The ultimate goal of psychological counseling

The ultimate goal of psychological counseling, the general consensus in the industry is to "help clients remove inner obstacles and gain the ability to choose their own lives" - there is no unified standard for "getting better", and there is no preset "perfect personality" template. The ultimate goal of all interventions is to return to the client's true needs.

In the first year when I took on cases, I always focused on the "elimination of symptoms" in the textbooks as my goal. It wasn't until I met the 32-year-old Internet operator visitor that I shattered this stereotype. When she arrived, she was already suffering from moderate anxiety and had suffered from insomnia for three consecutive months. She felt nauseous when she thought about the company's upcoming director competition. Her previous consultant gave her two months of self-confidence training and asked her to practice "I am qualified for a management position" in front of the mirror every day. As a result, she was so anxious that she had to do half an hour of mental training before even entering the company. It wasn’t until the third time we talked that she cried and said that she had loved doing content since she graduated. The so-called “promotion to a management position” was the “right option” that her parents, bosses, and friends all told her. When she thought about having to hold cross-department meetings every day and give performance talks to her subordinates, she felt that she would never be happy in her life. The subsequent consultation did not force her to "break out of her comfort zone", but just accompanied her to sort out what kind of life she wanted to live. Three months later, she voluntarily gave up the competition and transferred to the company's internal content department. She went to the ceramics studio after get off work every day to make clay, and she could sleep on the pillow without taking sleeping aids. Her anxiety symptoms disappeared without her realizing it.

Of course, this conclusion is not what I came up with. Different schools actually have different emphasis on the expression of the ultimate goal, and there has been no unified result after decades of arguing, but the core actually revolves around "the autonomy of the visitor." Psychoanalytically oriented counselors will say that the goal is to "make the subconscious conscious." To put it bluntly, it is to help you figure out why you are always wrestling in the same pit, and no longer be pushed away by the inherent patterns formed in your early years. I had a visitor before who always had no bottom line in intimate relationships. After talking for half a year, I finally realized It turns out that her flattery was essentially a conditioned reflex when she was a child, exchanging "sensibleness" for her parents' attention. Later, for the first time, she calmly refused her boyfriend's request to help him revise his PPT in the middle of the night. Even after a quarrel, she did not break down and attack herself like before. In the framework of psychoanalysis, this has achieved her goal. Humanism is more straightforward, that is, "be yourself". There is no need to force yourself to conform to any template given by the outside world. Whether you are fragile or unmotivated, as long as it is your true feeling, it is worthy of acceptance. Even with the CBT approach, which has always been criticized for being "too utilitarian", the ultimate goal is not to train clients into robots without negative emotions. I used to supervise a Chinese-German class, and the CBT teacher specifically complained that many novices turned CBT into "cognitive test questions."

Of course, there is still a lot of controversy over this issue. For example, many visitors will come with the expectation that "if I do consulting, I will get a promotion and a salary increase, repair my family of origin, and become a perfect person." When they find that the counseling has not helped them achieve these worldly goals, they turn around and call psychological counseling a scam. There are even differences within the industry. Some extreme supporters of psychoanalysis will require all visitors to dig out childhood trauma. Even if the visitor only wants to solve the problem of insomnia at the moment, if he cannot dig out it, he will be labeled as a "resistance" ； There are also some short-term consultation practitioners who will deliberately cater to the "quick-effect needs" of the visitors and set a bunch of false goals for you, such as "get rid of the people-pleasing personality in 21 days" and "repair the intimate relationship in a month." In essence, they turn consultation into a tool to meet the expectations of the outside world, completely deviating from the core of the ultimate goal.

I have been doing consulting for myself for the eighth year, and now I always tell the client up front in every initial interview: I will not preset any "correct" direction for you to change. If you want to solve the problem of poor sleep first, let's talk about sleep first.； If you are struggling with whether to quit your golden job in the eyes of others, let’s talk about what kind of life you want to live. ； If one day you feel that you don’t need consultation anymore, even if others think you are “not fully recovered yet”, you can end it at any time, and you don’t have to pursue the ultimate state of “complete recovery”.

Not long ago, the operation manager who gave up the director competition and switched to content came to visit and sent me a ceramic cup that she made herself. The mouth of the cup was crooked and a big word "huang" was engraved on the side. I put it in the most conspicuous place on the shelf in the consulting room, and occasionally glanced at it every time I received a new client. I always felt that this was closer to the ultimate goal of psychological counseling than any textbook definition - you don't have to become a correct, perfect, and recognized person by everyone, as long as you live a life of your own choosing and not be awkward, that's enough.