How Prejudging Destroys Progress In Therapy

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I get a LOT of hate mail regarding misunderstandings during Free Trainings, and even about our methods when teaching, and while I understand that a lot of this comes with the territory, it’s a bit worrying to me that people who are supposed to be responsible for healing work can even talk like this. Let’s talk about how prejudging can be harmful when working with clients.

Early this week, a very interesting thing happened. In fact, something that’s quite frustrating. But I want to make sure that everybody understands this as a lesson for everyone that wants to practice, master and understand Solution Focused Brief Therapy. So let me tell you what happened.

For the past few weeks, months, or even years, there have been people that will say really negative things to me. And I understand it comes with the territory of being a public figure.

I have the largest following in the Solution Focused Brief Therapy field. And as a result, I’m probably the most highly scrutinized person in the Solution Focused Brief Therapy field. And that comes with a consequence.

So here’s the kind of thing that happens that just really frustrates me. And they’re really kind of two things.

Number one, it’s when people attend my free lectures, and we give free continuing education credits, and for whatever reason someone might not receive theirs, it went to their spam folder, their email provider blocked our email, something like that.

They will send me an email calling me a liar, a fraud, a scam artist. They will say these horrible things just because they didn’t receive their continuing education credit. But all they have to do is send me an email and say, “Hey, I didn’t get the certificate, could you resend it? Or did something happen?” Or whatever. But they accuse me of these really horrible things. They say these horrible accusations.

The second thing that people do is when we do these free trainings, occasionally we offer a paid course for people who want to take their learning further. The reason we do that is because no matter how great of a job I do during a free 90 minute lecture, or whatever the event is, it’s still just a 90 minute lecture. And inevitably there are people that will send me messages like, “Hey, I want to learn more, do you have any courses on this, that or this?”

So we often make an offer for people, we give them a huge discount for just being there live. And people will say, “I feel like I just signed up to listen to a sales pitch.” And they’ll say horrible things.

So I wrote an email to my email list expressing my frustration with these things, because they’ve gone on for a while and they’re just really ridiculous.

And I got this one reply from a woman who read my email. And the gist of her email, she said that she has signed up to attend our live in person two day event and now she’s afraid she’s going to be disappointed if she comes to this live two day event because the tone of my email feels overly emotional, and manic. And she made some suggestions to me as a “clinician.”

And I thought to myself, this person does not have a grasp of Solution Focused Brief Therapy. And quite frankly, it concerned me. And I want to tell you exactly why.

Based on one email, or based on attending one of my lectures, you’ve now diagnosed me as someone who struggles with mania, and then have decided to give me feedback based upon the merits of that diagnosis. I want to tell you how problematic that is.

If you’re going to diagnose somebody with something like mania, which is mostly associated with bipolar disorder, you know that you have to do a very rigorous assessment to do that. You cannot make that kind of diagnosis just by interacting with somebody via a free webinar or receiving an email.

But there’s an even bigger issue here, which is rather than have compassion and listening to to what this person might be going through, in this case me, they decided to judge me, and judge me quite harshly, which is the exact point that I’m trying to make by the things that are frustrating me currently, and remove my humanity. A very normal experience is the experience of being frustrated.

Now, look, I have put myself in this position. I’m the one who decided to build this big following, and I decided to be the public face, and I decided to make videos, and I decided to be a very public figure. But there are consequences to this. Like how many of you guys could handle being called a scammer or a fraud, multiple times a day, just because tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people are seeing your content? Even if five people per day say that, that’s still kind of a harsh thing.

So rather than give me the grace of being a human, you decide to label me with something like mania, and then start giving me advice. That is wildly incongruent in Solution Focused Brief Therapy, where we don’t believe in the process of diagnosis leading towards effective change. Now, does the diagnosis exist? Sure, we believe the diagnosis exists. But there’s no need to label people, because once you label someone, you make their problem inherently worse.

So even if I did struggle with mania, you would have just made the problem worse, by labeling me in such a way.

You would have made the problem worse by not allowing me to be a human, and frustration is a very normal human experience.

And then, by giving me advice, you remove my autonomy, and you remove my agency, which is exactly what we don’t do in a Solution Focused Brief Therapy session. And it’s exactly why we don’t give homework assignments. Because once you tell somebody what to do, you remove their autonomy and their agency.

And I want everybody to understand, it is okay to treat other people as if they’re human. It’s okay to treat people with compassion and kindness. And it’s okay to honor what they are going through. Don’t be judgmental. Don’t start giving advice. Don’t give unsolicited feedback.

These are the things that we have to break away from. These are habits that we have to start moving away from, that make it very, very difficult for people to do Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

So I don’t in any way mean to single this woman out, that’s why I’ve blocked out her name when we showed the email. But I do want everybody to see, these are the very things that are getting in your way of understanding Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. See you next video.