Doctors and surgeons deal with stuff that is obviously wrong with the body in front of them. We can know what is wrong with something, without knowing what is right for it. The absence of wrong things does not mean anything is especially right about it. Between “Yuck” and “Wow” is a large range of “okay I guess”.
Doctors and surgeons are trained to identify what is or might be wrong with the body in front of them. They do not have as clear an idea of what a “good” body might function and look like, never mind how a “healthy person” might live. They might point out that the idea assumes that there is only one way, or at most a very narrow range of ways, that counts as “healthy”, while all the evidence suggests that there are many ways people can live perfectly well.
The equivalent for a psycho-therapist would be to identify the various insults, abuses, mis-uses, missed good times and learning opportunities, that the client endured on their way into adulthood. Just how badly were they brought up? Was it all the parents, or was the young client a puzzling tearaway or otherwise hard to deal with? What limiting beliefs has the client got as a result? And so on.
Having discovered those injuries, the therapist should explain what the client can do to change the way they think, how they live, who they spend time with, and so on, if the client wants to stop feeling the angers, resentments and other negative emotions, and become a more normal person. There may be limits to the changes the client can make or is prepared to make, and the therapist must respect those.
The question is where the idea of the “normal person” comes from.
One answer is that it comes from psycho-therapeutic practice. Therapists hear patients complaining that their lives would be better if only they had this and that and the other thing, and conclude that this and that and the other thing are essential requirements for human happiness. With this in mind, plus memories of the course on “positive psychology” at university, they start to concoct a list… I mean, construct a model of what a “good life” looks like. This model then guides the way they talk to, hear, and advise their clients.
The therapist should explain what is involved in this “good life” and ask the client if there is anything they particularly want, or that clashes with their other goals. The weakness of this approach is that there is a fair amount of slop in the interpretation of the specifics of the “good life”. It’s at this point that the therapist can, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps with the firm conviction of their correctness, foist their own ideologies on their clients.
This open-ness to ideology is not a bug of psycho-therapy. It’s a feature. The therapist has to use their own experience and understanding, some of which will come from their ideological leanings, to interpret the ideas in the model. It’s unavoidable.
Most of the clients want to find love, connection, cut out the substance abuse, stop self-harming, get along well with others, and stop being so damn sensitive all the time. They want to “go along to get along”, to fit into a social / political / moral way of life, “to be good members of society” - but as they see what it is to be a “good member of society”. It’s important that the client and the therapist do not have any points of serious disagreement about what that is.
Therapists and psychologists are inclined to be ideological. The majority of therapists are women, as are the majority of therapeutic clients. The subject has developed to deal with women’s problems in a way that makes sense to women. There are male therapists and psychologists, but they have to get through the market- and ideologically-slanted university courses and professional training, and so have to adopt the relevant protective ideological plumage.
Therapists openly offering Muslim therapy, Christian therapy, feminist therapy, and other overtly religious or political approaches to therapy are not doing anything wrong. They are providing a specific product to a specific market - if you’re not in that market, you won’t take that product. One possible exception would be when a therapist with a strong social justice / feminist outlook is assigned to a client by the Courts.
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