorders included, and the symptom thresholds people must meet to receive the diagnosis were not decided by serious scientific evidence, but were the product of committee decisions that, at best, reflected the well-meaning professional opinions of a small subset of psychiatrists. In short, most people didn’t know that the fundamental changes Spitzer brought to global psychiatry required only the consensus of an extremely small group of people. Indeed, as Spitzer openly confirmed to me in our interview: ‘Our team was certainly not typical of the psychiatry community, and that was one of the major arguments against DSM-III: it allowed a small group with a particular viewpoint to take over psychiatry and change it in a fundamental way.

Davies J (2014) Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good. London: Icon Books. 34 (via constellations-soc)

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made a playlist for my crush 😍

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I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.

Charles Bukowski (via wordsnquotes)

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When a client asks a therapist for advice on an important life issue it’s a no-win situation for the therapist as long as the question is taken at face value because the client is robbed of personal efficacy. If the advice is enacted and things don’t work out it’s the therapist’s fault. If the advice is enacted and things do work out it’s the therapist’s victory.

Therefore the goal in these cases has got to be to move the conversation away from the manifest content, away from the request for concrete advice about a concrete situation, and towards the true underlying psychological meaning of the encounter, which is the unconscious transfer of existential responsibility.

Whether we recognize it or not many of us set up our lives so that authority figures make most of our important decisions for us. This strategy reduces painful existential anxiety by letting us wash our hands of our existential responsibility. When we’re faced with multiple choices and the decision is left up to us existential anxiety skyrockets as we realize that one course of action will by definition make the other possible courses of action fall by the wayside.

In a way then asking a therapist for advice is the micro-version of asking God to guide one’s hand. There’s no anxiety, only certainty, when a powerful, all-knowing presence sanctions behavior.

The point of therapy is not to foster more dependence, more authoritarianism, it’s to foster freedom and responsibility. As a therapist this means saying no to direct advice and yes to helping clients see why receiving this advice is so important to them. It means helping them trace the visible and invisible sources of authority over the course of their own lives, to help them better understand how they have unconsciously conspired to allow these sources of authority to usurp their human freedom. Therapy is about gaining the psychological tools necessary to make important decisions not about being spoon fed advice.