Psychology misunderstood: open letter to weekend coaches.

Against labor intrusiveness. The mind of human beings should not be a test bench.

Psychology is a university career precisely because it is a very complex field of study. In this science there is nothing that is self-evident, although judging by how we have fared in our lives we may believe otherwise, that being happy and enjoying physical and mental well-being consists of following guidelines that are "common sense".

This is why weekend coaches who base their training on workshops lasting only a few months are so damaging.. They are not harmful because they use an English name instead of "psychologist" in order to have a better chance in the job market, but because their practices are based on a lot of assumptions that are false.

• Recommended article: "Differences between Psychology and Coaching".

Psychology is complex

Over the last decades, the different tools available to psychotherapy have been improving and growing in number. What at the beginning was considered as ways to address mental disorders today also includes types of intervention in people's general wellbeing. Psychologists can help improve social skills, learn effective forms of leadership, manage anxiety in stressful times, etc.

This kind of progress exists because all kinds of complex theories, hypotheses and research have been formulated about how human beings think, feel and act. This has come to challenge deeply held beliefs that seemed to be self-evident, such as that we make purchasing decisions from a rational cost-benefit logic. Reality is much more complicated than common sense dictates..

Recently, however, there has been a proliferating trend of wanting to learn psychology and "ways to help others" simply through weekend courses or workshops lasting a few months. These weekend coaches deliver a very harmful message: that human psychology can be summed up as "doing what you really want" and getting closer to your goals by basically wishing very hard and trying very hard.

Blind faith in the will

If this conception of the human mind causes problems, it is because it assumes a number of ideas that are not true. For example, that the solution to problems related to psychology is to stop making excuses and to go for what we really want.

In other words, it is assumed that the discomfort of many people is produced by the presence of inhibitions and self-imposed barriers.. As if we all naturally tend towards happiness and the absence of happiness has occurred because we have deviated from the right path.

This kind of approach to psychological problems (whether disorders or not) basically puts all the responsibility on the individual. They point out that he/she should try harder, that he/she should be happier, trust others more and, in general, learn by him/herself to focus on the good things in life.

These kinds of proposals not only serve to make invisible the problems that are part of the environment in which the person lives; they are also totally useless for a very simple reason: they do not provide any tool with which to make progress, they simply point out that the person has a problem that has not been solved. A description of what is happening is not an explanation of how to change that, and knowing how to facilitate change requires proper training.

Coaching based on ambiguity

So, where a person is showing depressive symptoms, a weekend coach will try to help them by pointing out the importance of seeing the good in the bad, thinking about what they really want, and thinking about what they really want.thinking about what you really want to do, etc. As if these kinds of processes were simple and one learns to do them oneself without help simply because one has the privileged information about what is going on in one's consciousness.

This idea that it is the client himself who knows the most about himself and that the specialist should simply "encourage" the individual to reconcile himself with his own potential spontaneously is based on totally ambiguous and useless concepts.

As the weekend coach has not had the time to learn the theory necessary to create a precise and adequate vocabulary for his work or to question the epistemological bases of his proposals, he will understand his work as a kind of art in which, without mastering too much, he must develop an emotional sensitivity (i.e. not intellectual and which does not involve thinking in precise concepts) to connect with the mind of the other person.

This is why the weekend coach uses all sorts of terms that he does not even know how to define without resorting to more totally ambiguous and confusing concepts: "looking inside oneself", "trusting one's emotions", "healing one's own self"etc. It is a way of working that does not even allow to check if the sessions have served any purpose; how can you know if someone has managed to connect with his or her "inner self"?

Weekend coaches? Better with studies

Psychology is not an art nor is it based on training oneself to connect emotionally with the other. Those are characteristics that anyone could claim for themselves, including shamans or people who offer pseudo-scientific solutions such as family constellations.

Psychology is what it is because it is preoccupied with creating theories, hypotheses and theoretical models that can neither be learned in a single day nor use ambiguous language that means something different for each person. Practice is essential in this discipline, but so is theory.