Who Do You Listen To?

We humans are a remarkable species. Despite all the wars and genocides and other stupidities, we've continued to grow in wisdom, to develop our arts, to conceptualize the world in new and productive ways. Technology is taking creativity to a whole new level. Nearly anything we can think up, we can create, or at least fund a research department at a university to study the possibility.

We've figured out a lot of stuff over the centuries. We've written lots of books, full of great ideas. We have amazing people all around us -- on TV, on the web, on our street and across the world... elders and thinkers and just plain insightful folk. We're blessed with an abundance of wisdom and tested theories and educated guesses.

The problem is, we don't listen to much of it.

We're choosy. We're choosy about how we spend our time and we're choosy about how much information we let in, and from what sources. Being choosy about who we listen to... it's smart. If we weren't choosy, if we followed authority unquestioningly, we'd almost certainly end up fighting a senseless war or committing genocide or perpetuating some other stupidity. So questioning is good. It's very good.

Except when it's not.

At some point, being choosy can turn into being rigid and closed-minded. We decide we'll only let in the really valuable information, and in our culture, we tend to decide a thing's value according to how much we paid for it.

There are hundreds of books in the bookstore that could change your life, but if you only paid $15.99 for them, you'll only give them $15.99 worth of attention and credibility. We don't want to believe this about ourselves, but it's true.

We therapists, lots of us, join this profession with lofty ideas of helping people even if they can't pay. We learn fast. If a client doesn't pay something -- an amount that means something to them, that costs them -- then they don't listen to a word we say. We have no credibility in their consciousness, no matter what they say or believe to the contrary.

We still see lower-fee clients, but usually, the work is harder and the client gets less out of it. My higher-fee clients think I'm a miracle worker. My lower-fee clients "aren't sure it's helping." And I'm quite certain there is no difference in how I'm treating them.

[Truly. Therapy is not like making widgets, where you can slack off and only do 50 an hour instead of 100; withholding in therapy (or any relationship) takes more energy, so we don't bother, even if we wanted to.]

My point is that humanity knows a lot, and we don't need more books or gurus or next-big-things to tell us how to improve our lives. The answers, especially here in our culture, are floating around us all the time. They're on TV, on the radio, in books, in magazines... in the house next door, maybe even in your own house.

If you honestly can't see them and need help to open your eyes psychologically, therapists are great.

If you can see them but you don't really like the direction they point in (i.e. unresolved grief) and so you're just looking for different answers, well... the entrepreneurial machine will continue churning out the same ideas in new forms, so you'll have an endless supply of information to consume and dismiss.

Just know that you're not getting anywhere. You'd probably be better served by stopping, picking one source of wisdom -- one book, or one teacher -- and working with it on a long-term basis.