Cox News service ran this article about public counseling, featuring Oprah’s in-house relationship guru Phil McGraw (he’s not a real doctor! — though he does have a doctorate degree in psychology.)
His attraction, in part, is what Oprah calls his “in-your-face reality check” approach to telling people what they need to do or quit doing in a no-nonsense Texan drawl. He can be funny, too:
… a distraught woman [called] in to the “Oprah” show to confess she’s been in love with a married man for 20 years. She asked McGraw if she should keep waiting for the man to leave his wife. His response? “Where are you on the Easter Bunny?”
Most of the time I don’t have a huge problem with the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am personal problem advice givers — Ann Landers, Dear Abbey, Dr. Laura, John Gray, et al ad nauseum. I actually have to give some credit to John Gray for his Mars/Venus book which gave me some ideas to try with my wife ten years ago — ultimately pissing her off to no end but hey, it helped get us on the road.
And I do tend to be a proponent of cognitive therapy — a cousin of rational-emotive therapy, described in the article as “… the idea is that emotions are directly related to thought processes, and if people change their thoughts, they will change their emotions.”
My main complaint is when people refer to these media shrinks as therapists instead of counselors. Yeah, I’m biased because I used to be a family therapist twenty years ago. But troublesome problems don’t often lend themselves to pat advice, no matter whether you’re a basically stable person or FUBAR. When I’m stuck, I usually need something more. I’ve tried the advice and the obvious solutions and I’m still stuck.
A family who needs help with a misbehaving kid might get coaching from a counselor on how to set up consistent rules and consequences. A therapist might do the same on the surface, but at another level, is always looking for the unseen forces that are contributing to the problem, or at least preventing the parents from solving it on their own. It might be their marriage — they’re battling by undermining each other’s parenting. Maybe it’s an unseen grandparent who’s doing the undermining, and a boundary needs to be drawn by one of the parents. A skilled therapist deals with these systemic factors, overtly or covertly. Counselors don’t.
So if you’re stuck and the obvious stuff ain’t working, find a good therapist. I’m scheduled in another month, as my wife and I are stuck about how to handle things with my mother since my dad died. I think this will be the 5th or 6th time I’ve done stints with a therapist in the past 28 years. That might seem like a lot, but I’m probably not a lot more screwed up than most. I just don’t like spinning my wheels.