Therapy Kvetch #2
Another kvetch about studying therapy: it always feels like we’re being expected to accept nearly-uncritically even the most ludicrous, gimmicky, and empirically untested therapeutic approaches. There’s a lot of pressure in these classes to be “open-minded” (so much so that your brain falls out, I’d say). I feel like I’m usually the only person in class to bring up the fact that many of these approaches are not shown to work by research and that they rely on huge leaps of faith regarding human nature.
For instance, the theorist I’m studying now believes that marriages work better when people marry someone who complements their birth order position (i.e. a youngest son marrying an oldest daughter) because then they’ll fulfill their “roles” that they learned. What? Citations or GTFO. And I know that tomorrow I’ll go to class and be expected to act like this is some brilliant insight while offering only the mildest critiques (the consensus at the end of each class seems to be “well, this doesn’t work for EVERYONE, obviously, but…”).
Yes, nothing works for EVERYONE, but some things are clearly shown to work better than others.
