Open letter to weekend coaches

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

That is why weekend coaches who base their training on workshops lasting a few months are so harmful.. They are not because, in order to have a better job opportunity, they use a name in English instead that of "psychologist," but because their practices are based on a bunch of presuppositions that are false.

• Recommended article: "Differences between Psychology and Coaching"

psychology is complex

Throughout the last decades, the different tools available to psychotherapy have been improving and growing in number. What at the beginning was considered ways of dealing with mental disorders today also includes types of intervention in the general well-being of people. Psychologists can help 

improve social skills, learn effective forms of leadership, manage anxiety in stressful times, etc.

This kind of progress exists because all sorts of complex theories, hypotheses, and research have been formulated about how human beings think, feel, and act. In this way, deeply rooted beliefs that seemed to be evident have been challenged, such as that we make purchasing decisions from a rational cost-benefit logic. The reality is much more complicated than what common sense dictates.

However, recently there is a proliferating tendency to want to learn psychology and "forms to help others" simply through weekend courses or workshops for a few months. These weekend coaches send a very harmful message: that human psychology can be summed up in "do what you really want" and in getting closer to our goals by basically wanting it very hard and striving.

Blind faith in the will

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

That is to say, It is assumed that the discomfort of many people is caused by the presence of inhibitions and self-imposed barriers.. As if we all naturally tend towards happiness and the absence of it has occurred because we have strayed from the right path.

What these kinds of approaches to psychological problems (whether disorders or not) do is basically place all the responsibility on the individual. Point out that he should try harder, be happier, trust others more, and generally teach himself 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; In addition, they are totally useless for a very simple reason: they do not provide any tool with which to 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 the ambiguous

Thus, where a person who presents depressive symptoms, a weekend coach will try to help her by pointing out the importance of seeing the good in the badThink about what you really want to do, etc. As if these kinds of processes were simple and one could learn to carry them out without help simply because one has privileged information about what goes through his 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 concepts and useless.

As the weekend coach has not had time to learn the necessary theory to create a precise and adequate vocabulary about her work or to question the epistemological bases of his proposals, he will understand his work as a kind of art in which, without dominating too much, one he must develop an emotional sensitivity (that is, not intellectual and that does not go through thinking about precise concepts) to connect with the mind of the other.

That is why the weekend coach uses all kinds of terms that he does not even know how to define without resorting to more totally ambiguous and confusing concepts: "search within oneself", "trust the emotions", "heal one's own being", etc. It is a way of working that does not even allow you to check if the sessions have been useful for something; How can you tell if someone has managed to connect with their "inner self"?

Weekend coaches? better with studies

Psychology is not an art nor is it based on training to connect emotionally with the other. Those are characteristics anyone could claim for themselves, including shamans or people offering pseudoscientific solutions like family constellations.

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